Epstein Files Fallout, Nvidia Risks, Burry's Bad Bet, Google's Breakthrough, Tether's Boom

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Speaker 1 Wait. You brought a car dealer with you? You know, Matthew?

Speaker 1 Oh, your car dealer from your home game, is he? Yeah, Matthew.

Speaker 1 Is he dead money? What's the story here?

Speaker 1 Sadly. No? Okay.
Sadly. I haven't been in the the home game for a little bit, and it looks like people got out of line.
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Speaker 1 You've wanted us to talk about the Epstein files, and we're going to talk about it today in a stunning turn of events. The House and Senate voted nearly unanimously to release the Epstein files.

Speaker 1 The vote was 427 to 1, Chamoth, for the Epstein Files to abstain.

Speaker 1 No, the person who abstained well played was Republican Clay Higgins from Louisiana. Thanks for asking.

Speaker 1 He said it reveals and injures thousands of innocent people, witnesses, people who provided alibis, family members. He makes a great point.
But A.G.

Speaker 1 Pambandi, of course, has addressed that already, that they're not going to release any open investigations and they're going to remove names if it would harm anybody.

Speaker 1 The Senate passed it by unanimous consent, which requires a sign-off from every senator. And Trump, in a reversal, signed the bill last night saying, give them everything.

Speaker 1 We did see some emails come out from the Epstein files last week. Friend of the pod, Larry Summers, was a main character in them.
And he was communicating with Epstein up until 2019, asking him

Speaker 1 for advice on dating.

Speaker 1 He's since stepped down from OpenAI and several other public-facing roles. And was just, I think, put on leave from Harvard.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 what do you guys think's going to be the fallout from this, I guess, is what

Speaker 1 from the the release of the files? Is that the question? Yeah, I mean, I guess we'll put our tinfoil hats on.

Speaker 1 Let's break this down. So I think the first question is, what is the relation between the Epstein files and Donald Trump? And I think the answer is it's flimsy.

Speaker 1 And the reason is because this is the most investigated, most litigated human being on earth.

Speaker 1 And I think that if you had something that was incredibly salacious and accusatory of Trump, it would have been released during the Biden administration because it would have made a lot of sense politically to try to damage his candidacy.

Speaker 1 So the fact that we haven't seen much of anything other than some photos means that there's nothing there related to Trump.

Speaker 1 So then the question is, why didn't the Biden administration release more of the files when they had them for four years?

Speaker 1 And it's probably because there are a non-trivial number of Democratic operatives that are touched by these things.

Speaker 1 Well, also, they did have, I think the reason they didn't release them was because there was an open Gheelane Maxwell case as well, and she was appealing it so they couldn't release them.

Speaker 1 There's probably two of them, but you know how this works. There's innumerable number of ways to leak stuff, right?

Speaker 1 My point is now what you're starting to see in these documents is that it seems to be tainting the Democratic establishment elite more than the Republicans.

Speaker 1 It explains why there was so few leaks in the last four years. The point is, Jeffrey Epstein was a total creep, right? That island should be covered in cement and drowned.

Speaker 1 The house should be burned to the ground and replaced with something nice. And you have to make sure that these, you're the one that said this.
It's a thousand women? That's what I saw reports.

Speaker 1 They keep saying a thousand women.

Speaker 2 Someone said a thousand women.

Speaker 2 Apparently in there, there's claims that it's a, oh, it was one of the victims who said there's a thousand of us.

Speaker 1 Okay, I mean, you have to be incredibly careful and thoughtful to protect their rights and just to respect what they've gone through.

Speaker 1 But I think now we need to just release these files in an orderly manner and put this episode behind us, learn what we need to learn from it, get better, be better, treat these people with respect, and move on.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 But do you think the release of the files is meant to help the victims, or do you think it's meant to identify fodder to go after political enemies?

Speaker 1 Neither of those two things. The releasing of the files at this point is one of these things

Speaker 1 that is about a compact

Speaker 1 between those that have power and those that ask for something. This is an issue that has animated millions of Americans.

Speaker 1 So when they constantly keep asking for these things to be put out there, I think it's a good signal for the government to listen to folks and release them. Again, in a respectful way.

Speaker 1 Similarly, there are other things that I think fall into this. We've heard about the JFK files, right? The killing of Martin Luther King, the Amelia Earhart files, and so

Speaker 1 all the UFO files. I think what it does is it shows a pattern of being responsive to the voting public.
And I think that that's a good thing.

Speaker 2 So Higgins, who, by the way, was a sheriff, he was an Army staff sergeant, and he's been in Congress for, I think, nine years.

Speaker 2 In addition to talking about the victims, he said, you know, this abandons 250 years of criminal justice procedure in America.

Speaker 2 And releasing broad reveal of criminal investigative files released to a rabid media will absolutely result in innocent people being hurt.

Speaker 2 Do you think this is like a singular situation with Epstein because it's so extraordinary and there's so many people tied up in it?

Speaker 2 Or does this this set a precedent where anytime people and the media start to say, hey, we want to know what's going on in the middle of an active investigation or former investigation that these files kind of get released and this becomes a new standard where we're just going to start to open up investigative files like this?

Speaker 2 Do you think it's like a singular thing?

Speaker 1 Because this is his whole point. This feels like a singular thing.

Speaker 1 And also it'll bake for a lot of these issues have to bake for a decade or two before people want them to come out. This has been going on for now for how many decades?

Speaker 1 Well, it's like a 20 years story right now.

Speaker 2 I feel like investigative piece that's missing is how did he get away scot-free in florida i actually when there was he was criminally charged he was convicted and plead out and he was basically let go i can actually tell the story that i feel you know about this i know a little bit about it because i met epstein a half dozen times at the ted conference oh you did yes so interesting i've talked about it on my twitter incessantly um because i

Speaker 1 you you are in his book i i am amongst the thousands of people in his black book i met him at the ted conference my you know book agent jeffrey Epstein. David and I.

Speaker 1 Okay, congratulations, you guys weren't in New York.

Speaker 1 I went to the TED conference. I just avoided that room.
Well, there was a billionaires dinner at the TED conference. I didn't actually go to the TED conference.

Speaker 1 My book agent would host the billionaires dinner. And if you type in billionaires dinner, I used to go to the TED conference.
I used to go to the TED conference. It was like.

Speaker 2 I was never invited to the billionaire's dinner.

Speaker 1 This is in the 1990s. Like, this is how old this is.
He was there giving donations to scientists, Marvin Minsky, MIT, Joey Joe. MIT, all that stuff.

Speaker 1 And when he went away and he got busted in Miami, the way it was framed in the TED community was that he was set up and this was just like an underage girl.

Speaker 1 They had checked her ID and it was like some sort of a setup and that he had been given a work from home

Speaker 1 sentence. He could go to work every day and then he had to report to jail and that it was all just like a misunderstanding is how they framed it.

Speaker 1 I think, looking back on it, I think he's a spy. I think he worked for intelligence agencies.
Now, I am not the conspiracy theorist of this podcast.

Speaker 2 Worked by or shared Intel with because the public.

Speaker 1 Okay, sure.

Speaker 1 It could be any in that sense.

Speaker 2 We all know people in the intelligence community and there's easy ways to pass Intel without it being shared. Sure.

Speaker 1 Like working for.

Speaker 1 Then I think the question becomes, was he an asset? Was he sharing information? To what extent?

Speaker 1 And the reason I think this is because why would he have an interest in the top scientists in the top universities to get close to them? And then who did he want to pass that information on to?

Speaker 1 Who would want top intelligence from scientists? Russia, Israel, the CIA. And then the compromise thing does seem also likely because he had cameras everywhere.
And they've talked about this.

