Short CNN, DogeCoin & Brearley
Long our natural immune systems, truth and bitcoin
Spent the week on the road in Frisco, Texas. All I can say, is was damn nice to be back in America after spending the last few weeks in NY. From working out at Cowboy Fit to meetings in the Big D, it was wonderful to be in a town where those wearing masks were in the distinct minority, and people were busy living their lives.
In the global financial casino, things are heating up as the Covid hysteria is starting to peter out despite the best effort of the establishment grifters and reapers and their useful WhiteWoke idiots to extend the faux emergency.
Although I’m expecting a correction and the signs of a short term top are picking up, it is important to remember - in an unlimited ‘printer goes Brrr’ environment, all tops are short term. Telltale signs include the number of inquiries I fielded from non-crypto laymen on whether they should buy Coinbase the day of its initial public offering. A safe and timeless rule on par with finished beats perfect, is never buy a highly hyped IPO on the open the day it goes public. Market makers and banks will typically aggregate the market buy orders at the bell and open the stack the price to an artificially high level. You can almost always do better waiting (or better yet, buying in the private market long before it goes public).
Another clue that we’re dancing in ManiaLand is the number of letters from value hedge fund managers and old school cranks claiming the market has gone completely bonkers.
David Einhorn, penned the type of note that I’ve seen a 100 times in markets where animal spirits are running wild that can best be summarized as, “Everyone else is crazy, I'm the only sane one....that's why my returns suck.”
To his credit, there is a lot of crazy shit out there (I’m talking financial markets, it’s nearly ALL crazy shit in the political realm).
Take Dogecoin, a meme filled that is at best hilariously overvalued, and at worst, worthless dogeshit.
Here’s an explanation from a crypto-focused website featuring quotes from Dogecoin’s creator Billy Markus that is neither accurate nor comprehensible. It’s hard to say whether it’s a blog penned by an AI computer or just an English-Third language writer, but I thought I’d cut and paste it below because this is as good an explanation on DOGE’s value and recent appreciation as most buyers can offer:
“The worth of Doge comes from Meme standing. So long as computer systems can run the equation, Dogecoin could by no means run out. In contrast to Bitcoin, which has a set variety of items that may be mined, the yellow canine on a coin might be purchased and bought for affordable. For the previous decade, Dogecoin may very well be purchased by the 1000’s for nearly nothing, making it simple to gather. This “pleasant, low barrier to entry,” Markus stated, has allowed the coin to go mainstream in a method that plenty of ironic artwork hardly ever does.
Over the previous few years, cryptocurrency has exploded in recognition, with Bitcoin hitting a report $64,000 this week. This mainstream consciousness created by this digital gold rush has impressed a concern of lacking out that’s inflicting cryptos to skyrocket in worth.
“I feel the market has been attempting to determine what the intrinsic worth of all cryptocurrency is during the last 12 years,” Markus stated. “It hasn’t settled on one but.”
Learn the unique article on Business Insider.”
I used to think sell-side research was garbage, but man that takes the cake. Either way, steer clear of crap like this and XRP. For those brave men who don’t fear death, you can even short them or put on the pair trade below.
TRADE OF THE WEEK
In light of the spike in worthless coins like Doge or XRP, kamikaze traders should short DOGE or XRP, and go long INX or BTC. It’s a relative value trade, and let’s be frank, I’m not seriously recommending this trade for anyone that isn’t a professional. But it could be a good learning experience for how markets work.
DOGE and XRP have market caps of $40 Billion and $75 Billion, and damn close to zero utility whatsoever.
INX is the first SEC approved security token exchange and sports a market cap of about $180M. Here’s a brief write up I did on it. You already know which horse I’m betting….
This is what a nightmarish, dystopian police and surveillance state looks like. Canada and parts of Europe have lost their mind, nerve and soul. Even as the twin hellholes of NY and California start to crawl back from the lockdown induced madness and psychological torture perpetrated by their governors and the White Woke useful idiots that helped perpetrate this self-induced misery, Canada and Europe are doubling down on economic and social suicide.
To their credit, the Waterloo and Ottawa police departments issued statements that they would NOT be enforcing the unlimited stop and question powers. American cops should have had the fortitude to do the same. They’re already defunded and despised by the Left, the least they should do is have the integrity and decency not to enforce bogus ‘public health’ laws that are designed to suffocate small business and provide zero utility. If you want to alienate your only remaining supporters, keep ticketing, arresting and harassing small business owners and residents for daring to live their lives.
CNN was exposed as the worthless fraud they are….for the umpteenth time by Veritas. I’m amazed that exposes are still necessary as it presumes there are still people that don’t know that mainstream media like CNN, MSNBC and network news are worthless purveyors of propaganda and false narratives.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, the best way to approach these sources if you’re still addicted to the fear porn and corporate media is just to presume everything they say is a lie. It’s the inverse ‘I believe everything I read’ Spinal Tap approach, but it actually works since it’s the rarest of occasions when a sliver of truth breaks through their 24/7 agitprop narrative.
