SPEAKER_00: Season 5 of Angel is brought to you by Odoo is a fully customizable and fully integrated suite of business apps that lets you build and scale your stack as you build and scale your business. Your first app is free forever and right now Odoo is offering $1,000 off your first implementation pack at odoo.com slash twist. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash twist. LinkedIn jobs. A business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters. Post your first job for free at linkedin.com slash angel and assure is the leading provider of special purpose vehicles and fund administration with over 5,000 completed transactions and $2.5 billion under administration. Angel listeners can get 20% off their first SPV at assure.co slash angel. Our next Founder University is February 22nd and 23rd and is for women entrepreneurs. The deadline to apply for this free two-day class is Friday, February 12th. Go to founder.university for more details.

SPEAKER_02: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Angel. Yes, the sister podcast special we do as part of this week in startups and this season, season five, we're talking to super angels. Super angels are angel investors who've had either great success, a large number of investments, high profile, know what they're doing. And on episode four here, we have Howard Lindzen, you know him from stock twits, but you may not know. That he also has done pretty amazing as an angel investor was in Robin Hood, obviously co-founded stock twits, angel list, wag rally road, which I missed out on to mogul back in the day that was acquired by Adobe. I remember that buddy media that was acquired by Salesforce tweet deck back in the day that was acquired by Twitter. What else was good? Yeah, yeah, customer and golf. Now customer was just acquired by Facebook.

SPEAKER_08: So congratulations. Now you started, welcome to the pod. You started angel investing 10, 15 years ago. When did you start angel investing?

SPEAKER_14: I started early. I was a, uh, the first bubble. It's a good story. Jason first bubble was, um, 99, 2000. And back then I was trading at a hedge fund and back then it was like the internet. As you know, you were early there. I didn't, I didn't know who you were, but, uh, you know, all the deals were getting a pastor. It was around series Q series, Q, Q, uh, and, uh, what does it even mean? And I'm trading stocks and I just wanted in all the hedge funds wanted in. So I, there was a deal called, uh, it actually was called Viva.com at the time. And you, and the only way to get Viva.com, uh, was to buy cars direct and you probably know Scott Painter. And so they raised like a crazy round that that was the top, pretty much the top of the market. So I wired my money and, and that was the top.

SPEAKER_22: Uh, so that was my, it just, the money went to Mary Meeker's, uh, bonus, I think it's basically like a package of a hundred dollar bills, like a brick and just throwing them on top of a bonfire, not starting one, but just tossing it right in there.

SPEAKER_14: So I think, I think eight years later, cars direct, uh, went public under the internet brands there. I got 10% of my money, but as part of the, uh, the ugly stepchild bonus of investing in, in cars direct, I got shares in this Viva.com. Which was a good friend of mine, Scott Ingram now, and he turned that into rent.com, which sold to eBay for almost 500 million. So I got lucky in that the, uh, crippled, um, crippled bad word, but you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_29: The, the ugly stepchild of cars direct made me a lot of money.

SPEAKER_22: The wounded, the injured. Yes. We have to be careful with certain words that people don't.

SPEAKER_30: Yeah. Come at me. I can't believe it. Cancel you. Of all the things that have canceled me.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah. And the lesson I think from there is you're never out of the game, right? Like if you have equity in a company and a company is still fighting, you're never out of the game.

SPEAKER_14: So I called, uh, and again, I'm passive aggressive as most investors are. Uh, I think people who aren't are lying, but, um, the, cause we hate losing and we, we armchair quarterback people in hindsight. We see it all day on fin twit and stock twits, but, um, the, the fact that I reached out to Scott and was helping him. And it was like, I was there, even though I was a small investor through this whole thing and asking him questions, see how I can help. And I did nothing about the internet. And I did nothing about the internet. Maybe I still don't, but, uh, we became friends and, and it was to be part of that journey, even though it was not the original investment is. And Scott's an LP and we work on stuff together. So it's great.

SPEAKER_08: And that passive aggressive is not one word passive comma aggressive or passive period aggressive. These are two different concepts in investing. Correct.

SPEAKER_14: I think they are like, I think I've learned to manage the, the true passive aggressive, which is like not giving good advice, you know, holding back. And just cause you're mad versus, Hey, you know, you have our money.

SPEAKER_44: Uh, let's figure out it's up to me to keep that relationship with the founder.

SPEAKER_14: Cause it is my money and I like to win. So you have to bite your tongue a lot. Uh, and you only learn that from getting absolutely annihilated by certain founders.

SPEAKER_44: But, um, you bite your tongue a lot because you do it for your help.

SPEAKER_07: You have other people to bring along through the goal line.

SPEAKER_47: And you do a lot of public market investing, obviously with stock twits.

SPEAKER_48: And did you create the dollar sign hashtag on Twitter?

SPEAKER_02: I remember you were the first person ever to use it. Was that your innovation?

SPEAKER_14: Yeah, it sent Fred. So what was funny is, uh, the hashtag was interesting, but there was so much spam on, on, on Twitter. And like is hashtag Apple, A P P L E. How do you decide if it's a, some guy saying, I went to the fair and bought a green apple. I went to the, to the corner store and bought a green apple versus I was in the apple store. Fucking. I love apple. So you had to figure out a way to separate. I'm sure. I'm long. Yeah. People were contextually talking about stock. So lucky for me as someone who came from the hedge fund world, I'd lived in the ticker based world. So apple didn't mean a, a, a P P L E. Apple was a, a P L. So, uh, so we put a dollar sign in front of it. And other than the symbol Hitachi, which became shit, which is rappers. And, uh, it really worked for pretty much everything. And, um, I sent Fred on, you know, back then Wilson, a, a blackberry message saying, you know, dollar sign. I love. He goes black. Then it wasn't apples. Blackberry was the king. Right. And I pinned him and I was like, dollar sign. I love blackberry. And he's literally sent me something back right away. It was rim at the time. R I M M.

SPEAKER_25: Yeah. Yeah. And Fred literally within three seconds said, this is genius. You know, cause Fred's Fred and he just.

SPEAKER_61: Yeah. Um, obviously about Fred Wilson, founder of union square ventures with Jerry Kelowna.

SPEAKER_08: And then.

SPEAKER_62: And he, Fred had been an investor in wall.

SPEAKER_63: Flatiron partners and union.

SPEAKER_14: Yeah. Yeah. So Fred had been in a personal investor in wall strip, uh, with Mark Pincus and Brad Feld. And so I got lucky. Fred had introduced me to his whole mafia. And, um, so I remember texting or BBM or pinning Fred who was already in Twitter.

SPEAKER_16: So I said, Fred, what do you think? Will you invest? And Fred obviously has the foresight to say, you guys are like kids to me. I'm like, we'll be in a boardroom and we'll be fighting over Twitter or stock Twitch. So I can invest.

SPEAKER_14: So I went to foundry and they invested, but the dollar sign came out of that, uh, exchange.

SPEAKER_48: When you look at public market investing and then the psychology of private market investing, what is the, the key differentiator when you have to shift your brain and say, okay, I'm in a private market investment. This is my psychology. This is my psychology. I'm in a public market.

SPEAKER_66: This is my psychology. This is my tactics. What changes when you shift those gears? It's the question.

SPEAKER_44: It's the mission of what I try and educate and teach. Cause we're all wired differently. I think you, you love private investing.

SPEAKER_69: I don't know if you trade stocks. Yeah. And you've obviously had a good hit. I don't trade stocks cause I feel like I'm at such a disadvantage.

SPEAKER_44: But you're not because you were early in Tesla and you probably had some other great hits, but they're kind of the same.

SPEAKER_72: Um, but what happened in, in 1999 was staggering and that like some of the greatest investors

SPEAKER_44: just got so turned off by public markets, be it union square, like Fred Wilson, cause back

SPEAKER_73: then everything was going public. Right. And so the VCs of that era probably did think they were smarter than they were because the public markets are very intoxicating as we've seen now, uh, all the new fresh newbies thinking they understand the markets. And I think even the smartest people in the world got carried away in 1999. Okay. And we're not there yet, but I'm saying in 1999, we all thought we were smart. Meaning I'm doing cars direct deals and then paying up to get it, to get the ugly step.

SPEAKER_14: Like it was crazy. And so I don't think people really can remember that, uh, that weren't literally trading it.

SPEAKER_36: And so, uh, the, the investors of that era stopped public market investing.

SPEAKER_73: Because they were sober. Like they saw stocks go from like 20 billion to like zero in weeks, if not months.

SPEAKER_09: It was very strange to see a $200 stock go to $3. And then quickly, quickly. Like in weeks. And the other thing that was crazy about it was. There was this thing called book value. I remember I was a journalist doing Silicon. I reported somebody's like, well, this company has a billion dollars in cash and they're worth a hundred million.

SPEAKER_47: And I'm like, so if you shut it down, you make, uh, 900 million. How does that work? Exactly.

SPEAKER_25: Well, jumping around. That's why specs are popular now because book has cash has zero because there's zero interest percent interest rates. And if, you know, these crazy kids doing, and this is why, you know, this is what I live

SPEAKER_14: to talk about is cause I'm a loser, but, uh, these kids YOLOing GME, but it's very upsetting

SPEAKER_73: to me when they can literally go and play very close to book value before they have a merger and bet on like bet on people, right? Like you literally have fantasy stock market going on with specs, which is happening. Don't get me wrong.