Speaker 1 So I think

Speaker 2 you're saying he recorded famous people. And then used that to get things.

Speaker 1 I think there is a non-zero chance that that part of the story is true.

Speaker 2 The part of the story that's unanswered.

Speaker 1 But I don't know that it's like a 90% chance that happened.

Speaker 1 And I think that when we go back and we look at this, there's a bunch of people who have embarrassing interactions with this person who spread money everywhere. Everybody wanted his money.

Speaker 1 That's where they were lining up. All the scientists, Joey Ito, Reid Hoffman, all of these folks were trying to get his money.
Which is peculiar.

Speaker 1 And he was also giving tax advice to the Microsoft people, to Peter Thiel. So he was always trying to integrate himself into powerful powerful people with money and scientists.
Why?

Speaker 1 Was it to make money or was it for some other purpose? I think it was not to make money. I think there was some other purpose here.

Speaker 1 Now, I am not a conspiracy theorist, but because this thing has gone on so long and it has not been released, I think there's

Speaker 2 mechanisms that are keeping it at bay.

Speaker 1 That's what, that's to me, like the Occam's razor version of this.

Speaker 1 I think there's going to be very embarrassing or compromising things for intelligence agencies, which is, I think, the same thing behind

Speaker 2 JFK's assessment. If I could have one question answered for me out of the Epstein files, or if I could just have the question answered, I'd want to know where did all his money come from?

Speaker 2 Because it is not very clear how a guy who is managing money for a billionaire

Speaker 2 Wexler, we all know, like if you're a money manager, maybe you're making half a percent a year managing.

Speaker 1 That was documented. How he got

Speaker 1 Black, who's the founder of Apollo, in one year paid Epstein $168 million for tax advice. That That came out in the lawsuit that ultimately led to Leon Black resigning from Apollo.
Right. And

Speaker 1 was it tax advice? Well, that's what he said it was. Now, look, I'm not trying to high roll anybody, but I've had all the tax advisors come and give me their advice.
This didn't cost you $168 million.

Speaker 1 It cost you $1,200 now.

Speaker 1 No, it's cost me millions.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 But it's never...

Speaker 1 I am hard-pressed to understand

Speaker 1 what advice could have been given to me

Speaker 1 that where I would have paid $168 million,

Speaker 1 here's your accountant. They just sent the bill.
It's $172 million. No, no, no.
And it's crazy. Right.
You're right. And look, if you go to the best estate lawyers in the United States,

Speaker 1 it will cost you $5 to $10 million.

Speaker 1 What do you think he was getting paid for? I mean, was he getting a portion of the savings for doing tax loopholes?

Speaker 1 Maybe he was charging on some sort of a commission, but he had, he was a money manager for many of these, like Microsoft executives, et cetera. And when Peter Thiel said, why did you meet with me?

Speaker 1 He said, tax advice, which makes total, that's a total Peter Thiel, like legitimate.

Speaker 1 That totally tracks. Peter Thiel was known for his Roth, right? And he's known for like studying these kind of things.
Makes total sense to me.

Speaker 1 I think that we're going to have a bunch of Larry Summers-like embarrassing things.

Speaker 1 There could be embarrassing things there for Democrats, Republicans, everybody in between, the scientists, obviously, who went to the island and all that stuff. It's going to be all embarrassing.

Speaker 1 And I think we're going to get to the end of the day.

Speaker 1 We're going to find out that some intelligence agency was somehow involved in this and that's why it's being covered up and that's why it's so that's your prediction that's that's my prediction yes muster cannot spoken which intelligence agency will you pick yeah oh good sir look into your crystal ball i mean

Speaker 1 cia i mean it would be one of the big three the CIA, which he was talking to, I think in this latest volley of emails, he was talking to people from Israel, from the CIA, and he was talking to to Russians.

Speaker 1 He was talking to all three in the emails that have been leaked.

Speaker 2 So you could be talking to Russian intelligence?

Speaker 1 He was talking to Russians. Oh my God.

Speaker 1 So yes.

Speaker 1 Russians, I think, is just generally, he was very involved with Russians. Could you imagine how much anxiety we would have if that was our job? Could you imagine?

Speaker 1 I can't even imagine. I just want to go to my office, build some stuff, make a few investments on Twitter, play with my kids, text people.
You know, like that's a real thing. It just seems like, what?

Speaker 1 What? Oh, my God. I mean, I just...
Jason, when they they make the movie, are you going to play yourself?

Speaker 1 I mean, if you look online, if you go to the edge.org site and you look at those billionaire denies, you'll see me in a couple of pictures with Larry Sergei, Zuck, Ev Williams, when we were all 29, 30 or so.

Speaker 1 Can I nominate Jesse Eisenberg to play you? I know his hair is curly and yours is. I think it's more like Leo,

Speaker 1 probably now, or people might say Ethan Hawke. I get a lot of those, but I digress.
Who would play Ghillan?

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 which young Gillane? Who plays Reid Hoffman? Reed Hoffman. Who would pay Reed Hoffman? Huh?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I just don't see a world in which Reed was involved in shenanigans. I'll be totally honest.
I think he was just trying to raise money. I think it's like unfair that everybody is like

Speaker 1 who met him is being dragged into like, oh, they were somehow a pedophile. Like, that's just crazy.

Speaker 1 I think they were all trying to get rid of the money.

Speaker 2 Yeah, because this guy was a consummate networker, obviously doing a bunch of stuff.

Speaker 1 He funded all of those dinners. He was funding all of these dinners.
He was hosting dinners in New York. In New York, he was known for having these dinner parties with,

Speaker 1 you know, all kinds of famous people. You can look online.
He was constantly.

Speaker 2 That was his business, pretty much.

Speaker 1 His business was to meet with people.

Speaker 1 To throw dinners?

Speaker 1 To throw dinners, Treman. That seems calorically toxic.
You know what I mean? Like dinner parties. You overeat at a dinner party.
Imagine having like three of those a week.

Speaker 1 I don't know. Jason.
I don't know anybody who's having three dinner parties a week. It's a lot.
All right.

Speaker 2 Jason and I went to Carbon last night. Well, we'll talk about it when Keating gets here.

Speaker 1 That got a little heated. I mean, speaking, come on, we'll talk about it.
All right, we'll talk about it when he gets here. Somebody got out of line.

Speaker 1 All right. Thanks again to our friends at the Venetian.

Speaker 1 I had dinner last night with Paolo Arduino, CEO, founder of Tether. Can't wait to meet him.
Amazing, amazing guy.

Speaker 1 That is an incredible business. What have we got? $150 billion in treasuries now?

Speaker 1 It is an incredible. And here's why that business is incredible.
This is what I like. You're talking about Tether the stablecoin.
Tether the stablecoin. Yes.

Speaker 1 There are 500 million people using US dollar-backed stablecoins from Tether all around the world, all over Africa, all over Central America, all over Asia, number one.

Speaker 1 Number two, his user base is growing by 30 million users a quarter.

Speaker 1 The financial inclusion that then ties back to US dollar hegemony is unbelievable. So if you think about it.

Speaker 2 Explain it to me like I'm an idiot who's never bought a stablecoin.

Speaker 1 Okay, so just like every week, which is what I have to do. Just like every other week.

Speaker 1 So let's look at these businesses as roughly the same. There's Circle, there's Tether, there's World Liberty Financial.
They all have a stablecoin. What is it?

Speaker 1 Okay, so let's just say that Jason is a cash worker.

Speaker 1 in India. Let's just use that example.
Sure. He gets paid 100 rupees.
And he's like, you know, the rupee is constantly getting devalued. I have, I'm constantly losing purchasing power.