As the headmaster of Dalton, a notorious private school for the privileged, resigned this week over the school’s mindless adherence to implementing a Critical Race Theory curriculum across all facets, another private school made headlines as a father at the equally prestigious, $54,000-a-year Brearley School sent a scathing, nearly 1700-word letter to the institution’s roughly 600 families over Brearley’s “obsession with race.”
Here’s a snippet:
“It cannot be stated strongly enough that Brearley’s obsession with race must stop. It should be abundantly clear to any thinking parent that Brearley has completely lost its way. The administration and the Board of Trustees have displayed a cowardly and appalling lack of leadership by appeasing an anti-intellectual, illiberal mob, and then allowing the school to be captured by that same mob. What follows are my own personal views on Brearley's antiracism initiatives, but these are just a handful of the criticisms that I know other parents have expressed.
I object to the view that I should be judged by the color of my skin. I cannot tolerate a school that not only judges my daughter by the color of her skin, but encourages and instructs her to prejudge others by theirs. By viewing every element of education, every aspect of history, and every facet of society through the lens of skin color and race, we are desecrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and utterly violating the movement for which such civil rights leaders believed, fought, and died.”
I highly recommend you read the full letter linked here.
Each week I’m going to balance the daily deluge of alternate news and negativity with some key lessons that will help us build and act. It’s clear that no one is coming to save us except ourselves, and by golly, we’re going to do that come hell (a Biden administration) or high water (Woke Zombie mobs).
Since the response to the Peter Thiel video was overwhelmingly positive, I’m going to include Shane Parrish’s list of eight lessons he took away from Thiel’s book, Zero To One. The book is an exercise in thinking — about questioning and rethinking received wisdom to create the future. And thinking about thinking is what we’re all about.
1. Each Moment Happens Once
Like Heraclitus, who said that you can only step into the same river once, Thiel believes that each moment in business happens only once.
The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.
Of course, it’s easier to copy a model than to make something new. Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange.
2. There is no Formula
The paradox of teaching entrepreneurship is that such a formula (for innovation) cannot exist; because every innovation is new and unique, no authority can prescribe in concrete terms how to be more innovative. Indeed, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.
3. The Best Interview Question
Whenever I interview someone for a job, I like to ask this question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
This is a question that sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Actually, it’s very hard to answer. It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon. And it’s psychologically difficult because anyone trying to answer must say something she knows to be unpopular. Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.
Most commonly, I hear answers like the following:
“Our educational system is broken and urgently needs to be fixed.”
“America is exceptional.”
“There is no God.”
These are bad answers. The first and the second statements might be true, but many people already agree with them. The third statement simply takes one side in a familiar debate. A good answer takes the following form: “Most people believe in x, but the truth is the opposite of x.”
What does this have to do with the future?
In the most minimal sense, the future is simply the set of all moments yet to come. But what makes the future distinctive and important isn’t that it hasn’t happened yet, but rather that it will be a time when the world looks different from today. … Most answers to the contrarian questions are different ways of seeing the present; good answers are as close as we can come to looking into the future.
4. A Company’s Most Important Strength
Properly defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think.
“Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.”
— Nietzche
5. The Contrarian Question
The question “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” is hard to answer at first. It’s better to start with, “what does everybody agree on?”
If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.
[…]
Conventional beliefs only ever come to appear arbitrary and wrong in retrospect; whenever one collapses we call the old belief a bubble, but the distortions caused by bubbles don’t disappear when they pop. The internet bubble of the ‘90s was the biggest of the last two decades, and the lessons learned afterward define and distort almost all thinking about technology today. The first step to thinking clearly is to question what we think we know about the past.
Here is an example Thiel gives to help illuminate this idea.
The entrepreneurs who stuck with Silicon Valley learned four big lessons from the dot-com crash that still guide business thinking today:
1. Make incremental advances — “Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is suspect, and anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble. Small, incremental steps are the only safe path forward.”
2. Stay lean and flexible — “All companies must be lean, which is code for unplanned. You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out, iterate, and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation.”
3. Improve on the competition — “Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know that you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors.”
4. Focus on product, not sales — “If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth.”
These lessons have become dogma in the startup world; those who would ignore them are presumed to invite the justified doom visited upon technology in the great crash of 2000. And yet the opposite principles are probably more correct.
1. It is better to risk boldness than triviality.
2. A bad plan is better than no plan.
3. Competitive markets destroy profits.
4. Sales matters just as much as product.”
To build the future we need to challenge the dogmas that shape our view of the past. That doesn’t mean the opposite of what is believed is necessarily true, it means that you need to rethink what is and is not true and determine how that shapes how we see the world today. As Thiel says, “The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.
6. Progress Comes From Monopoly, not Competition
The problem with a competitive business goes beyond lack of profits. Imagine you’re running one of those restaurants in Mountain View. You’re not that different from dozens of your competitors, so you’ve got to fight hard to survive. If you offer affordable food with low margins, you can probably pay employees only minimum wage. And you’ll need to squeeze out every efficiency: That is why small restaurants put Grandma to work at the register and make the kids wash dishes in the back.