SPEAKER_14: A lot of smart kids are speculating on Chamath and me and other people that have specs, but yet they're wasting their time. In my opinion, like speculating on AMC and GME, but you know, again, that's the game. I don't know. So the real difference to answer your question would be public and private.

SPEAKER_73: Obviously is private investing suited me much better because I don't like seeing the price. If behaviorally seeing what your account is worth, the great traders have the ability

SPEAKER_16: to separate looking at their statement live in real time, their P and L and being able

SPEAKER_14: to shut that out and think about what it'll look like in five years. I didn't have that gift.

SPEAKER_16: I was the kind of guy that would count his chips. Like when I, I never was a Vegas guy because I just counted my stacks. Instead of paying attention to the game. Yes. Pay attention to the game. Right. And what the market does, like kind of the Dead Sea, if you go to Israel and you go to the Dead Sea, no matter how many times they tell you not to shave your, your balls or your pits the day before your face, every fucking teen shaves. And then they go into the Dead Sea and that salt finds your fucking, you know, yes.

SPEAKER_85: It goes into every poor and it itches.

SPEAKER_14: That's okay. And so I'm saying the market will do that to you too.

SPEAKER_16: And private market investing can do the same thing to you, but you're directly talking to the founder. You understand the cap table and you're not looking like with the Robin Hood this weekend.

SPEAKER_73: You know, if it's a public stock, would Robin Hood have traded down 90%?

SPEAKER_91: Or double. No, but then you wake up Monday and it doubles. But like, if that was a public stock, it would have been a disaster for a company. A couple days. Yeah.

SPEAKER_14: And so then you, so that's the biggest difference. And what's becoming very cool now, Jason, and we see that with altimeter with Brad, and we see it with like ROM, a friend of mine, like these tech guys that actually do crossover investing.

SPEAKER_44: And I think that's the future, right? We had the super angel period, but now we've entered this period where there's venture capital type returns back in the public markets. And see, this is weird.

SPEAKER_93: This is something you have to explain.

SPEAKER_39: This is a very interesting moment.

SPEAKER_02: As someone who's invested in over 250 companies and buys many more, I want to get right to a serious pain point that I see all the time. And that's reducing your burn and ask yourself, how much money are you spending right now on all the software products that you use? And how much time does it take to integrate them all together? Well, let me guess, way too much is probably your answer. And Odoo, O-D-O-O is here to change that. Odoo is a fully customizable and fully integrated suite of business apps that lets you build and scale your stack as you build and scale your business. It's simple and modular. So you use what you need and all their apps integrate perfectly with each other. Plus it's all open source. So you can spend your capital on talent instead of expensive software. What kind of apps does Odoo have? Well, take your pick. For instance, their accounting products are perfect for anyone who is ready to upgrade from Excel or QuickBooks, but doesn't want to break the bank with some of the more expensive options out there. They also have project management, invoicing, sales, marketing automation, help tests, timesheets, inventory, and so much more. Your first app is free forever. And right now, Odoo is offering a $1,000 credit on your first implementation pack. That's not a joke. Not a hundy. 10 hundies. 10 hundies, if I do my math correctly, equals $1,000 off. So go to odoo.com slash twist. O-D-O-O dot com slash twist. O-D-O dot com slash twist and get the $1,000 in credit right now.

SPEAKER_48: When we look at venture capital, our goal, and I just closed my third fund and I'm, you know, now I'm in decade two of angel investing slash now being like a venture investor. You're trying to hit 20%, 30% annualized return in the stock market is traditionally, correct me if I'm wrong here is 7% is what it's done.

SPEAKER_09: 10. Okay, 10%. And so you're saying now we're seeing people in the public markets doing what venture capitalists

SPEAKER_96: can do. Is that sustainable? Or is this a moment in time?

SPEAKER_16: Yeah. Great question. So this is what makes the market so fascinating and to me every day is it switches.

SPEAKER_14: Like Tom Tangas at Redpoint is a great writer because he kind of likes public markets too. And I think, like I said, in 2000, we'd lost a generation of great venture capitalists who

SPEAKER_73: had public companies because they were like, motherfucker.

SPEAKER_98: Never again. Never again.

SPEAKER_73: If you talk to Fred Wilson, he's like, what? What's the stock market? You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_14: And so it's really interesting when I talk to Fred because he realized the stock market

SPEAKER_16: is interesting again with zero interest rates and yada, yada, yada, but he just doesn't want a part of it. Right?

SPEAKER_19: And so these young VCs, and I consider myself old, but the young VCs who don't know the

SPEAKER_73: public markets are a serious disadvantage right now.

SPEAKER_14: And so the VCs who are crushing it happen to be coming out of the hedge fund world because they understand emotion. They understand pricing. They understand over-evaluate. They understand all, everything that you need to know.

SPEAKER_73: And finally, the public markets are actually offering them small cap technology opportunities. And so there's a whole new game. So the public markets and the private markets are coming together much better than they were. They were over here for way too long.

SPEAKER_08: And when you say over here, these were two separate entities and crossing the chasm was

SPEAKER_09: like this giant effort. Uber and Airbnb stay private longer for 10 years, 11 years. And then somehow they make this miraculous cannonball jump across the ravine like evil

SPEAKER_48: Knievel to public.

SPEAKER_105: Yes.

SPEAKER_48: Now with SPACs, our bestie Chamath and others are saying, here's desktop metal, which we were lucky to be angel investors, or here's Virgin Galactic, which we weren't didn't have to, you know, and let's watch and see if these emerging technology companies that are worth low billions of dollars that in some cases, I guess Virgin Galactic is not doing commercial flight yet. They're really like, you know, they're taking orders, I guess, and they'll be doing public

SPEAKER_47: flight soon. But you're investing essentially in a private company, right? Like that would typically have been a private investment.

SPEAKER_107: So I'll tell you a story. Cause it's fucking genius. What they did. Okay. Cause you know, when I, StockTwitch isn't genius.

SPEAKER_14: Twitter was genius. What was genius about StockTwitch was the cash tag. Like what you just brought up at the beginning, what you recognize about StockTwitch was the hack, the dollar song. Yeah. Right. And that's why I never really wanted to raise money. I was like, Twitter is going to co-op that, but it's not a real thing. It's a feature. It's a feature. It's a feature. So, and it's elegant. It's actually just an elegant, clever, Fred says genius, but whatever the word is, it's clever. Okay. So was the hashtag. So, I'm born in Toronto. So there's two things that Canadians know.

SPEAKER_16: They know that there's donuts, Tim Horton, and they know about SPACs and they know about SPACs and musky guns. So that we know two things. I went to the Tim Hortons. When you're born in Canada.

SPEAKER_73: I went to the Tim Hortons. Yeah. And you can buy a SPAC at a Tim Hortons. You can. The Canadian.

SPEAKER_70: Two donuts, a coffee and a SPAC. That's the family meal. That's the quick meal.

SPEAKER_14: That's the family plan there. Yeah. And you get the write-off of the SPAC because they all go to zero in Canada because you just invested in some mining, copper mining company in Saskatchewan. Right?

SPEAKER_73: So, so SPACs have been this elegant in the wilderness feature that was misused because there wasn't the cloud. So, so it was a very speculative tool used by like backwater banks by really smart people that created it.

SPEAKER_72: And it's kind of like Tinder, Tinder, the swipe was an elegant thing that needed the date to make it a thing.

SPEAKER_116: Right. It was a device searching for like a mission to accomplish.

SPEAKER_25: Like, yeah. And so Brian Norgar, you know, and my friend, it's like the swipe is useless, but on a dating thing, genius.

SPEAKER_73: Okay. So the SPAC is a very elegant feature, but it wasn't used for growth vehicles. Most of the time it was used to, to do a promote, to get people in.

SPEAKER_16: So to go dig a hole in Belize or in Houston or in Nevada or right.

SPEAKER_73: And there was oil. It wasn't used for growth. Right. It was used for ugly duckling companies. Got it.

SPEAKER_94: So the, the, the SPAC had a really negative connotation.

SPEAKER_119: It would be the equivalent of doing Tinder for ugly people is what you're saying.

SPEAKER_94: Which is perfect.

SPEAKER_121: It was a segue. Getting the analogy. A segue into me.

SPEAKER_16: So, so, so what Chamath, I think that I haven't talked to him about it, but what I think he did is he recognized this feature as elegant.

SPEAKER_73: Uh, obviously understands finance and, you know, you have this culmination. You see it in the market. The markets tell all.

SPEAKER_14: You have guys like Masa in a Uber writing a $400 million check after one meeting. Hmm.

SPEAKER_73: Of we work. So me as a home player, I'm like, what the fuck? And, and in wag, for example, I was a seed investor on wag. The dog walking marketplace. Yeah.

SPEAKER_127: So when they.

SPEAKER_73: Doing fabulous. Yeah. Doing fabulous.

SPEAKER_16: And from, from Masa, Tom, Gary, and I looked at each other and said, we should just sell because this is now a binary event.

SPEAKER_73: They took a company that was growing and said, put a gun to his head and said, here's 300 million. If you don't take the 300 million, we'll give it to Rover. Oof. Right? Like, so it was like, it was series D and E were being used as weapons. Crazy. There was no elegance to it. So people don't talk about that. But the real story of we work is also the story of specs because the timing became why would I, I'd rather have Chamop as my series D person. And I'd rather have that series D lead, be a public company where at least my employees can sell stock and I can, I can retain my employees and I can talk about projections or I can talk, you know, seven years out.