Speaker 1 I want to swap that into a US dollar. So he would create a crypto wallet and what Tether will say is, great, give me your INR, your 100 Euros, sorry, your 100 rupees.

Speaker 1 They immediately swap it to a US dollar. So now there's a US dollar and there's a token for that dollar.
I give Jason the token for that dollar. Now I have this dollar.
What do I do with it?

Speaker 1 When I accumulate enough of these dollars, 50 billion, 100 billion, I can take that and I would invest it in treasuries so that it's completely safe.

Speaker 1 U.S. treasuries.
U.S. Treasuries.
Now, if Jason decides to send it to you and then you redeem, I can sell a little bit, one dollar of those treasuries that I own and undo the change.

Speaker 2 And does Tether earn all the interest on the treasury?

Speaker 1 So I'm getting to this. So now

Speaker 1 Tether and Circle and World Liberty, they earn interest on that. And so now when the number gets big enough, this number gets ginormous.

Speaker 1 Then what they do in Tether's case is they then reinvest this capital into all kinds of distributed assets, Bitcoin, gold, real estate.

Speaker 1 But what they also do is they now invest in things like financial inclusion in Africa. So he walked me through kind of a bunch of things that he's doing yesterday.
It is

Speaker 1 an incredible business.

Speaker 2 And so as a holder of the stablecoin in my wallet, I'm not earning any of that treasury yield. I just have a flat dollar denominated or dollar protected stablecoin.

Speaker 1 You have a pegged to the dollar. You have a dollar pegged stablecoin.

Speaker 1 And that is sufficient risk management and risk mitigation for half a billion people.

Speaker 2 They're not trying to get a 4% or 3% interest yield.

Speaker 1 So now that they care more about

Speaker 2 not being in.

Speaker 1 You're bringing up the big point, which is in the United States,

Speaker 1 what is the big fight now?

Speaker 1 The big fight in the United States in this thing called the Clarity Bill that is meandering through the House and the Senate is

Speaker 1 what should happen in the market structure. So meaning if you, David Freeberg, is the one that gave me the dollar, and I am, let's say, for example, say Coinbase, and I issue you a stablecoin,

Speaker 1 do I share that revenue with you? Do you earn all of it? Obviously, the banks, like the JP Morgans of the world, the Citibanks, they don't want that, right? Because that's their net interest margin.

Speaker 1 That's what happens today. You deposit money in the bank.
And Sachs said the city program, they

Speaker 1 go together in the stablecoin legislation. They weren't able to give the stablecoin providers the ability to pay interest to consumers.
They did that concession, but that will change over time.

Speaker 1 But the banks were able to fight for that concession. The banks were able to fight for it.

Speaker 1 But then you have the emergent crypto companies who say, hey, this is like, let's find a way where we can do a sharing mechanism. How they hack around it is they do kind of sharing, but this via this.

Speaker 1 kludgy way called rewards. Yes.
So like you earn rewards and you earn reward points, but it's not really what it should be.

Speaker 1 It should be that if you earn net interest margin, you should be able to share that.

Speaker 1 And by the way, you should be able to have different rules in different markets because, again, if you're in Kenya, the last thing you're probably thinking is, do I get the 4%?

Speaker 1 What you're more worried about is the Kenyan currency, whatever it's called, is about to depreciate another 60% this year. Let me just hedge that.
And that's more than enough value.

Speaker 1 Anyways, I thought Paolo was incredibly impressive. Well, I will say this.
Business is really impressive. I have been super critical of Tether publicly, and they had a lot of challenges as a business.

Speaker 1 They were banned in many markets. They didn't do any audits.
People didn't know what was in there. They've done an incredible job cleaning all that up.

Speaker 1 Now they are starting to do going from attestations to audits, and they desperately want to be legal in America in that legislation.

Speaker 1 They have three years to do it, and they have to then unwind being banned in New York, banned in Canada, all these places they got banned. I had an offer for you.
Okay.

Speaker 1 But I just want to say, let me finish my thought for a second. I just want to give credit to David Sachs.
What we saw under Biden and what we we saw with the anti-crypto approach that they took,

Speaker 1 and Trump in his first presidency was anti-crypto as well. That decade of anti-crypto led to a lot of people doing offshore stuff like Tether, a lot of shenanigans.

Speaker 1 And actually Sachs, who can't make it this weekend, he has now created a framework which is helping people do it the right way and taking out all of these questions.

Speaker 1 And Tether is example one. They were involved in human, the tethers have been the default for all kinds of

Speaker 1 picture.

Speaker 1 This has been in our congressional hearings. They have Darville mentioned very clearly.

Speaker 1 Let's not make the accusation if we don't know. What I saw yesterday was a very, very, very credible and thoughtful entrepreneur and a great business.

Speaker 1 The other thing, sorry, that I'll say is I would like to invite you to come with me. to the Tether conference at the end of January.
Okay. We are going to...
We've never turned down an invitation.

Speaker 1 Here we go. Here we go.
Here's what we're going to to do. Here's what we're going to do.
We're going to fly together to El Salvador. We're going to do...

Speaker 1 El Salvador, we're going to do a tour of the prisons? No, no.

Speaker 1 We're going to do an interview with Bukele. Okay.
And then we're going to do an interview with Paolo, and then we'll fly home.

Speaker 1 Will you come with me?

Speaker 1 If I can ask him any question I want,

Speaker 2 you have to go check out the prison.

Speaker 1 No,

Speaker 1 I've been told you're going to

Speaker 1 be able to do that. You cannot go to ERCOT the first trip.
You go to ERCOT the second trip.

Speaker 1 I don't want to go anywhere near that prison, but if I can ask him any question and he'll be fine with with it, he's great, dude. Yeah, I'm happy as I'm happy to go.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 In any other world, he would have been in Silicon Valley doing the same thing. Anyway,

Speaker 1 the other challenge they're going to have is when interest rates go down, these businesses are going to have to figure that out as well. But $183 billion in circulating USDT.

Speaker 1 That's a ticker symbol right now.

Speaker 1 $135 billion of that's in treasuries, and then another like $10 billion in Bitcoin and gold.

Speaker 1 And land.

Speaker 1 And well, and that means they're throwing off whatever 5%.

Speaker 1 They were making $7, $8 billion a year just on the holdings. Not going to tell you what the details are, but I've never seen a business like that.
No, they said it's a 500.

Speaker 1 The word on the street is a $500 billion market cap, which would be roughly 50 times their

Speaker 1 price to sales ratio. Let me say different.
They're making $10 billion. What's more, it's,

Speaker 1 what do you think their profit margins are? Forget the growth quantum.

Speaker 1 Oh, you only need 100 people to run the business.

Speaker 2 So yeah, if the interest is the revenue, it's probably 60, 70% margin business.

Speaker 1 Upwards of more than 95%.

Speaker 1 It makes total sense because you, I mean, how many people. You know what I thought last night at dinner? Here we are grinding trying to get to third floor.
Get me started. 50%.

Speaker 1 It's so many of our businesses. Get me started.
And he's like, yeah, you know, it's incredible. It's incredible.

Speaker 1 Good for him. Congratulations.
Congratulations.

Speaker 2 The good news about that is...

Speaker 2 There's a financial theory, though, that high-margin businesses like that invite competition more. That's literally where

Speaker 2 this is where competition gets grounded.

Speaker 1 Stripe bought

Speaker 1 a stablecoin provider. It's pretty well known.
Stripe, Visa, everybody's going to have their own stablecoin. So Tether will not have the market all to themselves.

Speaker 1 And obviously, Jerry Muler and Circle is a very viable.

Speaker 2 Unfortunately, margin like that's only got one direction to go.

