We got Joe Weisenthal from Bloomberg calling in. Hi, hey Joe, how you doing? It's our financial brother.
I'm thrilled to be here with my uh with my technology brothers. Thank you for having me.
I'm so glad to have you on the show.
I'm not a professional. I'm not used to this. You know what, the last time I did any sort of like video call-in show, my producer Kale, who was in the room with me, he scolded me because he's like, you look like garbage in that video that you did, because I just went down to like the basement here at Bloomberg and I like propped up my phone and it was a weird angle. So he said next time you do anything, just let me know. And so he got me set up. Shout out to Kale and this really nice, this really nice studio here. I have like a proper ring light and everything in front of me.
Great. So uh can we give, can we give the viewers a little background on you? As I understand, your your passion is for uh finance podcasting, but you have to make ends meet by playing in some sort of band. Is that right?
That's right. You know uh yeah, you can't really live on finance podcasting is what uh alone. And so I'm in a country music band called Light Crude. And yeah, we pass a bucket of tips around after each show. And I think the last show uh I probably, after netting it out with the opening act and the other members, I think I got about $10. That was the take.
There we go. Yeah, there you go. It's fantastic. Uh well yeah, I mean yeah, thanks for joining. Um I did Odd Lots a couple months ago. It was a great show. Um we had a bunch of stuff we wanted to talk about uh today. Uh I mean, did you see this SEC news uh that VCs will be about to, they should be able to advertise their active fundraisings? This was in Axios today.
Oh, did did this, I I I missed that today, but I'm sure I'm sure this will be wonderful. Many retail investors convinced that they're getting on, getting in on the next big thing. This can only mean good things. I'm sure it's a more wired checks to you guys.
Well I think I think the idea is that if you can put $100,000 into a fund or if you can put a million dollars into a fund, it sort of implies that you're accredited, right? I mean it could be less risky than some SPACs, I guess. Like you know, you get into some diversified fund that's professionally managed. Doesn't seem that crazy.
I love that. Well, there are riskier things that are conceivable, so therefore, yeah, no, I get it. Hey look, you can advertise literally anything else, right?
So so so I I I I want to know uh you got to break the news here. You uh posted yesterday, I have a good idea for something I want to write in the newsletter tomorrow. I'm so tempted to just waste it as a pithy tweet right now. You put it in your newsletter. We're gonna encourage people to go subscribe. But can you break us down what was that good idea?
I hated that Solana ad and I I know everyone hated it and I hate just like if someone follows me on Twitter, I don't usually like jump on the thing that everyone's jumping on. That's not really like my style. But I hated that ad. It had nothing to do with it being like anti-woke or whatever. It was just like I hated the premise. Yep. That like investing in crypto, that like investing in meme coins, which is the primary use of Solana, is somewhere along the line be in the same conversation. Like we built the railroads, we landed on the moon, and we trade coins on Solana. It's like no, I'm sorry, I don't accept that premise. It's not part of it. And I was going to make you know like there's this, the joke when I was gonna, I could have just done it in a tweet, which is the real set, which is you know it's like what would your job be on the um you know the Soviet commune? And everyone imagines that they're the poet. It's like what would your job be on the um you know the Martian landscape? And probably your job's going to be miserable because it's miserable up on Mars and it's cold and there's no climate. You're probably doing something with like trying to mine ice or something like that. But everyone imagines that they're the guy who's going to be like, oh I'm going to like set up the decentralized payment platform to finance. Like everyone imagines the Martian meme coin artist. Yeah. It's like I'm going to be the guy posting dank memes to like motivate the workers who are out on the out on the Martian landscape. I hated that ad. I hate the whole premise. It could have been a tweet, but because I have employed, because I need to make ends meet here at Bloomberg, I was like, you know what, I'm going to write it up in slightly longer than 280 characters for my newsletter today.
Yeah, I mean you know to to steelman the Solana on Mars, we're going to need to fractionalize that ice, get it on chain, trade it. Like this is going to be important, I think.
Yeah, no, I like who has the one token. You got to tokenize the ice. I get that exactly.
Maybe. All right, well then I'm slightly open-minded to it. We've got a we've got a working theory. We want DOGE to let us privatize the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and put the planes on chain. We want planes on chains. So that's our that's our political platform. Uh I'm I'm curious what you think the the whole play was with Mark uh and the Tesla video yesterday. Do you have do you have any sort of comments on that? It felt weirdly sort of conflicted in the sense that you know was I don't know what the... I'm sorry, I'm so online and I'm embarrassed. I missed who Mark... Mark...
Mark Rober. I totally missed it.
Yeah, yeah. Anyway, uh yeah, Mark Rober put out a video testing uh the Tesla self-driving uh which is camera-based against the LiDAR uh system from a from a rival company.
We're going to we're going to switch this interview. We're gonna we're going to pretend like we're interviewing a country music superstar. Just ask me about country music. You asked me about like Tesla. I don't know anything about that stuff.
Well well what about uh your your recent interview with Andrew Ferguson? Uh, biggest take from it was that he very eloquent and a great storyteller. He did a really good job of kind of going back multiple decades talking about Trump I and Lina Khan and stuff and like kind of just taking me on a tour of what's going on. But um and also it very interesting that he kept coming back to like worker harm as well. That was kind of an interesting talking point. But uh first like what what was your what was your read coming out of that in terms of like how things might change?
