Trump verdict, COVID Cover-up, Crypto Corner, Salesforce drops 20%, AI correction?

And now the crypto people have basically had a political awakening and realized they have to get involved in the political system.

I think we're going to have a crypto framework and it's worth probably five points in this election.

But if there are 50 million people who have now decided to have at least a hedge against the establishment and the traditional financial system, and you are threatening to take that wealth away, I could see how 80% of those folks show up to the ballot box and say, all right, which one of you will just leave me alone?

And if you look at what this price chart could indicate, is that if this thing starts to get to these levels of appreciation, it is going to completely replace gold and start to become something that has transactional utility for hard assets.

the founder public companies that have gone public achieved a $10 billion market cap and are still founder run as the CEO from there, outperform nearly any index you look at.

So I think what the market is voting with their dollars is that these large lumpy monolithic software companies that need big 50, 100 million dollar customers, they're not gonna find them soon

And I'm seeing that a bunch of SaaS companies are kind of hurting today now in the wake of this. They're down like 5%, not 20, but so I wonder if what the market is wondering is whether there's a more general slowdown that we're on the precipice of.

And then also, if they keep raising taxes, like their plans are, then affluent people are going to be trying to protect their assets.

Well, I can promise you this. I don't think Trump's going to raise taxes, but Biden will if he has the trifecta.

It took a long time for this to work its way through the economy, but I think we're finally seeing it now.

This is, I don't know what else is more definitional of stagflation. The economy is not growing, prices are going up, and the cost of borrow has gone through the roof.

Obviously, the other thing that's happened is we've commercialized Bitcoin. And we talked about this sort of as my big prediction for 2024, which is these ETFs are really going to allow Bitcoin to cross the chasm and have its sort of central key moment.

We're looking at 5% 30-year treasury rates, which means that you are gonna see multiple compression that's gonna happen across the market for tech stocks.

So while this is incredible for NVIDIA, the chicken is coming home to roost because if you do not start seeing revenue flow to the bottom line of these companies that are spending $26 billion a quarter, the market cap of NVIDIA is not what the market cap of NVIDIA should be.

So I do wonder if there is a slow reckoning underway right now in technology that's, as we talked about in the show, a function of both kind of an economic slowdown.

No, no, that's happening in startups right now. I'm seeing startups with four developers do what just a couple of years ago, they would need eight to do there.

100%. I mean, if you just look at the polls, it's 100% there'll be a switcheroo.

And by the way, if you want to make a switcheroo and get a different candidate than Joe Biden, that's not going to happen now because Democrats and the media think that this is their salvation.

So there are subsidies, there are kickbacks, there are government programs that now number in the trillions of dollars a year, incremental to what we were going to spend if things were the status quo.

is there a shifting underway in the SaaS business model that the premium that SaaS companies were able to charge and the pricing model on a per seat basis and the dollars that they're able to charge per employee or per user is so significant relative to what that enterprise can build themselves now with the commoditization available to them under this new era of AI

And it doesn't mean Salesforce is a bad company, it's just that it is on the wrong side of the life cycle.

Those models will work for other kinds of companies, but I don't think there's going to be a huge disruption to the seat model is my sense.

You have put up a candidate that nobody wants. His policies on the border and some other issues are not, you know, in sync with the majority of the country.

Anyone who's sitting in the middle as an independent or an undecided, I think it is much more likely that they are going to have sympathy for Donald Trump coming out of this, not admonishment.

And I think that if you were undecided or pro-President Trump, you probably found more reason to support him for all the reasons that Friedberg said.

The Democratic Party knows they're running a candidate who can't debate, who can't put two sentences together, who can barely find his way off a stage, whose policies are coming home to roost, the economy, like we talked about on the show, is slowing down very rapidly.