Missy Hyatt

Transcript

This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show. Is it because, Elon said he was gonna accept Dogecoin? No. I I because I'm talking to a bunch of people about it this morning that everyone got bearish. Like, no one was expecting a rally, which at that point, I was like, maybe the path of least resistance was up. And one of my friends was like, yeah. I'm in this, like, 100% crypto investing Telegram group, and no one's talked about crypto investing for days. Yeah. There's been, like, a debate about religion. Yeah. I mean, I think the capitulation point was essentially everyone sort of universally agreed that there's no actual use case for Bitcoin and Ethereum and all these coins. And so and on top of that, there's all these liquidations of, you know, hedge funds were liquidating and all this stuff. So everybody sold. There was no anybody still holding is a believer now. And there's probably just a flight to cash in general with the global market situate. Not even But I think that's been going on for for 6 months now. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. The liquidations were it's actually kind of astonishing. Like, the crypto lenders, there used to be 5 big ones with multibillion dollar balance sheets, and 3 of them got wiped out in the span of a week. And what's his name? Sam Bankman Fried said there's there's more coming, but maybe that already happened. He said it a few weeks ago. Or it's priced in. But there is this funny thing that keeps happening where it's like some crypto lender I've never heard of. It's like, oh, they're suspending withdrawals because blah blah blah. By the way, suspending withdrawals is not a big deal. They lent the money out. They can't just, like, get the money back and It's what we did. Yeah. Exactly. Like, it's like a hedge fund. You can't return all the money every single day. Yeah. It it's bad if your, depositors expect it if, you know, instant liquidity. It shows you f**ked up somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. See, if if that's the case, was there supposed to be instant liquidity? Yeah. Okay. Then yeah. For Celsius, there was, but it I'm not sure for, like, head crypto hedge funds. No. Not hedge I mean, 3 arrows capital, that one, like, multiple people will go to jail for that because it's like it's one thing if you have a project like Terra, which was just an economic design that wasn't gonna work, but the people behind it genuinely believed that it would. And they didn't lie about anything. It's also it's another thing. Even Celsius, like, yes, they they invested too much money and too many illiquid stuff. But 3 hours capital was just fraudulent on, like, 5 different levels. Oh, I I didn't know they were fraudulent. Like, what what ways are they fraudulent? One, they said that they were only, like, a proprietary hedge fund that traded their own money. It's come out that they actually raised significant amounts of outside money. 2, they commingled funds. So they were managing money for some treasuries or something, protocol treasuries, and they used those assets as collateral to take out their own loans, which is kinda like if you remember what MF Global did when John Corzine blew it up, that they couldn't meet a margin call, so they started dipping into these supposedly segregated customer accounts? You know, by the way, which is fascinating because John Corzine, okay, he was the CEO of Goldman Sachs. Like, you there you don't you can't get a higher pedigree. Like like, CEO of Goldman Sachs people go on to be secretaries of treasury, federal reserve chairman, whatever. John Corzine, wasn't he, governor for a while also? I think he was governor and senator of New Jersey, wasn't he? Yeah. So Corzine was head of Goldman Sachs, governor of New Jersey, senator from New Jersey, had some scandal. MF Global, just a total scam like anybody else. Yeah. And it was both, I believe, at the time, one of the, if not the biggest futures brokers firm. And I believe they had just gotten approved to become a primary dealer on treasury bonds. Right? That's a privileged, difficult position to acquire. Yeah. But he had so much pedigree and so many connections. There was no way he he would ask for anything, and he was getting get it. Yeah. Yeah. But but this goes to the example. Like, we were talking about Uber earlier before the recording started. Like, Uber's a scam, and most people don't realize it. Just to summarize what we were talking about earlier, before they went public, the venture capitalists were paying for every single ride you took. They were subsidizing all the rides. That's how Uber could grow so fast and lose, like, a 1,000,000,000 a year. And then the venture capitalist is like, okay. We can't fund this now. It's worth $70,000,000,000 in the latest round. We've all made our money. Let's just sell it to the idiots. So they went public, and the public