Bankless - Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin, Portfolio for 2024, Institutional Adoption & Crypto Tribalism

Episode Date: April 22, 2024

✨ DEBRIEF | Ryan & David unpacking the episode: https://www.bankless.com/debrief-the-anthony-pompliano-interview  ------ Bankless Nation, we’ve finally got him… Anthony Pompliano is on the show. Pomp is an investor and media personality, best known to the crypto community for his relentless bitcoin evangelism. Expect to learn about the Bitcoin Halving, the state of BTC EwTFs, the consequential institutional adoption and crypto tribalism. We wrap up the episode with a quick lightning round with Pomp and a peek into his 2024 investment portfolio. ------ 📣 SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24  https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2    ⁠   🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo    ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum   🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle  🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/toku    🔐 SAFE | ATTEND SAFE{CON} https://conf.safe.global/  ------  TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 6:25 Bitcoin Halving 12:07 Institutional Adoption 24:08 Bitcoin ETF Aftermath 34:02 Institutional Dangers 41:49 Bitcoin Evangelism 49:44 Culture Wars 1:03:47 US vs Crypto 1:13:46 Bear Market Learnings 1:16:35 Pomp’s Focus 1:23:04 Pomp’s Portfolio 1:27:48 Lightning Round 1:31:59 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES Anthony Pompliano https://twitter.com/APompliano  The Pomp Letter https://pomp.substack.com/   ------ Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures  

And so like if I said to you like what is the quintessential bitcoiner, right? It's like, okay, they own Bitcoin, they eat meat. They like son their balls, right? You just like going on the line. What? I don't. There's this whole time. Is that the last one a real thing?

Yeah, I mean, you get tea from doing that. Yeah, you get higher testosterone. Like this whole thing. Welcome to bankless where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman and we're here to help you become more bankless. Anthony Pompeiano on the show today is better known to us. as pomp. He's an investor. He's a media personality. I think he's probably most known to the

crypto community for his relentless Bitcoin evangelism and has certainly been relentless over the years. And that's where David and I first ran across him in 2017. He was preaching the good word of Bitcoin. And sometimes he gave us flack for some of our Ethereum bullishness, I would say. We've recorded this conversation just before the Bitcoin happening. It'll be released just after. And that's really where we started the conversation. How is this happening? this Bitcoin happening, different from the rest. We also get into what it's like to talk about Bitcoin to the suits on CNBC. And then the Bitcoin ETF, where's it going?

We also talk about Bitcoin evangelism, who is left to convince here, and the bear market of 2022. What did Pomp learn? Finally, we end with a download on Pomp's crypto portfolio, what that looks like in 24, his predictions for price and his predictions for the upcoming U.S. election. Pomp, I remember, Ryan, watching Pomp kind of rise in 2018 through 2020 and 2021 as the Bitcoin evangelist, right? Like really putting out content that was educating about Bitcoin, the Bitcoin narrative, Bitcoin thesis, 21 million hard cap, low time preferences, right? And this just felt like a

flashback to some like very early formative bankless years because I think both you and I were like watching Pomp do this like media machine that he just figured out this like system of, of just like rising on Twitter and then rising as a podcast and rising as a businessman, like learning about memes. And so like a lot of it was like early flashback to like some of the things that I think like bankless was built on. It's like understanding memes, understanding the importance of virality, importance of like concepting ideas into people's head. So a lot of this just felt like really old school like early beginnings for me even getting into the crypto space. I don't know if that's how it felt like for you. But like I was getting like flashbacks

during this episode. Yeah, I totally get that. And I guess there's maybe some pomp influence over bankless in some ways. Though certainly I think, and maybe famously at the time, we really departed on his ideas for Ethereum. He was very bearish, at least publicly, on Ethereum at that time. And so there was kind of a contrast between like Pomp and bankless in those early years. But I think we've put a lot of that behind us. And there's actually a refreshing conversation that we asked Pomp about how he evaluates

Bitcoin culture right now and what his thoughts are and maybe how he's reformed or moderated some of his views over time. interesting part of this conversation. Yeah, there's plenty of material here that I want to talk to to you about the debrief. I already have some notes for the debrief, so we're going to go and get into that right now. But first, before we get into the episode with Pomp, a moment to talk about some these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, whether you're buying Bitcoin or any other token. You should do it on Cracken, our preferred crypto exchange for 2024. If you do not have an account of Cracken, consider clicking the links in the show notes to getting started with Cracken

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He is a fellow podcaster. He is a media personality. Is there anything he is not? I don't know. Pomp, welcome to Bankless. How are you guys doing? Long time coming. I appreciate you guys have of me.

It has been a long time. Do you know, I think I first got to know you as being like the Bitcoin evangelist in 2017, 2018, like the main person that was sort of telling the institutions to get off zero. Beating the drums. Yeah, beating the drum, taking this message to the masses. And this is going to come out either shortly before the Bitcoin happening or shortly after, which is a big freaking deal. and I want to start with this question.

What about this happening is different in Bitcoin land? Like, where are we on the kind of the trajectory of adoption that you have been beating the drum about this entire time? Yeah, well, thank you guys for having me. A lot of people don't know this, but I actually started out mining Ethereum in 2016. And I didn't know anything about crypto. So, like, there was no pitch of, like, Bitcoin is going to be this great, you know, digital gold or global reserve currency. ether, it could have been, you know, I don't know, video game. Like, I literally had no clue about any of it, but there was a guy who came to me and he said,

hey, you can buy these computers, you can plug them in and it like prints money. And I was like, I mean, that sounds ridiculous. Like, where are the computers? Like, how much do they cost? And so, like, I think as many people who get into mining, like, you either do one or two things. Either you're very technical and you, like, go and you set it up, you start hooking up the computers and kind of doing it yourself. Or you're just like more like capital allocation and you basically like order computers.

you think they kind of got shipped somewhere. Someone's supposed to be hosting it. You have a dashboard. And like it looks like, you know, ether is getting produced every day. So I was in that second camp. And at the time, I think ether was like maybe like eight bucks.

And we were mining like five a day. And I remember being like, I'm never going to make back this money. Like we're making 40 bucks a day. Like, oh my God. This is like, what did I do? And then in 2017, as you guys know, better the most, you know,

ether went from like $10 to $30 to like $100 by, if I remember correctly, like April or May of 2017. And I remember being like, oh my God, that $40 is now $400 a day. We've already made back our money. And like most things in life, you know, too good to be true. I sold it all at 150 and it was like, you know, I'm a genius. Ran to 1400.

Too prideful to buy back in. But I tell that story because, yeah, I mean, I was like, you know, I made some money. I don't want to be the guy that, you know, FOMO's back in. But what it allowed me to do was I got the like enthusiasm and I got to see the positive side of like, hey, this stuff can move. There's people buying it, really spent some time learning about it. And then I did a lot of work, right? Like, my wife always tells a story. Like, she remembers me, like, having almost like a textbook. Right. And I was like reading a book. And she's like, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm like studying. And she's like, you would never study for anything

in your life outside of like something in finance. So, you know, let's see what happens. And by the time 2018 rolled around, I think what I came to the conclusion was that like Bitcoin was going to serve as this like digital gold thing. And it was going to be a store of value. And usually stores a value end up being kind of like all or nothing. So, you know, I always say that dollars, if you live in the United States, like you don't carry Mexican pesos around, right? You don't care of Bolivars or anything like. You just use dollars.

You're paid in dollars. You're saving dollars. You spend in dollars, et cetera. And then Ethereum, obviously I started mining it. I was still, you know, paying a lot of attention to it. But the thing that I was most excited about Ethereum early on was in the mining space. I made the mistake of intellectually going long an idea, but not actually acting on it, which was the world was going to run on GPUs.

And so I have this, like, famous tweet in my head. Nobody else cares about it, but it's like the death blow. I tweeted the world is going to run on GPUs. And it's because I was doing the ether mining, I should have bought Nvidia. Like, you know, like, how stupid am I? And so it was this idea that, like, you could switch with the GPUs, theoretically, between, like, maybe you want to mine ether today, but all of a sudden it may be more, you know, kind of economic to go and mine using, you know, DNA sequencing or self-driving

cars, like all these use cases that now I think are kind of becoming very popular. Now, the reason why that mining is really important is obviously the Bitcoin mining side, having really matters to those people, and there's a whole thing we can talk about. But also, this world changes so fast, the industry changes so fast that actually Ethereum miners are no more, right? And so if you think, like, if we had gone and built out data centers and be like, oh, we're going to switch back and forth between all this stuff, whatever, it may actually not have been a good business.

because one huge part of that thesis, like, went away. And so on Bitcoin's having, I think maybe the only thing that I really can quantifiably point to that is different is we hit an all-time high before the having. But that feels like probably the most important difference. There's a lot of kind of qualitative stuff that maybe people would point to that's like, you know, there's more institutional interest now. Mainstream media seems to think it's not going to go away. So they're talking about it more. You could make an argument that like the holder base in general is more educated than they were. were in the last two, you know, halvings, maybe also, like, expectations are higher.

It's like, hey, every having the price goes up so, like, it better go up this time. And so people change their behavior, which then could actually create it to go higher. So, again, qualitative stuff we could debate. But, like, quantitatively, the only real difference is, like, maybe hash rate is the highest it's ever been. And we hit the all-time high before the halving. And those two things seem to be pretty important. Remember listening to your podcast and pop back in whenever it started, 2018, 2019.