A monopoly like Google is different. Since it doesn’t have to worry about competing with anyone, it has wider latitude to care about its workers, its products and its impact on the wider world. Google’s motto—”Don’t be evil”—is in part a branding ploy, but it is also characteristic of a kind of business that is successful enough to take ethics seriously without jeopardizing its own existence. In business, money is either an important thing or it is everything. Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money; non-monopolists can’t. In perfect competition, a business is so focused on today’s margins that it can’t possibly plan for a long-term future. Only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits.
So a monopoly is good for everyone on the inside, but what about everyone on the outside? Do outsize profits come at the expense of the rest of society? Actually, yes: Profits come out of customers’ wallets, and monopolies deserve their bad reputation—but only in a world where nothing changes.
In a static world, a monopolist is just a rent collector. If you corner the market for something, you can jack up the price; others will have no choice but to buy from you. Think of the famous board game: Deeds are shuffled around from player to player, but the board never changes. There is no way to win by inventing a better kind of real-estate development. The relative values of the properties are fixed for all time, so all you can do is try to buy them up.
But the world we live in is dynamic: We can invent new and better things. Creative monopolists give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world. Creative monopolies aren’t just good for the rest of society; they’re powerful engines for making it better.
7. Rivalry Causes us to Copy the Past
Marx and Shakespeare provide two models that we can use to understand almost every kind of conflict.
According to Marx, people fight because they are different. The proletariat fights the bourgeoisie because they have completely different ideas and goals (generated, for Marx, by their very different material circumstances). The greater the difference, the greater the conflict.
To Shakespeare, by contrast, all combatants look more or less alike. It’s not at all clear why they should be fighting since they have nothing to fight about. Consider the opening to Romeo and Juliet: “Two households, both alike in dignity.” The two houses are alike, yet they hate each other. They grow even more similar as the feud escalates. Eventually, they lose sight of why they started fighting in the first place.”
In the world of business, at least, Shakespeare proves the superior guide. Inside a firm, people become obsessed with their competitors for career advancement. Then the firms themselves become obsessed with their competitors in the marketplace. Amid all the human drama, people lose sight of what matters and focus on their rivals instead.
[…]
Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.
8. Last can be First
You’ve probably heard about “first mover advantage”: if you’re the first entrant into a market, you can capture significant market share while competitors scramble to get started. That can work, but moving first is a tactic, not a goal. What really matters is generating cash flows in the future, so being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you. It’s much better to be the last mover – that is, to make the last great development in a specific market and enjoy years or even decades of monopoly profits.
Chess Grand-master José Raúl Capablanca put it well: to succeed, “you must study the endgame before everything else.”
Final Prediction: Ben Askren with a unanimous decision over Jake Paul. I’m locking this one in at 8PM the night before, and will keep it embargoed. Let’s see if a rusty professional can handle a fit, talented amateur. Either way, “Let’s get ready to ruuuumbbblllleeee!”
What I’m Reading…
**Let’s build a new country… virtually. Balaji on why the network state is built cloud first, land last.
**How Will Cryptocurrencies Create Freer, Wealthier, and Less Corrupt Societies? Crypto will force politicians to spend money responsibly, not for popularity.
**Is Bitcoin the solution to the end of this long-term debt cycle? Explained using Ray Dalio’s Principles.
**Democrats claim to want what Republicans currently have, a nice, peaceful life. But, it’s the Dem cities that have riots and racial problems…
**California has paid over $31 billion to unemployment scammers.
**Peter Thiel considers Bitcoin to be the next reserve currency, while working with IRS to find and tax BTC transactions.
**18 reasons why not to take the vaccine. Whether you are for or against, this is a good series of points both sides should consider, especially the Branch Covidians.
**Kentucky to shut down entire unemployment benefits computer system for 4 days after too many cyber attacks.
**More research supporting using magic mushrooms as a treatment for depression.
What I'm Listening to...
When even mega-douchebag liberals like Bill Maher admit how f’n wrong and pathetic Dems have been on Covid, you know the tide is turning. Look for some serious revisionist history soon where they all pretend they were against lockdowns.
Unregistered 161: With James Corbett on the Corbett report. Open and closed conspiracies, social engineering, and the most powerful weapon of all - The ‘narrative’.
Andy Frisella breaks down how to crush each day.
What I’m Watching…
Apologies in advance for the host's accent and eyebrows, but the Veritas guy gives an insider perspective on our corrupt media and makes a great case for why they are one of the few real (and important) journalists left.
The Dawn Wall (Netflix) - Cameras follow Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson as they take on the staggering challenge of free-climbing Yosemite’s most formidable rock formation, and try to shrug off a devastating incident that few will ever experience.
Twitter Octagon
Parting Words….
A lot of times people tell me they are Christians or they believe in God's words. I always say to them, "You don't need to tell me, I will know that by how you live your life.”
That’s it for this week. Thanks for taking the time to read this, I appreciate the support. If you haven’t yet, hit that subscribe button so you don’t miss an issue.
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See you next week!