money is the dumb money, essentially. And now the public can't subsidize Uber. Uber either has to charge more for rides, which they can't do, or pay drivers less, which they can't do, or go out of business, which is what will happen. Uber, Lyft, and there's other business models like this. So so what isn't a scam? And, Dan, you and I have this conversation all the time. Like, what's not a scam? That's a good question. I mean, I mean Most cryptos are scams. Yeah. But who's who's taking the other side of Uber, though? There's clearly analysts out there and and Okay. But we know the analyst business Yeah. Is a scam. Yeah. So, like, the analysts, they make a price target of $100, and if it moves down, they change their price target to 80. And if it goes down to 60, they say, oh, look. We're a genius. And then they call all the hedge fund clients, and then they trade through us because we're such smart analysts. Look. We said Uber was gonna go below 80 when previously they said it was gonna go up to a 120, and it's all a scam. The the the Well the analysts don't know anything. Really the better question. I mean, you're really saying what VC funded companies aren't scams. Right? I mean, there's a lot of traditional companies that aren't, but there's so much money that I mean, and Omid and I have talked about this also, and and and we have too, James, where, not to bring up names, but Omid can speak to this where he's had personal conversations with VCs that have so much money allocated to crypto investments that when you would bring up something like, hey. Why don't you look at more traditional crypto investments or or bigger names, whether it be Bitcoin, Ethereum, you know, something? That's not why they're raising so much money. That's not why they're raising $20,000,000,000 and charging 2 and 20. So they're gonna continue to recycle that money through every new crypto either, you know, startup or token or whatever because the the money is just gonna continue to flow. Or they're raising money because they say they're a crypto VC fund. And sovereign wealth nations that can't buy Bitcoin but want exposure to crypto invest in these VC funds. So they just come up with a message that raises the money, and I'm not saying crypto's a scam. I'm saying maybe 95% of it is a scam. There's some percent that's legit. But, look, hedge funds we know are a scam, not because we ran 1, but because you could look right now, hedge funds charge enormous fees. Like, let's say a hedge fund has a $1,000,000,000. They could make up to 60,000,000 a year if they return 20% and get their 2% fees. The same mutual fund with a $1,000,000,000 would probably make instead of 60,000,000 would make 5,000,000. And Yeah. And what's the difference? We look up the holdings. They all own Google, Facebook, Netflix, Exxon, Microsoft. They own the same stocks. I I would just to add a little bit of, nuance to this, I think we should differentiate between scams and things that are disingenuous. So a scam to me is like an outright fraud Yeah. Where someone's literally lying to you and probably doing something that is illegal, and even if not by the letter of the law, then certainly within the spirit of the law. And and there's no shortages of those out there. I think what's been interesting in recent years, even in crypto, is that, like, you see a lot more of what I would consider disingenuous, or maybe that's not the right word, but the people who are backing the project or running the project or the company present a front of confidence that deep down inside, they don't actually believe. So it doesn't mean they're stealing your money, but I think, like, I don't see how anybody could be an executive at a company like Uber 10 years after it failed to turn a profit, burning 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 of dollars. And and I don't see how, like, in their private conversations, if you were good friends with them and you were like, hey, so and so. Like, is Uber ever really gonna make money? They have to have some doubt at this point, but then that's not what they can say on the earnings call because the stock would just completely collapse. You are correct in making that distinction, but at the same time, I would say it's pretty gray. I mean, if they know if they know, you know, ultimately, that it's that it's not really viable long term, I agree they're gonna they're gonna provide a united front. They're gonna they're gonna have what they deem as a a reasonable business model. But deep down, they know investing a $100,000,000 at a $10,000,000,000 valuation is something that has no viable way of ever reaching that or or See the and this is where it it it's a it is a gray area. Is it a scam or is it disingenuous? Like, the VCs who invested in a $10,000,000,000 valuation, they invested not because this is a great company, but because they knew they would be able to take it public, again, to