And you were on this big campaign of Get Off Zee, zero, get the institutions off zero. And it was just like this very measured thing of like, if we can just convince a marginal amount of institutions to get one percent of their base, their investments and put it into Bitcoin, that has just massive implications to the price of Bitcoin just because one percent is a lot. And now here we are in 2024. And like now one percent is actually like three percent. Like institutions are now allocating three percent. And so for a long time, we could not get off zero at all. Institutions were stuck at zero. Now they're just skipping to 3%, which I think is very related to this fact that Bitcoin is at all-time highest before

the happening. Like, it's because of the ETF, right? Like, it's because the outside world is now, like, not thinking that Bitcoin is this crazy thing anymore. Bitcoin is now, like, civilized. And just an overall theme of, like, since the Genesis of the Bankless podcast has been one part of, like, crypto is actually moving more towards society. At the same time, society is also moving more towards crypto. Like, these two things are converging. And there kind of seems to be this, like, hand of Adam, God touching Adam fingertip at the Bitcoin ETF. And that's kind of to me, like a way to like kind of define this thing. But the thing is like you've been advocating for this future. You were the first one. So like what's it like to actually have been like at the

beginning of that arc, like leading people here? And that now actually is it as powerful as a moment as it seems because this has been your campaign since Genesis. The God and Adam finger touching. That's an fantastic analogy. Oh, that's so good. Wait, who's God and who's Adam is Adam? God is Tradfying. Adam is Bitcoin. Okay. Yeah. But you're not the other way around. Oh, yeah. No, it's definitely going to be able. Larry Fink is pretty powerful.

So first I would say, like, I don't think I was the first to be like, oh, the institutions are going to buy this stuff, whatever. I think maybe my very small contribution was I have a small enough brain to come up with like memorable one-liners that people then could go repeat. So like, you know, the marketing of that idea. But definitely there was people before me that, you know, we're kind of banging the drum. And what I would say in terms of the institutions at the time, what's the Pablo Picasso, I think, line is like good artists borrow, great artist steel. I heard somewhere else that somebody had said like get off zero as a mantra about a different asset class. And I was like, that's amazing. Like, I'm just going to repeat that here and, you know, hopefully it'll resonate. And so really the thought process was just like

schmuck insurance, right? I think as what like Chamoth has called it or the idea that like, I think Satoshi early on wrote and said, you know, maybe you should get some just in case it catches on. Like that was really it. It's just like, what is the smallest amount possible that we could get you to break the seal? Because once you break the seal, because once you break the seal, you. And seal like then game on. And so just like it wasn't like do one percent, right, which like also could have been the like memorable line, but it was like just get off zero. Like literally just buy one Bitcoin. It's $3,000 or something, right? Like just one. Now you're a Bitcoin holder. If you're holding it, you're going to pay attention to it. If you're paying attention to it,

you can't help but fall down the rabbit hole. And so that was really kind of the idea. Now I will tell you that I went and in 2019 did 120 flights around the world going and talking to institutions. There was days where I would like fly to a city and I would talk to like three institutions in a single day. It wasn't just me, you know, Mark Euseco, Jason Williams, we had a team. Like, we were just full court press. There's not that many people who did it. Really? Like, you know, there was some, but no, I mean, like, I don't know. I'd have to go back and count exactly, but it off the top of my head, maybe we worked with like 10 institutions. But like, maybe we met with 300 or 400. So like on a percentage of conversion,

base is like not that high. And so I always get reminded to that because to see now what's happening, you have to wonder how much of it was timing. So like they just needed to get familiar with it. And time expiring actually just meant that, hey, the Lindy effect is here. I'm like, this isn't going to go away. That had some contribution. Two is there's probably some element of like they needed time to do the work internally. The third one is you need the people who work in the institutions to become bitcoins personally before they then go advocate to convince the institution to be like a Bitcoin holder or an investor. And we can talk about many stories where institutions literally, there's like one person inside the organization. They're the Bitcoin or they convince

their buddy. Their buddy convinces another person. And the next to you know, it's like half the team is holding Bitcoin or crypto in general. And then they go and they do it as an institution. And then also you needed like a different form factor. Like go on Coinbase was never going to be a thing for an institution because this is not what they do. We early on had a venture fund, and we told institutions, hey, it's a venture fund. We're going to invest in the equity of these companies, but we're going to buy a little bit of Bitcoin, like 15%, give or take, I think it was the first fund. The amount of effort that we had to do in diligence to explain that Coinbase was a qualified custodian that was going to hold the Bitcoin, that was like 80% of the diligence conversation. So even though Coinbase to all of us was like, oh, of course, this is like the safest thing possible.

Like at least we're not on name your external, you know, international exchange. to them, they were like, I never heard a Coinbase. Like, what is that thing? Who owns it? You know, who's regulating it, et cetera. And so I think that that's like really the confluence of why the institutions finally have started to allocate is like you needed the ETCS to get approved. You needed them to have time. You needed people internally to buy Bitcoin.

And then you also, in some weird way, needed them to like have career risk removed by time and also Paul Tudor Jones bought it. Stanley Drucker Miller bought it. You know, all these people like, I don't know if they're wrong, then we'll all be wrong together. Like, you know, it's kind of, you know, like misery loves company type thing that they all got comfortable and finally just said, yeah, let's hit the bid and let's go buy some. Yeah, I think a lot of people who are looking at this just, it felt like overnight suddenly Larry thinks on, you know, like CNBC and he's saying like, yeah, you know, Bitcoin is the future. Here's our Bitcoin

ETF. But what they don't realize is there was this confluence of like six years plus of effort and infrastructure that need to be built out. And evangelism and like individual brains that had to be like converted and turned onto this. And And I'm wondering if you could kind of compare and contrast, right? Because you were on sort of the media circuit as well, I think, in like 2017, 2018, that time period where I would see you on like CNBC and like squawk box and this kind of thing. And the tone from some of the interviewers sometimes in Tradfai was just kind of like, you have what percent of your net worth in crypto?

Like, what are you doing? Like, here's this guy evangelizing about Bitcoin. There was almost like kind of a, I don't know, a smirk in the background of how they used to approach Bitcoin. That is much different now. And some of these same anchors that I see in 2024, actually having arguments with people like Gary Gensler and people like Jamie Diamond reciting crypto talking points that we used to talk about in 2017, 2018. And I know you've kind of revisited some of those same shows this cycle. What's the difference between last time and this time? Are they taking it more seriously? Has there been a tone difference? Have light bulbs clicked on?

Like, yeah, give us a sense. Yeah, I'll tell you a couple stories that probably can highlight this. So the first time that I got asked to go on television, I remember being like, bam, we did it. Like, we all made it. We convinced them. They are fine. They hear the message and convert. Of course. Like, we're geniuses. Like, thank you. We finally, all the work that we've done, 2018 and I go on television, they absolutely ripped me a new one.

Like, yeah, the price, I think we had dropped the Bitcoin from 20,000 to like 6,000, right? And they're just teeing off on me. And I remember walking off the set being like, oh, I was the, like, punching bag. Oh. You're the scapego. We have not made it, guys. actually it's the opposite. Like they are laughing at us.

So that was kind of the first one. Well, does that just make sense as in because like they're not going to report about it on the way up? Because they're not invested on the way up. And so on the way down, they need to be right. They need to like take a victory lap. Yeah. On the way up at like late late 2017, I think is when they really started to cover it. It's interesting.

There's a number of people in crypto today. I could think of Camila Russo. I think also Michael Casey, a couple of others. Like I think maybe both of them worked at Bloomberg. and were actually living or covering currencies in Argentina, like 2012, 2013. And so they saw Bitcoin earlier. They were some of the first people to write about it from like the traditional mainstream media, whatever. And so there were some people who were like kind of looking in and around it.

But then there was like the talking points. And I always like to give Joe Wisenthal a hard time because he wrote a piece in 2013. He was like, Bitcoin's a joke and the picture's like a clown. And then it was that, you know, I don't know, 100 bucks. And now it's at 70,000. And so, you know, you had both sides of it. Now, the second story I'll tell you about 2018, 2019, is the second time they invite me on, Kevin O'Leary is on the set. And on the way there, I'm listening to the show.

And he starts talking about crypto garbos. Instead of garbage, he said garbos. At least you guys are a little bit above the garbage, but it's still, you know, nonsense. And so to, like, highlight how these shows sometimes come together is before the show's a commercial break, I walk out onto the set. And him and I have never met before, you know, I could be somebody who's super nice. I could be a complete asshole. He has no clue. And we start talking about Bitcoin and he says, how much of your dough is in this?

And I'm like, you know, more than 50%. And his eyes like fell out of his head. The producer says, you know, three, two, one, you know, we're back to the show. Kevin doesn't wait two seconds. He just goes, how much of your dough is in this? Like, right on. I say more than 50% and he just goes on a tirade. I forbid you from doing that.

That is insane. And he's like going on and on and on. And so I was like, oh my God. I'm like punching bag number two. Like this is going to be the difference. Now today what I will say is if I go on and let's say a crypto kind of skeptic comes on after me, what I think that the mainstream journalist slash hosts have gotten really good at is they will actually press me.

Right. So like, Andrew Ross Sorkin in a recent segment, he was like, look, I went to South Africa. I talked to a lot of people. No one owns this stuff. Like you guys talk about it being adopted internationally. Like, what do you say? And, you know, I would put folks like that in a camp up they are probably cautiously optimistic.