SPEAKER_44: And so it became a story where, man, if you could convince the founder what a SPAC was, which was the hard part. Right. Because they had been.

SPEAKER_73: Because you have Gurley talking about, well, you have Gurley talking about, oh, IPOs are fine and direct listings are the thing. No one was talking about SPAC. It was like direct listing. And I'm here as someone in a crossover investing world saying, what are you fucking talking about, Bill? Like, tell me about your direct listings.

SPEAKER_44: There's two. Spotify. And Slack. And Slack basically traded at its price for two years. So that's dumb. And Spotify took three years to break out. So I'm saying to track list, the track record of, of direct listings.

SPEAKER_73: We already see it. There's hundreds of. Small sample size.

SPEAKER_14: Small sample size. No. And I think, listen, if you're asking me to, to fast forward 10 years, I would say direct

SPEAKER_137: listings will come back and you will settle somewhere in the middle between IPOs, SPACs and direct listings.

SPEAKER_61: Because you can raise money with them now, right? You're going to be able to, the SEC said, it's cool to do a primary offering. Or I'm sorry, it would be a primary or secondary offering. This would be a primary offering with your direct listing. So it used to be direct listing if you had cash in the bank, but you're not raising money. But now you can do that.

SPEAKER_143: And so the way I see the world is just converging, you know, and, and so we had it too good in the private markets. It got abused. I think the top of that was seeing T row price fidelity and soft bank kind of corner the

SPEAKER_44: market in series D and E, right?

SPEAKER_14: Like you had to put them on the cap table. Right. And then we saw those deals go to bonkers and like, first of all, it was misallocation of capital. WAG didn't need 300 million. All these companies didn't need that money.

SPEAKER_61: Brandless was the one I remember having Tina Sharkey on and it was like 200 million to make generic foods. Like what's going on here?

SPEAKER_14: So it was a complete misallocation of capital. So Bain and Chamath figured this out. I don't know if that's a true story. That's the way I would believe it happened. And I was sitting with Bain in February, right before COVID in New York. And we were laughing. I was like, Bain, if you could do a SPAC, anybody could do a SPAC. Like, you know, Bain, like he was so funny.

SPEAKER_147: Adam Bain we're talking about.

SPEAKER_19: You cannot upset Adam Bain. You cannot upset him. Right. Like he's just a gentleman's gentleman.

SPEAKER_149: Cool.

SPEAKER_44: Yeah. He'll laugh at it. He'll laugh at himself. And, you know, you can't say that to Chamath, I imagine. But with Bain, it was like, tell me what you're doing with Virgin Galactic.

SPEAKER_16: And he told us how they were doing it. And my friend, Doug Horlick, who's a Goldman banker, was sitting there picking his brain. And I just said, wow, you know, it's fucking genius. And Adam said, we'll help you. Like, we'll teach you how to do it. Yada, yada, yada. And so someone who was very skeptical on SPACs in February, and I was writing about this

SPEAKER_73: in my blog up until because of Canada and all the other bullshit that was going on. Once I realized the hack and the feature, I knew it was an elegant product, but to see

SPEAKER_14: it applied to like a big vision was something new. Yeah. And so kudos to Chamath and all the people that are running with this.

SPEAKER_158: The new year is here. Thank the Lord. It's February. We're getting to work.

SPEAKER_02: Everybody is grinding and your business is growing. I know your business is growing. You're listening to this week in startups. You're getting these incredible culture tips and growth tips. And at launch, things are going bananas. The podcasts are growing. And what does that mean? It means I knew any video editors. I need a community managed because nobody's managing the slack. It's chaos over there. We need a social media editor. We need an archivist. I mean, we need people. So where am I going to find my candidates? What am I going to do? I'm going to go to LinkedIn jobs. Of course, that's what I'm going to do. And LinkedIn is global. They're national. They're international. We have over 722 million members worldwide. What that means is it's easier than ever for you to find great people because LinkedIn knows everybody's job description. They know the size of the company they work at. They know their soft skills. They know their hard skills. LinkedIn jobs is going to put your job in front of the right people. It's never been easier if you're using LinkedIn jobs to find the right person and to find them quickly. And that's what you're looking for. Just use LinkedIn jobs. And when you're ready to do that, you're going to get a free job listing. That's because LinkedIn jobs. It's been a huge supporter of this week and startups and my podcast angel. Go to linkedin.com a n g e l and you will get to post a free job. There are terms and conditions that apply because they're letting you post for free.

SPEAKER_61: So thanks again, LinkedIn jobs. We found so many great people on your platform. We love the product. We love the service. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode.

SPEAKER_09: And what it does, which is really, I guess, paradoxical in a way, we have these very paternal

SPEAKER_48: accreditation laws. If you make $200,000 a year, you got a million dollars in cash, whatever it is, you can invest in private companies.

SPEAKER_161: Mm hmm.

SPEAKER_48: Now you can not invest in those private companies, but you can go to Vegas or, you know, bet on sports betting, poker, whatever. If you're the other 96% of Americans, then SPACs come out and you take the same inventory

SPEAKER_09: of private companies that are pre launch in some cases, or, you know, have modest amounts of traction.

SPEAKER_48: And then you make them public. And now you can invest them as, you know, somebody who works as a Uber driver, Postmates driver, or is unemployed and got a stimulus check, currently, or is, you know, whatever, a developer making $75,000 working from home, you couldn't invest in private companies. Now you can.

SPEAKER_163: So that is part of the magic is that you get to get in earlier on companies.

SPEAKER_143: Yeah. At the macro level, Jason, it's a supply demand imbalance.

SPEAKER_164: Explain what that means.

SPEAKER_16: Meaning for 10 years, I was the idiot yelling into the wind. And obviously you saw a little bit of this, whether you know it or not, because wall street

SPEAKER_44: and main street told you to set them forget. They said, you're dumb. Oh wait, you should buy Vanguard. You should buy black rock. You should just fucking be dumb. Like they basically said, be dumb. Right.

SPEAKER_16: Pay no fees. And for that, we will deliver your 10% return a year. Set it and forget.

SPEAKER_36: Yeah. Talking about the biggest con of all. First of all, it's a great product. There's nothing wrong.

SPEAKER_73: Again, great product. But I think a shitty choice for millennials because. Why?

SPEAKER_167: Because isn't it the truth that if you set it and forget it. It's a choice.

SPEAKER_14: Yeah. Okay. Just hear me out. There's still, it's still momentum packaged as passive.

SPEAKER_16: Meaning the S and P 500 is still a momentum strategy. They drop out companies that drop below a certain level and add another company.

SPEAKER_44: That's very active. It's packaged as passive. Okay. Okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_169: Never thought about it that way. Everything's momentum. There's an active manager there saying.

David Friedberg: No, it's a, it's a formula. No, it's a formula.

SPEAKER_14: It's a formula. Based on if you drop below a certain market cap. We were, it's a top 500 market cap company. Right.

SPEAKER_48: So all of a sudden Tesla gets added. Cause it's, you know, a momentum stock that people.

SPEAKER_73: And now if I want to buy the S and P 500, I own a lot of Tesla.

SPEAKER_76: And so the product just became to me, not the original intention. Okay. Because you would wake up in the morning.

SPEAKER_174: Yeah.

SPEAKER_73: No. So imagine you're here's, here's the, the top in Vanguard investing to me.

SPEAKER_16: I wake up in the morning and I owned the companies.

SPEAKER_73: I hate Verizon, AT&T, uh, Comcast, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo.

SPEAKER_08: The companies you know are abusing you and you can unsubscribe from. Yes, correct.

SPEAKER_73: You can't unsubscribe. These are the ones you know they don't have a great product when you can't unsubscribe. If Vanguard had come up with a product that said, here's the S and P 500. Deselect the companies that you don't want. And we'll rebalance that.

SPEAKER_179: They win.

SPEAKER_180: They fucking are this close to have winning the game. Hold on a second.

SPEAKER_181: This is such a brilliant idea. Roll your own Vanguard or customize it.

SPEAKER_183: So it's like, here's your sneakers, but you could change the colors on them.

SPEAKER_73: Hello. If fucking Fidelity and Vanguard and BlackRock had just not sat on that feature.

SPEAKER_14: And, and so Robin, and so, so, so, so we have this era and VCs that I was just talking to Jeremy Phillips at Spark.

SPEAKER_16: I was yelling at VCs. Like, what am I seeing? You know, I start StockTwits. I'm way ahead of the curve because back then it was set and forget.

SPEAKER_73: The crisis happened. You're an idiot. Don't pick stocks. Yeah. You're, you're an idiot. You're an idiot. You're not qualified. You, you can make 10% a year giving your money to Vanguard.

SPEAKER_44: Behind the scenes, Vanguard and BlackRock are doing their thing, which is like cutting deals with the lobbyists and making sure every, uh, 401k plan has time dated, uh, target dated funds. So when you sign up at Uber or whatever company, fortune 500 company, you have five choices of your, you can't, God forbid, you should be able to pick stocks in your 401k. Okay. So they did their job. They did their job of locking you in. Okay. Now what that behavior created was Wells Fargo.

SPEAKER_73: Meaning if I'm Wells Fargo CEO, who cares what I do? Because every day, every month when Betty Lou puts money into a 401k, she's getting an allocation of Wells Fargo. So as long as you don't have to earn. Yeah.

