Preston Pysh (01:45):

Tell people a little bit about your background and just more about yourself if they’re not familiar with you.

Sahil Bloom (01:51):

Grew up on the East Coast, born in New York City and then was raised in the Boston area. Father was a professor, he was at Harvard, so we grew up just outside Cambridge. I played baseball, my whole childhood was just a ne’er-do-well kid. I ended up I was fortunate, I got a scholarship to go play baseball in college. So I went out to Stanford, 2009, played there ’09 to ’13. Unfortunately, I hurt my shoulder. I was a pitcher, hurt my shoulder and derailed any aspirations I had. And honestly, had no clue what I was going to go do next. I was trying to figure out like everyone else, what my journey was going to be, what my path was.

Sahil Bloom (02:24):

It seems from the outside looking in, you have everything, well put together, etc, but I was totally lost. And at the time, I ended up meeting this group that was just starting an investment fund in the Bay Area, got linked up with them, ended up taking that job as one of the first analysts at that firm, and really stayed there over the course of six, seven years and just rode the wave as the firm continued to scale. And we raised more money, we were investing in cool things, and because I’d been early there, I got a lot of cool opportunities from the early days there.

Sahil Bloom (02:51):

I had my first experience with Bitcoin in 2014, had a crazy friend on the baseball team who was mining this stuff in his dorm room instead of going to class, I had no clue what the hell he was talking about, but that had started me down, not just the crypto and Bitcoin rabbit hole, but also just down the technology and future rabbit hole. And so while I was building my career in more mainstream traditional finance, I always had this eye towards the much more interesting things candidly that were happening in this futurist world. And none of it made sense to me, but I had started reading because of that and talking to people.

Sahil Bloom (03:26):

And for that, I’m very grateful because now, I live in a world and I’m operating in a way where I get to actually work on that with more of my time. COVID hit, I was very in the trenches of this mainstream finance role, all of a sudden, I had more time on my hands, I decided to start writing as a way to fill some of that time. I’d always loved writing, sharing creative work, but never really had an outlet for it. So I picked up my Twitter account, which I’d had for my baseball days, probably had 500 followers at the time, this is May 2020, and started writing. Started writing these threads, basically just trying to break down finance and business topics in a purely accessible, digestible way.

Sahil Bloom (04:06):

Not talking over people’s heads, not doing the TikTok YOLO into options, really low stuff, just shooting down the middle and shooting straight with people. And I just found that it clicked and it resonated with people, I really enjoyed it. I was getting a lot of value from cementing my own learning on these things. And so I kept at it. And we’ve seen it obviously, but it’s snowballed over the course of the last 18 months that I’ve been working on it. And it’s been fun because I’ve gotten to meet a lot of really cool people like yourself and all these people that I get to interact with on a daily basis now in the broader Twitter community.

Preston Pysh (04:38):

Let me ask you this, you’ve picked up on this really unique psychological factor, at least I think it is, of people sharing content specifically on Twitter when it’s in a thread format. You could take some of your posts, put them in an article and post it, and I think that you’d have way less engagement, like one tenth the engagement if it was in an article format, but when you break it into a thread, for whatever reason, there’s something happening where people want to keep going down. And obviously, it’s phenomenal content, like you said, you’re writing it for the person who’s reading, not yourself or trying to make yourself sound smart.

Preston Pysh (05:14):

You’re writing it for the other person to actually learn the content, which is what I love. And so what is happening? Why are the threads more shareable in that? Is it something that you knew when you got started? Is it something that you just figured out as you were doing it? Or what do you think?

Sahil Bloom (05:33):

That’s a great question. I guess there’s a couple things. Twitter has always been this amazing discovery tool for content, for written form content, but they had never really developed, there was never any product adaptation innovation with it. The platform itself was languishing for a long time. Trump actually breeds a lot of new life into the platform as much as people don’t want to admit, it was dying a slow death and it was revived as it were. But what I noticed when I first came to Twitter was that threads weren’t really a thing, no one was really doing them, and I needed to write a few tweets to explain the thing that I was trying to explain. And so there wasn’t actually a good way to do it.

Sahil Bloom (06:07):

You couldn’t add to a thread the way you can now. And so you actually had to tweet below the other tweet and just hope that you numbered it so people would read it. But the reality for Twitter was I think they very quickly realized that threads were a great way to keep people on the platform. So rather than just having the single piece news bite, long form content, all of a sudden on Twitter, it was like a blog in Twitter form. And what I did was I admired all these writers like Ben Thompson, these technology writers, Benedict Evans, all these guys that they have these repositories of content, and then they were able to link back to prior things that they’d written to establish foundations.

Sahil Bloom (06:44):

And I started doing that with Twitter. Earlier threads I’d written, maybe I’d written a thread on call options or maybe I’d written a thread on short squeezes. And then when I’m talking about the GameStop situation, I’m writing a thread on what happened with GameStop, I’m able to loop back to that foundation building and link in there. And so I just created over time from testing and learning this Twitter native blog that kept people on the platform. And so when you think about for Twitter, they wanted to prioritize that. So from an algorithm standpoint, the Twitter algorithm favors threads enormously now.

Sahil Bloom (07:15):

And then that has been the case and it’s developed and it’s even more so now where thread content is the best way to grow your Twitter following into scale because it’s being prioritized, it’s being shared more.

Preston Pysh (07:26):

I never thought of it from the Twitter prioritizing it, I was going about it from this vantage point of maybe people read the first tweet and the buy-in there is so minimal for them to just scroll lower, and then they’re like, “Okay, I’m into this.” But if I click on an article from Bloomberg or whatever it might be, I’m making a commitment of two to five minutes and I’m saying, “Uh, I’m not going to read that, I’m just going to skip over.”

Sahil Bloom (07:55):

There’s also just the traditional media thing where, I don’t know, I think people at some point and were just Fed up with all of traditional media and left or right wing, wherever it stood, it was just like, “A lot of this is garbage, it’s click bait headlines that have nothing to do with the actual content.” And so part of me thinks that decentralized media and Twitter was a cool place for people to escape. And so it became more shareable because people just liked that. But to your point, if you look at my tweets and my threads, you’ll notice common features there where everything is very spaced out, I use a lot of hard enters.