Like they would like to see it work. They actually think it could be a good thing for the world, but they're skeptical by nature. And they're journalists. So their job is to ask you questions that push what you think or what you say. And it's not, you know, it's not an opportunity for you go and do PR, right? And so they're doing the job of the journalist. But then what happens is if, you know, let's say Jamie Diamond comes on, they then flip around on the table and now all of a sudden they're advocating for the opposite of Jamie Diamond's view.

So what I think we sometimes as a community get sucked into is like we're all pro these assets. And so when they push back, we're like, God, they're so dumb. They don't understand. But if you actually watch, when they're pushing against the critics, you have to realize, like, no, they're just doing their job. Like, they're going to play the devil's advocate to whoever's on the show. There are some hosts, as you guys alluded to, that, you know, they're all in.

They own it. Joe Kernan probably being a great example. And so when the hosts start to debate each other about it, I think we all kind of can, you know, laugh and say, like, wow, we really, maybe we are here now, where we don't even have to, like, do the debating, we just let them debate for us. So it's night and day difference. But, again, it's hard to debate against it if, Paul Tudor Jones, Stanley Drucker Miller, Larry Fink, you know, many well-respected smart people.

Well, that's right. I mean, part of the cynical view here is they weren't bullish on it. And when I say they, I mean trad-fi and kind of the entire apparatus around traditional finance, wasn't bullish on it because they didn't have products to sell. They didn't have Coinbase, right? Yeah. And this time, they do have products to sell. So they've got ETFs, the fastest-growing ETFs that have, like, ever been ETFs, basically. They've got like tokenized treasuries now.

And so the context for this is in this bull cycle, we're in a completely different regime, it seems like. And what's your perspective on what the Bitcoin ETF did for the legitimacy, not only of Bitcoin, but the entire crypto asset class? Most people in crypto, I think, if you would have asked them last year, they would have said Bitcoin is a commodity and there's not regulatory clarity about these other things. So outside of their personal opinion, they were like, that's how the regulators are looking at it.

I don't think traditional finance looked at it that way. I think traditional finance said, no, all these assets don't have regulatory clarity. So they kind of put them all together and they didn't have enough information or experience to kind of separate out how the regulators were actually thinking about it or looking at it. When the ETFs got approved, now everyone walks around and they're like, oh, the ETFs mean that the regulators have like approved Bitcoin. Now, we all know that's not true. It's not like they approved the asset itself. They're not telling people to go buy it. But I think that is like a zero to one difference in people's minds.

So if you work your way down kind of coin market cap list, if a Ethereum ETF gets approved, I think Tradfai will then say, oh, the regulators have like blessed this asset, et cetera. Now, one of the questions I think that comes up in kind of the ETF approvals is Bitcoin has today a lot of unique things. Some people think those unique things are positive. Some think they're negative. So proof of work, blockchain. There's not that many others that have those specific kind of characters to it. So when they approve Bitcoin, there's not a long line out the door of people saying, well, I'm just like Bitcoin. I have proof of work. I have this, I have that whatever. You know, I should be the next one approved. I do think that that is probably one of the headwinds for the ether ETF is that if they approve a proof of stake blockchain, there's a lot of other ones like that. And they're all going to line up and say, hey, you know, what about me? Doesn't mean that they have to approve the other ones. I think it's just harder now to cipher between the differences. And so then I think lastly, there's a very interesting dynamic of getting

to price versus exposure to the asset. So most people think of that as like, I don't want to have to self-custody this. Right. And so historically it's been like, well, maybe I can just pay Coinbase to do custody or whatever, but you got to go sign up for a Coinbase account. You got to like figure out is Coinbase the best one. You got to like make sure the assets are still there, do reporting, whatever. But if you go to like the nation states, I actually think one of the most interesting

parts of the ETF is like now sovereign wealth funds can go and buy Bitcoin price exposure, but not have to take custody of the Bitcoin. And so what they basically are doing is they're removing the geopolitical conversation. Because if all of a sudden, let's say name your country, you know, somewhere that maybe is like borderline friend or foe, if they start like hoarding Bitcoin, I think there's a lot of people are going to be asking questions. Like, hey, why are you guys like buying the Bitcoin and like holding the Bitcoin? Are you planning to go off the dollar? Like, what's up? If you'd say you're just buying an ETF, it's very obvious that you're just getting dollar like price exposure.

You're not actually like taking control of the Bitcoin. And so the reason why that's interesting is like El Salvador is taking self-custody of their Bitcoin. Yeah. And like the IMF does not appreciate that. Of course. The central bankers powers that be do not appreciate that fact. Yeah. So like if you think of it from that perspective, like the ETFs now have greenlit sovereign wealth funds, which I do believe they're buying the ETF.

And it's just like they're doing it. Right. They put a certain percentage in the S&P. They put a certain percentage in QQQQ. They're going to put a certain percentage in gold. Like it's just an allocation decision. They just buy assets. Yeah.

I mean, if you have a trillion. dollars like what are you supposed to buy like you can't just buy a trillion dollars of you know google right so like you have to have a diversified portfolio whatever but i do think that it now allows for the sidestepping of the geopolitical complexity and allows you get price exposure and so it opens up this conversation of like how much of wall street and to your point of like now they have a product to sell is they want exposure to the price and to like the a um but they don't give a shit about actual bitcoin yeah right and so like you know it's kind of like careful what you wish for because yeah you may be letting the fox in the henhouse and sure like number goes

up but what are the tradeoffs and there probably are tradeoffs that we don't yet understand right especially as you get deeper and deeper into some of the complex derivatives and things that can get created on this i'm sure somebody's going to create a you know two x or three x leveraged short bitcoin etf like what is the impact of that on price how does rebalancing which tradfai loves It's like an intellectual, you know, Olympics for them of like, when should you rebalance, how often, all that kind of stuff. Like, that's new price pressure and, you know, sell pressure in the market. So all these things are changing. But at least in the beginning, price goes up and people are happy.

Yeah, we've often used the idea that the ETF is the ERC 20 token for Tradfai. As in it, like, it makes BTC like a module, a money Lego for the Tradfi world for them to play games with. That's their money Lego. And all of a sudden, they can like stack on derivatives and derivatives and derivatives. it is. It's like the whole like not your keys, not your coins thing is like a feature for them. It's like, please, no keys. Just coins. No keys. I've never heard that, but that is fantastic. That's the great analogy. Yeah, that's 100% what the ETF does. Right. Yeah. So like maybe we can like double click on that for a little bit because I think bankless listeners will totally

understand what like money Legos are inside of the Ethereum context, right? You put your token in the protocol and then you put that in a different protocol and now you play your games and you wrap your yield and you optimize your yield. And now this universe is like being opened up to Tradfai with Bitcoin as like the asset. And we are just now in like the first inning of Bitcoin getting like introduced into the Tradfai world. So what does a Tradfai money Lego ecosystem look like? And what would the future of Bitcoin look like when like they start to like play with their whole like money Lego that is Bitcoin? The better it is as like a dark hole, the more money they make. Right. So like there's a huge part of Wall Street, which is like, they actually don't want the retail person to understand the full thing,

because that means that they can't take fees and all these different components, et cetera. But in the most basic sense, I think you can think of maybe like three or four examples. So, like, one is like, they'll just buy the ETF. So like, there's a Lego, there's not a Lego, right? Okay, hey, I can buy the Lego. Like, okay, that's one thing. You get price exposure to this asset that is way more asymmetric on the upside and downside than anything else they have.

And so, like, that'll be interesting in some components. The second thing, and I think we're starting to see it now is now I have almost a return amplifier. So now I can take this ETF thing and I kind of like sprinkle it in all my portfolio. So, oh, I have this like fixed income fund. Let's put a little bit of Bitcoin. Let's put three percent of that fund. We'll put that in Bitcoin. So all my other fixed income like competitors or peers, they're all returning eight percent. But me at eight percent plus three percent of my fund in Bitcoin, I now return nine and a half percent. I'm the better fixed income portfolio. I go out and I pitch. I outperform everyone. Look how smart I am. You're buying

a fixed income, but really it's the Bitcoin doing the work to outperform the market versus the actual asset. So I think we're starting to see some of that happening. Fidelity's doing it, Black Rock's talking about it, et cetera. The third thing that I think is going to start to happen is you are going to start to see all the financial products being built in and around Bitcoin, not necessarily because of the ETF explicitly, but because now people are going to realize, wait a second, there is this asset that is now going to get swallowed into the legacy system. And so there's an example. There's a company called MeanWise. they are building a Bitcoin life insurance policy.

And the entire business is based in Bermuda. It's a regulated life insurance company, just like you would see anywhere else. I mean, I recently met these guys, and I was like, man, it's so smart. The company denominates everything in Bitcoin. Revenue, expenses, their balance sheet, assets, liabilities, the amount of the policy.

Like, everything is denominated in Bitcoin, including when they give reports to people, et cetera, everything's in Bitcoin. So that's a good example of like, okay, well, if I'm in the life insurance, business in the traditional financial world and somehow I can like again sprinkle bitcoin in somewhere i could either dive in the deep end or i could just sprinkle some of this in maybe i can sell more life insurance policies like that becomes a really interesting you know to use your

guys words like a lego that gets kind of put into this world and so you can go through every single part of the traditional financial system and i think you're going to see people trying to do this and it's because what ends up occurring is there's this coalition of all the products become the same, right? There's, there's like lack of uniqueness in these financial products. So when you go buy the S&P, what is the difference between one S&P, you know, fund versus another? Maybe the fees are like five basis points difference. But at the end of the day, like, you're just buying the S&P, right? Sure, maybe some tracking difference.