SPEAKER_192: Don't have to earn the shareholder. You literally get shareholders for free money for nothing.

SPEAKER_14: And you can behave as badly as you want. Wow. And you can't vote them out of, you can't vote them off the island because he owned the S and P 500. It's like you're forced to buy bananas. Yeah. It's bonkers.

SPEAKER_16: So what we're seeing here is kids are not that dumb, right?

SPEAKER_73: Why do I need 500 stocks to be diversified? Wouldn't 15 do the job? Sure. And say, I'm, say I'm wrong about three and they go to zero.

SPEAKER_44: But if I pick five good ones, just like a venture portfolio and just set and forget those Nike, Lulu, Peloton, whatever the brands they use every day. Snapchat. All I got to do is get three of those right.

SPEAKER_73: And I'm a venture capitalist and I'm liquid. And so this is what you're seeing happening.

SPEAKER_16: I call it the unbundling. Ben Thompson talks about unbundling and bundling. Sure. We are going from cable channels, right?

SPEAKER_198: If you get to pick now, you're like, you know what?

SPEAKER_09: I want Disney, HBO Max and Netflix, 10 bucks each. Let's roll as opposed to my bundle, which was 150. Yeah.

SPEAKER_180: And some people will still like the bundle and Vanguard.

SPEAKER_73: I'm not saying it's a horrible thing. I'm just saying for someone who likes, who hates giving my money to criminal organizations, I would prefer to choose my bundle.

SPEAKER_202: And if Vanguard and BlackRock had just offered this feature, there'd be no Robin Hood. Wow.

SPEAKER_66: That's how close we are.

SPEAKER_205: You and I are angel investors in Robin Hood, correct? Correct. Correct. You invested before the product was launched like me, I think, or shortly thereafter.

SPEAKER_72: Yeah.

SPEAKER_44: So I had seen, you know, obviously, because of StockTwits, I sit in this weird seat where I get to see things because people come to StockTwits and say, hey, help me get 10,000 users. A lot of Baizhou ping me. They didn't know me, but I guess they knew me from StockTwits and they ping me. Sure, hard not to. Yeah. So they ping me and I flew. I was like, I was an investor in eToro. So Robin Hood is not the first company to do this.

SPEAKER_16: The most innovative company, I think you know who they are, eToro, which is a guy named Yoni Asia. Him and his brother started eToro, which is Robin Hood meets Coinbase for the rest of the world. There are 140 countries started in 2009.

SPEAKER_14: It's like a mobile trading app. You could trade Forex, you could trade everything. Anyways, I wanted that to exist.

SPEAKER_73: And for some reason, the VCs in America were all busy knocking off Vanguard. So the VCs got caught up in Betterment and Wellfront. So they were like, oh, Vanguard is going to win. Let's do a better software package. User interface. User interface. That was their hack. And I kept looking at those deals going, wait a minute, that's not good enough. Like, what's your margin? Like, low switching costs.

SPEAKER_16: So I passed on all those deals and I didn't make fun of them, but I was like waiting, waiting, waiting. And I believed in the eToro model.

SPEAKER_14: So when Baizhou and Vlad hit me up, I flew up to see them and they showed me the app. It wasn't live. And I said, that's going to work. That's it. I said, if you can build that, you have a billion dollar company. Wow. And I wrote a hundred K check.

SPEAKER_218: Yummy. I think it was 10 million valuation.

SPEAKER_137: And then, and then I helped promote like the first, I got them so many users from StockTwits.

SPEAKER_14: And then a funny story is, so when the A round, we're seed investors only. And our first fund was 6 million. And so Baizhou and Vlad were just so smart at optimizing valuation. So they called me and they said, listen, you love Robinhood. You got StockTwits. You were going to raise an A round. Why don't you guys do a term show?

SPEAKER_16: I said, our fund is only $6 million fund. Oops. Yeah. So what I had taught, we did a term sheet. We sent them a term sheet for the A round, an $11 million term. I called Fred Wilson, my mentor. And I said, Fred, what would you do? He goes, well, do you believe it's going to be a home run? He says, don't worry about the valuation, write a term sheet. And I said, Fred, I don't have $11 million. He goes, well, you'll raise $11 million. So I think I faxed a term sheet on like July 4th.

SPEAKER_44: And I think to their credit, they shopped the deal. And I didn't know how to like corner the deal. And, and, and index beat me out on the deal.

SPEAKER_48: Well, that's the, you know, you became the stock.

SPEAKER_09: I was a pawn. The stocking horse. And, you know, that happens to me sometimes. And what I learned about that is you have to have the follow through. So what you have to do is send that term sheet and then harangue and hound the founder.

SPEAKER_205: I did everything right. That the wire is coming. Here's the wire. We're ready to ship the wire. Are you ready to go? Let's go. Because I have had the same thing happen to me. I send a term sheet.

SPEAKER_09: And now I understand why people do exploding term sheets, which I thought were dumb. But you do need to have this pressure to close. If not, it gets shopped forever.

SPEAKER_224: If you are an accredited investor, you need to understand what a special purpose vehicle is. This is how I have made my career. What is a special purpose vehicle? Well, it's an investment vehicle that allows up to 250 investors to invest up to $10 million into one entity on a cap table of a startup. Nice and clean, not 250 names, but one name. If you're an angel investor with a bunch of rich friends, you could start your own syndicate powered through SPVs. Here at launch, we could not be more pleased with our partnership with the team at Assure. They power my syndicate, which is the largest one in the world. Over 6,000 active members. TheSyndicate.com is the back end that I rely on to get all of these syndicates done. Assure is the leading provider of SPVs, special purpose vehicles and fund administration, people running venture firms with over $2.5 billion in AUA. If you're wondering what that is, assets under administration, not management. That's what I do. And over 5,000 completed transactions. Amazing. They've developed an innovative software called Glassboard. It basically automates everything. It makes it really easy breezy for you to make sure everybody gets their documents from the entity formation all the way, hopefully pleased to the IPO. Not only do investors like it, founders love it. They love it because it just keeps their cap table clean. That's the number one thing for a founder. They manage the entire process over the life of the investment and you are going to get 20% off your first SPV. What a great deal. Assure.co slash angel. That's Assure.co slash angel to get 20% off your first SPV.

SPEAKER_25: Here's a great story. So this goes to learn by doing and why I love Robin Hood and all this stuff.

SPEAKER_205: Learn by doing. This is the critical lesson of 2021.

SPEAKER_44: Well, it's critical lesson of life. Sure. You ride a bike. You don't watch a video. You could watch videos now and that makes you better. Like, you know what? Yes.

SPEAKER_73: You can three dimensionally see what it is riding a bike, but until you pedal or fall over or understand it. Okay. So learn by doing applies to finance to learn by doing applies to languages. Duolingo. If Duolingo was, it's no different than Robin Hood. It's a trading app to teaching you the language, right? Robin Hood's teaching you the language of money. You may hate it. You don't understand the rules. I get it. Okay.

SPEAKER_48: The best way to learn how to do options trading and shorting and this stuff is to actually go short something. Because you can have, I've watched a hundred YouTube videos on shorting puts longs.

SPEAKER_229: I've never put $3 on it and see that you owe 20.

SPEAKER_09: It's like poker, right?

SPEAKER_205: If you start playing poker, you start to understand, wow, my aces did not hold up. And there were three hearts on the flop. I should have known.

SPEAKER_232: Matt beat you there. Yeah. So, so, so in, um, but I was going to say something important and I'm old.

SPEAKER_73: And now I forget we were talking about, Oh, Robin Hood.

SPEAKER_16: So I learned by doing it. So I send the facts. I send the term sheet. I don't hear anything for a day. And this had happened to me back with Henry Blodgett too. One time when I was really early on in the game. Uh, but the Robin Hood meant more because I'd be a billionaire is that we send the $11 million term sheet. We don't have the $11 million, but you and Vlad knew we didn't have $11 million.

SPEAKER_44: They trusted me for sure to do it. But I was kind of scared. I'm like, fuck it. They signed this. I got a lot of work to do. I'm going to be calling it, you know, and it was at a, we wrote a term sheet at a $60

SPEAKER_36: million valuation at the time. There was no products though. Like it was not shipping. It was a, I think there was maybe a wait list. Okay. Wait list. Yes. They were, they were.

SPEAKER_235: Kudos. Kudos. Right between those two points. Yeah.

SPEAKER_13: 20 or $30 million before they launched. Yeah.

SPEAKER_14: Yeah. So, and they brought it, they were just so good at the cap table stuff, but very dangerous game and very few can pull it off. So, because it's a momentum game. So anyway, so we send the term sheet. I'm shitting bricks. I mean, I'm happy to go raise the money. And then we get a call that, Hey, Yon's coming in. It's like a 15 day close instead of like a Howie Linsen six month clothes where I got to call my mom to give me 50 grand to fill the term sheet. So it's like, uh, I probably would have called DJs. And so, uh, the, and, and, and index was like, fuck you. Who's social leverage? Like Yon was like, I don't give a fuck who Howard Linsen is. No, he didn't probably say that, but he was like, no, we want to put in all the money.

SPEAKER_69: Right. So, so in, in, in, you know, people may say things about Bajun and Vlad, but they, they

SPEAKER_16: came back to us and said, listen, you guys gave us the term sheet. You can have as much as this deal as you want. Oh, nice. And, and so we put, we'd put a large check into the A round as well.