Speaker 1 Correct. And if the

Speaker 1 margin, if the interest rates go down, which is, we'll talk about that as well,

Speaker 1 that's going to be headwinds for that whole space. All right.

Speaker 1 We've been talking a bit about

Speaker 1 Brad Gersner personally deciding to blow up the AI bubble and then destroying the stock market. I'm joking.
Shout out to Brad Gerstner. My gosh, the short Bitcoin thing has been a bonanza.
Oh, really?

Speaker 1 Crazy.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 1 Is it below 90? It is, right? It's like 88. I know it hit 88 or something, but I mean, watch out below.

Speaker 1 Let's see the price.

Speaker 2 Watch out below. Okay, let's talk about NVIDIA.
So

Speaker 1 NVIDIA had a blowout quarter. Revenue up

Speaker 1 62% year over year, 22% quarter over over quarter, net income 31.9 billion. That's up 65%

Speaker 1 year over year.

Speaker 1 They expect 65 billion this quarter.

Speaker 1 Jensen, friend of the pod, has said that they can't keep their product on the shelves. It's sold out everywhere.

Speaker 1 And then at the same time, Michael Burry, who has got to short on it, he's been mixing it up.

Speaker 1 He is posting in response, I think, to Eufreeberg last week, making it a defense of the reasonable life of an H100 of these new chipsets

Speaker 1 that NVIDIA sells. Is it four years, five years, six years, seven years? When do they get replaced? When do they have a useful life? End gap accounting.

Speaker 1 He believes, just to make it easy for the audience to understand, that major tech companies, big tech, are cooking the books in order to spike their earnings, that this is a house of cards, and that he's going to short

Speaker 1 Palantir because it's 100 to 1 sales, price to sales ratio, but he's going to also,

Speaker 1 you know, short NVIDIA, et cetera, because of the depreciation. What's your thoughts? I know you've seen his comments, Friedburg.

Speaker 2 I downloaded the gap depreciation rules. I was going to play Accounting Corner jingle, which a fan, by the way, sent me over the week.
Oh, great. But I super fan.
I got the internet working.

Speaker 1 We'll put a good post. We'll put a good post.
I want to hear it then. Depreciation and round trips, too.
Let's talk about some unearned revenue. Sharpen your pencils.
Let's see what you got.

Speaker 1 It's accounting corner at the online pot.

Speaker 1 Very nicely done.

Speaker 2 Thank you, thank you for joining me here at Accounting Corner. And thank you to Roxana Martinez for that incredible jingle.
I think we should adopt it.

Speaker 1 Love it. Love it.
Send in your jingles, folks. Jason Adams.
Depreciation rules.

Speaker 2 Accounting standards 360.

Speaker 1 Here we go.

Speaker 2 Depreciation must reflect the assets estimated useful life, not market innovation.

Speaker 2 The specific language.

Speaker 1 Can you call us at 1130 tonight and put us to bed?

Speaker 1 You found a corner even more boring than science corner. Come on.

Speaker 2 People love accounting corners.

Speaker 1 Explain it because I'm

Speaker 1 important.

Speaker 2 Under the GAAP standards, the general accepted accounting principle standards.

Speaker 2 So you set a useful life and you reset that useful life as you do a reassessment on when you're actually using that asset, not necessarily if there's a better asset that makes more value.

Speaker 2 So let's just explain this again. You make a big investment in property plant equipment, PP ⁇ E,

Speaker 2 and that investment you write down over a period of time that you as an accountant estimate to be the useful life of that asset.

Speaker 2 So if you're going to use a building for 20 years, every year you write down the cost of that building by 1 20th. You don't get to write it all down in the first year.

Speaker 2 In fact, what Burry is arguing is that if you wrote it all down in the first year, your profit would go down and your business would look worse.

Speaker 2 So when you make an investment that you can use over a period of time, unlike salary, when you pay someone a salary, you're paying them for the hours they're working that quarter, that year.

Speaker 2 And so that money is an expense. It gets recognized as paid out that period.
But when you make an investment in a building or a piece of equipment that you're going to use over a period,

Speaker 2 you depreciate it, just to go through that principle again. And so there's standards in GAAP on how do you recognize the depreciation schedule? What's the useful life?

Speaker 2 And the useful life is when you're actually realizing return value from that asset. Burry's point is incorrect on Twitter, he said.

Speaker 2 The idea of a useful life for depreciation being longer because chips from more than three to four years ago are fully booked confuses physical utilization with value creation. That is incorrect.

Speaker 2 There is value creation because they are generating revenue from those chips this year, six years later. So there is, in fact, a useful life for that chip that has extended into year six.

Speaker 2 Now, let me ask you, it doesn't matter, and this is a part of the gap point that I wanted to bring up.

Speaker 2 So what he's arguing is you should depreciate it over, say, three years, which means you're doubling the cost every year and that it's all written off in three years.

Speaker 2 But if you did that, to give you a point of example, in Google's case, their total net profit would come down by roughly 10 to 12%.

Speaker 2 So it's not like they're cooking the books and recognizing some massive delta in their profit by doing this. The difference between three and six years is roughly 12% of their profit.

Speaker 2 And they're still using these chips.

Speaker 2 And what Gap says is that only if the new asset, meaning the new chips, replaces the old one, then the old assets remaining useful life has to be marked down and you take accelerated depreciation that year.

Speaker 2 Or if the maintenance costs spike, which means you have to spend money to fix the asset, which is not the case with chips.

Speaker 2 The third is if the throughput requirements exceed the old equipment capabilities, forcing early retirement. They're not retiring.
They're still making revenue off the old chips.

Speaker 2 Or if technological obsolescence means that you're putting it up for sale, then you can, meaning you stop using it after a period of time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and if you put it up for sale, you would actually know the market value of it. You could take that from the depreciation.

Speaker 2 depreciation. There's an almost textbook gap, which is that if you're still using the asset after six years, you can depreciate it over six years.

Speaker 1 I think this conversation lacks technical literacy. So let's assume you're Google, and let's just say that the equivalent of an output token was the equivalent of a link.
Right.

Speaker 1 The first thing you would tell me is, hey, Hmat, not all links are made equal. Right?

Speaker 1 So for example, if you generate a link for a pharmaceutical drug, Google charges a price per click that's way different than the link that they generate that goes to Amazon to buy toothpaste, right?

Speaker 1 Now, for Amazon, it actually costs the same amount of money to generate that link. For Google, sorry, right? I think the thing that he needs to understand is he's equating this to energy.

Speaker 1 But the reality is that in AI models, the thing that we care about is what is that output token? What is the revenue that's being generated?

Speaker 1 What is the revenue that's being generated by the output token?

Speaker 1 And ultimately, what he doesn't appreciate is is that obviously Google and Facebook and Microsoft and OpenAI and X are not going to be in the business of generating negative revenue output tokens just for the sake of it.

Speaker 1 How do you know that? My wife got to the end of the internet this week. She launched X, put it on voice mode.
She was stuck in traffic going from our house all the way to San Mateo and back.

Speaker 1 That's like,

Speaker 1 and she, no, no, no, it's 25 minutes up, 25 minutes back. And she said, hey, you know what? I ran out of tokens.
Like it said, you can't use it anymore.

Speaker 1 Young Grac, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Why do they do that? It's because they are very conscious of there's a certain energy output, there's a certain revenue potential, and then beyond this, they start to gate it. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 You do it on OpenAI, you do it on all these things. So they are already keenly aware of the value of these output tokens.
They know the revenue it's generating. Sorry, just one thing.

Speaker 1 And then the second thing is, in the bowels of these organizations,

Speaker 1 Everybody has completely rebuilt all of the decoder infrastructure. What does that mean?