Like, for the average person, there's buying the S&P. But if all of a sudden you can show up and say, oh, we give you S&P exposure and we outperformed by 200 basis points, because by the way, we sprinkled three to five percent of Bitcoin in here, now you have a differentiator. And so in the short to medium term, the differentiator, everyone will lean into. Over the long run, everyone's going to sprinkle it everywhere, and then it's going to all become not unique again. And we're going to kind of be back to square one. They've got to find a new shiny thing to try to play this game with.

This is interesting because the institutions coming into Bitcoin and into crypto marks kind of like a new milestone for us. And it's sort of like it's interesting that it's happening in the 2020s and kind of like the second decade of this entire experiment. I want to double click on your comment earlier of be careful what you wish for and the fox in the henhouse, because this is really interesting to me. On the one hand, having the institutions come into crypto and the big banks and Larry Fink and Black Rock and eventually Jamie Diamond will cave, you know, we will, you know, like JP Morgan will come in, the rest of them

will come in. That feels good because it is legitimizing of like all assets will be tokenized. This is a real, and it provides kind of a heat shield against like what I think we in crypto call the final boss, which is like eventually nation states and the act. actual central bankers might wake up and look at this and say, do we really want a non-sovereign monetary instrument being like free? Like, is that really good for our fiat money system? Or is that kind of enemy? And when we recruit the institutions, we get kind of a heat shield against that. We get kind of some protection because, you know, Larry think the other institutions are going to be in their lobbying and say, boy, I'm making money here. It's not that bad. We can kind of like,

tame the nails off of this tiger, and it can be something manageable. So on the one hand, I see it as good. On the other hand, I'm kind of worried that it does start to, you know, erode what has made crypto and what has made Bitcoin very special, which is it's a peer-to-peer money system. You can own your own keys and have your own private keys. You don't have to have it with a third-party custodian at all. It's not fractionalized, so you know exactly how much Bitcoin is out there, and that could start to erode. In fact, people like Ben Hunt have been on our podcast, and they basically say, you know, the nation states are never going to let you guys do this peer-to-peer monetary experiment thing, okay? They're going to, like, write you into a corner of

the script and place you over here, and you're not actually going to have the free money that you guys think you're going to have. And I worry about that a little bit with the institutions coming in, is are they going to, let's say, corrupt it, or make it much more like the banking system that we just left. What are some of your reflections on that? Because on the one hand, it seems like a nice problem to have because the entire first decade of our existence, we were just worried that we would get strangled in the crib. And now, like, we're too big for that. They can't just shut the whole thing down. But on the other hand, now I'm more worried about kind of like the corruption of the system and that we've become a bit too tradfai and like

to banker and then we lose the things that make Bitcoin and crypto special. Yeah, if you think, you know, keep your friends close, keep your enemies close. right is kind of like what they're doing and so to some degree yeah wall street if they can wrap their arms around an entire industry that ends up being more beneficial to them what i would say is for the technology platforms the assets etc that are actually decentralized owning a large portion of the coins will not give them any you know new power that the system doesn't give to other people so you know use bitcoin as the example if you own one bitcoin or you own 60 percent of the bitcoin that's in circulation you have the same power, right, in terms of the system itself.

Now, obviously, you have more money, so there's economic gain, but in terms of being able to change the protocol or anything that doesn't really matter. So I do think that it is kind of this weird thing where decentralization will get put on a pedestal to be even more important because you want to be able to have the governance outside of the system regardless of what the system does. But yeah, any time that you have something of value, like the people with the money are going to want the valuable thing, right? So, like, naturally, you need that.

Now, another interesting idea is being a contrarian forever is actually a bad plan. You want to be a contrarian and then become the consensus. That is where value is, right? So, like, for the first 15 years of Bitcoin, buying Bitcoin was deemed in, you know, whatever circles that you kind of went in, a contrarian thing. But as it becomes more and more consensus, you will see a direct overlay with increase in U.S. dollar exchange price. So what you actually want, if you own a lot of Bitcoin, is you want it to become consensus because

then that means that it is getting monetized. It is becoming more valuable in dollar terms. Now, the hard part of this is as you push out on kind of the risk curve or push down, you know, coin market capitalist or whatever, is how many of these assets aspire to be something that Wall Street will find valuable versus they are actually trying to solve something else? And so the example I always give is like if you're a technology platform, so I would put, you know, Ethereum, Salana, many other kind of smart contract platforms. It's like they are competing in some form or fashion to have cheap fees, be fast, serve, you know, as a building block for these applications, et cetera. Wall Street has usually said, well, we want to get exposure to a sector, right? We want to actually buy a couple of these companies, et cetera.

So like those probably get pulled in as well. So you have money or kind of digital gold. You then kind of these smart contract platforms. but like the meme coins probably don't get pulled in right it's something that is distinct and different and so it's like wall street and what they're trying to accomplish is not looking for exposure to those and in between you know bitcoin and smart contract platforms and then call it the meme coins there's a whole bunch of other stuff and right now i think what the industry is going through is we're trying to figure out like well what does the large capital pools find valuable and so if you go to

you know kind of like the deep in space i think a lot of us are like excited like hey that's pretty cool. Like you change economic incentives. You have these new systems, like things are seem to be working. And I've been surprised at times to hear some of the large hedge fund managers mentioned by name things like helium. Like in some of the I've seen like annual reports or interviews or something. I'm like, wow, I did not think, you know, somebody would be talking about that. On the other hand, you start to think to yourself, are they aware of it? Because actually they're huge investors in T-Mobile or AT&T. And in the boardroom, they're like, how do we, you know, kill this thing? Like, this is a threat to our business.

And I don't know the answer, but I do think that it is something that we need to be aware of. And where I think you want to allocate capital is to things that have a monopoly of position. So for example, Bitcoin having a monopoly on this idea of like digital money. Or you want to make investments in things where your eyes are open to I am headed into a competition. And I think that this technology, this platform, this asset can win that competition. Right. So like today, if you're investing in, I don't know, an e-commerce platform, And you don't realize that you're competing against Amazon and Shopify, like, you're pretty

much screwed. Right. But if you think that you're investing in the next great e-commerce platform that can unseat Amazon and Shopify, that's a whole different analysis and a different idea. And so I think that's really right now where people are still looking at it as like we're competing in the crypto industry. But now I actually think you've got to look at it as like winning the crypto industry competition, it has to be almost an afterthought. It has to be, can we win in the free market?

of ideas, crypto and non-crypto, and that's actually where majority of the value is going to accrue. Yeah. You're just saying the markets are actually starting to blur between the crypto markets and the trad markets. Now this is just becoming one gigantic playing field where now the world of crypto economics is now entering in the world of like, call it like normal startup, normal society, normal products. We kind of open up this conversation, Pomp, talking about you as like Bitcoin's evangelist back when Bitcoin was contrarian and now it's consensus. Now it's entering the world in which like everyone is like not skipping over one and getting into 3% of their portfolio, right? Which, you know, is a meaningful amount. What does the world have in store?

What does the world need out of a Bitcoin evangelist in the year of 2024? Or like, is your work done? Like, what does being a Bitcoin evangelist in 2024 mean these days? Yeah, I mean, the Bitcoiners hate it. I have the best position in all of crypto, which is probably half of the Bitcoiners hate me because I'm not 100% Bitcoin. And then most of the other market, maybe half of them hate me because I talk too much about Bitcoin and not enough about whatever the thing is that they're excited about or the bag they want to shill or whatever. Yeah, we can relate. Yeah, I'm sure, right? And look, and actually, a lot of times, like, that's a good position to begin. The example I always give is, like, when I was talking about Bitcoin, a lot of times what I

noticed was I would go talk to Wall Street, and Wall Street investors would be like, Bitcoin is the single most risky thing that I would put in my portfolio. And then I go talk to, like, somebody in, you know, crypto Digen, and they're like, dude, that's boomer coin. Like, what do you? talking about it. Like nobody owns Bitcoin, right? And so like sitting in between the like most conservative and the most risky person actually may be like an interesting spot to sit. And so when it comes to like Bitcoin evangelist, I do think that it is important to kind of have this like passing of the torch. And if you said to me today, like the most important Bitcoin evangelist is Larry Fink. I've joked that like he's the CMO of Bitcoin. Right. And like him going

on national television and saying, oh, people are buying Bitcoin. It's a flight to quality. the messenger matters so much. He can repeat the same things that all of us have been saying for a decade. Nobody cares. Yeah. It's that Larry thinks said it. Different when Larry says it.