to to sell it to the stupid money Yeah. At a $50,000,000,000 valuation. To be fair, the VCs, that business model, at least for now and has been, is very much intact. They know what they're doing. They know they're gonna be able to push these to valuation. They know there's gonna be money out there, and there's there's gonna gonna be a way to sell this at a higher price to someone else. And even if they don't, they don't they don't need to bat 800. They need to bat 2 you know? I mean, we know that model. Right? The a ton of these will fail, but they know the Ubers and and the big ones will take care of it. So that that works. But but this is you know, we've talked about this a long time ago also about even the PE firms. We've always looked at those and said, wait a second. Like, they they have no real edge. Who is the Yale, endowment guy that called him out? Oh, yeah. David Swenson. Yeah. So the most successful college money manager out there, he wrote a book about investing. And he basically said investing in private equity was like, you know, buying the s and p 500, but with leverage. Like, you know, buying Yeah. 3 or 4 times the s and p 500 by borrowing money. Because and with private equity firms, you'll never know how they do because it's private. But when the market does well, they'll have enormous gains because that's when they sell all their BS companies. And when the market doesn't do well, you don't hear from them. So you don't know how they're doing. You just but but, Dan, tell your experience. You don't have to just say the name of the firm, but, like, when you were working for a a huge private equity firm, several $100,000,000 was huge back then in the nineties, to tell your experience of, like, how they raise money. When I left the investment bank where I was working and went to work for a large private equity firm As I was coming in, they were raising a new fund, which at the time was an enormous, you know, number, late nineties. And I remember opening up the pitch book and and seeing the the memorandum, the number one, the top right at the top, their best performing portfolio company. They had the IRR right next to it. It was it was just off off the wall. Right? It was a huge IRR, huge home run, huge home run, led the way to them raising the fund. We raised the fund. We closed the new fund. I wanna say the new fund was, you know, close to a 1000000000, maybe maybe a couple 1000000000. And within months of us closed the new fund that that top the best investment we made went bankrupt, Literally went bankrupt. And I remember the partner scrambling. What are we gonna do? Like, we we literally sold everyone on our ability and our our return, and and the company went bankrupt. So, you know, again, was it, you know, disingenuous? I mean, was there a gray area? I mean, and and that's but but soon after, no no one cared. You know, they just started making new investments and and wrote that one down to 0, and and, you know, that's when I kinda looked at it. I'm like, this, you know, it's it's it's a classic situation. They raise money like you said. They exit when everyone else exits, and, then they just go quiet. And here's where it's also a gray area. You know, you would think like with Madoff, for instance, as an extreme example, you would think the people who invested in the Madoff fund were innocent victims. But the reality is, you ask somebody who invested in the Madoff fund, why did you invest in the Madoff fund? They all thought he was doing something illegal. Yeah. They thought but it was different than they didn't think he was a Ponzi scheme. They thought he was He had some ads. Front running his customers from the brokerage side of his firm. And so, like, he knew what they were investing in and he would buy first. So they were willing to participate in a scam that they knew was illegal. So were they complicit in some way? Of course, they were. And and so I'm just curious, like, what business forget about, like, finance even. Like, what business just by itself is not a scam of some sort? I I think so the one thing with finance is there is this element of musical chairs that everybody is either implicitly or explicitly buying into. Right? Like, VC works. May maybe because the economy grows. Like, there are inventions and innovations, and, you know, every now and then, there's a company that truly is great. Yeah. But it what we've been saying about PE and VC, like, it's true enough that a lot of what they do works so long as there is a greater fool who's willing to pay a higher price for whatever they're investing in. And we've had multiyear decade plus cycles where that generally works. And when we all work together, we used to talk about this, how we would make decisions sometimes where, we felt like the long term interest of our LPs would be represented by either doing or not doing something. However, there was an immediate short term gain