Speaker 1 Before something gets to you, the user, there's all kinds of different manipulations that people are doing in the models, after the models, before the models, and all of that stuff has been rebuilt.

Speaker 1 So I think what he needs to understand, and look, in fairness to him, what I would say what Gap needs to appreciate is when those laws were written, it's for a factory. It's for a turbine.

Speaker 1 And it's this static thing. It probably doesn't do a very good job of understanding the world of chips.

Speaker 1 But could he take a little bit of effort to call somebody and actually learn how this works? Yes. Is he doing it? No.
So there you go. Yeah,

Speaker 1 hold on. I think that the most important point of what you said there is, Shamath, this is a new asset and it's a new space.

Speaker 1 There might be some companies that are like, we're going to lose money on this and we're going to let you build, I don't know, Sora videos, right?

Speaker 1 And that's just going to be a money loser for five years as we get chat GPT to 2 billion users. We don't care about it.

Speaker 1 And And those machines are going to have 90% of their utilization in the first three years. And then for the next seven years, it'll be, you know, 10% of their value.

Speaker 1 They'll be doing some small jobs in the background that won't be as important. Accounting isn't built to do this kind of refined depreciation schedule.

Speaker 2 What do you mean 90% of their utilization? Because if they're still making

Speaker 1 value to the consumer, so that

Speaker 1 if you theoretically think about the value of that H100, what value did the users get out of it? Well, the value today is like I'm making goofy Sora videos that generate no revenue.

Speaker 1 It's all money losing. But down the road, that might actually be

Speaker 1 advertising and it might create some number of clicks. It might create some number of subscriptions.
So we'll actually be able to attribute revenue to it.

Speaker 1 There's no way to look at these devices right now and to know

Speaker 1 how much of them are actually generating revenue in the first few years versus the next few years.

Speaker 1 I think we know now much more than we did even six months ago. How do you how to value an output token? And then what is the

Speaker 1 what is the instructions we give to the accounting community on how to deal with that?

Speaker 2 Dude, this is not that complicated. In the past, there have been efforts to try and change straight line depreciation, but your point of utilization, I don't think, is necessarily the correct one.

Speaker 2 If they're still making revenue on that chip, every year, year four, year five, year six.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so even if they're still using it,

Speaker 2 it's still generating revenue for them. And I think that the, remember, the cost of electricity and the cost of running the data center

Speaker 1 is still,

Speaker 2 like, it's still an expense in that period. So all of that shows up as an operating expense.
So if it's generating negative profit, negative gross profit, the market sees that.

Speaker 2 And I will say one more thing that I think is really important.

Speaker 1 And they would turn it off. Gap standards tolerate it.
You get the point and then they'll stop.

Speaker 2 You get, look, there's no hidden information here.

Speaker 2 Burry's implication that they are cooking the books or hiding accounting is completely false because all of the accounting is apparent in the cash flow statement and in the balance sheet.

Speaker 2 Remember, companies have three financial statements, an income statement, a balance sheet, and a cash flow statement.

Speaker 2 The cash flow statement reconciles the income statement and the balance sheet, makes the linkage, and it shows you all the cash that's going in and out of the company.

Speaker 2 And many analysts and many investors that are intelligent and do their homework will look at the cash flow statement and they will see the capex, they will see all the investments going out.

Speaker 2 and they will calculate a number typically called free cash flow that will allow them to estimate the true cash generation of the business in a particular period and make an assessment of should they be valued on free cash flow or should they be valued on the GAAP standard of EBITDA and the investor has the choice on how they want to value the company.

Speaker 2 And Burry is incorrect in thinking that they're hiding anything because it's all there. They're following GAP standards.

Speaker 2 And then investors make a market and they all decide what do I want to value this company on? Cash flow, EBITDA. Let them choose.
And then the market sets the price.

Speaker 1 I think we've given this guy way too much airtime. He's not very good at what he does.
I mean,

Speaker 1 I mean, I'm sorry, but like, this is a good idea. Come on the program, Burry.
We'd love to double-click on it. Is there any other random person out there in the internet you want to take? Let's just

Speaker 1 use a magic default to generate numbers and names. I would say that there's a lot of people who think highly of his own.

Speaker 1 It doesn't mean they're right and doesn't mean that I think it could be a good conversation. You know who we've never had on the pod? Stan Druckenmiller.
Let's get Druck before we get Michael Brown.

Speaker 1 Have both of them. I mean, why are we choosing here? Okay.

Speaker 1 Google released Gemini 3. It's pretty great.
They regained the lead on most of the benchmarks. Polymarket now has Google at 89% to finish the year as the top LLM.

Speaker 1 And all the speculation that Google was going to have their search franchise absolutely slaughtered by ChatGPT

Speaker 1 has turned out to not be true, at least not this year, with their searches going up, revenue going up.

Speaker 1 But the big story is speculation around Gemini 3 being trained only on Google's TPUs, not NVIDIA's GPUs, your thoughts, Jamath. I think TPU is an incredible product.

Speaker 1 I'm biased, but I think it's an incredible architecture. This latest spin is very profound.

Speaker 1 But I also think that what we are quickly seeing is that there's going to be a highly fragmented layer of decoding chips that exist in the marketplace. Grok is one.
TPU is one. Microsoft has a spin.

Speaker 1 Amazon has inferentia. Facebook, I think, is apparently spinning up their own silicon.
So we're going to get to disaggregated decode pretty quickly. The question is, who will win?

Speaker 1 There will be a bunch of different solutions.

Speaker 1 I think what's incredible about Google is, I don't know if you saw the stats, but they went from like 8% share to like 16% share of the entire chat market. as of like this last month.

Speaker 1 That's an incredible stat. On the enterprise side, Anthropic is just absolutely crushing.
So what are we seeing? We're seeing a nascent market get created.

Speaker 1 We saw an allocation of traffic that basically favored one company over everyone. And now we're starting to see a sorting function and a classifier in all of these different markets.

Speaker 1 It's like breaking apart, right? There'll be winners in science. There'll be winners in enterprise level coding.
There's going to be winners on the chat side. And where are the advantages going to be?

Speaker 1 On the enterprise side, it's going to be model quality. Anthropics is excellent.
On the chat side, it's probably going to pivot around your existing inherent distribution.

Speaker 1 Which is an operating system, which is your browser, which is your phone, which is Apple and Google and Microsoft.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the only thing that I would push back on what you said, though, is that I agree that Google has done an absolutely incredible job in defending search.

Speaker 1 But I think what this creates

Speaker 1 is the setup where now they can cannibalize themselves versus having their market cannibalize for them. That's still going to be a very tough decision for Google to make.
And it's going to happen.

Speaker 1 I'm going to take the other side of it. I think what's going to happen is the AI gains in advertising, targeting, and the number of searches is going to go up.

Speaker 1 So while the revenue per search might go down, the number of searches goes up and then the targeting goes up. So I'm going to take the other side of it.

Speaker 1 I think the search franchise is going to grow and that Google is not going to lose to ChatGPT.

Speaker 1 And I think the big loser in all this is going to be OpenAI because they started with 100% of the market and they're only going down and they're facing a Google firing on all cylinders, Anthropic and Grok, beating them in the leaderboards pretty consistently.

Speaker 1 So I think the short in all of this, if you were going to put on the paratrade, is short OpenAI, which I think is overvalued and is going to go down.

Speaker 1 And I think I would be long Google, Grok, and Anthropic.

Speaker 1 I think that they're going to have many challenges.

Speaker 1 Also, I don't think the startup community, I'll just add this as my final thought on it, the startup community is not trusting OpenAI with their data.