SPEAKER_14: Fantastic. Yeah. So, so learn by doing. Put a quick million or two? Yeah. We put 800 grand. And so, so you can tell the returns that has been. And so that's why I'm very, so, so you could say what you want. This is why you're so relaxed. Robinhood. Well, it's not that I'm so relaxed because eToro is even a better company in many ways, but it's, it's that they did the right thing. Like Yon did his thing. Learn by doing means I called Fred. Fred's the expert, right? He's, he's, he's, he's the fucking OG or whatever you call it. It's the Yoda. Fred took my call and he said, Howard, write the fucking term sheet.

SPEAKER_73: Guess what Howard does? I write the term sheet.

SPEAKER_143: The next thing is Yon did his thing as a VC is like, who the fuck cares about social leverage? We have our chips. This is our chip. We want every dollar. But by writing that term sheet. Yes. You secured your position.

SPEAKER_244: They didn't have to. This is why I liked it.

SPEAKER_48: No, they do the right thing. I mean, they're getting destroyed. They did the right thing. They're getting destroyed right now. But when we look at what happened with Robin Hood the past week, it is a good idea for us to sort of deconstruct what happened here.

SPEAKER_247: I'd love to.

SPEAKER_09: Yeah. So you have a group of people who identify this opportunity in GME. They think it's undervalued, yada, yada.

SPEAKER_116: They basically create a, I don't know, I don't want to say mob, but they can, they create a voting block to then go after the voting block that is short. What is that a proper assessment of how this started?

SPEAKER_143: I will be honest, I'm not an expert at the mechanics of this. Yeah. The reason I love what I do is I try and stay up here.

SPEAKER_73: Yes. I know the messy. Robin Hood put a beautiful package on a very complicated back end. That didn't change. That's what people are learning right now. Just because it's beautiful does not simplify what's underneath the thing.

SPEAKER_143: Okay. See, this is interesting. Just because Uber is beautiful, the chaos that must happen to get a car to your fucking place. Absolutely. And that's why it's worth a hundred billion. God bless. Right.

SPEAKER_73: I mean, Airbnb. I mean, talk about mess. Airbnb. Airbnb will be the biggest company, could be the biggest company in the world at Ventron because they're taking some of the most, it's such a big market. It's such a complex thing. And they've turned everybody into Donald Trump. And if Donald Trump could be president, that means every fucking person is now, could be a landlord.

SPEAKER_14: And I also hate Airbnb for that reason because people don't, just because you can be Donald Trump doesn't mean you should be Donald Trump. No, please don't. Please don't. We all have neighbors. So, but, but Airbnb is the hardest company to stop in 2021. Because? Because it's so, it's so distributed.

SPEAKER_253: So messy. And it's just so, it's so messy.

SPEAKER_256: So much chaos and they organized chaos.

SPEAKER_16: And I think what the VCs, whether they flinched this weekend to put up their three and a half billion. I don't, I'm not in the room. I haven't been in that room in a long time, but I do speak to Yodi at eToro. So I know what's going on.

SPEAKER_14: So I know what's going on, but not directly. Okay. And I have a lot of people in my relationship with eToro is fuck that many people pushing the same button, forgetting about GME. It was going to happen. Yeah. Okay. That many people, and that's why I hate about the S and P 500. And that's what happened in March when everybody pushes the same button to sell the S and P 500. Wow. Get me out of Vanguard at the same time. You have moves that never have been seen before in the worlds of Donald Trump.

SPEAKER_73: Never have I seen. Yes. What happened in March. You haven't.

SPEAKER_259: It was like literally the market loses half its value instantly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_73: And that's the market. And so apply that to GameStop. Anything can happen. Right now.

SPEAKER_16: The good news is we distress tested. This is why the markets are the best game in the world. And everybody's talking about roadblocks. And I keep saying the stock market is TAM is completely undervalued. What you got right in Robinhood and what I got right in Robinhood is TAM.

SPEAKER_264: Total addressable market.

SPEAKER_16: People thought Wealthfront and Betterment were going to be the winners. Retirement. Yeah. Well, no. Just set and forget in a beautiful UI. What I believed was the TAM of do it yourself was undervalued. And that Robinhood was unlocking, unbundling this.

SPEAKER_73: And so that was my bet. I didn't know what would happen in 2021 with GameStop. I'm not smart enough to know that. But what I do know what happened is when you put 20 million new people into a game in nine months. Yes. Fucking shit will fucking break. Yes. And GameStop broke the system.

SPEAKER_270: Not just Robinhood. They broke everybody.

SPEAKER_193: What happened with Robinhood coming out first was they gave cover to everybody else.

SPEAKER_73: To throw them under the bus. Right. And to tell the story that Robinhood probably should have told. But remember, if Robinhood tells the true story, not that they should have told the truth. I don't know what happened. If Robinhood tells the story that there's a run on the bank and we found a hack in the system, more hedge funds would have piled in to drive Robinhood out of business.

SPEAKER_273: Right. Because that's the way Wall Street works.

SPEAKER_73: If they say we have a weakness, if they say reality, and I'm not saying they lied. Right. Because I didn't even watch TV.

SPEAKER_143: But if they truly told you what was going on, do you think the fucking mob cares? And do you think the hedge funds care if Robinhood goes down?

SPEAKER_73: If Robinhood's an institutional business, they're out of business. They're Lehman. But Robinhood is really an important product because it's an educational product.

SPEAKER_141: It's an onboarding system.

SPEAKER_275: And it's democratizing everything and educating people.

SPEAKER_48: Yeah. Is there messaging off?

SPEAKER_141: Maybe.

SPEAKER_48: Well, I mean, if you had a choice to give your kids $250,000 to go to college or give them 100,000 to bet on Robinhood, 100,000 to, you know, bet on startups and 50,000 to have a buffer to live off of and, you know, go to some trade school.

SPEAKER_47: If those two things don't work out, you'd obviously pick that. Right.

SPEAKER_281: And my son's living that side of the business. He works at StockTwits.

SPEAKER_16: He works at a restaurant. He golfs. He trades. He's 21. He's learning way more than he would have learned in college.

SPEAKER_44: He hated college. My daughter is the other person. So this is for people with kids. I have two kids. I don't know how many kids you have. Three now.

SPEAKER_282: Yeah.

SPEAKER_44: Okay. You have three kids. No one put a gun to your head, but I have two kids.

SPEAKER_143: And my daughter is like directly on the rails. It's like whatever the system says to do, she does. Check in the boxes. Check in the boxes. Life is good. My son is like over here. He's like, there's no trains.

SPEAKER_72: I don't fucking trust anything. I have Uber. I have Netflix. I have Tinder gold. What are you telling me about the system?

SPEAKER_73: Right. Of course I'm a socialist. I have everything that I want on my phone and my parents pay for it. And health insurance. I don't get sick and I got my parents' health insurance. Of course he's a socialist. But he's not a socialist because he leads the news.

SPEAKER_36: He's a socialist because every single thing he needs other than his pillow.

SPEAKER_287: Provided for him.

SPEAKER_36: Is provided for him. That's a socialist.

SPEAKER_287: The warmth of that smartphone.

SPEAKER_72: Okay. So he now looks like a genius because COVID has shown us how fucked up the system is.

SPEAKER_143: And so my daughter is working from home, doing her first job. There is no office. Chaos ensues. She has no mentorship.

SPEAKER_14: She did her four years of college, straight A's, yada, yada, yada. My son has got two jobs. He's out.

SPEAKER_289: He's golfing. You know, he doesn't know.

SPEAKER_09: He's not a wage slave. He's not showing up for work, punching a clock. And those folks can tend to go further because they have opportunities.

SPEAKER_232: Well, so, so, so I don't know. But what I'm saying is the Robin Hood, we're getting back to Robin Hood.

SPEAKER_73: They opened up a language that was locked in this, like, don't fucking worry about it. Yes, you own Wells Fargo. They don't even tell you, yes, you own Wells Fargo, but just trust us. Low fees. Don't try and do anything.

SPEAKER_14: You know, Vanguard's got your back.

SPEAKER_09: Let me ask you a question about, um, what the right thing to do is. They, um, were told to stop all, I think, according to reports and Elon's interview on Clubhouse, uh, with Vlad, hey, you gotta shut down buying and selling because you need to put more money up. So they put them more money up. And in the meantime, they say, listen, we're going to let you sell. He can't buy anymore because that's going to sink our firm. But we don't want to lock you into not being up to self. The thing goes down. Cause you'd be really upset because when they went down in March, that's what happened. They had to shut down both sides of trading. And I think that was technical issues when, uh, in March, uh, cause they couldn't keep up with it and people went crazy.

SPEAKER_298: Oh, you can't sell. So that was the right thing to do. I guess.

SPEAKER_143: Again, it's so easy to be armchair quarterback. That's what Twitter, Twitter should change its name to armchair quarterback, but no skin

SPEAKER_137: in the game commentary in the end, that beautiful UI. Yeah. Led to a fucking, uh, what do you call it? Uh, uh, uh, somebody broke the code. Right. But you know, if you let people just bang the button, if you let my mom who doesn't know how to use a phone, claw away at her phone, shit will break. Right.

SPEAKER_73: And everybody figured out how to get into the system. And once the sharks are in where they were mixed. It's like the, it's like the raid on the Capitol. There were some normal people mixed in with some fucking crazy people.