Yeah, of course. And he's earned that right because of his track record and his experience and all the things that he's done. But so I think that's one is like, it may not be so much like what is the message as much as

as who is the messenger at this point. And then the second thing that I would say is I've always thought that the single greatest evangelist of Bitcoin is the no-eastern, named kind of, you know, average Bitcoin user. And the reason why I say that is because they have experiences and they have a story that is impossible for anyone to argue with. Right. If I go on Twitter and I tweet something, people will just be like, oh, look at this moron, right? He owns some

Bitcoin. He wants it to go higher. He's just an asshole, you know, and he's got a Twitter account. And like regardless of whether it's true, not true, whatever, it's like easy to yell at the people who are just like talking about it, sitting in America, et cetera. But if you go to a another country and you talk to someone and they're like, oh, my local currency collapsed and like I own some Bitcoin. By the way, I also want dollars, right, but I do own some Bitcoin and that Bitcoin has protected some portion of my economic value from devaluation. Like, you can't argue with that person, right? It's just like, okay, like that is your lived experience. So I do think that like the beauty of Bitcoin and kind of the node operators and

the like network itself being peer to peer and decentralized, et cetera, that also is true from an evangelist standpoint. Now, I will issue a word of caution, which I have said many times before and people, you know, don't listen. I think that you have to be careful not to fall into the religion. And what I mean by that is it's true in Bitcoin. It's true in other communities as well. But I think part of what ends up happening with Bitcoin is people start to get a very rigid mind. And so like if I said to you, like, what is the quintessential Bitcoiner, right? It's like, okay, they own Bitcoin, they eat meat. They like son their balls, right? You can just like go down the line. Oh, my God. Is that last one in real thing? Oh, yeah, yeah. You get tea from doing that.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, you get higher testosterone. This whole thing, right? Don't you know, right? I say that. I didn't know that. It's great news. Yeah, come on. You look like you got some tan going on there, right? So, like, if you think of it from that perspective, right, it's like, okay, by the way, like, living a healthier lifestyle, exercising, eating healthy, like, I'm on board. All good. But when you start to then say, I am going to judge other people for not subscribing to the exact, you know, regiment and protocol that I have for my life. it's dangerous. And so what I think is starting to occur to some degree is you get this ossification of a philosophy and of a community. On one hand, that's really good. The fact that 21 million Bitcoin will be 21 million Bitcoin forever. And if anyone ever tries to change that, like there will be a, you know, a digital eruption of defense from kind of the Bitcoiners is a positive thing. The fact that there has been a slowdown and innovation in Bitcoin

is probably not a good thing. Right. And so how do you kind of measure these things? I don't claim to have the answer, right? But I do think that it's important to not fall into kind of the religion. And so what ends up happening also is if you look at some of the Bitcoin development, Bitcoins are borrowing a lot of ideas from Ethereum, Solana, L2s, NFTs, you know, stable coins. Like you go down this whole line. And so that was always the plan too. Yeah. I mean, look, for years people have said like, hey, that's all R&D for Bitcoin. Right. Right. Like, whether it's true or not, I think there's a lot of people who thought that. But if you go talk to like the most hardcore bitcoins in terms of like the religious fanatics or the zealots, they will literally tell

you that there will never, all these other blockchains will not exist. If you look at the maybe softened Bitcoin review, it's like, look, these other blockchains may exist, but maybe I don't believe the coins will have long term value. If you then soften a little bit more, it's like, hey, you know what? Like these other things are like basically tech startups. The blockchains will exist. The coins may or may not have value, but like, I'm just focused on Bitcoin. And so that spectrum of like how hardcore are you what i found in investing is that actually you want to have deep conviction but you want to have a flexible mind in terms of like a positive sum experience so you can be a very hardcore believer like bitcoin is going to survive i one time on television said if i had to bet my life

on one thing it'd be that bitcoin would remain resilient and the tv host had a blast with that but at the same time it's not so locked in on the high conviction of this one thing that you then think everything else is zero, right? And so it does crack me up a little bit with kind of the Bitcoin evangelist conversation. There are people who showed up. Like if you remember, like more than half of Bitcoiners showed up in 2020 or later. So like everything we're talking about 2016, 27, 20, 22, 29, like they don't know, right? They don't have that context. So when they hear like, oh, I mind Ethereum first, shock some of them. Or the idea of, you know, the other phrase that I used to say all the time is tokenize the world. And they're like, oh, Pop, what do you know? Larry Fink said

tokenization, now you're going to start talking about it. I fucking taught Larry think about that. Right. Right. Like it's just the context isn't there. And by the way, where did I get that idea from somebody else who was talking about it? Right. Right. So it wasn't my idea.

I didn't come up with it. And so I do think that there's this element of like, are you trying to create a religion or are you trying to understand how the world is evolving and you're willing to have kind of flexibility? I don't have a perfect balance, but I try to be more in understanding where the world is going then, you know, falling into the religion. Launching a token, don't let complex legal and tax issues slow you down. Toku provides specialized support to optimize your launch and ensure that you as a founder

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of smart accounts is unfolding in real life. Secure your spot today and be a part of the transition to smart accounts. Click the link in the show notes to learn more and take your first steps towards smarter crypto management. At some level, what's great about this and what's great about, you know, your superpower of being able to simplify communication to like this memetic one-liner is you can sort of plant the meme and then let it grow somewhere else and you can pass the torch as you say you don't need to be the primary evangelist forever because if larry think adopts the meme of tokenize the world or like get off zero or whatever else that's been implanted then i mean that's already like the programming is done i am curious your thoughts because one theme that we've been tracking

over the past year or so is sort of this Bitcoin Renaissance theme of all of these Bitcoin builders. And you are right. I mean, it does seem to be there's this division in Bitcoin culture around like Bitcoin fundamentalists, let's call them, that don't want to build anything on the chain. You know, like what's the purpose of Bitcoin? You know, like, $21 million hard cap and like digital gold and get out of my block space. You know, the block space is for Bitcoin transactions. That's it. That's what Satoshi meant. There's this other tribe of Bitcoiners who are like, F that, I'm building stuff. I'm doing layer twos. We'll do NFTs. This is kind of a Bitcoin Renaissance tribe. And we've seen some fracturing in the community of like Bitcoin favorites,

darlings, leaders like Nick Carter, for instance, you know, the Udys of the world, even Eric Wall, they're kind of shunned by the fundamentalists. It sounds like you come in on the side of I'm like a pragmatic investor who just loves Bitcoin, right? And what do you make of this? What do you make of the Bitcoin Renaissance? You think that's a good thing? Do you, do you, you have any input into these culture wars or just try to stay above them? I don't worry so much about the culture war as much as maybe like, you know, the L2s, the side chains, the NFTs, like all the stuff on top of Bitcoin. My default is that they won't work because the probability of new things working is near

zero, right? I mean, just look at startup success rates and things like that. But I think that the work is important because the only way we're going to know is if somebody tries or not, right? So like, it's not, you know, a good example is the creation of Ethereum or Solana or whatever. The different architecture, like we don't know does it work or not until somebody tries it. And so I do think that progress is made through experimentation, like innovation is driven through not ideas, but actual execution. And that is what we want.

Like there is a group of people who believe that we can build things on top of Bitcoin and use it for something other than just money. If they are correct, that is probably a multi-trillion dollar opportunity. If they are wrong, then what's the worst that happens? Bitcoin remains digital gold and, you know, they wasted some time and money. It's like pretty good tradeoff, right? It's kind of like one-x downside, you know, thousands of X upside. And so, yeah, I do think the experimentation. So I'm like almost like an experimentation maximalist in terms of like if we want innovation,

we have to keep trying things. What I think it ends up being interesting to me is that many of the people who have become kind of the hardened Bitcoin maximalist and kind of really dug their heels in on the culture war, many of them go about communication in a very unique way. Maybe it's one way to put it. And so I always just, again, learn from history. There are very few people who have been able to build highly successful things over a long period of time by being very abrasive to other people. There's a time and a place for it.

It doesn't mean that you can't tell people they're wrong or whatever. But I do think that like that is one component. And then the other thing is I always wonder like the people who are attacking other folks, how much have they actually built themselves? Because in my experience, there's two things that are true in the world. People who are doing more than you, one was never attack you. right like they don't punch down people usually only punch up they don't punch down and then the second thing is that people who build things and have ram their heads against the wall for a long period of time they actually know how hard it is to do this and so they tend to be much more sympathetic to people who are trying things

and it's kind of like you know maybe chumas like the man in the arena type thing without the meme so when you see all the attacking and the craziness the other thing people in the bitcoin community don't realize is like I mean, same thing happens in Ethereum. Same thing happens in the Slana community. Same thing happens in these others. It's a human nature thing. It's not unique to the Bitcoin community. But what I do think is the breakthroughs happen to the people who can kind of tune that stuff out.

And they just said, look, I don't care what other people think. Like, you know, it's science. Either I get the technology to work or I don't. What other people's opinions are don't really matter. And I think that both as a country in the United States, as a society and also in these communities, or return back to, you know, people kind of being somewhat disagreeable and just saying, look, I'm going to try what I want to try. Probably would benefit all of us.

This is definitely something that we've been experiencing, I think, in the Ethereum land, or at least have seen starting to emerge. There's like a tribe of Ethereum people out there who are starting to, like, just repeat a script that I personally kind of consider outdated. It's like script players. They're just like kind of repeating a script. They're not really live players. And I think, like you said, this is likely true for all layer one communities.

this is like the weird novel thing that crypto is already weird to begin with. We have these weird blockchain things. We have these weird private keys, like all the tech things that make crypto weird. But the really weird thing about it is like the social tribes that come with the entire industry and how incredibly social this industry is. And I don't know if Tradfai really understands that side of things or even knows about that. And this is something that I don't think as a like human arc of our species has really ever encountered. We never really have had these like very social, tribal financial assets that have collided with what is previously just cold, hard, rigid, calculated analysis, usually DCF, you know, analysis. And so like there's this world colliding. Maybe it's not

colliding. Maybe it is colliding. That's kind of what I want your perspective on Pomp is we have this old world of Tradfai, which does not understand tribes, nor do they care. Yet nonetheless, like this new thing that is now emerging and colliding with. the TradFi world is this very like social layer based technology where like what is the final backstop of all of these layer one blockchains the respective social layer, the respective tribe that's supporting each system. And I think you can't really go to Larry Fink and be like Larry Fink, let me tell you about the layer zero. It's the thing that's supporting the value of BTC the asset. He's not going to know about that. He's not going to care about that. Yet nonetheless, these things are like

colliding. Do you have any thoughts or reflections on this? Yeah. So I would push back and say that Wall Street definitely understands tribes. I would even argue that Wall Street. Street invented the like financial tribes. So, you know, value investors versus like growth investors. Those guys been arguing for 100 years, right? They're still arguing. There's still, you know, which one's better or whatever. There's this great story of Bill Miller who, you know, is a very famous investor, owns a lot of Bitcoin. At one point, he was the largest individual shareholder of Amazon because when the stock dropped after the 2000 kind of tech bust, he was buying and bought like 15% of that company or something. And there's a book written about Bill.