Speaker 1 If you use OpenAI and you see them releasing products like Sora, if you were in the space of doing image generation, social networking, why would you trust OpenAI with your data?

Speaker 1 If you're doing a cursor and OpenAI has that product, they're not going to trust them.

Speaker 1 They're going to go with a model like Anthropic, which is taking a more neutral, we're not going to go to the applicational level.

Speaker 1 And they're also using DeepSeek and open source models, again, because they don't want to give their data and their advantage over to a person and enabling somebody who might compete with them.

Speaker 1 Let me just

Speaker 2 make two comments.

Speaker 1 Sure.

Speaker 1 Number one is I think what we will

Speaker 2 see over time is

Speaker 2 probably a differentiation of general purpose

Speaker 2 workhorses in chip architecture to more of these kind of special purpose.

Speaker 2 chips that work well with certain models and certain applications. You can kind of think about inference in machine vision in robotics.
You don't necessarily need an H100 to do that.

Speaker 2 You can use a purpose-built chip to do that in a way that reduces power cost, reduces ultimate kind of capital cost to deploy that in an edge environment.

Speaker 2 In the core data center environment, you may end up having models that are different for graph neural nets versus LLMs.

Speaker 2 There are going to be different chips that'll likely fit very differently with different architectures.

Speaker 2 So, you know, I would say that the general workhorse is what we had, but now that everyone's making these investments, and you should expect that the investment dollars in chip design is only going to ramp up, not down.

Speaker 2 Massively. There's going to be differentiated chips for different markets and different applications.
100%. And that's where there's a risk to NVIDIA.
The other kind of thing.

Speaker 1 Who do you think is the best chance of challenging NVIDIA?

Speaker 2 So, this is where I was going to go. The other black swan that I think is missing in the equation today, and my early prediction for 2026 is Huawei,

Speaker 2 where I think that there's lithography technology that exists in China that is not publicly discussed, that is going to be deployed in Huawei and all these fabs that they're building in mainland China.

Speaker 2 And Huawei can create at a very low cost, probably very high volume, and probably in reasonably short order chips that can start to rival for certain market applications chips that might be expensive and long-term.

Speaker 2 Give a timeline for that.

Speaker 1 Two years, three years out? I think they're machine having an impact on the channel.

Speaker 2 I think they start to make announcements. And by the way, remember, chip architecture, and even Jensen's talked about this, is being redesigned with AI.
So AI can design better chips.

Speaker 1 So announcements 2026, Impact 27?

Speaker 1 Probably fair. Sure.
Okay. Great.
Love it. Is this what it'll be like when we have to be in a studio? When we get to this level of scale where our show actually matters? And we need to be in a studio?

Speaker 1 We could be in a studio together, yeah. I mean, we'd have to.

Speaker 1 This show would have never happened. Or worked.
Yeah, I mean, you have four people with actual schedules and jobs. It's not like we do this for a living.

Speaker 1 Oh, you do. No, I mean, I invest in 100 companies a year.
Not well, but I'm saying you do it. No, I'm not saying that.

Speaker 1 You could have carved out the time. The rest of us actually have jobs.
No, actually, I literally just got back from launching Foundry University in. That's what I'm saying.
Watching.

Speaker 1 That's the key word, watching. You didn't say doing.
And launching Foundry University in Tokyo, thanks to my partners there. Did you watch that?

Speaker 1 And investing in 100, 150 companies per year and launching the fifth launch fund next year. So go to launch.co and you can email me.
I had a distribution from you, by the way, recently. Yes, good.

Speaker 1 And that first fund is like 5, 6 X now. Yeah, but it was on 18.
What's your top fund? Have you hit a 5x fund yet? Yes. Okay, great.
So welcome to the club. Welcome to the club.
It was on 500 million.

Speaker 1 Okay, great. Awesome.

Speaker 1 It's actually more than a 5x. Okay, great.

Speaker 1 I'm happy for you. I'm happy for you.
I should have just done it with all my own money.

Speaker 1 That is actually the question, I mean, that a lot of people have.

Speaker 1 Do you feel you're a better investor when you're investing your money, or do you think you're better when you have the discipline of having to report into LPs? It's actually a good question.

Speaker 1 My returns have been better when I've been by myself, but I think that there is something really valuable about working for other people, which it does keep you accountable.

Speaker 1 I mean, what's happened is my dispersion has increased massively investing on my own, which means I cut the losers off far longer than I would have if I was running a fund, because I think what I signed up for when I was running a fund was never lose money, ever, and return the money as quickly as possible and then run the upside.

Speaker 1 And so I would have traded a 7X with high vol for a guaranteed three and three and a half X because I think that was my responsibility as the GP

Speaker 1 because my LPs were Memorial Sloan Kettering, the Mayo Clinic. I wanted to give them the money back because they have programs.
Right. And it's not my job to hold the money back.

Speaker 1 With myself, I can keep it out. So then the ups are higher, but then the lows are also lower.
Yes. Because some of these things just get annihilated.

Speaker 1 Like, look, like relativity space, you know, I took a $400 million

Speaker 1 goose egg. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And this is the challenge, Friedberg. Eric Smith shows up and he's like, here, it's a billion dollars.
Pay to play. And I'm like, okay, I'm not going to do it.
Yeah. So it goes.

Speaker 1 Friedberg, you had a venture studio for a little while. You had to deal with outside investors.
Now you're obviously in the driver's seat, CEO of Ahollo.

Speaker 1 You also had that pressure. You have to answer to LPs.
Did it make you better at the job or did it make you better?

Speaker 2 Same investor.

Speaker 2 My venture studio owns the majority of o'hoalo so just so it's our biggest driver of value so i'm spending all my time on oha that's kind of my but do you run if do you run the production board still like are there investments that i'm on a few other boards um but no active investments i'm not doing any new investing actually a lot of folks moved into oha or we moved out to stop doing new investing and then slowly we're kind of as we have a liquidity event we'll do a distribution but the goal is for tppb to end up being a holding company with just o'hollo in it that's where all the value is going to come from So

Speaker 2 we actually just did a distribution and then we're going to do kind of distributions as we have other kind of events for the other things that are in our portfolio.

Speaker 1 And then we'll just focus on a hollow. When you came into this venture studio model, did you anticipate, which is what most people do anticipate with venture studios, that you'd have one breakout.

Speaker 1 Here's the thing. And you would go all in on that.
No, I was delusional. Okay.

Speaker 2 In 2011, two years before I sold Climate Corp, I started a company called Metro Mile. I was the chairman of the board of the company.
I hired an outside CEO, fired him in a year,

Speaker 2 promoted the CTO to be CEO. For years, I worked with him as the chairman of the board.
I invested close to 10 million of my own money in this company, spent years on it.

Speaker 2 It had raised a Series B, a Series C, Series D, was doing great. I'm like, man, this is awesome.
I can be a chairman, not a CEO, run these companies. This goes great.

Speaker 2 Scaled to like whatever it was, $100 million of revenue. I started Itza, which as you guys recall, was this quinoa fast food restaurant.
I put robotic as well.

Speaker 1 Robotic way ahead of your time.

Speaker 2 I put 3 million of my own capital in the business. And then I had a CEO run it.
And then we raised outside money, which I was not planning to do in that business.

Speaker 2 And I'm like, man, I am so good at starting companies and being a chairman. This is what I should do.
And that's what led me to start the Venture Studio.

Speaker 2 Both those companies ended up being net negative returners for me.

Speaker 2 And over time, many of the other projects that I was a founder of, but chairman of, didn't succeed financially.

