1/13 MARK (@MarkYusko): “I do get angry about this, because the average person has everything stacked against them, the average investor has everything stacked against them, from accredited investor rules, to the inability to access talent, to the inability to access the best
2/13 “assets in the private markets. They can't get into Sequoia and Kleiner and all the great venture capitalists. They have no chance to be involved in private real estate or private energy, except in crypto. #Bitcoin is a venture capital investment; it is a D round
3/13 “of a late-stage venture capital investment. Why? Because if I want to own Amazon — Amazon is not a company, Amazon is a network. Amazon doesn't make anything, they are a search engine; they match buyers and sellers and they take a cut, and they take a very large cut.
4/13 “A friend of mine bought this company called Lock Laces. It's the thing that runners use to slide down their shoelaces so they don't have to tie them. He bought it, and he went to Amazon and said I want to sell on Amazon. They said, OK, we take 45% of revenues. He said
5/13 “what, 45%? No way. Then you're not on. He was like fine. And it was a good thing, because his sales went up 10X, so he made 5 times more by putting it on Amazon. They are an unbelievable network. But a network grows, according to Metcalfe's law, and it grows exponentially.
6/13 “So the most valuable companies in the world today are networks: Amazon, Apple, Facebook. Those are not companies, they're networks. #Bitcoin is a network. It is the fastest network to $100 billion ever in history; it's the fastest network ever in history to
7/13 “$1 trillion; it will be the fastest network to $10 trillion, and then $100 trillion. What people don't understand is how exponential math works. If I say to everybody on the call, what's 2 times 2? 4. Easy. What's 17 times 23? I'll wait. That's the limit of human
8/13 “intelligence. The average person cannot do that in their head, they need a calculator. So what if I say, how about nonlinear regression? How about parabolic exponential growth? Probably not good at that. And I use this example all the time: If I take 20 steps across
9/13 “the office, I'm in the other side of the office, linear steps, 20 linear steps, other side of the office. If I take 20 exponential steps, I go around the world twice. And that's the beauty of being able to invest in the protocols themselves, which are venture capital
10/13 “investments; you can own them no matter what your net worth, you can own them directly, you can own them in fractional pieces, you don't have to own a whole #Bitcoin, you don't have to own a whole Ethereum. All of these things are democratizing access to capital formation,
11/13 “business formation, wealth creation in a way... and imagine a world — this is where my mind gets blown — where every asset, every stock, every bond, every currency, every commodity, every piece of art, every piece of real estate, every private business, everything is
12/13 “digital, trades 24/7, fractional ownership, and I have an algo — instead of me trying to wake up and figure out what to do with my 401 (K), I have an algo that owns a little piece of that Beeple, owns a little piece
13/13 “of the most valuable — or the best-performing asset in the last 10 years…”
1/39 RYAN (@RyanSAdams): “I want to maybe end on this question, which is: What advice do you have for the crypto natives? Like, again, a lot of people, as we started this podcast listening to Bankless (@BanklessHQ), crypto is really their first experience in investing.
2/39 “They're learning about investing through crypto, which is sort of bizarre. I think they're leveling up faster than they might in the real world. But there are still some timeless lessons that can be applied from traditional investments here. What are those? Share some.”
3/39 MARK (@MarkYusko): “So the first is, to understand the difference between investing, trading, speculating and gambling. None of them are bad or good necessarily. Just like introvert and extrovert; people are like, oh, introverts are not cool and extroverts are cool.
RYAN (@RyanSAdams): — “which is such a pain point, I think, for many of our listeners that does not
2/16 “exist in the same way in crypto."
MARK (@MarkYusko): "It's a scam. Look, it's not intended to protect you from the ravages of the scammers. It's created to protect the rich. The rich created the accredited investor laws not to protect the small investor. That's a crock.
3/16 “I know plenty of people who aren't rich who are really smart, I know plenty of people who are rich who are not very good investors and vice versa. So 'accredited investor' is to protect the wealthy so they get access to the great deals. It's like why companies stay private
1/47 RYAN (@RyanSAdams): "And, Mark, the 'life imitating art' I think is actually a really good way to illustrate the fact that people understand what's going on, maybe not as explicitly as you have stated it, and that's why we've brought you on to the podcast, to explicitly
2/47 “state things. But people feel this; young people feel discouraged, they don't feel included, they feel lost. It's not just young people, but it's the majority of the United States. And this is the same through line that we saw in the Roman Empire, where the people of the
3/47 “world, they knew that things were corrupted, they knew that things were wrong. And if we take a historical perspective, people saw — inside the Roman Empire, it was hard to see it fall in real-time, but if you look back in hindsight, the writing was on the wall.
1/14 RYAN (@RyanSAdams): “I think so much of the infighting between left versus right is very media driven, not to get on politics. But I think every American, at least that is not among kind of the elite, is anti-corruption. Like we —
2/14 MARK (@MarkYusko): “Amen. And, Ryan, I'll sum it up for you. I don't mean to cut you off. But this is my thing: There is no left, there is no right, there is no Republicans, there's no Democrats. Remember, there was Democratic Republicans, the Hamilton thing.
3/14 “There is no left or right. You're right, it's just the media. There is in and out. That's all there is. And when you're out, you do or say whatever it takes to get in. Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, lifelong Democrats got in by being a Republican, being Republican. Ha-ha.
1/29 RYAN (@RyanSAdams): “I guess my question to you is, Mark: What is the central bank's next move? Because the framing of the macro is, we're in an era of money printing and we've been doing a ton of it. What happens next? How do we get prepared for this decade?
2/29 “What's Powell's next move?"
MARK (@MarkYusko): "He's going to print more. Look, the history on this is very consistent: All empires fail, every single one, reserve currencies end. The final throws of those empires is rife with this type of cronyism, this type of taxation
3/29 “without representation, so to speak, this type of rampant inflation and money printing. Go back to the Roman Empire. So the Roman Empire, there are some quotes from Marcus Aurelius that could have been written yesterday, literally; they just talk about rampant government
1/29 RYAN (@RyanSAdams): “I think what you’re saying is, basically a fiat currency, modern monetary policy, is the root of this warping effect that we see across all assets. But you said something different, and this is the part that was most explicit to me, and it maybe
2/29 “came out in a tweet I recently read from you, which you said: The Fed (@federalreserve) has only one goal, just one goal: —