And in it, he got shunned from the value investor community because he was buying tech stocks. Wow. And his point was like, value investing is not a sector. It's just I buy things for less than what they're worth. And so I've evaluated that a company is worth X. It's, you know, X minus whatever is what it's trading at today. I'm buying it. That is a value investment.

But the like classical, you know, value investors were like, no, dude, you didn't buy the textile company or you didn't buy the, you know, whatever kind of traditional, you know. Like look at those PE ratios, right? Yeah, of course. So, like, in a weird way. way, now they all did it with like suits, ties, Rolexes, and Colon on. So, you know, they're much more cordial. They weren't dropping memes on each other's heads and, like, screaming and yelling in Twitter spaces. So it was like, you know, a different warfare maybe or competition. But I do think that there were tribes. The other thing that is unique is they didn't have the communication methods.

So, like, I do think a lot about, you know, in warfare, historically there was like what they called mechanized army. So this is like, we're going to show up with tons of soldiers with, you know, all these different army tanks and stuff, and we're going to, like, invade your country. Think, you know, America going into Iraq in 2003. We are amazing at invading countries. There is not a country in the world that we can't invade and successfully, you know, kind of claim victory. We're horrible at sticking around and fighting insurgencies because by nature and insurgency is

really hard. It's like this loose, decentralized network of people. They don't wear a uniform. They have all these communication tools that the U.S. can't really fight back, et cetera. so it's very difficult to do. If you think about what crypto is, crypto has a lot of the same similarities

in the sense of like, we have Twitter. This is like this decentralized swarm of people. If somebody says something, right? You know, look at the legislation. A legislative thing gets proposed and we don't like it. People come out of the woodwork. I've never seen us coordinate better and go across kind of quote, quote, party lines

than when there's some sort of legislation that threatens the crypto industry. You have Bitcoiners, you have Ethereum folks, you have Solana folks, you got NFT folks. You got everyone. They line up and they say, how do we work together?

But it's this weird thing where it's because there's an attack coming from outside. And so Michael Arrington one time told me the story, which I thought was great. The tech industry, he created tech crunch and he would write these articles. And I'll claim that Michael was writing with a sharp tongue. So he didn't mince words. If he thought your product suck, he said it sucked.

Right. If he thought it was amazing, he'd say it was amazing, whatever. And at some point, somebody attacked him from outside the tech industry. And the tech industry basically rallied around him. It was like, hey, he might be an ass. But he's our asshole, right? Like, he's on our side.

And I think that crypto's a lot like that. Now, what Wall Street, I think, is learning is that there's immense power in the coordination and communication of these folks on the internet. GameStop is kind of an example that I think they really saw first. But now all of a sudden, they look at Bitcoin and they're like, wait a minute, 70% of these guys didn't sell when it dropped from 69,000 to 15 and went back to 70,000. these people are insane. And if you ask yourself, like, why did they not sell?

It's because we have access to information. We have a community, like a support group. When it went down to 15,000, you could get online and people like, it's okay. Like, it's going to come back, right? Like, you're not sitting there. And the only communication you have was like your telephone, right? And you'd have to, like, dial someone's number to, like, call for support rather than, you know, sell a stop. There's Bitcoin church in session every single minute of every single day.

Yeah. So I just think like all these dynamics are like feeding into this idea that like we're more connected than ever. We're more educated than ever. And if you can build long term conviction and avoid short term action, being hyperconnected and hypereducated is actually an advantage. The downside to this is like if you get on Twitter every day and based on sentiment you buy and sell, like you're going to lose money. Right. You're going to get screwed. And so it's like use it for the long term education and conviction and just avoid the like nonsense where, you know,

What did people say yesterday? We're recording and the inflation numbers came out. People were like, I survived the CPI recession from, you know, 815 to 1215 yesterday or whatever. Like literally, you know, we woke up in the morning. Everyone's happy. Inflation comes out. Everyone's like, you know, down in the dumps for four hours. Then all of a sudden everyone's back again.

And it's just like, yeah, you can talk yourself into doing all kinds of stupid stuff if you pay attention, you know, too closely. How do you think the U.S. is doing, like, with respect to crypto? I'm talking about kind of our governors, our governments. like does this U.S. the nation state as a whole? Like how is it reacting to the rise of crypto? Because like there's one school of thought where, oh my God, this is a threat to U.S. dollar like sovereignty and we're worried about this disrupting the banks and all of these things, AML KYC, all of that, right? There's another school of thought where it's just like the U.S. has always been a tech leader. I mean, built Silicon Valley, led the way in the internet during the 1990s.

This is a massive opportunity. This is a free open permissionless system, right? This is something that a democratic country can actually export to the world and make it better. How would you evaluate how the U.S. is doing so far on crypto? What do you think they should do? Because there's also this anti-tech backlash I'm starting to see. It's not just in crypto. It's an AI too. And I worry about this.

Yeah, there's a lot to unpack here. So let me just throw out a couple of ideas. The first is the tech backlash is really happening for two reasons. Folks who feel like they are falling behind don't like when they see other people succeeding or getting ahead. And so in the 80s and 90s, they went after Wall Street and hedge funds and folks who they seemed to be on the pedestal. They were being, you know, celebratized by the media and movies and content, et cetera. And so it was like, if you were in the hedge fund industry, we hate you. And that culminated with, you know, Zuccotti Park and Occupy Wall Street and Global Financial Crisis, et cetera.

There was a shift somewhere between the 2000s and 2010s where the new like boogie monster became tech. And some of their complaints or critiques of the industry are true. Like there is suppression of speech. There is censorship. There is, you know, tipping of the scale in some cases, et cetera. So I just think that it was like they saw tech people making money. I actually think the social network had a positive and negative impact on society. In a positive way, it inspired an entire generation of people who want to go become entrepreneurs and technologists. And that's a really good thing. On the negative side, it basically opened up an entire country's eyes to the fact that tech was making money.

And then they put the target on their back and everyone said, hey, let's go attack them. So I think that is just a natural thing. Crypto actually, I think, will become that thing as prices continue to go up. Like it's going to go Wall Street to tech to like crypto will now be the new boogeyman. When I think of America, I'll give you a great example, which is I was at an event last night and somebody asked a panel and they said, at what point will the government consider Bitcoin mining critical infrastructure? And there's a couple of panelists and they had very intelligent answers.

and I agree with everything as I said, but when it became my turn to answer, I said, you know, I want to be careful. I think we want this stuff to be critical infrastructure, but we don't want it to be recognized as critical infrastructure. And I said, you know, critical infrastructure gets translated inside of the government as infrastructure overseen by communists, right? Critical infrastructure, we all think like, oh, that's amazing.

But if you think about the Baltimore bridge that just collapsed, I don't think it's going to get rebuilt, right? By the time they get done with the environmental studies, they get done with all the DEI stuff, when they get done with the plans and the procedures, and then probably a corruption or two, you know, investigations, like all these stuff. Like, it's never going to get rebuilt. But like bridges are critical infrastructure. And so in a weird way, the closer that you pull what should be entrepreneurial or innovative

technologies and industries to the government, you pull it more into a bureaucracy. And so what ends up happening is this idea of critical infrastructure, the things labeled critical infrastructure are actually our least innovative areas. They're the ones that make the least progress. And so what we want is we want to create things that are hyper-valuble to people, but we actually want them to remain as close to the private industry as we can, not the public industry. And the reason why I use that as kind of a mental framework is when we think about policy, when I see a legislative bill or I talk to a policymaker or a politician, a regulator,

etc. I always ask myself, the things that they are talking about, how much of it is they are trying to pull these things into their apparatus, pull these into the bureaucracy, versus they are trying to create a box for the private market to play in that is fair, safe, et cetera. And the truth is nothing is black and white. So sometimes a bill or a proposal could be, you know, 80% good-hearted. And there's like this 20% piece and you're like, oh, that's going to pull it into the bureaucracy. That's going to hurt it. And so what I think we've seen specific to crypto is most of the politicians who are against it are trying to pull it into the apparatus. They're trying to pull into the bureaucracy.

And what they want to do is pull it close and then kill it. Right. But you've got to pull it close to kill it. What I think most of the proponents want to do is they're basically standing there. They're trying to shield their peers or their colleagues from touching it. And they're like, let this thing grow. Like let the innovation occur. These people are smart.

They'll figure it out better than the government will. where I think we end up is probably somewhere in the middle. And so if you do think about like one of the things the United States government from a structural standpoint and over centuries now has been is no one administration or president can have a drastic negative impact for more than eight to 10 years. So people definitely can make stupid decisions. They can have a negative impact during their kind of administration. But then another president comes in and if it was a really bad decision, usually it's from the other party, they kind of roll stuff back, they change it, whatever. The idea of checks and balances, kind of the three parts of the government, right, all those things, I think, really kind of help.