Speaker 2 And over my years being on boards, I realized how frustrating it was to be on a board where you would tell a CEO a bunch of stuff, they wouldn't listen, they would do whatever they wanted to do.

Speaker 2 I was frustrated pulling my hair out, watching them do things I wouldn't do, not doing the things I would do.

Speaker 2 So after many years of this failure after failure, I realized, you know, this was the moment where we had this amazing outcome, series of outcomes at O'Hallow.

Speaker 2 And it was a research project for several years. We put close to $40 million into this project before these results started to come in.

Speaker 2 I'm like, holy shit, this is the game-changing business of my career. This is the power law.
And that's when I made the decision.

Speaker 2 I'm going to go all in on this and I'm going to run it as a- How'd the LPs take that?

Speaker 1 And how did you communicate it to them?

Speaker 2 Everyone was very supportive and very active. They were like, this is exactly what we always hoped you would do, was to find a winner.

Speaker 2 And I never thought that that's what I would do because I swore after I sold Climate Corp, I swore I would never be a CEO again. It's too stressful.
It was damaging to my health.

Speaker 2 It's like overwhelming. I'm so into it.
I cannot stop building the business. It's just, it consumes me.
Everything about it, I have to win. I have to make the business an ultra success.

Speaker 2 It consumes me. And I knew that it would happen to me again.
And I've got kids and all this stuff. So I had to really like dig deep to make the decision to do it.

Speaker 2 And actually, you know what changed my mind about this was I saw the movie Oppenheimer

Speaker 2 in IMAX and I left that movie and I cried and I realized I wasn't doing what I should be doing with my life by being,

Speaker 2 you know, this board member who was useless. And I'm like, what am I doing here? And I said, I'm going to make this.
And I'd been thinking about this. And And I'm like, that's it.

Speaker 2 I took me over and I made the decision to step in as CEO. So yeah, the LPs, the investors were all thrilled because they had all said, like, we hope you would run something one day.

Speaker 2 And then more capital came in. And we've been running Oho for the, it's been two years now this month that I've been running Ohollo as CEO.
And I'm really happy I did it.

Speaker 1 That's incredibly inspiring. Jamath, would you like to mock Freedberg for crying at Oppenheimer in any way?

Speaker 1 I saw you queuing it. He's doing that.
He's like, you know,

Speaker 2 great movie, by the way.

Speaker 1 I cried. I cried when I got married.
I cried when my kids were born.

Speaker 1 He cried at Oxheimer. He's like, oh, my God, he's splitting me atoms.

Speaker 2 But do you ever ask yourself, what do I do with my life? Like, do you ever think like, hey, the impact I thought I would have in my life, that there's a missing piece to that?

Speaker 2 There's something that I didn't accomplish that I always expected I would, that there's something I didn't achieve as a person.

Speaker 2 And then you see these kind of extraordinary outcomes that others do and you're like, man, what was I do? What am I doing with my life?

Speaker 1 What am I doing? I think that's a pretty profound insight you had. And it sounds like you made the right decision.
All right, next up on the program, one of our favorite human beings.

Speaker 1 You know him from high stakes poker. The one, the only, the madman of the poker tables and the mensch in our poker group, Alan Keating Keating.

Speaker 1 Have a seat. Have a seat.

Speaker 1 You're sitting next to me. Oh, good, good, good.
Morning.

Speaker 2 Just like at dinner last night.

Speaker 1 You were my right.

Speaker 1 Let me introduce.

Speaker 1 You were not at dinner last night. Hold on.
Let me just do a proper introduction so so the audience understands who Alan Keating is. We'll get to it.
Alan Keating, just type that into

Speaker 1 YouTube. Watch a bunch of Alan Keating clips.
Alan, very famous.

Speaker 1 Very famous.

Speaker 1 Alan Keating.

Speaker 1 I was incredible.

Speaker 1 Alan Keating ran the high-stakes game here, the elite big game for many years.

Speaker 1 Then he started investing in companies. He was the seed investor in a little company known as Polymarket.
And he's gotten into our friend group.

Speaker 1 I don't know how many years ago, Jamath, you brought him in, and he fit right in. We started hanging out 10 years ago, and we got to know him.

Speaker 1 In that time, he also started to play high stakes on TV, stopped running the big game here in Vegas.

Speaker 1 And on TV, you're known for playing way above the rim in a way that to call it non-traditional would be an understatement. Take us through

Speaker 1 okay, go ahead, Jamath.

Speaker 1 Yeah, look. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Shamath will explain your career to you. Go ahead.
Keating, listen up. Keating

Speaker 1 at his core is an exceptional player. Not a traditional, like, you know,

Speaker 1 you'll see some of the other guys who are more solver-oriented, but Keating has incredible, incredible live reads. Kind of like a modern, younger generation of Helmuth.

Speaker 1 I mean, Helmuth has good live reads, but now, you know, he's like an aging horse. We're going to have to.
Yeah, he's older. We're going to send him him to the blue factory soon

Speaker 1 but Keating is in his prime and what he can do is he can soul read people which when you're playing at the high stakes honestly, that's all that matters because you can't play solver based at these at the stakes in which we play you cannot you're just gonna get run over and That's why you see him being able to do these things because everybody else steps into the game

Speaker 1 They're like a deer in the headlights. They're so afraid and he is very comfortable.
Yeah. And so he can see it and he can pick people off like when he picked off Doug Polk with with a four.

Speaker 1 How does that happen? It's because he can soul read people and he's attuned to play this game.

Speaker 2 Keating, true or false, can you soul read people?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think

Speaker 3 I'm navigating fear on the poker table better than most. So I think when people are

Speaker 3 afraid, they tend to give things away or get scared or act different. And I

Speaker 1 bet sizing the Doug myself comes. The problem with the Doug Polk hand was that he f ⁇ ed up the bet sizing on the turn.
He ships the turn you fold.

Speaker 1 He puts himself in a horrible situation where he's B forting the river.

Speaker 1 I mean, and you just soul ran. And it was great.
It was incredible.

Speaker 3 There were a few different tells that I

Speaker 1 wonder if I should value it to but give up.

Speaker 1 Break it down because these guys, the most important thing.

Speaker 2 But by the way, I think this is important because a lot of people think poker became solved because of computers and AI and everyone uses trainers now.

Speaker 2 But to your point, to Jamas' point, like there's still at the core of the elite level of the game, very much a tell and psychology world kind of.

Speaker 1 We'll get Nick to play picture and picture this hand. How big was a pot in the end? A million something?

Speaker 1 No, probably 600.

Speaker 3 600, 700k.

Speaker 1 Doug Polk, who is a phenomenal heads-up player, had Ace King. Like the best in the world.
You, like a ding-dong, had

Speaker 1 4-2. 4-2.

Speaker 1 It's playable.

Speaker 1 To 75 rand. Somebody wins that's a pot.
Somehow. Somehow.
Somebody winds up seeing a

Speaker 1 raised flop.

Speaker 1 He was like, what, like 150 on the flop?

Speaker 3 75 free, 35, 75 all in.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Okay, so take us behind the hand.
Like, what's the read? And why are you playing 2-4 to begin with? Why don't you explain that to the

Speaker 1 big boy watching, yeah? But explain the thinking there, because a lot of people

Speaker 1 train. Let him talk.

Speaker 1 A lot of people...

Speaker 3 want to, like you said, put everything into a solver and reduce something into a vacuum and navigate that situation. And I don't really have a passion for that.

Speaker 3 I have a passion for like what's happening in this moment. What's happening with this person? What's happening with me? What are they perceiving me as? And

Speaker 3 in that moment, Doug had gotten some confidence around a couple hands. And

Speaker 3 there was a player in between that I knew he didn't think much of his hand. And he didn't think much of my hand.
And it seemed like an obvious situation for him to pull it away from me. And

Speaker 3 I thought about re-raising all in pre-flop just to simplify it. And I think that was probably a better way to do it.
But at the same time, I do a lot of things for the fun of it.