Sahil Bloom (08:27):

I try to make it a very optically engaging experience and readable rather than just being blocks of text, because personally, when I see blocks of text now, my attention span and society’s attention span has gone like this over the last 10, 15 years as content has gotten more bite size. And so I tried to play into that. And then basically, I was like, “Okay, well, you still need a place to expand on these things. I’m going to have a newsletter and use that to expand on the ideas, but Twitter will be where I keep it really, really short, punchy, and more viral.”

Preston Pysh (08:55):

I love it. And it’s so readable, it’s fun to go through it, and you can come back to it, you can bookmark it. I don’t know, there’s just something about it that just works so much better than some of the longer form.

Sahil Bloom (09:07):

I think it’s amazing platform for learning. I’ve learned more from being on Twitter and engaging with your content, with people, whether it’s in crypto, Web3, all of these communities, I’ve learned more on Twitter than I have from any book class, anything I can possibly do. And so it’s like, Twitter’s become the new university in a weird way, and I know that’s become a meme and people talk about it, but there is some truth to it and they’re starting to play more into that. So it’ll be interesting to see where it ends up two, three for or years from now.

Preston Pysh (09:36):

It forces people to get to the point. If you can’t describe it in that, you sure you can go deeper, like a reply or if I have a question, if I can’t get it into that, well then this is too long of a question in the first place.

Sahil Bloom (09:50):

I agree. It’s also an idea meritocracy, which just on the surface is such an awesome thing. I don’t need a fancy credential, I don’t need Ivy league degree.

Preston Pysh (09:58):

Amen.

Sahil Bloom (09:59):

I don’t need any of these things to grow. A kid on the street in India has just as good of an opportunity to go and create and build an audience and scale as some kid who grew up in Westchester and is getting all the country clubs and whatnot. And that’s a cool thing. When you live in a world where technology is actually enabling more of a meritocracy and more of an even opportunity playing field, I’m all for unequal outcomes. I always say this, love unequal outcomes. I’m a capitalist, I’m a free market guy, unequal outcomes, totally with it, but unequal opportunity, not with that.

Sahil Bloom (10:31):

And so I think if we can figure out ways to even the opportunity playing field, you’re always going to have unequal outcomes because that’s how markets work. Some people are going to rise, some people won’t, but we need everyone to have the same basic opportunity level along the way.

Preston Pysh (10:45):

Love it. You’re in the hedge fund space or you’re in the fund space and you have an interest in money, economics. Talk about what got you interested in that particular space, if you can talk about some of the types of things that you were doing deals with, something like that.

Sahil Bloom (11:04):

I’d grown up in a household that was not at all associated with finance, it was associated with economics, my dad was an economist. And so I’d been around concept of money and economics, but more in a theoretical sense than an actual sense. My dad was never in, I don’t even know if my dad owns a stock to this day, it was never a thing in my household. I grew up in a financial household. I went to Stanford, had no idea about it because I was playing baseball, I was dicking around trying to figure out if I could go play professionally.

Sahil Bloom (11:31):

And then I started this job, had absolutely no idea, it was a private equity fund, had no clue what private equity was. I read the Barbarians at the Gate, bad, scary things about private equity. And then the reality was much different than that candidly, counter narrative stuff. But it was basically, we were going in and investing in these businesses and there was debt involved, not that much. It wasn’t like the heydays private equity where these guys were throwing 95% leverage onto a deal because things had gotten clamped down post ’07, ’08, ’09. And so basically it was a really cool learning ground of just seeing businesses.

Sahil Bloom (12:04):

I spent time at some of the coolest businesses across America and our fund was doing mostly more value oriented stuff, which meant it was real meat and potatoes businesses. This wasn’t the high flying tech companies in the Bay Area and in Silicon Valley, it was like, I went down to a catfish farm in Louisiana and got to hang out for a day with this guy that’s like the catfish king of Louisiana. And it was the coolest set of experiences at a young age that I could have because I was really getting to see the lifeblood of American on entrepreneurship in a real way, and had a great experience, really enjoyed getting to work with a lot of these entrepreneurs.

Sahil Bloom (12:39):

But along the way, I just started to pay more attention to what was happening in with the Fed, with mainstream economics, with the markets, things that were happening post ’08, ’09 that I wasn’t exposed to, that I started reading up on. I’ve always been a fan of history, so I started reading more about historical bouts with hyperinflation. I’m fascinated by these extreme events of history and what we can learn from them. And so then all of a sudden, COVID hits, and you’re suddenly living history. I had this profound realization, I was texting friends about it, waking up like, “This is a once in a lifetime thing, a once in a generation thing that is happening to us right now.”

Sahil Bloom (13:19):

And it’s pretty rare that you realize that in the moment, but it was so abundantly clear. And so I quickly started to just pay attention to things that were happening. What are people talking about? What’s the Fed saying? What’s what are central banks globally saying? Who’s acting quickly? Who’s not? And you just start realize, “This whole system, so much of it just makes no sense.” And the way that people can just go create money out of thin air and how people react to it, and then the way the markets were going, people were literally, there was millions and millions of people that were out of jobs, not working, staying at home and the market’s going like this and it’s soaring.

Sahil Bloom (13:53):

And so it just felt like this is my one opportunity in my life to learn on the ground in this way and I need to just immerse myself in it. And so I basically just started waking up at 4:00 every morning and just reading, listening to things, reading for several hours. I had more time on my hands because I wasn’t traveling. And so I just went all in on trying to understand macro.

Preston Pysh (14:14):

Were you still doing the private equity stuff?

Sahil Bloom (14:17):

Yeah. I was working 80, 90 hours a week on that. I just wasn’t traveling, and so I had more time because I wasn’t constantly on planes. So I was doing that as my day job, I’d start emailing and stuff at 6:30 or 7:00 in the morning and be done by 6:30 or 7:00 at night. But in those off hours, I couldn’t go out, I couldn’t hang out with friends. We were lockdown in our houses, and in California too, it was really locked down. And so basically, I filled those hours with just reading and trying to learn and trying to get, even 2% as smart as some of you guys and some of the really smart people out there, I figured it would arm me.