And so if you look at like Bitcoin, Bitcoin actually has three parts to the quote-to-quote governance of Bitcoin. You have the developers, you've got the miners, you've got the node operators. And so there's a lot of similarities there. What I do wonder, though, is do some of the politicians, regulators, or policymakers believe that they actually have unilateral control or oversight over this stuff. And I think what we've found across time is that unilateral control or oversight is actually really negative. And so if I had to give us a grade right now, I would say that we have done things to slow the adoption and innovation of these technologies inside the United States. But despite that, we still have incredible progress that's been made.

And one of my favorite data points to share with policymakers and especially the economic folks is crypto may now be too big to fail for the U.S. dollar. And when people always look at me and they're like, what do you mean, that's crazy. Stable coins have extended the reign of the dollar and global adoption of the dollar in a way that the U.S. government and the U.S. dollar kind of, you know, the electronic form was never going to do. Also, the stable coin issuers are now like the 14th or 15th largest holder of U.S. treasuries. And we're living in a world today where China and Japan used to buy 22% of U.S. debt. they now buy 7%. So who is going to buy our debt?

Well, actually in this very weird way, the rest of the world is being dollarized by stable coins. It starts off small. Now we're at over $100 billion. It'll eventually be over a trillion. And their currencies that they are buying these dollar stable coins in is being converted to U.S. debt. And so if you want to have buyers of U.S. debt in the future,

stable coins may be one of the single most important innovations that has come out of the last 15 years. And so when you start to talk about it from that perspective, all of a sudden, everyone kind of, you know, the knives go away, right? They say, okay, hold on a second here. I don't want to kill something that's helping me. But what I don't want, and rightfully so, is I don't want criminals. I don't want money laundering.

I don't want terrorist financing. I don't want these, you know, horrible things. And so that's the challenge that policymakers have, is now they're starting to see positive impact. And so they've got to be aware of that and understand we don't want to kill everything. but how do you still get at the thing that's kind of metastasizing on the industry and it's hard and I don't know

if they figure it out. I totally agree with that take by the way which is like I think this is another sort of idea that we're like talking about right now is kind of front running I don't think that the US government apparatus really understands how much they actually need stable coins and they do actually need them because it is the best

way to export US debt or treasuries the best way to find a buyer I think people don't realize that if you look at something like tether it's basically it's treasuries. It's all U.S. debt underneath the covers. And if you start to put like the pieces together where Black Rock just recently launched a Biddle Fund on Ethereum, for instance, and Circle has recently integrated with that, people can convert directly on chain from treasuries to stablecoins. That to me is like just a bandwidth pipeline to get more treasuries into

stablecoins and more of this onto crypto. The government at some point is going to wake up and realize that crypto is not a threat to the U.S. dollar sovereignty, it's like the bailout for U.S. dollar sovereignty, because this is the way you actually export it to all of the different countries that need it. Now, I do think a byproduct of that, though, Pomp, is these other countries who want to maintain their own fiat currency sovereignty, they're going to start putting walls up, right? They don't necessarily, when you talk to kind of like the CEO of Tether, Pablo, like his concern is some of these countries, even the EU, for instance, putting up walls against stable coins, against the dollar. They don't want to let the dollar in because it acts as an

apex predator for their local currency. So I think we'll see some of that too, which is going to make this really interesting. I'm curious your perspective on this pomp. So we're on the other side of a bear market. We're all feeling good. It's like the middle of a bull run and we all think things are going to go higher. But I feel like sometimes bear markets are actually the best time to learn things as an investor. Bear markets make us better. What did you learn in the last bear market? the bare market of 2022, 2023. There's obviously all of these frauds, all these scams. We saw algorithmic stable coins go to zero.

What were the takeaways for you and the learning lessons? It may not be a popular one, but my most important lesson was that laser eyes can be incredibly focusing and clarifying, but they also can be blinding. So some people need laser eyes to focus. Other people are blinded by them. And I think that it goes back to our conversation around, you know, how far into to the religion are you? And can you actually have the flexibility of mine? So that was one of the big lessons. The second thing that I would say that I learned is I spent a lot of time understanding

the intersection of these technologies and kind of the broader market. And I've built some pretty deep conviction, you know, in terms of where some value will accrue there. And then the third thing is I think we now have entered this era where the industry is mature enough that there are certain things that occur in other industries around services or products that we have not had in crypto because it was too small or it didn't really matter that now are becoming kind of key components to help these organizations. The organizations are big enough now. They have the budgets and the needs and all of that. And so we spend a lot time building companies as well to try to fit those needs. And so if you look at those three things, it's like my conviction on Bitcoin

has never been higher. I actually think Bitcoin's been de-risked. Right. It's like price goes higher it gets de-risk, which means more people will buy it, so the price goes higher and it gets de-risk more. It's like a very interesting thing. I think that there is this element of the blending between crypto and these other markets. And then the last one is we almost are like, we're in high school now, maybe. Like we were in elementary school, then we're in middle school. Now we're in high school. We're trying to go to college, right? Like, I think we'll get to college. And then eventually we get to be like a full grown adult and, you know, Bitcoin's a million bucks and, you know, all these other assets at value, whatever. But when you get to, you know,

high school, now all of a sudden, like, you could drive a car. You have a cell phone, right? Like, there's things that come along with. I think the industry is now at the point where, like, there's certain things that we need, which is good. It shows that we're maturing. What about your own focus, Pomp? Because the focus of me and Ryan, at least our arc in the crypto space, actually, he's not, like, terribly off from yours as well. Podcasts in the space, also investing in the space. How has your focus or your interest changed and adapted over the cycles? Because as we are all navigating and understanding what crypto is, we are also all growing as human. So maybe this question is also a little bit more just selfish. I'm a little bit more interested

on the personal side of things. But like, what are your goals as you are now entering like your third cycle? You've seen a thing or two. You have both interest in crypto but also a life to live. So how has your focus change? How has your priorities change as you've gone throughout your years? Yeah. I don't know if I have it all figured out. I know I don't have it all figured out. I would say that there's maybe two or three things that I know are true for myself. One of them is I started my career building companies and I still think of myself as, that's my main focus. Those companies can be, you know, what we would think of as traditional companies or they

can be an asset management firm, but really spending a lot of time doing that and I enjoy it and find intellectual stimulation from kind of the challenge of trying to build stuff. You could also think of a podcast as just like another company, right? It's just like you've got to find what's the product, who's going to end up consuming this, how do I make money with it, all that stuff. I think that there's a focus on once you become long-term convicted in this as an asset class and you've kind of made your bets, you start to optimize for different things. So it's like very weird. And without getting too philosophical, I think a lot of people who have had any sort of financial success, they start to kind of be like, okay, like, what else do I care about? You know, and I have a friend who's incredibly wealthy. And he one time told me a story where I think it was like, I don't know, half a million bucks or something.

He'd make this decision. And he basically was like, it's not going to change my life. I remember just being like, oh, okay, like that is like a level of a decision. I remember I was, I don't know, like 27 years old when he told me this, right? And I'm like, dude, I mean, I would do a lot of things for $500,000 right now. Like, I don't have a lot of money. So like, you know, that's like I can't fathom that place in life. And as you kind of get older and kind of life changes, I think you start to understand that more. Right.

And so that's been a big piece of it. And then the other thing, too, is that kind of like is an extension of that is I get a lot of enjoyment out of helping other people. And so a lot of the companies that we start, we probably give an outsized amount of ownership to the partners that we have. And the thought process just being like, yeah, look, you know, I have a certain reputation. We're bringing capital and distribution. And like all these things we've done it a bunch of times, et cetera, somebody else may ask for, you know, a very large majority of the business. We tend to revert back to like, now we're just be 50-50, right? Like, that's actually kind of fair. And we could get more. But there's this

great Ken Langton quote where he says, I never do a deal without making sure that I left more on the table for the other person. Right. And it's kind of just like, as long as they feel like they're getting something that there's value there. But then what I find is in helping them be successful, we end up being successful ourselves. And so a lot of that, you know, is kind of a mindset change where as an investor, you intuitively know it. I put money into a company. I want that company to be successful. The company is successful. I'll make money. But then when you start to think about it in all facets of your life, you know, we have folks who works for some of our businesses, especially young folks. It's unclear. Like, why would I spend, you know, five hours a month with them,

trying to help them with, like, career development when I know that they're not going to be here in a year? But then what I've learned over time is like, well, that person ends up being a representation of you as they go out into the world. That person ends up, you know, 20 years from now may send you a deal, right, or whatever. So it's just like, be a good contributor to kind of the ecosystem and try to help people. And if you do those three things, I think that you can end up in a pretty good spot. And then if you said to me, like, what am I optimizing for at this point? On the professional side, I just have this very deeply held belief that capitalism and entrepreneurship can solve our problems. So if you look at the problems that the country faces or our society faces,

like many of them can be solved through capitalism and entrepreneurship. And people are always like, what do you mean? How do you solve homelessness? Well, like, you get people. You get people. jobs, right? You get them off the street. You help them financially. Like, you put them in a better position. People are like, well, uh, you know, what about income inequality? Well, it's like, well, that is like literally the definition of a financial education problem, right? Is if people invest versus saving dollars, like you close the gap. If you look at things like housing affordability, like, we just need to build more houses. Like, that is the answer. And it's super simple. There's a whole much reasons why we don't do it, but like we just got to build more houses. If we build more

houses, like, houses will become more affordable. And so when you have that kind of lens, you start to think through, like, what are the problems that are worth tackling and like, how can I help? The hard part, and maybe the word of caution I, you know, constantly try to remind myself is if you've had any degree of success in building companies and you have this, like, level of ambition to like go try to help solve these problems, you have to be very carefully. You don't get pulled too thin. And you try to do too many of them. And I actually think we see the that in crypto a lot. How many people should have a portfolio of like five assets, but they have like 50? How many people are like, I'm in 17 Dow's and you're like, how do you possibly, you know,

doing anything? And so I think it's true, you know, in all facets of life, but there's just some off top of my head that I've kind of learned or optimized around. You know, that life trajectory kind of, have you ever heard in Aval? I think he's got a tweet that says this. I'm going to paraphrase it. Just like when you're starting out, you start out as a mercenary. And then you become a missionary. We get older when you make it, you become an artist. So it's like mercenary. missionary, and then artist. It feels like that's been

part of your trajectory as well. And I feel like that for myself too. It's about at first you just got to make it. Yeah. And then you can start to drive more meaning and figure out how to give back and like the causes you care about. And maybe at the end,

I haven't reached this phase. You just become a freaking artist. I'm bad at art in all forms. So I don't know if I'll ever make it there. I'll aspire to. Memes are art. Yeah, memes are art. You know, good tweets are art.