Speaker 3 And I thought it'd be a little bit more fun to

Speaker 3 get him in a spot later on, a couple streets down, where I could, you know, bluff him out or call him down.

Speaker 1 And did he have a tell on the turn? Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, he goes 75,000, like kind of directly. And about an hour and a half before then, he had the same tonality, same cadence, and he was just

Speaker 3 stealing, airballing the situation. And there was just a myriad of

Speaker 3 things where it was like,

Speaker 3 that might be something. I'm not sure.
That might be something. I'm not sure.
Well, here's a lot of things that might be something. And I'm pretty sure that the combination of them.

Speaker 1 What happens if you call and he shows pocket jacks or something? So, you know, and then do you like in those spots where you call off and you lose,

Speaker 1 how do you process losing $700,000 that way? Do you think this is so stupid? Why did I do that? Or do you, do you, are you saying, what's, what's the self-talk? What's the internal monologue?

Speaker 3 I don't know. I guess I don't know where it came from, but I wanted to always kind of have a sense of humor around whatever happens to me.

Speaker 3 You know, the things I can't control, the things I can control. You know, if

Speaker 3 I put myself in a spot,

Speaker 3 I've gotten to a point where I can immediately recognize how ridiculous what I just did was and kind of laugh. And be okay with it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, sure. So like you're forgiving yourself during the hand?

Speaker 3 Yeah, there'll be like an internal part that's just like, yeah, of course that's what I'm doing.

Speaker 1 This is so dumb. Why am I doing this? This is so dumb.

Speaker 2 So to be able to pull off the hands you pull off, you have to have a I don't give a shit kind of attitude about

Speaker 1 this is all a game.

Speaker 2 I don't take it too seriously because that's where fear comes from.

Speaker 3 It's about mastering the the fear. Yeah, I think I just recognize that people make bad decisions when they're scared.
And that's why I like...

Speaker 1 Sorry, say that again, mastering fear. You put in reps.
How do you put in reps to master fear?

Speaker 1 Because that extends to many other things in life.

Speaker 3 Right, absolutely. Like we talked about this in investing and

Speaker 3 different strategies about how big of a bet you want to make relative to your bankroll and venture and stuff like that.

Speaker 3 Well, I like making the bet where if it doesn't work out, I'm in a little bit of trouble.

Speaker 1 You like to feel the pain.

Speaker 2 You like that, that feels real.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's a motivator.

Speaker 3 It's something that drives. And I like poker.
I'll put myself in the same type of situation.

Speaker 1 Just like two years ago, Keating calls me. He's like, hey, this is like about portfolio construction and like a specific company.
We won't say the company. Talk for a f ⁇ ing hour.

Speaker 1 And I'm trying to give him my best advice. Look, here's how you structure it to minimize volatility.
You know, take some of these chips off the table, do this, do that.

Speaker 1 He goes, I really appreciate this. Calls me two days later.
Yeah, so I doubled down on this thing and I just put it off.

Speaker 1 Okay. Throw that report calling a management out the window.

Speaker 3 You don't know this, but I've tripled down.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. Well, here's the thing.

Speaker 2 What was your purpose on calling him then? So if you felt that that was where you were going to go, why are you checking it? Were you trying to check your sanity? Or like, what were you doing there?

Speaker 1 Why do you check it out?

Speaker 3 I'm inviting him to the deep end.

Speaker 3 I'm saying.

Speaker 1 You want to come with me? No, no, no. You're talking about me? No, I don't.
I'm asking why he called you. No, why he called you? No, no, I thought you're talking about Doug Pokemon.

Speaker 2 No, no, I'm asking why you called Chamak in that situation where you're going to double down, triple down. You really don't like, what was the problem?

Speaker 3 I have access to someone that's like infinitely smart

Speaker 3 at the thing that I'm trying to understand.

Speaker 2 You're jumping in the deep end. Yes, yes.
Why are you asking him, like, should I jump in the deep end first?

Speaker 3 Because I want to earmark all the reasoning, right?

Speaker 3 I'm setting,

Speaker 3 I'm trying to understand everything about this decision because

Speaker 3 I'm going to live with the outcome of that decision no matter what. Right? So I want to remember his take, my take, my feelings, other people's thoughts.
And I want to

Speaker 3 put that into like a little bit of folder that I can come back to.

Speaker 1 If you unconsciously or you've discovered something, which is referred to as super forecasting

Speaker 1 in like behavioral sciences, which is if you write down and you understand all the permutations of your decision making and then you reflect on it years from now, you'll just be better at decision making.

Speaker 1 So that's actually what you're doing. And I think it just comes natural to you.

Speaker 1 And you were going to say when you thought the question was about the Poké and about inviting him to the deep end yeah unpack that concept of saying hey we both know that this is this hand's out of control we're in the deep dark waters there could be sharks in there explain what you're doing because i've been in hands with you where i feel like you just dragged me out to the deep water where i've got jacks or queens and then all of a sudden i'm going to be playing for my entire stack and they don't feel good anymore, even though I have an overpair to the board or whatever.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's a great point.

Speaker 3 I just think there's

Speaker 3 some purity or beauty in the chaos

Speaker 1 after

Speaker 3 everyone's after you get past where everyone's prepared.

Speaker 3 And I'm interested in that space, and I have no interest in the space that everyone's prepared for.

Speaker 1 Everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the face. You remind me of Alex, you're the Alex Honold of poker.
Alex Honold is the guy who. Oh my gosh.
Oh, my God. What is this for in Vegas? Oh,

Speaker 1 And you

Speaker 1 see? Oh my God. His bestie.
And she's me hooked.

Speaker 1 His cashmere.

Speaker 1 And look, guys, Helmuth decided for this special occasion with us here taping all in for the first time in Vegas.

Speaker 1 Helmuth decided to wear a track suit that's only 12 years old. He was one of his newer tracks.

Speaker 2 A few years ago, at Helmuth's birthday, we each tipped in, I think, three grand to buy him a new wardrobe.

Speaker 1 There was was like 60 of us, it was like 70,000.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it was 20 of us.

Speaker 1 We each put in three grand. We put in our clothes.

Speaker 1 You remember that all amount of clothes, and

Speaker 1 he hasn't won a single thing. He showed you the shirt.
He bought them to the posterior. No, no, no.
This shirt you guys bought for me. I will say this.

Speaker 1 No, hold on. Between that wall,

Speaker 1 between that wall and that wall, you guys gave me all. You gave me all those clothes.
Did you sell them? A ton of clothes. No, no, I gave them to my sons.
Oh, okay.

Speaker 1 All right. Sit down.
Phil Helmuth, please sit down. I got to close the show.
Hold on. And then we're going to please everybody stand Supplemental.
Yeah, three, two. All right.

Speaker 1 Alan Keating, you're a mensch. It's a pleasure to know you.
Great to play with you.

Speaker 1 And we're going to have some exclusive content on our YouTube channel of the besties playing poker with incredible professional poker players like Jason Kuhn, Alan Keating, and then I think Phil Hummy is my choice.

Speaker 1 We'll let your winners ride.

Speaker 1 Brain Man David Saxon says,

Speaker 1 and instead we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you.

Speaker 1 Besties are gone.

Speaker 1 That is my dog thing. I noticed in your driveway.

Speaker 1 We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orchard because they're all just used to

Speaker 1 sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

Speaker 1 We need to get mercy.

Speaker 1 I'm going alley.