to be had, which our competitors were taking advantage of. And then they would turn around and be like, oh, you know, we've made x percent a month. And we would sit there and be like, well, that's not sustainable. That's gonna end badly, etcetera, etcetera. But then when the music stopped, it ended badly for everybody. And I think Woah. Well, like, we couldn't we couldn't invest in John Paulson's fund, you know, which is the he was the biggest winner shorting the housing situation, and and he made a lot of money in the financial crisis. We couldn't invest with him because he was losing money every month until, Lehman Brothers blew up, and then he made an enormous amount of money. But we couldn't afford to lose a little bit of money every month. Right. Yeah. So going back to the question of what actually creates value, I I think, like, one of the interesting things about the pandemic was it focused all of our attention on the things in the economy that actually really matter that we take for granted, like restaurants and supermarkets and truck drivers, and laundromats, and on and on. So there is this fascinating interplay between those kinds of businesses. Like, restaurants obviously create value. Right? Like, personally, I love going to restaurants. And by and large, I feel like you get what you pay for. But then there's this fascinating interaction between the financial world and these, quote, unquote, real world businesses. And I still actually do not have a good mental model of what within finance you consider honest value contributing activity. Well, let me get take it into a different area. Sports. Let's take basketball as an example. I'm not saying a basketball team slash company is a scam, but there's so much potentially bad behavior happening, like, you know, drafting kids or paying kids in high school or or if they what do they do in basketball? And I'm just making I could pick any sport. It's it's all the sports, but that's that's another, you know, I question it every day. I question it earlier today. I saw, you know, this is just random, but but these teams and you've seen that the salaries of basketball, football, baseball never they just simply never stop. They go up every year at astronomical rates. And so you just have to ask yourself at some point, when when does that is there is that simply not a greater full theory, but, you know, ESPN, ABC, you know, all these networks, Amazon's now getting into it. Apple's getting into this game where they're just overpaying for TV and broadcast rights. And so I guess the money's there, but it but at some point, that that has to collapse also. And I know everyone says, you know, they said that 5 years ago, 10 years ago, you know, just just franchise value, everything just continues to go up. And I just think who's you know, but it's usually VC guys buying sports teams and paying these astronomical you know? And so you you wonder if that's that's when it ends when when that piece collapses. But, you know, you're talking not even star players, just role players are making 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars, you know, and so and I just wonder because the the kids don't watch it anymore. None of my kids would. No no kid. No kid has an intention span to watch a sporting event. I mean, they watch clips. You know, that that's a good point actually. Like, when we were younger, there was basically you had no choices for entertainment. You either watch a sports game or you watch Laverne and Shirley or something like that. And, now there are so many choices. Like, I could people spend hours on TikTok and Facebook and Instagram, on YouTube, and then there's all the streaming services. Who does watch a basketball game? Like, are there people like, is there ratings, TV ratings for these basketball games Sure. Or baseball games or whatever? Playoffs and, you know, regionally, maybe? There is there is one thing that some live sports, has going for it, which is that with the media market becoming increasingly fragmented between Netflix, YouTube, TikTok, etcetera, events like, say, the Super Bowl or the NBA playoffs are sort of like the last place for advertisers who want to reach a mass market at once. So that I think there is value in that. Because you have to watch it in real time too. You you Which is special. Right? Like, I I there's a part of me that actually likes that about sports that I'm watching it at the same exact time that all my friends and family are watching it. And it's not like, I don't know, some hot TV show where it's like, oh, I haven't watched it yet. I'm gonna binge watch it when it's over. But the other thing about pro sports that I've always thought fascinating from an economic point of view is there are many things that pro sports gets away with that would be completely illegal in any other industry. Like what? Well, first of all, like most pro sports teams are government