Sahil Bloom (14:50):

And alongside that, I’ve always had this powerful realization that you have to put skin in the game with these things in order to learn. I call it pay to learn or something like that, but basically you have to have skin in the game if you want to really try to understand something. And so what I did was, I’d saved up some money, fortunately I was in an okay finance a spot, and I was like, “Anything I’m learning about, I’m just going to throw some skin into the game so that I can actually care about it, follow it and try to learn.” And I did some, really dumb stuff. I got sideways on a hilarious short on the S&P 500 that I woke up on a Monday…

Sahil Bloom (15:26):

I actually didn’t short, this is a funny story actually in hindsight. I had bought some puts on S&P 500, and I’d never traded options, didn’t know anything about it. And they swung, I was in a great spot, I’d made a bunch of money on them and didn’t think anything of it. I just thought they would expire and I would get the cash out. And then I woke up Monday morning and had this massive short position opened on S&P 500 because of how the options had expired in the money. And I was confused sitting there. And that day, the Fed came out with some aggressive thing, and I’m seeing the market just going up, up, up the whole day. And I’m sitting there with this like…

Sahil Bloom (16:00):

It was massive. It was the size of the entire account, short position that was just getting into the red and going the other way. And I’m sitting at my desk losing my mind, but I ended up getting out of it and lost a good amount of money, but not devastating. But basically, those moments, the amount I learned from that experience, horrible as it was, is just incredible in hindsight. And so it’s like, you need to have those kind of thing, you need to get bloodied and bruised in the arena in order to really learn sometimes.

Preston Pysh (16:29):

I could not agree with you more, and anybody who’s been in the markets for a very long time who says they don’t have a story like that are lying.

Sahil Bloom (16:36):

Totally lying. You got to get completely wrecked on something. It’s like lost porn, everyone calls that now. I think it’s a good thing. I was talking to Howard Lindzon recently, he’s the StockTwits founder. He’s a really funny guy, had him on my show recently. And he was talking about how it’s like modern day gladiators. You go talk about, you own up to your failures and the things that have happened to you, and it’s not about going and bragging about all of your great successes, it’s about owning both sides of it. And just being open about the times when you got completely destroyed on things just as much. And I think that’s a cool thing in general for everybody to learn alongside each other.

Preston Pysh (17:13):

No doubt. Hey, you recently had a thread that was outstanding, first and foremost, is it can Cantillon Effect or is it-

Sahil Bloom (17:21):

I pronounce it Cantillon.

Preston Pysh (17:23):

Cantillon, I’ve heard that too.

Sahil Bloom (17:24):

I’ve gone and looked and tried to figure it out. It’s funny because the guy Richard Cantillon is pretty, there’s not much on him, you can’t find much on him. And he died under really suspicious circumstances too, which is a funny, separate story.

Preston Pysh (17:37):

Give us the inside scoop for people that aren’t familiar with this. Why is it important? Get into a little bit of the specifics of theory.

Sahil Bloom (17:46):

The Cantillon Effect is named after this guy, Richard Cantillon, Irish-French economist, philosopher businessman, I suppose. He grew up in the 1680s. Not a whole lot is known about the guy. He made a bunch of money in the Mississippi Bubble, John Law is the famous Mississippi Bubble speculating on the Mississippi company, which spectacularly exploded. I have a thread on it somewhere, but John Law had to run away, dressed as a woman because people were chasing him down. So it’s a funny whole side story, but basically, this guy made a bunch of money speculating on that.

Sahil Bloom (18:17):

And I think he learned at a young age, proximity to power really mattered. He had a bunch of powerful connections through his family, through his employer, and that led to him making a lot of money at a young age, Richard Cantillon, that is. And so when he was older, I think it’s about 1730, he writes this piece, which ends up being his only real contribution to economics, but it is considered to this day the cradle of political economy writing. And in it, he talks about a number of things, but one of those things is something that’s become known as the Cantillon Effect, which effectively says that there are distributional effects to new money creation.

Sahil Bloom (18:53):

Well, what does that mean? When you have new money enter a system, it doesn’t just poof, appear within the system and everybody gets the same benefit from it, what he’s saying is that the flow path of that money where it enters and how it flows through the economy really matters, and it matters in a way that it impacts people differently. And so I was writing about it and I was trying to figure out a good, simple way to explain this, and I use the example of a tiny little island society. And I use that because it’s easier to envision these things I find as a general framework, if you think in very simple terms and use that as a framework and then expand out in a more complex things.

Sahil Bloom (19:30):

And so the island society, you’re living there, you wake up one morning and find a million dollars on your doorstep. You open it up, no one knows you have it, there’s a million new dollars here. What do you do? You take it and you start spending it. You go and buy really nice clothes, you go buy a house, a bunch of land, all this kind of stuff. And when you do that, the market has not reacted to the fact that there’s all this new money there. So you, because you’re the one that has it, are able to go benefit from that. You go and buy things at their current market prices and you go and spend a bunch of money and your standard of life has dramatically improved.

Sahil Bloom (20:00):

You’re living lavishly, you have great clothes, you got to watch, you got to house, land, all this stuff. But then suddenly the people who you distributed that money to with your purchases, don’t quite have the same experience. Now, the sellers of those goods, the workers that produced the goods that you bought are now in an environment where prices start to rise because suddenly there’s an awareness that there’s more money in the system, so demand has surged, supply has yet to catch up and prices start to rise as a result of that.

Sahil Bloom (20:27):

So now when those people who’ve received your money are going to spend it, they’re actually looking at rising prices. So their life, their standard of life has not improved in the way that yours did. And so this is like a simple example and it’s a tiny microcosm of what a lot of us were looking at and seeing when the Fed started printing all this money in central banks globally, but the Fed US was probably the closest example for us. All of a sudden, this massive amount of new money is flooding through the system, vast majority of it came from the top.

Sahil Bloom (20:57):

Everything they were doing, infusing money into the banking system to try to open up the overall gears as it were, was all going from the top. And what did it do? The asset prices got massively inflated. Look at housing, look at the stock market as the most clear example, who owns stocks? It’s rich people. It’s the wealthy. Who has the vast majority of their net worth tied up in these assets in real estate and stocks? It’s the wealthy. And who takes the brunt of it now that we’re feeling real inflation harm? It’s the poor, it’s the workers, it’s the wage earners.