I'm curious, what does this look like from portfolio perspectives? So you were talking about earlier in, you know, like CNBC or Kevin O'Leary is hassling you for having 50% over 50% Bitcoin. Are you still over 50% crypto and Bitcoin? How's that, you know, change for you. Yeah, definitely still over 50%. And like, you know, I'm actively trying to diversify for a whole bunch of different reasons, but I feel wrong selling. So I don't sell.

So what that means is like I have to somehow make more money and then like deployed in non-crypto use cases or kind of asset classes. Why does it feel wrong to sell? Is that just like an investment case? Or do you feel like you've got, you just actually have some psychological attachment to the Bitcoin? No, it's just, I just have such deep conviction. It's like, you know, I'm not the type of person who is smart enough to say, oh, this asset's going to go up, but like, I've got enough meat off the bone, right?

Like, it went up enough. And so, like, I'm just going to take my profits and go home. I'm like, no, like, obviously I see what's going to happen for the next 15, 20 years. So, like, I just, I'll kick myself. I'll regret it. Right. And so it's like maybe regret minimization. I don't want a 20 years from not be like, why the hell did I talk myself in a

selling any of that. Ryan gives me these same words every now and then. He's like, yeah, every once in a while I think about selling, but then like selling something means buying something else and what the shit am I going to buy? Yeah, exactly. What do you buy? You buy treasuries? You buy the dollar? I'll take it a step further. Selling something means you're going shorted. Right. Yeah. And like shorting Bitcoin or, you know, crypto or whatever. Like it's insane. So yeah. Shivers up the spine. So I don't do that. You know, I try to do other things. And inside of crypto, the biggest position is Bitcoin. The second largest position for me personally is Solana. Don't kill me. The thesis there. That's a fantastic trade, especially in the last 12 to 18 months.

So I mentioned it on another podcast, but I had no exposure to Solana and I had Bitcoin and a little bit of Eath from years ago. And when Solana ran up through Morgan Creek, our fund there, we had been an LP in Multi-Coins Fund 1. And so they obviously had made a great investment in Salana, gone up a lot. You know, frankly, it was like, hey, great job guys, but like don't know that much about it. That's why we gave you the money is because you guys are the experts in this stuff, whatever. When it crashed down, it felt very similar to kind of me going back and learning about Bitcoin and stuff like that. And I started trying to understand this stuff. And so I started buying it around $48, double down at 55. And then I actually sold the Ethereum to buy Salana at 73 or 75,

something like that. And my thought process was purely all price. So it's not actually, like, if you go back to that ETF conversation about like price exposure versus like holding the asset, I don't think that I will be holding any of the portfolio outside of Bitcoin 10 years from now. But I do think I'll still be holding the Bitcoin 10 years from now. Right? So it's like I kind of know what I'm doing in terms of like Bitcoin is this long term thing. Like I hope to give my grandkids one day. These other things are very much like which asset do I think is going to go up in price more in short to medium term.

And I look at it as like, that's part of my job as an investor is to like measure price appreciation more so than I don't need to like get sucked in to be the evangelist of. of, you know, name your next asset. I think I, you know, I've done my time and I'll let somebody else do that stuff. I think you're going to get a lot of commenters why they figure out how to be your grandkids from the pump because that's going to be quite the gift, you know, by the time that comes. What else do you do, right? Like, I think about this all time.

Like, okay, Bitcoin becomes the thing that everyone thinks it's going to be, right? Whether that means, like, everything becomes, you know, hyper-bitcoinization or just like it's really valuable, it's like this very weird thing where you can give things away or you just pass them on when you die, but you can't take it with you. And so it's, I don't know, this is like very weird thought process

of if you are successful at investing, at some point, the most important decision you will make is what do you do at the end with the capital and wealth that you've generated? And that is also why, like, the government is like,

well, give us 50% right through kind of the inheritance tax and stuff like that. And so I don't know the answer. I mean, it's the hardest problem probably in finances. How do you kind of keep wealth over a long period of time? But I think the psychological cop-out answers, like, yeah, just give it to the next generation

and they'll figure it out. Pomp, this has been great. We've got five minutes left. You ready for a quick lightning round? Let's do it. All right. Bitcoin price by the end of 2024. Where are we going?

Higher. I don't know by end of 2024. I think in this cycle, I could see over 150, probably not higher than 200. But if you asked me price, odds are I'm wrong. so who knows. What year does the first central bank allocate to Bitcoin? Before 2030. Before 2030.

Cool. You were talking about financial literacy earlier. If you could design the perfect curriculum for high school students, what would it be? Start a business. Start a business? Yeah. How to start a business. Would you teach them about money at all?

Because start a business, one, can set them on the path to financial security, et cetera. But also, if you really think about an individual, if you operate like a business, than you're acting with fiduciary responsibility. So like spend less than you make. You know, what do you do with your profits? How do you reinvest in yourself or invest your business? Own capital.

That's huge. Yeah. Just like, I mean, most people's problem is they do one of two mistakes, personal finance. They either spend more than they make or they take the money and then they put it in dollars that are devalued away and they don't have any investments.

So as a business, like, what do you do? Like, you have to drive profit and then you have to reinvest the capital to be able to grow your business, right? So like, if you teach somebody how to operate a business,

I actually think they implicitly learn personal finance. And probably some of the best financial advice I ever got was like just treat yourself like a business, right? And whatever you do for your company, you do for yourself. And you'll mitigate the downside. Might not mean that you're going to be the richest person in the world, but you'll mitigate the downside. That's really what you're trying to do.

Trump or Biden, White House by the end of the election. Not what you want, what you predict, to be clear. Yeah, not what you want, but what you think is most likely. I think you've got to go with Trump right now. I mean, that's what the polls say. my guess is that it will be closer than people think. But yeah, the polls say Trump so far is let's see. How about recession? I feel like the recession is just kind of never come. But will we get one in 2024 or 2025? No. Because I think that they're so scared of the recession that they'll continue to create these inflationary pressures. I think the bigger risk is that inflation goes back up towards 10% more so than a recession. But by the way, trying to predict the macro environment is like, you know, basically like trying to read,

or do tarot cards or something. My God, who knows? All right, well, in contrast, this last one will be an easy one. Aliens, do you believe in them or no? Yeah, I mean, the odds that the aliens don't exist has to be so small. But the best counter argument to it is then why haven't we seen them? Right. Right?

But, like, yeah. And I'm sure you've heard all of the arguments. Yeah. I was going to say, this is a question you always used to ask at the end of your podcast. I'm curious what the best response you've ever heard was. They're already here. And I was like, what, I was like, what do you mean? And they were like, yeah, we think they're in the sky, but like look in the ocean.

You know, like there's things. You see videos on Twitter all the time, right? There's like some crazy thing in the ocean. Like, what is that? And so I think, you know, who knows if it's real or not? I don't know if they're like little green men that come down from the sky with a spaceship or whatever. But in my life, I've learned where there's smoke, there's fire and there's way too many, you know, leaks and conspiracy theories. And, I mean, you know, every time I see an Air Force commander come out and say something, I'm like,

What is the incentive for that person to be risking their career to come out and say that we have saucers or whatever the latest thing is? And so, yeah, probably true. How many times did you ask that question on the podcast? Hundreds. Hundreds. Yeah. It was a great way to know whether people ever listen to the podcast. People like, oh, I listen all the time. And I asked them like the two or three questions at the end and they'd be shocked.

Maybe he just never made it to the end of the podcast. But okay. Pomp, this has been a long time coming. Thank you so much for joining us on bank lists. Yeah, Bitcoin bull through and through. And yeah, you've certainly gotten a ton right over the years. So it's been a pleasure to have you on bankless. What should folks look for from you?

Like any interesting projects that people can get involved with? Yeah, what's kind of the latest with the pomp media empire and just everything you're doing? No, nothing really. I mean, just follow me on Twitter. Nothing really? Just tweet all kinds of crazy stuff, whatever we're doing. Whether it works or not, who knows. But yeah, we're trying to just have fun at this point.

Oh, yeah. Nice. That's a good place to be. All right. We'll leave it at that. Bankless Nation, got to end with this. Of course, none of this has been financial advice. How dare you think that? Crypto is risky. You lose what you put in. We're headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey.

Thanks a lot.