subsidized Yes. Monopolies. Yes. So not only do you have a local monopoly. Right? Like, the 3 of us couldn't just be like, we wanna start our own basketball team and have it be in New York and be part of the National Basketball Association. The NBA legally can stop that in ways that no other industry could. The whole labor market is completely manipulated and fixed. So I was just thinking about the idea of a draft. Can you imagine if, like, any other industry colluded to say that, oh, they're college students graduating, and we're gonna take every programmer, and then we're gonna have a draft for software engineers. And we're gonna, like, pick them in order. And they're not allowed to independently negotiate with anybody until we tell them which company they're gonna work for, and a lot of their salaries are fixed because we determine that the starting salary for engineer is x. A a lot I mean, baseball actually has a specific antitrust exemption in the US, which is also crazy. But all the other sports, like, every time I go to a baseball game here in New York, and I'm like, city runs extra trains to get people there. They provide all these extra cops and stuff to provide security. A lot of times, they're not paying taxes or, like, the government spend $1,000,000,000 to help build their stadium. Almost no other industry enjoys those kinds of government protections. Yeah. Alright. Let let's take another industry, the music industry. So do you mean to tell me that it's a coincidence that the top 50 or a 100 musicians on the planet as ranked by Billboard every week happen to be also amazingly good looking. Like, it just happens to be the case that these people who were, like, so amazing looking spent 3 quarters of their lives practicing the guitar and never thinking about their looks. It just was an afterthought for them, and they all became like, nobody ugly practiced guitar their whole lives. And then, by the way, then there's a there's one company in, I think, in Sweden. There was a book about it called The Hit Factory that produces all the top 10 songs. Like, they have a formula. They know exactly what gets gets hits. Yeah. And and then if your voice is bad, they auto tune it so you sound perfect. It's Milli Vanilli. Exactly. Except except that guy, the one half of Milli Vanilli, was so ashamed. Yeah. He killed himself. He killed himself. And now it's just an everyday thing. Like, every single band on the planet. Like, for all I know, Paul McCartney lip syncs when he performs that. Crazy about that industry is is milli vanilli. The the I I can't remember Rob Pilatus, maybe one of one of the half's a million, the the other, killed himself. And and fast forward, not a lot, you know, beyond that. And no one even cares about lip syncing. They all do it. They they it's not even shameful. Percent now. It's yeah. But that just means that that's what the market wants. Right. Right? I don't have a problem with anything that you said is because they're selling entertainment. And, like, there are probably a lot of unattractive, very talented musicians playing local bars and clubs, or they have a niche following of 10,000 fans or something. I agree. Like, I'm, it's overstating it to say they're a scam. Let's maybe another way of stating it is not everything is what they seem. Like, when Billboard lists the top 100, musicians, these aren't necessarily the best musicians. When, a a bookstore or New York Times bestseller list we already know the New York Times bestseller list for books doesn't actually rank the top selling books. It's just someone's opinion about what the best books are. Like, that that was revealed in the past 5 or 10 years or whatever. I'm just trying to think of, like, what what industry we know with finance, it's all, you know, borderline illegal. What industry is actually, like, legit? Like, even even law firms, do they you know, I remember one time well well, this was pre OMID. Dan and I were starting a hedge fund, and I took the old docs Yeah. For our older hedge fund Yeah. And just did a search and replace. It wasn't that hard to figure out. It was a 30 page document where I just switched one name to another, and my lawyer found out about it that I had done that. He called me up, and he was yelling at me. This grown man was yelling at me, another grown man. He said, I never have seen anything like this in the industry. How could you do this? And and I said, well, I bought the original documents from you for $30,000, like a, like Yeah. A 20 page document. Why can't I do what I want with it? I own it. Yeah. And he had nothing no response to that because that was, like, an implicit scam that they were running. Yeah. How about, pay to play podcasting, James, which you are not? But, since I the new book came out, I I hear from all these podcasts that are like, oh, we'd love for you to come on our show. Blah blah blah. If you just pay us a $1,000, we can