Sahil Bloom (21:29):

The people who have continued to earn, maybe their wages have inflated a little bit, but not enough to compensate for the fact that prices are rising as much as they are. And so when I looked at it, I originally looked at it back in mid-2020 when we first started to see it. You were seeing rich people in the share of wealth increasing dramatically as this was all happening, and then you were seeing poor people getting screwed over, frankly. And it was all a result of the system. And the Fed, they tried to do certain things, they had the fiscal response with the stimulus checks and they were trying to do things that supported people on the bottom.

Sahil Bloom (22:03):

And they actually did an okay job of getting some of those things out there to where I think most people, there weren’t people starving in the streets in the US, at least I hope, but there were these massive distributional effects where the rich got richer, and if you were a wage earner, too bad, you missed out on what was probably the largest transfer, the largest wealth creation event of our lifetimes, if you were an asset owner. And so that’s the general story around the Cantillon Effect. And I think it’s a fascinating macro topic because it relates to so many of these different things.

Sahil Bloom (22:37):

I’m always looking for connection points and it’s a macro story and it relates to the Fed, it relates to money creation, it relates to all this policy, but it also relates to crypto, it relates to Bitcoin. A lot of people look at it and say, “Well, Bitcoin is fixed. There’s 21 million Bitcoin, it’s deflationary naturally.” And that’s a big thing and it’s a big topic of discussion. And I personally just think it’s something worthy of discussion. It doesn’t need to be political. People should not want massive distributional effects to money creation, it shouldn’t be a thing that we seek. And so we should talk about it and look at it.

Preston Pysh (23:09):

So as a person out of private equity, I’m sure you have friends in venture capital, do you think that this effect of how all this additional fiat units are being added into the system and being in PE, being venture in capital, they’re seeing a huge amount of the first cut how that fiat’s going to be allocated into this system. How do you see that impacting really the Bitcoin and digital asset space? Because it almost seems, especially in the VC side, they’re just trying to get the money out the door.

Preston Pysh (23:44):

Because as you are well versed on general partner fees versus limited partner fees and how that whole system works, if they’ve got a fund that’s $100 million fund and whether they raise the 100 million or not, they’re collecting fees on the 100 million, they want to get the money out the door so that it looks they’re doing something. So how much of the space is being warped from how it’s actually being allocated to productive projects versus just getting it out the door to suck fees?

Sahil Bloom (24:15):

There is no doubt that capital is unbelievably abundant right now. The common narrative within the VC landscape has just been a capital is a commodity at this point. And so VCs are actually scrambling to figure out how they differentiate because everyone has money. And so if you’re a company, you can raise money from literally anywhere. And so it’s actually being more selective and figuring out who you’re going to take the money from. Does it create distortions? Absolutely. The pricing on VCs are complaining about it, I’m sure, but the pricing on a seed deal, pre-seed deal used to be five, $6 million, post money valuation.

Sahil Bloom (24:46):

You’re lucky if you can find a seed deal under 20 million, a hot seed deal under 20, 25. And so there’s clear pricing distortions happening. We see it across the market. PE multiples in the stock market, within private equity, multiples have continued to rise because people are raising and have all this capital, plus rates are manipulated, super low. I can go borrow money at basically nothing. I don’t know what you can go get a mortgage at today, but it’s insane. And rates are artificially low because the government’s been manipulating them. They’re not free floating, they’re not market determined. And that all creates distortions because what it leads to broadly is people having to move out the risk spectrum to find yield.

Sahil Bloom (25:24):

And so when your risk-free rates are basically zero, I think Chamath wrote a great thread on this, I wrote a thread on it at one point, basically you just have to go chasing yield, and so you go further and further out the risk spectrum to find it. And that creates a lot of distortions and it creates a lot of risk on behavior that when people point and say there’s a bubble and something has to burst, it just looks that way. You continue to stack on top of a house of cards, you keep putting the cards on top and you hope that no one’s going to come in and give it a little knock at the bottom.

Sahil Bloom (25:51):

And at some point, the Fed the government broadly, they just happen, everyone wants to kick the can down the road. No one wants to be the one person who’s it’s on their watch that the big event happens or that there’s a pullback. And so everybody just does whatever they need to kick the can, kick can, kick the can, but eventually, chickens come to roost.

Preston Pysh (26:10):

How do you think through portfolio construction based on these circumstances? And we’re not even talking about zero rates, we’re literally talking about negative rates across the board when we talk in real terms, with CPI at 6.2, the 10-year Treasury is at 1.5.

Sahil Bloom (26:28):

CPI too is like CPI, right?

Preston Pysh (26:30):

Yeah. And that’s the number they’re telling you.

Sahil Bloom (26:33):

Yeah. It might as well be China reporting out numbers.

Preston Pysh (26:37):

It’s really getting to that point. And so if the number they’re reporting to you is producing this real negative, call it 300 to 400 basis point return negative, how does a person construct a portfolio in those circumstances and feel like they’re making wise decisions?

Sahil Bloom (26:57):

It’s a really challenging question. I think it’s more challenging for people who are soon to retire than it is for me. I’m 30 years old. When I think about investing, I think about the next 10 to 20 years probably. And so for me, if I’m my age or around my age, I’m thinking really long term horizons, like what technologies are going to be a huge part of our future, semiconductors, pretty safe bet, semiconductors are going to be a huge part of our future. And so I’m making personally money where my mouth is on this. I’m making personally large, long term sector-based bets on things.

Sahil Bloom (27:27):

Where cybersecurity, I think, is going to be a huge part of our future, I can’t see a world where that is not a thing. And so I ascribe to the, I think Jeff Bezos talked about it, what will stay the same rather than worrying about what’s going to be different. And so I think about it that way of like, what’s going to stay the same, well, cybersecurity, digital is going to be huge part of our future. Technology’s going to be a huge part of our future, and cybersecurity is going to be a massive issue, that’s going to be the wars of the future. And so if I can invest in a sector like that, I feel good about that, maintaining its pricing power long term and being able to scale.

