E172: SBF gets 25 years, Trump's meme stock, RFK Jr picks VP, Biden's 2025 budget & more

when you look at the products that service the retail market, they've also become increasingly gamified. Robinhood is probably the best example of having built an incredibly good business by making things more like a game. ... on top of the whole movement to sort of allow individuals to monetize their own name and likeness via the stock market, which we just talked about, the second movement is that a lot of these things are becoming less financialized and more gamified. And so you just have many more participants. ... you can have a GameStop moment in any of these things. You can have these zero-day options run the stock to the moon.

When you have a small float like this and a rabid group of people who are gambling, you will get your face ripped off.

We're still in this lockup period where for six months, there's a very small float, and it's probably the case that once there's more shares on a liquid market, we'll find out what the real valuation is.

Actual value of this company with 5 million in revenue, 4 million in yearly revenue. I mean, if you really want it to be absolutely insane and give it 100x valuation, it's worth 400 million. ... you'll lose a large amount of money, I predict, if you buy this.

So to the extent that this business saw a contraction, and maybe the truth social thing didn't end up being that valuable. ... So he's got a lot of outs here to maintain this market value. And then on top of that, to your point, there's 70 million odd people who would want to support him in one way, shape or form.

I think what you're going to see is that lawyers from the DNC and the Biden campaign are going to fight tooth and nail to keep this ticket off the ballot, at least in the major contested states, like the five or six states where the presidency will be decided in 2024

this seems really like it's going to damage Biden, which was my original prediction. And that reason why a lot of the right wing were supporting RFK was because they wanted, they saw this as a clear path to take away a couple of points from Biden. ... I think they could peel off a couple of percentage points in those states.

First part of what you said is 100% right. I'm not sure that a bunch of Republicans are going to get organized, J Cal, to vote for RFK in that way.

I have one company myself and I'm proud to say I've sold no shares of my Robinhood. I keep all my Robinhood shares. ... Their whole plan was always to provide the full suite of services.

He made a seed investment in Solana that I think is worth billions now, especially now that Solana has recovered. ... I think that Solana was hard with the brush of being a Sam coin because SBF invested in it, but as it turns out, as far as we know, it's a completely legitimate developer project.

on the defense side, there's a large portion of that budget that's migrating away from traditional tactical warfare to things that are unmanned vehicles and cyber and whatnot, that could save two or $300 billion there

Cocoa has moved in price from about 2000 bucks a ton, which is where it normally trades at, to $10,000 a ton. ... They're talking about cutting the size of their chocolate bars, raising prices, and starting to use other ingredients. You'll start to see that happen in the shelves in the next couple of months. But this is the big news in the commodity markets right now, is this parabolic spike in cocoa prices.

they are looking at reimbursing things like Wigovia and Ozempic and whatnot. ... you put a large swath of the American population on those drugs, the reimbursement value of those drugs versus the cost of actually the chronic care management would save you many hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

I remain steadfast in my commitment to there being only one major issue facing this country, and that is the federal debt and the deficit. We are increasing the federal debt by a trillion dollars every hundred days. That number is not slowing down. ... I think that the necessity of raising tax rates, the necessity ultimately of cutting entitlement programs, the necessary inflation that will arise because of the condition of the federal government's debt level, because we're going to have to keep printing money.

The first is that our debt to GDP either historically, but also in relation to other countries is still relatively reasonable. And what that basically shows is we have a lot more debt that we can issue, which means that there's a lot more deficits to run. ... the problem is politicians will use this as a reason to continue spending, because they won't be forced to. And that's not a great thing, but this is probably why the status quo will go on for a very long time.

The hard part is that our interest expense keeps growing because as our debt rolls onto more expensive, higher interest bonds, then our interest expenses increasing. Just a few years ago, our interest expense was only 300 billion a year. Now it's over a trillion a year. ... And that's just going to keep growing and growing. And then the other thing that's going to grow is all the entitlements related to demographics.