SPEAKER_306: And in the end, they were all insurrectionists and they were all upset. It's like January 6th.

SPEAKER_308: You could have some normal Trump supporters. This is January 6th unleashed on GME.

SPEAKER_310: You could have some fucking people cosplaying. Yeah. And then you could have some people who are like literally.

SPEAKER_193: That's the markets 24 seven. This is the beauty of it. Like kids are saying they love Roblox.

SPEAKER_73: Roblox is what? 30 billion dollar valuation. In that world, Robin hood's 200 billion. Right. Now you can yell at me for saying that. Right. I get it. But that's my argument. If you're saying Roblox, which is for eight year olds to what? 20 year olds? Who plays Roblox?

SPEAKER_313: I don't even know. I don't know anybody who's ever played it. It's.

SPEAKER_73: Okay. But Roblox is going to be the hot IPO. What age group is Roblox or eight to? Okay. Apply Roblox to 18 year olds to a hundred year olds. Right.

SPEAKER_60: That's a big fucking Tam. That's a big Tam. And that's just the bat. Wow. That's crazy.

SPEAKER_116: Now let's talk, let's shift to the pandemic because this is a black swan event. Have you gotten the vaccine?

SPEAKER_29: My wife does a lot of charity. She has. I haven't.

SPEAKER_116: Got it. But you're close. I'm assuming you're a little ahead of me. So you're getting close. And we're doing 1.5 million shots. Some days we've got 600 million shots on order. The vaccine seems to have been under sold. Not one person who was in those first 75,000 in the trials has died from it. Only one got hospitalized and it wasn't a ventilator or anything acute. They got sent home very quickly. Basically. It's a miracle.

SPEAKER_14: I think it's a miracle. It's a miracle. I think even Phoenix like is a fucking Phoenix is very organized right now. Like we were a hotspot, but like, I can go do eight hours of work next week, uh, at the fairgrounds or whatever. And, and, and, and at the end of my shift, get a, get a, uh, shot. What? Yeah. So wait, explain this again.

SPEAKER_323: You can go work. For eight hours. You get a shot. Yeah.

SPEAKER_324: So Phoenix has figured out how to get people their shots. Well, I'm saying, I don't know. It's not my fault.

SPEAKER_326: I'm not gonna clean toilets for a week. I thought that's what you did. At rest stops. Regularly.

SPEAKER_25: That's what I do. I just have to tell you what, Jason, they would love you at rest stops. As someone who doesn't even love, like you that much. Don't do that. Don't even do that.

SPEAKER_330: Don't even do that.

SPEAKER_25: Don't even do that.

SPEAKER_333: We like each other. We remind each other too much of each other. And that's why we fight. What is it like siblings?

SPEAKER_36: No, I just don't like your haircut. Really? I've felt that haircut was a little third Reich. I've always felt it was a little third Reich.

SPEAKER_338: I got it. So, you know, it's interesting. You bring that. As a Jew.

SPEAKER_339: I always worried that that haircut has interesting.

SPEAKER_298: You bring up the Nazis.

SPEAKER_342: I didn't say you said it. I was good. No, literally. We're both going to get it on the subway.

SPEAKER_205: This is a true story. I'm on the subway going into work in the nineties. And this old woman comes up to me and she puts her hand on my forearm. And she pulls herself close and she goes, Hitler youth.

SPEAKER_181: You've seen the sound of music. And I'm like, what are you talking about? She's like, you look like Hitler youth. And I'm like, I don't know what Hitler youth is.

SPEAKER_345: And I'm like looking up Hitler youth later. Like what is Hitler youth? I don't, I've never seen the sound of music. I don't know what you're talking about lady.

SPEAKER_346: So just a tip from one Jewish guy to, I'm sure you're not racist. Right. You scare a lot of people.

SPEAKER_202: And I'm just finally telling you. You go, you go buzz cut. Your followers will double. Now you're going to lose the QAnon support on your Twitter feed.

SPEAKER_304: So I don't know where you stand on that, but if you want Jews to embrace Jason Calcanus.

SPEAKER_350: Right.

SPEAKER_304: Fix the hair.

SPEAKER_350: Got it. Okay. You know what? I'll talk to my rabbi. I'll talk to Mordecai. I have my rabbi.

SPEAKER_352: Talk to Mordecai.

SPEAKER_350: And so one thing. Mordecai is my rabbi on Twitter. And now we become friends in real life.

SPEAKER_220: He walks in Crown Heights and eat brisket and talk about life.

SPEAKER_253: Well, keep your enemies close. You know how Mordecai is. Keep your enemies close.

SPEAKER_14: So, so here's what I was going to say coming full circle to the markets. We're at this beautiful point. You asked. And I apologize.

SPEAKER_355: You're at, we're at this beautiful point where all the alpha was in the private market. Yes. Okay.

SPEAKER_94: Alpha meaning gains.

SPEAKER_73: Alpha meaning smart people like Chamath, you, me, Fred. And it was like a party. It was a fucking party. Okay. And we were hoarding. Yes. The IP room. We were hoarding. And Andreessen's like the new Goldman Sachs. He's genius. He's like going on Bloomberg and saying, oh, the bubble.

SPEAKER_149: He doesn't want people in the game. No. His . Whatever the word is that guys use. We're going to have to beat that one. Beat that. Please beat that.

SPEAKER_14: But he's, he's got 6 billion. He goes on Bloomberg, just like Goldman would say and say, why would you invest in private markets or a bubble?

SPEAKER_72: And then you get a call from your LPs and going Mark Andreessen just said it was a bubble. I'm not giving you money. I go, no, he's trying to not let me have money.

SPEAKER_363: He's like, you don't want to go skiing here. Don't move to Austin. It's terrible. The water is terrible.

SPEAKER_364: And there's like fish.

SPEAKER_73: And so I'm like the little private guy going Mark Andreessen to shit my pool.

SPEAKER_36: But so, so the, so the, the VCs had it all. Then Masa got carried away. And all the people got carried away.

SPEAKER_119: He raised 45 billion from MBS. Cause he could. Cause he could. In 45 minutes. Like in an hour. He raised 50 billion. If you're MBS.

SPEAKER_143: If you're MBS. And I see this living in Coronado with Mexico. Wealthy Mexicans. They set up a retail shore.

SPEAKER_16: It's kind of like the show. They don't care if they lose 80 cents on the dollar. They just clean 20 cents. Okay. So yeah.

SPEAKER_14: Yeah. I mean, it's a money. I mean, I'm very skeptical. I'm very cynical. Just like, just like people want to burn down the system.

SPEAKER_73: I'm very cynical of dirty money. That's everything's dirty. But if you're MBS, what do you care if you make 6%? You just cleaned. Yes. All that money. SoftBank. And again, I'm sure they're great people, but that's how money works. It just creates all kinds of fucking evil. And so the private markets had all the fuck and God bless. They hoarded it. They did it. And then it got crazy.

SPEAKER_141: And then the public markets are like fucking bank. And then the millennials came along and said, why the fuck do I want to own 500 stocks? Like I want to own Peloton.

SPEAKER_73: I want to own fucking Nike. I want to own Snapchat. And so they're unbundling it. Give me some Disney. Give me some Disney, but they'll learn that Disney is not a better stock than owning Netflix. Cause I'd rather own a pure company. I don't want to own conglomerate.

SPEAKER_36: So I think we're also going from the era of the conglomerate to the pure play. And that's what you see with SPACs. That's where you see with SPACs.

SPEAKER_09: It feels like Disney is in sync with you where they're just like, you know what? The entire organization is now being reorganized around their version of Amazon prime, which is Disney plus.

SPEAKER_76: No, the market's giving them a chance.

SPEAKER_73: And if they don't truly sync and spin off, uh, Disney plus Netflix will eat their lunch because, because of focus and because of accounting and because of, of, of, of scale. Yeah.

SPEAKER_338: I'm in a great, this is weird. I'm in agreement with you.

SPEAKER_73: I'm not saying Disney isn't a great stock, but if you give me the choice between a pure play digital content company and Disney, I'm going to go with the pure play.

SPEAKER_323: If I want theme parks, I'll go with Disney.

SPEAKER_116: Yeah. But here's the thing. This is what I think they should do. Just, I'm hashing this out with you. They have 87 million.

SPEAKER_202: Wait a minute. I solved your hair problem. Yes. Is that a thank you? Or is that something that you're going to consider?

SPEAKER_149: Of course. Of course. You think I want to be put in that bucket? No. Yeah. It will take a few months and I will help you. I see you saying shave it. Just go for like police officer. Or wear a hat.

SPEAKER_393: Or wear a hat. Or wear a hat. Continue on your Nazi ways.

SPEAKER_396: Here we go. I'm ready. I got mine. Dude, you're almost lovable with that hat.

SPEAKER_116: There you go.

SPEAKER_396: Okay.

SPEAKER_116: So go ahead. What if they said, when you buy your Disney plus, you get X number of tickets or each Disney plus gets a ticket to the park. Definitely. You can buy this and you get five tickets, five days in the park, whatever it is.

SPEAKER_202: Guess why the stock is back where it was above because of that. The market's already pricing that in.

SPEAKER_14: They'd be stupid not to offer that. Of course. You're absolutely right. And if they're not thinking of that, they're idiots because the stock market has already said that's assumed.

SPEAKER_09: It looks like Apple's doing that now too. They have some sort of family package.