Sahil Bloom (27:57):

And so there’s certain industries where I still feel fine about investing even at these prices because I know the macro is just so good and the tailwinds long term, you can overcome the inflation and whatever happens> Will there be a pullback at some point? Absolutely. I just can’t. The last few days before this recording, the market has tanked on the news of Jerome Powell’s renomination and I just can’t see it not having a steep, harsh pullback, but if you’re investing in things that you feel good about next 10, 15 years, so be it. I always come back to hard assets being in times like this, A, very core part of your portfolio.

Sahil Bloom (28:30):

I bucket things like real estate, land into that, I think farming probably holds up pretty well, food production, I think probably holds up pretty well. And then obviously, Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies. I don’t have as much of a perspective on the hardness of something like an Ethereum or Solana or some of these new technologies. I think those are interesting as futurist technology bets. I don’t think that they’ve played out their thesis around being truly hard asset bets in the way Bitcoin has. Bitcoin has proven, it’s like the Lindy effect, it’s survived as long as it has.

Sahil Bloom (29:02):

And so it’s starting to prove that it will survive longer. It’s like that famous thing from Taleb, who I know is not well liked within the Bitcoin community, but it’s a very powerful comment that he’s made around it. And so I think Bitcoin has proven that and falls into the hard asset bucket for me. The other stuff within the space is more futurist bets for me and something that I believe will be a part of the future, but maybe not within that hard asset allocation. But to the point on I’m soon to be retiree, my parents are hitting retirement edge, it’s a lot more challenging my question because they have a lot of their retirement accounts sitting in VOO, the S&P 500.

Sahil Bloom (29:37):

And what do you do? Do you pull it and sit in cash? Do you spin it into more of a hard asset allocation? It’s a little scary because you literally, you could see a 20% pullback, God forbid, but maybe it happens in the next couple of years. We’ve been saying that for the last eight, but maybe it happens. And so that is a much more tricky question, and honestly, not one that I feel particularly well qualified to answer.

Preston Pysh (30:00):

Join the club. You mentioned Powell’s reelection, what are your thoughts on that? That one really surprised me.

Sahil Bloom (30:10):

I ascribe to the wisdom of crowds on things, generally. I’m a big fan of this thing, Kalshi, is the name of it. It’s the only CFTC regulated event contract marketplace. It’s an amazing, really fun platform, K-A-L-S-H-I.com and they had a Fed nomination market on there. And so it’s predicted, except because it’s CFTC regulated, there’s no limit. So you can trade big numbers on it, which is fun. And that had like, I don’t think it ever went above 30% that he was not going to be nominated. So it was always saying he’s going to be renominated.

Sahil Bloom (30:40):

And so I was looking at and saying, “Okay, I actually feel pretty good about those odds, 70% that he was going to get renominated.” I was surprised by the response to it and how suddenly the market started pricing in, right increases and further tapering. And I thought it was interesting just seeing the market really get hammered, especially the tech names over the last two, three days after the announcement came out. But look, I think again, it’s the safety choice for Biden. I don’t know what he thinks about his chances in 2024, but I think he’s looking at it and saying, “We need continuity and stability. And what do I gain out of trying to go pick someone else rather than just sticking with the guy that everyone knows and that the markets have for better or for worse gotten comfortable with?”

Preston Pysh (31:23):

And it seems like him and Yellen, since now the treasury and the Fed are basically tied at the hip, they seem to have a good-

Sahil Bloom (31:32):

No, they’re independent, they’re independent institutions.

Preston Pysh (31:35):

They seem to have a very good relationship, which is required when you’re going through the current situation that we’re going to continue to go. I fully expect, and I assume based on your comments that you also expect it to continue to accelerate from here where their coordination’s going to be required.

Sahil Bloom (31:54):

Yeah, I think so. And look, they’re going to keep saying the same things. They’re going to keep saying inflation is transitory. That whole thing cracks me up because everything is by definition transitory until it’s not. You can just say, “Oh yeah, it’s transitory.” And then when it’s not, then you change your mind. And so they’re going to keep saying it and eventually, it’s not going to be transitory or it will be maybe, my guess is it’s not because I’m involved with a number of businesses and none of them are planning to lower their prices.

Sahil Bloom (32:17):

We’ve now taken price because we had to, and none of us are saying, “Okay, let’s take price this quarter and then we’ll just give it back. It’s fine.” All of these consumer businesses are basically saying, “Okay, we have to increase prices, and then those are the prices and we’re keeping them there.” And I think anecdotally, that is a pretty good indicator that prices are not just going to come down magically as soon as the supply chain constraints loosen up. They’re obviously doing things on energy, with the strategic oil reserve, which I actually think is probably right, pressures OPEC a little bit and play a little bit of a geopolitical game, but it’s a long road ahead.

Sahil Bloom (32:51):

It’s going to be interesting to see, but honestly, it’s like the boring pick because we’re going to get more of the same. I think some of the stuff Yellen has been talking about with the taxing unrealized gains, I just was like, “Eyes wide. What the hell are they talking about right now? This is insane.” But we live in this world now, it’s a little bit like we live in a world where politicians are playing the viral social media game, and policy makers are playing the viral social media game. And so instead trying to be logical and rational and work with the other side and hold hands to try to get things done that are rational policies, all they’re trying to do is get the one sound bite, the one little thing that they say that’s crazy enough that it goes viral or takes off or it gets memed because that’s how they’re growing their own personal brand.

Sahil Bloom (33:38):

That’s how they’re getting the big book deal later, that’s how they’re running for a higher office, senate, president, whatever it might be. And that’s a little sickening to see that were in this. Well, when I was a kid, I had huge ambitions to one day try to run for office and go into public service, and even through college, I had these ambitions. And I think that a lot of young people now look at public service and look at going to Washington as just an ineffective way to actually create change and create value relative to the other options they have. And that’s sad and it’s a big change that’s happened over the course of my life.

Sahil Bloom (34:13):

And I think it’s unfortunate, and I think it leads to this slow vicious cycle of lower talent ending up in Washington, not a lot of young people, we’re just going to have older and older people going to Washington, making decisions that are dated, not grounded in the future and what it looks like. And it’s upsetting. And so I do think we’re in for a real reset and need a real reset as it comes to policy, term limits, campaign, finance, reform, all of these things that I think could start to wedge into it if we want to end up in a better country for our kids than what we are in today.

