Winklevoss Twins Sing Don’t Stop Believin’ (in Crypto?)

BUCK: Remember the Winklevoss twins, the brothers Winklevii? If you saw the movie The Social Network — which is actually a pretty good movie — David Fincher directed it. The West Wing guy did it. You know him, Clay. What’s his name? The guy who wrote The West Wing. He was the screenwriter. Aaron Sorkin. Aaron Sorkin.

CLAY: Aaron Sorkin, yes.

BUCK: It’s on Netflix now, too, so people are watching it. It’s one of those rewatchables. Now you can watch The Social Network. Pretty amazing story. These guys are… It’s actually based on the book, The Accidental Billionaires.

CLAY: Good read. Ben Mezrich, right, guy who wrote that?

BUCK: Yes, which is a good read. But the Winklevoss twins — who are in the movie are played by the same actor ’cause there’s two of them — are identical twins. They were singing Don’t Stop Believing last night. The twins are performing in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Wait, no, this wasn’t last night. It was a couple nights ago, I’m sorry. But now they’ve just laid off 10% of their staff at Gemini, which is a cryptocurrency startup, and they’re… I don’t know. I think the people that got laid off are gonna stop believing in crypto at least for a little while, and I’m fascinated… I’m not a big… We probably have people in the audience —

CLAY: Monster crypto people, I’m sure, yes.

BUCK: — and I have friends who are super into crypto. I’ve always been… I own a little crypto, a little bit, like a tiny, tiny bit. Just kind of like I’m a gambler or something. I’ve just taken some money that craps table I put some money on crypto. And I’ve never really understood the argument in a way that I was a believer. I understand what they’re saying but I always say, “Dollars are a digital currency, and if crypto is a hedge against dollars and inflation, why is it falling along the economy right now?”

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: You would think… Do you know? I feel like the people that I talk to about crypto we don’t spend a lot of time on this show, a lot of our audience is, “Ah, it’s ridiculous. It lost a trillion dollars in value.” There’s gonna be lawsuits over this.

CLAY: Yeah, and I have a lot of friends who are super committed to crypto, and I’ve any invested in crypto myself, but my concern if I were an investor right now would be the number one reason that I thought it made sense was — and I’d love to hear from the crypto people. I’m sure they’re gonna deluge us so I probably shouldn’t even say that. But I have not read, so I would be interested in reading, a compelling explanation as to why crypto — which the biggest pitch and best pitch I’ve heard for crypto is it is a hedge against all of this crazy inflation, right? Governments are spending money like mad.

BUCK: It was gonna replace… People would argue that it was gonna replace gold, but then some crypto people said, “No, that’s not true. It’s its own thing,” but there always is kind of an apocalyptic mind-set somewhere in some of the crypto thread at least that I’ve been able to pick up. I am not an expert, by the way.

CLAY: And I’m not claiming to be, either. But my concern would be, I think a lot of crypto people are a hundred percent right. We have spent far too much money. We got $30 trillion in debt. Japan’s even worse than us. You look at a lot of the major global economies and I don’t know why you would want to be investing in those currencies. But this would seem to be the time when crypto would be skyrocketing.

Because the conceit of much of your investment, I do believe, is true. Yet instead of skyrocketing, crypto is actually falling faster and more substantially than the overall stock market. So if they’re moving in tandem, what are you hedging against? It seems to me you’re taking more a risk for none of the hedge gain. So that’s my question in terms of the overall marketplace movement of crypto.

BUCK: And if somebody, you know, thinking about starting their own coin named after the family dog or something, not a good time. Not a good time.

CLAY: Not a good time to be in the coin-printing business.