SPEAKER_14: Apple's unstoppable.

SPEAKER_143: The only thing Apple has wrong is the narrative. If they had like, What does that mean? Meaning Tim Cook's not out there talking like Elon Musk. He's not in clubhouse saying you don't understand the narrative.

SPEAKER_14: Apple is unstoppable because we have recurring revenue. If he was out there pounding the table, like Elon Musk, taking bullets like Chamath, the stock would be a much higher multiple.

SPEAKER_44: Period. End of story. I own it as one of my biggest positions, if not, but they're terrible at the narrative.

SPEAKER_09: They're, they're really not good at narrative. I agree. The products they launch are, you know, between average and awesome, uh, depending on the

SPEAKER_205: product, but they don't buy any companies and they have all this cash of the largest hedge fund in the world.

SPEAKER_119: Right? Like what should they buy? I'm okay with that. I'm okay with that. They, they could have bought Tesla for 50 billion, 75 billion.

SPEAKER_36: Because I'm okay with it. It's working. What's not working is they're not playing the story. And the market is rewarding storytelling.

SPEAKER_73: I mean, your bestie Chamath tells stories like a fucking professional. He's playing the narrative. He's got Adam Bain. Who's like, you can't hurt Adam Bain. He's like fucking kryptonite. Right? You want to pick on Chamath? Well, you can't pick on Chamath. Fucking Adam Bain's like Snow White.

SPEAKER_193: Right? Like he's, he's, he's, he's got his fucking podcast with you. He's got like, he's talked to his archenemies. He's like, he's running for office. He's like fucking power to the people. He's doing topless shirts.

SPEAKER_73: Like if I sent a shirt of my, with me without my shirt on. Career ender. Exactly. It's like your hair.

SPEAKER_202: It would be, if you put my body on your hair. My hair. We'd have no followers.

SPEAKER_408: We'd have no followers. Actually, I think we'd be deplatformed. I think right now, Amazon.

SPEAKER_409: QAnon will love us. We would, QAnon will love us. We'd be the new spokesman for QAnon.

SPEAKER_250: So the pandemic is going to end quicker.

SPEAKER_202: I think we're like so close. Because people like me, I love, I can't say this publicly. Hopefully you block it out. COVID has been phenomenal to Howard Lindsay.

SPEAKER_73: And I've been super lucky. Like I joke. It's not a joke at all because I'm doing, giving money away. And like, you can't do much, right? I'm trying not to get COVID. We're all playing a game right now. It's like, how much do you want to risk getting COVID? Right.

SPEAKER_306: I've been the somewhat good citizen. I go bike riding. I haven't been on a plane. Have not been on a plane myself.

SPEAKER_411: Right.

SPEAKER_306: I don't go to restaurants. No high risk. You go shopping?

SPEAKER_44: No. Of course not. Why would you do that? I write big tips. I write big tips. I go to my local restaurants. I don't know what I'm supposed to do. I listen to the news. I don't listen to the news.

SPEAKER_72: But my job is to survive. Okay. So now that we're so close, I'm even more of a hermit. Same with me.

SPEAKER_73: I'm ready to get the fuck up. Meaning, I want to get my shot. If people don't start behaving, I'm going to, not butt in line, but I'm going to play the game and get my shot.

SPEAKER_324: You know what I mean? If you want to take the narrative and-

SPEAKER_159: Let me ask you this. You got some, did you get any inside offers of how you might be able to get a little bit closer? Never, never.

SPEAKER_418: No.

SPEAKER_141: Nobody gave you a roadmap? Because of my chat groups, like you talk to Fred Wilson and stuff, we're not playing that game. I'm not.

SPEAKER_290: I would never jump the line. I got an opportunity to, but then I decided not to.

SPEAKER_157: Yeah. So I, I don't know, buy into all the drama. It's, you know, we build our own networks.

SPEAKER_66: Getting it now would be stupid, right? Like if you get it in the 11th month and it's ending in the 14th, you're an idiot.

SPEAKER_180: You're literally, what were you thinking? So now I'm more careful than I ever was. Me too. Because it would be so dumb to step outside and get COVID.

SPEAKER_73: Not that I'm scared of it, but it's like my job was to survive. My job for my LPs is to fucking manage money.

SPEAKER_143: Yeah. And my job is to be on Zoom and to try and get smarter and to like talk to really smart people and try and accept, just like our name of our firm, Social Leverage. Our job is to be armchair quarterbacks with skin in the game. It's like, tell me your problem. How could Social Leverage help? When you come to Social Leverage for Capital, Tom, Gary, and I, there's three jobs of a CEO.

SPEAKER_14: The most important one is don't run out of money. Yeah.

SPEAKER_202: Be solid. Yeah. So our most important job at Social Leverage, we're going to be the best that we can be. It's not so much recruiting. We'll do that.

SPEAKER_14: But it's like, if you do your job and you keep the lights on and you keep building this product and you go get those 10 customers and you recruit good people, we got your back. Because our LPs are the smartest people in the world. We're not, we're like individual LPs from Fred Wilson to Mark Pincus to Chris Saka. Like great guys, not huge, just great people. And so everybody knows who you are. So get the fucking product shipped, get your 10 customers, right?

SPEAKER_73: And recruit good people and Social Leverage will do the rest. And so we've done a good job of that as a firm. And that's why we're on fund four.

SPEAKER_116: And you have, have you met with anybody, any founders in person? Are you doing all your investing on Zoom?

SPEAKER_180: So we haven't written a lot of checks on Zoom. I'm now actually just like my own personal life.

SPEAKER_143: I'm like ready to fucking not write any more checks. And I want to get on and start seeing people face to face.

SPEAKER_426: Yes.

SPEAKER_143: Gary's younger than me and has done a great job on Zoom. I'm struggling to write checks based on Zoom.

SPEAKER_73: Because? It's just, I'm setting my ways and I'm like, the alpha's in the stock market now.

SPEAKER_44: It shouldn't, like, like this is a crossover fund. I look at Brad at Altimeter who's doing SPACs and does growth equity and does trading.

SPEAKER_14: And I'm like, that's who I want to be. Like he gets it. He has total freedom. If he feels like trading, he trades. If he feels like doing a growth stage, he does a growth stage. He's truly the man right now.

SPEAKER_44: Right. He wants to go on CNBC. He goes on CNBC. He's what I call crossover investor, which is like his LPs trust him to try and create alpha.

SPEAKER_68: You had the same idea I had. Which is what?

SPEAKER_430: Uber bought Drizzly. Genius.

SPEAKER_98: Genius. They can deliver beverages.

SPEAKER_09: What do restaurants make their margin on? Beverages. It's genius. You're ordering your, you know, Mexicans.

SPEAKER_431: First time I felt like buying Uber in forever. Right.

SPEAKER_09: So now we're starting to see, okay, Amazon is two day delivery. Uber is two hour delivery, one hour delivery, 20 minute delivery.

SPEAKER_433: Totally cool. But you made the next logical jump. If you are going to buy Drizzly, you should buy. Weed. Of course you should buy weed. Yeah.

SPEAKER_16: So he's, he's Mike Lazaro is kind of the lead. Mike and I are really good friends. Mike and I are working on a SPAC together. He's on my board. I was an investor in Buddy Media. Mike's one of the best entrepreneurs I know. And he and Adam Bain did, uh, put together the ease deal. I don't know, a couple of years ago before the fucking tailspin. And they stayed with it. Uh, I feel like ease is now in the right place at the right time. And, uh, if Uber, I don't think Uber needs the risk right now, but I think weed is on

SPEAKER_14: a path to for sure being in every state. And I think it's much safer to get it delivered under the Uber brand than it is. Of course.

SPEAKER_72: So I just think Uber has now that vision and chance to tuck in things that, that makes so much sense.

SPEAKER_16: That will increase people's joy. Uh, fucking Netflix should buy ease at this point. Yes. And Cheetos.

SPEAKER_120: They should just go and just, well, I mean, if you're going to Netflix and chill, you kind of need a gummy, you might need a nice sativa and you probably want a beverage and

SPEAKER_205: you're going to need some quesadilla. I mean, it's pretty obvious, but they covered everything we did.

SPEAKER_281: GME, weed, booze, Uber, Robin hood.

SPEAKER_193: Is there anything we have here? Nazis. There's nothing we haven't covered. Rabbis.

SPEAKER_441: Come for the Nazis and weed. Stay for the SPACs.

SPEAKER_73: Do you have no, you've had no guests that have gone this wider range of topics and still talked about nothing. And we've still, it's like Larry David.

SPEAKER_143: Nothing has been, nothing has occurred.

SPEAKER_445: You remind me of Larry David in a way. And that's a compliment. And it is a compliment.

SPEAKER_446: You, you do make people uncomfortable. I don't. You don't.

SPEAKER_73: So, so Larry David does it, which his genius, obviously is, can't thank you for even comparing

SPEAKER_16: me, but, um, cause he's an idol. Well, he's an idol of mine, like David Letterman, because he makes you uncomfortable.

SPEAKER_448: Yes.

SPEAKER_73: I do not want to make people uncomfortable, but I want everybody to not on purpose. Your hair. You're not on purpose looking like an, no one's told you this. It's not like you wake up and every day and go, Oh, I'm third. Right. You just, you just liked the way. No, your wife hasn't told you, by the way, Jews don't like you.