Preston Pysh (34:48):

On that, you recently had a thread where you were talking about this baby grant idea. Now, just explain the idea. And I ask this question with a little bit of hesitation because, I think you know why, because here we are talking about how we got all these policies and we’re printing all this money and it’s not money that we actually have, it’s all debt, and the last thing we need is more policies. Lay it on us. Let’s hear what you got.

Sahil Bloom (35:17):

Well, this was my fun foray into talking about policy on Twitter and getting called a socialist, which I am so far from. So it was pretty funny for me to hear it. I’m a pretty moderate guy overall and definitely a free market guy, so it was definitely a step in a funny direction for me. But basically, I’ve seen people talk about this in principle before, and I was trying to lay out a few concrete thoughts around it. But the idea is every baby that’s born in the US, and take the US as just an example of doing this, you create and fund a $10,000 investment account for them. And that is funded by the government. So already like, yes, there’s money from the government on this, and you start letting that compound.

Sahil Bloom (35:59):

So that money is then basically allocated into an automatic account, or you can opt into, in my world, you could opt into a number of different allocations of accounts. Maybe there’s one that has some allocation to Bitcoin or crypto, but generally speaking, it’s something that’s exposed to markets, it’s assets so that everyone can really participate in asset appreciation. And so the whole idea is, you aren’t leaving people behind and you are allowing them to invest both in their education of understanding how these assets work and actually financially in the future, in the growth and the economic progress of the country.

Sahil Bloom (36:37):

And so my whole thought is, you don’t need this to be some central pillar where it’s this massive amount of money. I think when I did the calculation around it, it was something you had like, I don’t know, 20, I need to pull up the exact number, but basically, you have $10,000 for each kid. I think there was 3.6 million kids born in the US in 2020. So it was something like $36 billion of annual a cost. Sounds like a massive number, put it into perspective, the US spent 6.8 trillion in 2021. So it’s a half a percentage of that. The 36 billion would only be like 5% of our annual defense budget. So you could reallocate some of that.

Sahil Bloom (37:11):

So it doesn’t necessarily have to be net new spending by the way, maybe the government just spends a little less than it is and puts it into something like this. But the idea is these kids would then always have a piece of skin in the game. And whether you’re born rich or you’re born poor, you have some stake in the growth and expansion of the US economy, compounded at 8% if it’s in S&P 500, that 10 grand is like a million and a half bucks inflation adjusted by the time you’re 65. But the bigger thing is the education aspect. And that’s what gets me excited, which is, you now along the way have this real stake that you could build an entire education ecosystem around.

Sahil Bloom (37:49):

So now, parents are talking to their kids about their investment account and the things they’re invested in. You’re having those conversations, you’re talking about taxes, you’re talking about budgeting, you’re talking about how you could spend it on college and do it tax in, and tax efficient manner. So you’re starting to create a portal for those conversations to happen in a real way that I think is pretty interesting. And I don’t know if the number’s 10,000 or if it’s $1,000 and it’s just a tiny amount, but there is something interesting to me about just creating opportunity for everybody to participate in the economic appreciation of the overall economy.

Preston Pysh (38:25):

I think this is the hard question that pops out of that. What prevents it from being like any of the other programs that exist today as far as retirement accounts for people that they’re paying into that our generation is never going to see that, but yet we’re paying into those types of government programs every single year?

Sahil Bloom (38:41):

I think it has to be privately run, government funded, privately run. I don’t think the government can do anything efficiently. I’m generally in the mold of, if you want something done well, you can’t let the government do it. So I personally think it could be government funded, but then you could create a whole ecosystem of jobs around actually the private management of this. And I think people need to have a license to work with it and make their own decisions along the way. And so maybe it’s through 18, it’s standard, and then at 18, they can start using it, toying with it, however they want.

Sahil Bloom (39:15):

But I do think it would have a really, really interesting effect over the long term of more people being educated, more people understanding markets, people investing in their own future. They would go invest, they’d want to learn, maybe they would learn more about Bitcoin because they were diving into it from their early days when they were a kid, they were having the conversations. But the reality is, we still have a country where over 50% of people don’t own a single stock. And so there’s a lot of people left behind in this broad economic growth that we’ve been experiencing as a country and the innovation.

Sahil Bloom (39:45):

And so it’s a cool way, I think, to get at that. And I personally view it as somewhat bipartisan. I think it’s very progressive and a little bit of a crazy idea, and I said that in the thread, I think it’s a crazy idea, but I’m all for talking about crazy ideas. I don’t like go yell at someone and call them an idiot because they said something crazy. I think if there’s something interesting, maybe it’s one nugget that’s interesting with it and you can run with that. But I do think there’s something interesting here.

Preston Pysh (40:11):

All right. You recently had a thread on the Evergrande situation, which is a really, really big deal in my personal opinion. And you wrote a great thread on this and for people that are listening, we’re going to have links to all of these threads that we’re talking about that Sahil wrote. Laid on us, what’s your take on Evergrande?

Sahil Bloom (40:33):

Canary in the coal mine, man. This the Canary in the coal mine for China, that’s the big question. Evergrande is this Chinese property developer, one of the largest in the world, massively over-levered, they basically were allowed to, as the whole Chinese property sector was, basically finance their growth with just insane amounts of debt in a bunch of different complex ways and different places. And so they got way over their skis. Suddenly, the Communist Party decided that they didn’t want the Chinese property sector, this over-levered made some new rules. Evergrande was in a bad spot on that, couldn’t borrow money.

Sahil Bloom (41:08):

And so the whole thing, we’ve seen de-leveraging spirals before, this is a classic one, psychological as well as technical. Started missing payments, people started knowing about that, it becomes harder to borrow, the whole thing started playing out. And the difference here was it played out on a grand global stage and China hates that. And so suddenly, you have this embarrassing thing happening, how are they going to handle it? And was it going to be one chip that fell that created financial contagion, not just in China, but globally?