book you for next week. I didn't even know that existed, but that's total do they have to disclose that they that you they were paid? I don't think they do. I mean, someone actually literally, some promoters send me, like, a menu of, like, here are these podcasts, and here's, like, how many downloads they get, and then here's what they charge to be on the show. After this episode, oh, James would like to talk to you offline about that. Yeah. I charge I charge $75,000. Right. But only in, in Monero. That's right. Not in, not in I've I've had people offer to pay me Yeah. To be on the podcast, but I've always there's no need for it. Like, I make money from ads, and it's enough to pay for for Jay, the audio engineer who who gets paid in Malaysian, you know, shekels or whatever. So It's a it's a throwback to the DJ business. Right? Payola? Isn't that what they called it? Like, that's what Which was illegal. Was it really? That's interesting. So I wonder No. No. No. For DJs, it wasn't illegal. Sorry. But for radio shows, it was. For radio music shows, it was illegal. Oh. But isn't that why you've seen, like, a resurgence or and we talk about this all the time when it relates to I mean, another huge scam, obviously, James. We've we've talked about this forever, colleges. Right? And you're seeing more and more people kinda talk about that. But that's why you're seeing, like, a resurgence of of people saying, look. There should be trade schools or you should go into HVAC plumbing electrician because it's a real skill where you're providing something real that people need, and they'll pay you for it in exchange as opposed to traditional stuff, lawyer, finance. Like, we're talking that that when, you know, when you run into a pandemic or something and it's not real or they can't push that same product, you you basically are out of a job. You know? When you see whereas if there's a truly a recession, people still need, you know, if they have a plumbing issue, if their air conditioner goes out, if their roof's leaking, you know, that that's real. That's where there is value in exchange for something that that you know? And those are traditional, but we've kind of gone away from that. Right? I mean, you never encourage your kids to become a plumber or an electrician, but you're seeing more and more people just because all these other industries have popped up, and they just don't seem sustainable over time. Well, I I I challenge anyone listening to this even to what industry is not like, other than those, I agree with you, Dan. So plumber, electrician are largely not a scam. Sometimes there's issues where they say, oh, there's extensive, you know Sure. We have to redo all the pipes, and and then you have to kinda, like, get a second opinion and hope hope for the best. Sure. But I sort of feel like most industries, like, let's take psych you know, psychologists, you know, or or psychiatry. It's all this medic you know, everybody's got medication now, and I'm not passing judgment on that, but it's just why is it the case that kids seemed healthy a 100 years ago, and now 90% of kids are on medication? Or, you know, everybody's got some diagnosis in the, you know, diagnostic and statistical manual of disorders. This is I can't think of any industry really. Maybe, yeah, what about what about teaching? Well, no. That's all related to the education thing. What about, like, a piano instructor? Because that's probably the skill. Any that's like any skill, whether it be piano, sports, anything, and that that's a huge industry now, right, with with kids. Right? Parents all want their kids to be an excellent, you know, pianist or a baseball player or basketball player, and parents nowadays are willing to overpay instructors to make their kids special. Right? No. Our parents never did that. My parents didn't do that. You just went on the side and played and found the best kid in the neighborhood and challenged yourself. Now parents overpay, and this entire industry has popped up. Youth sports, youth, you know, instruments, youth, you know, chess clubs. Right? And if some parent whose mom or dad is a VC, James, comes to you and says, hey. I'd love, you know, little Johnny or Mary to learn chess from you. You're not gonna teach Johnny or Mary how to play chess in a week. You're gonna stretch that out over 3, 4 years, and the VC mom or dad's gonna pay you well for 4 years. Right? I mean, you're so you're not really gonna be honest there. You're gonna say this takes a long time. This takes a long time and you're gonna have 20 of those kids and there there's entire industries that have popped up over this. So, I don't know if that means it's a scam. Right? Someone's just has a skill and they're you know, I guess someone can always come in and undercut you there, but that's, you know, that that's in anything. Well, you guys, thanks once again for coming on the podcast as always. Thank you.