SPEAKER_72: No, I'm saying I'm not trying to cause fights, but I will stick up for my friends to cyber bullying. And I will stick up, but I don't like it. I don't like fighting.

SPEAKER_16: You and I have been in rows and Mike Arrington. I didn't like it, but I felt people, you have to push back sometime.

SPEAKER_306: Yes.

SPEAKER_451: And I'm not a fighter. You have your black belt. I don't have my black belt.

SPEAKER_306: That was a funny moment. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I'll run from a fight because that's smart fully. Um, but on a digital.

SPEAKER_453: You run into the fight.

SPEAKER_193: Yeah. Yeah. Because you have hands that work. Yeah. My hands, my hands would just be, Oh, 10 seconds later. I would say I would like, and I, and I'm not smart at having long nails. I cut my nails.

SPEAKER_73: I have no edge right now. No. So, so in digital, I have a bit of an edge because I have people who trust me. You're witty. It will come to my support. Yeah. You're witty. I'm not going to let myself get pushed. No, I'm just not going to let. There's a point where I just say enough. Like when Chamath, he's a fucking legend, but to go delete Robin hood. When you also have SoFi, that's all pushed back. And I'll say, what are you doing? Like, what's the point? Yes.

SPEAKER_44: Don't shit in my neighborhood because I thought we were friends. Like I know you didn't do it with like complete malice, but I think I owe it to my investors.

SPEAKER_94: He addressed it on episode 20. Yeah, but I don't want to listen to your podcast. He should address it on Twitter where he calls the shit.

SPEAKER_09: Well, he did. He did address it on episode 20 in the first 10 minutes. So you don't have to go that deep into it. Let me ask you about, as we wrap up here, China, TikTok in relations with China, human relation, human rights, should we ban TikTok? Should we be engaging with China and having them pick the ending of our movies in Hollywood because they're funding it and we're sellouts? Or should we start disengaging from them after what they did to Hong Kong and the genocide they're doing with the Uyghurs? What's your personal take on that?

SPEAKER_328: Such a great question.

SPEAKER_14: I'm so anti China, uh, in general. And, but the world is so it's like money and soft bank. I'm like, I hate to hold myself out. I've been to China. I went, I saw, I went five star still scared the shit out of me.

SPEAKER_16: Still came away saying I'll never go back. I didn't have a horrible time.

SPEAKER_73: It just crept me the fuck out. It creeped me out. It felt like Hollywood. If you peered right behind the set, it was fucking chaos. No matter how much they put a beautiful UI on your experience. Yeah.

SPEAKER_245: Shanghai is interesting, but the drive into Shanghai is weird. It's like, I don't want that. I want Uber.

SPEAKER_202: I think China feels very fake to me.

SPEAKER_423: Um, I don't like fake. Um, and we're just lucky to be in America. This is why I always like, what are people complaining about? I get it. Like poverty and equality.

SPEAKER_73: I totally get it, but let's focus on that. Like we got China's got their own problems. So I don't like the fight because they got their own problems. They don't really want to come over here and take us over. That'd be nuts. They got plenty of money. Everybody's got money. They got digital. Everybody's got a phone. These kids don't want to fight wars. So we're fighting the wrong war. If you wanted to mess with China, you play the same fight.

SPEAKER_141: If Facebook can't be used in China, why the hell don't we have a digital wall?

SPEAKER_465: We are so in sync on this. It is insane to allow. We built a physical wall with Mexico.

SPEAKER_236: Yeah. We have a physical wall. We're working on. We should have a digital wall with China.

SPEAKER_410: And by the way, Mexicans are actually building shit there instead of China.

SPEAKER_116: Absolutely. We have a neighbor who loves America. And we share tens of millions of citizens who are overlapping in their citizenship. Build factories in Mexico. Let's build battery factories. Let's build iPhone factories.

SPEAKER_250: Let's do it and save all these tanker ships from having to take this giant run from China to America to Long Beach.

SPEAKER_470: To me, it's an easy answer.

SPEAKER_202: So I don't want to get into the politics of it because I just don't know how to... All I can do is not buy China, right? Good luck with that. I don't. I love Tencent because it's so smart and it's so creative and it's probably evil. But at the same time, they play them by the rules.

SPEAKER_73: Our rules are stupid. Trump's idea of not letting you buy Tencent and Alibaba is so un-American. It's ridiculous, right? And that's why I hated Trump. He would float these things. He was like a kid in a candy shop. And he was so disruptive to our time. We spent four years worrying about what one person would say. That's terrible.

SPEAKER_62: But on China, it seemed to me easy. If they don't let us... Deciprocation. Deciprocation. We could build a digital wall. I know we can. American can build a digital wall. Easy. Israel built a wall to stop missiles coming from Syria.

SPEAKER_48: Yeah. Absolutely. And look at... Like... Was it Pakistan or India? India was just like, yeah, TikTok's out. Forget it.

SPEAKER_120: We're having conflicts on the border. TikTok out of the store. Done. Like...

SPEAKER_73: There was no discussion. Yeah. Kids don't have to at least go suit up and go to Europe and die in a trench so they don't use TikTok. I think Trump, if he was good, could have asked people as an adult saying, this is a terrible war that we've entered. It's digital. It's not physical. Right. And we don't hate China.

SPEAKER_44: We hate the way they're behaving. And this is the only way we know how to fight it right now. Right.

SPEAKER_313: If they want capitalism, we need to have... Fair capitalism. Fair capitalism. And then we're going to play...

SPEAKER_14: Speak to the Americans like they're not idiots. Correct. And I think he refused to do that.

SPEAKER_44: I think America luckily voted him out. I say this openly because four more years of that bad hairdo would have been really chaotic. Yes. It's just like you, four more years of your hairdo.

SPEAKER_479: I knew it was coming. I was bracing for impact. You served the softball up to yourself and you just teed it out.

SPEAKER_480: Sometimes if you're not giving me softballs, I make them up.

SPEAKER_290: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it is nonsensical that Trump took up so much space.

SPEAKER_116: And how weird is it to not have him taking over the conversation every day? We can actually talk about other things.

SPEAKER_72: But how great is it that he bleep it out, bleep himself off. Who gets... The guy could have printed money until the end of time. His only job was not to get kicked off the Twitter.

SPEAKER_73: Like, if you're Donald Trump, because this is where Elon Musk is now king. Elon Musk knows somewhere deep down before he pushes a Twitter button. Yes. I do not want to risk getting kicked off Twitter. Right. Trump literally could care. Like, he treated Twitter like a garbage can. What was that counter-worth? And that bothered me about Jack Dorsey was he's shitting on you. Yeah. And you just keep backing down. And guess where Twitter stock is today with Trump off the internet? Higher than it's been. Yes. So it was never about Trump. That bullshit that the, oh, all the right-wingers, if you kick off Trump, Twitter's going to be destroyed. No, he wrecked their brand for four years. And now the, now the mob is focused on things that maybe just as unproductive, but at least something different.

SPEAKER_493: Well, it's a range of unproductive time-wasting things as opposed to one.

SPEAKER_149: We now hate Robin Hood and we hate this. Yes, Jimmy. And we hate the hedge funds.

SPEAKER_496: And we hate this guy and we hate Jamal. Courtside Karen.

SPEAKER_119: I don't know if you saw Courtside Karen yelling at LeBron. No, no. They literally let one row of people into the game and what happens? We can't even have one row of spectators.

SPEAKER_143: And so America is very self-destructive and I hope that Americans realize how lucky they are.

SPEAKER_202: It's not fair. There's a lot of inequality. I get it, but you know, I'm bullish.

SPEAKER_44: I'm just bullish and optimistic. All right.

SPEAKER_09: Listen, Howard, this has been great. Let's do it again. Howard Lindzen. You can follow him on the Twitter, Howard, L-I-N-D-Z-O-N. He's great on Twitter. And if you want to go back into the archive episode 309 and episode 348, 2012 and 2013,

SPEAKER_116: he's back in 2021 on this week in startups. And any plugs? You got any plugs?

SPEAKER_42: No, I mean, I would like, if I had enough money, I would buy some plugs.

SPEAKER_116: Well, I think when Robinhood gets liquid, you could sell in secondary. I mean, how many secondary offers are you getting from Robinhood a day? Let me just check right now.

SPEAKER_503: Hang on.

SPEAKER_116: I'm getting pounded with people who want to buy.

SPEAKER_143: It's, it's all day. Robinhood. Robinhood. And honestly, this is how frenetic public and private markets is.

SPEAKER_14: On the weekend, I was getting calls, is it going to be bankrupt? Like we've gone from the company, this is why private markets are important and public markets are important.

SPEAKER_73: People need to learn how, how to behave. And this has been a cool, this, all of this is a great lesson in behavior. The markets are about behavior. Yes. Not about how smart you are. It's psychology. And I think it's why it's the greatest game. You get to match wits against everybody. You love poker. The reason I don't like poker, it's a grind. Right. It's a little bit dirty. It's time consuming.

SPEAKER_72: It's kind of like, I get it. It's warfare. The market, you'd be so, you would love it because it's global, thermonuclear, 24 seven. War. You against everybody.

SPEAKER_119: It's chaos. It's like playing in that. Chaos. What's that game the kids play? Fortnite. It's like a free for fucking all.

SPEAKER_09: Everybody is just sniping everybody. Kill everybody in your path. All right. This has been an hour plus with Howard Lindzen.

SPEAKER_48: What a great pod. And we'll see you all next time on Angel. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.