Sahil Bloom (41:36):

It’s been quiet since the initial stuff that happened. I think it was early October, late September that it became really big news, and then it went quiet and people lowed to sleep around the whole thing. And my general view is, this was just the early event. And I say canary in the coal mine, I really do think that. And I think there’s something here, and that Evergrande maybe was just the first thing to start to show us that there’s there’s warning signs and danger coming.

Preston Pysh (42:04):

Especially in an industry that is very competitive, so when you look at the other developers in China, you know there it’s very cutthroat, it’s super competitive. And if Evergrande’s there blowing up-

Sahil Bloom (42:18):

They did some shady stuff. When they started struggling, they were selling financial products to their employees and to people that bought their home saying like, “Oh, you get this risk free, crazy high-yield investment product.” And telling their employees, “You won’t get your bonus unless you invest in this, so you have to.” And then basically, it was like, “We take your money and we don’t give you anything back,” because they were just funding losses. And basically, it was a Ponzi scheme. In a traditional sense, they were taking money from these people and using it to pay off someone else. And so pretty yucky and messy stuff.

Sahil Bloom (42:49):

And as it started to play out, it was very public. And there’s been some more trickle effects within the Chinese property sector since. You’ve seen a couple of other large and some medium sized Chinese property developers miss some payments on some debt. So I do think you’re starting to see something there. And honestly, the Chinese economy has been held up by the massive growth of their property sector over the last five, 10 years. And so that’s a little bit of a scary thing too, because China and their overall ecosystem has been driven by the promise that they will continue to grow as an economy.

Sahil Bloom (43:22):

And the strength of the Communist Party there has really been propped up and continued to hold up because of their ability to show growth. And if the economy kept getting better, your standard of living is going to keep getting better. And so the question is like, if that stops and if one of these things breaks, how does their hold on the overall economy hold up? On the overall political situation, is it going to become tense internally? How do they react? Do they lash out globally when that happens? There’s a lot of rather scary ramifications, I think, when you actually play it out in your own mind.

Preston Pysh (43:54):

Yeah. And even with the government stepping in and assisting with relocating those assets onto other company’s balance sheets that does not bode well when the assets are coming from a company that’s described the way you were describing it, where there’s just all these different bad practices. What’s the actual quality of these assets as they’re forcing these other companies that were competing fiercely with them to now list them on their balance sheets?

Sahil Bloom (44:24):

Did you ever see The China Hustle? Have you seen that movie?

Preston Pysh (44:27):

No. I haven’t seen it.

Sahil Bloom (44:28):

It’s great. It’s worth watching. Carson Block is in it, who’s a friend I’ve interacted with, Muddy Waters founder, famous for shorting Chinese companies in the early days as their economy was booming. And there’s a really funny scene in that where he was evaluating this one Chinese company. And basically, it was this high-flying company that had gone public in the US and was getting all these foreign investors, everyone loved it. And he basically went and looked at satellite footage and they were just moving around trucks at a place, but actually there was zero activity at the company. It just wasn’t a real company, there was nothing there.

Sahil Bloom (45:01):

And it was so, so interesting as just a microcosm of, I think, a lot of what has happened over the years there, it’s like, what’s real and what’s not? I wouldn’t take any Evergrande debt. I don’t believe in the yield of it, whatever it is. So it’s going to be an interesting six months or so in China, I think. And we’ll see a lot. I think there was a false alarm on Evergrande officially defaulting recently, they walked it back, maybe it wasn’t defaulting. A lot of it’s happening quietly behind closed doors, whereas in the US, it would have to be super public because it would all be in court.

Sahil Bloom (45:34):

In China, they can do more things because of the control that they have, they can do more things behind closed doors and maybe keep things quiet for a period of time.

Preston Pysh (45:43):

All right. What’s your framework for creating new content? This is one of the questions from Twitter.

Sahil Bloom (45:49):

It’s a good question. I’m a big believer in just having a content engine, and when I say that, what I mean is, you need a way that you can literally write every day. People constantly ask me that like, :How do you come up with all these new ideas? How do you always have things to write about?” And the reality for me is I just consume a lot. I’m constantly reading and listening and learning things. Every time you’re doing that, you’re having new ideas or things that you could talk about, write about and teach people about.

Sahil Bloom (46:15):

And so for me, it’s all comes down to my content engine and that’s what am I consuming on a daily basis? What articles am I reading? What newsletters? What podcasts am I listening to? And so for me, I take that and then I boil it down to, what did I find most interesting? What are the novel insights that maybe I could contribute and pull out of that? And I’m using that. I basically have a Notion. If anyone uses Notion, I have a Notion Board where I drop in. As soon as I have an idea, I’ll drop it in just as a one liner. And then when I get inspired to write more about it or read more about it, I’ll go populating notes.

Sahil Bloom (46:45):

Those notes will turn into a rough outline of how I might have a thread or a narrative or an article. And then from there, I can sit down and start to populate that and build that out into something that makes sense.

Preston Pysh (46:57):

Here’s one I like, most underrated Twitter account that you follow.

Sahil Bloom (47:03):

That’s interesting. Most underrated Twitter account. There’s a lot. A couple that I’ve really enjoyed recently that I think are just generally under followed, there is a woman who’s a friend of mine who’s writing a lot about Web3 and crypto, her name is Magdalena Kala. I think her handle is @magdalenakala, Mags.eth is her actual name. And it’s a board ape, is her picture. She’s been awesome, and just doing a lot of cool educational stuff around Web3 that I’ve learned a lot from.

Preston Pysh (47:36):

What do you think about Web3? I’m curious what you think about it.

Sahil Bloom (47:39):

I’m really bullish on the long term technologies that are being developed. I think 90% of it is probably fake Fugazi explodes. With a lot of innovation like in the dot-com bust, everyone wanted to call the internet fraud after it, but the reality was there were things just as much as web Band was terrible, there were things that started during that time that became amazing and a big part of our future. That’s how I think about big technological change is that you have to aware that the vast majority of the stuff that’s being developed now is not going to be a part of our future and it’s going to disappear and there’s no reality to it, but there will be these underlying nuggets and slivers of amazing technological progress that either in their current form or in some form that feels two or three steps removed from it, create some level of change.

Preston Pysh (48:29):

Do you think we have to get to Bitcoin becoming a global money at that point in order for many of these other 3.0 protocols to really be able to take hold? The reason I frame it that way is because a lot of the concerns that I have is just the centralization, and we’re at this point where you’re going up against a system that is about, I would suggest that Gary Gensler is about to come out and declare everything a security. And if it’s being listed on an exchange, you’re about to get wrecked if you’re holding something that is not fully decentralized. So how do you think that timing of all that plays out?

Sahil Bloom (49:08):

I think you’re right. A lot of these things look like securities, and so it’s like the duck test. If it looks a duck and it quacks a duck, it’s probably a duck. And so I do think a lot of these things DAOs, tokenized communities, all this stuff feels like a security. And so if it feels like a security, the government is going to find a way to regulate it and say that it’s a security. So I do think that’s a major risk and something that people are going to have to navigate it around. I think that when you think about what the future around this looks like, to me, it’s much more about the talent flow than anything else.

Sahil Bloom (49:38):

There are so many smart people that I think extremely highly of technical people, builders, etc, that are flocking to this. And I personally am just a big believer in follow the talent. I don’t believe quite as much in follow the money because I think money lies a lot of the time, but when really smart people and some people that I consider, some of my smartest friends are dedicating their lives to something that’s 10 plus years, 15 years out in their view, that’s exciting to me. And I generally as a rule of thumb, just choose to not ignore it.

Sahil Bloom (50:07):

I’m not deeply, deeply invested in any of this stuff today relative to my broader portfolio, but do I want a couple call options on it? Sure, absolutely.

Preston Pysh (50:17):

Any other people that you want to highlight?

Sahil Bloom (50:19):

Let’s see. Who else has jumped out to me recently? There have been a few that I feel like I’ve come across that have been really cool. Ana Fabrega on future of education EdTech stuff is amazing. She’s incredible, does a lot of cool video stuff that’s been really cool. Wes Kao is another one within education that’s been really fun to follow along with. And then just a bunch of these entrepreneurs that I follow. Josh Fabian is this friend of mine, founder of this business, Metafy, that’s about to announce a fundraise from some pretty big people. He’s just this absolute force of nature. One of the coolest back stories, was adopted, just this amazing gritty experience of grinding through really, really tough times to get to where he is.

Sahil Bloom (51:01):

And honestly, when I sit down with him and have dinner with him, I just want to go run through a brick wall after because he is so freaking powerful. But people like that, I get a lot out of being around and following these people and just learning from them along the way.

Preston Pysh (51:14):

Your best book in the last year.

Sahil Bloom (51:18):

I reread When Breath Becomes Air once a year, and that’s one of my absolute favorites. They’re two or three books I reread once a year, so I’ll name them all.

Preston Pysh (51:27):

That’s the second time I’ve heard that book recommendation this week, and I’ve never read it.

Sahil Bloom (51:33):

That was probably the most life changing book for me. So I read that once a year. First time I read it, funny story, I read it on an airplane. Bad idea, don’t do that. I was crying my eyes out by myself on an airplane, and the woman next to me, actually, had to ask if I was okay, she thought I was going home to a funeral or something. It’s very, very powerful. It’s a Stanford brain neurosurgeon who’s finishing his residency, he’s about to experience what he’s prepared for his entire life to become a neurosurgeon, and finds out he has terminal lung cancer, and he’s getting married. It’s a true story, and he writes it in the last year of his life before he passes away. It’s like, how do you rationalize when your whole life has been building to this one moment, how do you come to terms with the inevitability of your death?

Sahil Bloom (52:14):

And it’s so, so powerful and just deeply, deeply moving. And also, it just has this clarifying effect for your own life when you think about it. And so I try to read that once a year. Atlas Shrugged, I read once a year, which is an absolute beast to do, but so good. And great audio book too if people like listening to audio books. I personally think, that’s like the capitalist Bible in a lot of ways. People talk a lot of crap on it on Twitter right now within these more progressive movements, but it’s an amazing book, incredibly well written narrative form. And then Zero to One is one that I read every year as well. Super short, takes like an hour, but so good.

Sahil Bloom (52:49):

And so good if you’re trying to build things and trying to ideate and think about the future, just so, so sharp. So those are probably my three. And Atlas Shrugged definitely isn’t for you if you’re much more progressive, but it’s a good read and it’s probably worth reading for anybody, honestly, if you’re trying to just think through your own ideologies.

Preston Pysh (53:06):

Most unpopular tip.

Sahil Bloom (53:12):

Probably just blanket statements like Bitcoin fixes this aren’t particularly productive for furthering dialogue around these things. I agree with actually the broad sentiment that I do think Bitcoin is extremely useful for our future, but yelling on Twitter and some of the things that a lot of people have engaged in over the last year on both sides, I just think are not particularly productive. So I do think we need to continue to build nuance into the arguments and discussions we have.

Preston Pysh (53:43):

I like it. Sahil, thank you for making time. I want you to give people a hand off, like I said, we’re going to have it in the show notes, some links to some of your threads, we’ll have a link to your Twitter account, you have a newsletter. I know you’re doing some media, you’re doing interviews, tell people about that.

Sahil Bloom (54:01):

I’m a little bit all over right now, it’s been fun. So I’ve got the Twitter @sahilbloom, newsletter is called The Curiosity Chronicle, you can find it on my Twitter account, I think it’s sahilbloom.substack.com. Who knows if I’ll end up on Substack long term, I’d love to move to something that’s less centralized platform. I have a new podcast and show that we launched that’s all filmed in-person in a room. Hope to have you on at some point soon here. We’ve been filming that, it’s called Where It Happens, trwih.com is the website. You can check it out, I have released two or three episodes and it’s a blast.

Sahil Bloom (54:33):

So been a really fun run, really enjoying it, continue to love just interacting with everyone in the community, positive or negative, always around for the feedback and love just jamming with people.

Preston Pysh (54:45):

Absolutely love following your account, you put out such amazing content. Thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been a blast.

Sahil Bloom (54:52):

Thanks so much for having me, appreciate it.

Preston Pysh (54:54):

If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use, just search for, We study Billionaires. The Bitcoin specific shows come out every Wednesday and I’d love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that, and it’s something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm. So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening, and I’ll catch you again next week.

Outro (55:27):

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