The Pomp Podcast - #1030 Adam Singer Shares His Bitcoin Concerns With Pomp

Episode Date: July 4, 2022

Adam Singer is a digital marketing executive and the writer of the Substack "Hot Takes" In this conversation, we have an open-minded debate about Bitcoin. Adam shares is concerns around many aspects of the digital currency in an attempt to find answers to these concerns and to find common ground on both sides. ======================= Since 2018 Copper has been at the forefront of institutional digital asset development.   From award winning custody solutions, to creating the first truly off-exchange settlement function, Copper pioneers technology, products, and services, in lock-step with a rapidly changing world.    No other infrastructure provider covers as many assets, across as many exchanges, with the speed and security that Copper can offer. To learn how Copper helps the world’s largest institutional investors secure their digital assets, head over to copper.co   Copper - the unfair advantage. ======================= Exodus is leading the world out of the traditional financial system by building beautiful and user-friendly blockchain products. With its focus on design and user experience, Exodus has become one of the most popular and loved cryptocurrency apps. It’s supported on both desktop and mobile, allowing you to sync your wallet across multiple devices so you can have access to your funds anywhere. You can instantly exchange around 100 different cryptocurrencies straight from your wallet. Interactive charts let you view an asset’s price history and your portfolio’s performance over time. And maybe the best part, Exodus is integrated with the Trezor hardware wallet - making advanced security easy for everyone.  Visit exodus.com/pomp for your free download or search Exodus on the App Store or Playstore. ======================= Bullish is a powerful new exchange for digital assets that offers deep liquidity, automated market making, and industry-leading security. Combining the innovations of DeFi with the regulated environment of traditional finance, Bullish empowers users to trade with certainty and earn passively at scale across variable market conditions, in an environment backed by multibillion-dollar liquidity contributions from the Bullish Treasury. Visit bullish.com/pomp today to learn more.   Note: Bullish is licensed by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission. Virtual assets and related products are high risk. Consult your investment advisor and trade responsibly. Bullish is available in select locations only and not to U.S persons. Visit bullish.com/legal for important information and risk warnings. =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Adam Singer is a digital marketing executive. He's an advisor to many startups, and he also has been spending a bunch of time writing his own personal substack, which you can find at adamsinger.substack.com. In this conversation, we talk about his concerns around Bitcoin, and we spent a bunch of time going point by point around what I would consider the cautiously optimistic viewpoint on the digital currency. I really enjoyed this conversation with Adam, and I hope you guys enjoy it as well. Before we get into this episode, though,

I first want to talk about our sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by Copper. Since 2018, Copper has been at the forefront of institutional digital asset development. From award-winning custody solutions to creating the first truly off-exchange settlement function, Copper pioneers technology, products, and services in lockstep with a rapidly changing world. No other infrastructure provider covers as many assets across as many exchanges with the speed and security that Copper can offer. To learn how Copper helps the world's largest institutional investors secure their digital assets, head over to copper.co. Again, Copper, the unfair advantage. Check them out at copper.co today.

Today's episode is brought to you by Exodus, the world's leading desktop, mobile, and hardware crypto wallet. They offer beautiful, user-friendly blockchain products that sync across all of your devices, making it easier to send, receive, and exchange over 150 or more crypto assets in one place. And with world-class customer service available to you 24-7, Exodus always has your back. But the fun doesn't stop with staking and trading. They recently launched a new NFT marketplace where you can buy and sell your favorite NFTs on the Solana network. By partnering with the popular NFT platform Magic Eden, they're offering the full Monty on verified collections, with more added every single day. Ready to check it out for yourself? Run, don't walk, over to Exodus.com slash Pomp for your free download today.

Again, if you want the world's leading desktop, mobile, and hardware crypto wallet, go to Exodus.com slash Pomp today. This episode is brought to you by Bullish. Bullish is a powerful new digital asset exchange built for institutions that delivers the innovations of DeFi in a regulated environment. The Bullish hybrid order book pairs the high performance of a traditional central limit order book with the automated market making. Powered by deep Bullish liquidity pools backed by the multi-billion dollar Bullish treasury. So you can trade with certainty and at scale across variable market conditions. You can learn more at Bullish.com or follow Bullish on Twitter because the future belongs to the bullish.

Now, this is not investment advice. Digital assets and cryptocurrencies are high-risk products. Consult your professional advisor before dealing in them. Bullish's services are available in select locations only and not to U.S. persons. Visit bullish.com slash legal for important information and risk warnings. Go check them out at bullish.com

or follow at bullish on Twitter. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investment. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

Adam, my friend, how are you? Hey, man. Good to see you, Pomp. Thanks for having me on. And I'd just like to say that Joe is spot on that Reese's are, in fact, the best dessert. i don't agree with that but that's all right it's uh uh uh everyone's own personal opinion um i mean how does peanut butter make anything worse right that is true that is very true um all right we got a whole bunch of stuff to talk about here's what i want to do first you fire questions concerns or topics at me and we'll discuss each one some of them i think that we'll end up agreeing on some of them i think we're gonna vehemently disagree on and we'll

kind of work through your whole list. Sure, let's go. And just to level set, you know, I'm all bought in on the idea of Bitcoin making sense as digital gold. Like I fully wrap my brain around it, fully makes sense to me, totally get it. So actually, let's lead into the first question with that. So what's the scenario if Bitcoin never gets beyond digital gold? What if it doesn't get to the point it actually is a highly used currency? It's always seen as, you know, like a bar of gold or the gun in your drawer. You don't ever want to actually have to use it, but you don't want to not have one. Yes. I think there's two scenarios, maybe three scenarios where this could play out. Right. So the first is if Bitcoin, for some reason,

the world decided they didn't want it. Right. And we can get into why that may happen in the future. I don't think it's a high probability, but but that would be one is just everyone says, OK, we don't like Bitcoin anymore. They move on. Then obviously never transitions past that. Uh, the second is the world says, Hey, Bitcoin is digital gold. It's very valuable. Uh, but we don't want to use it for anything else other than digital gold. Uh, and I think that people who view that argument would make a comparison to gold itself. You could almost think of it as, uh, okay, what percentage of people or how much value goes into the gold market today? It's about $10 trillion, give or take. Uh, and so maybe it's Bitcoin's market cap is 10 trillion and it kind

of is equivalent to gold. Maybe it is able to eat into other store of value assets like art or real estate or something like that. Maybe it ends up being more than 10 trillion. But there's some world where Bitcoin is a store of value and it never gets used as a currency itself. And I think that's what would happen there. The third one is actually where I think that we are headed towards, which is Bitcoin, the asset, is used as a store of value, which we're obviously seeing now. There are people who use it for medium of exchange, but because of the U.S. dollar price volatility, they may want to use stable coins or something else on a more regular basis, but it is still used. Last year, it did more transaction volume on-chain than MasterCard or whatever. But what we're seeing start to develop is that Layer 2 and potentially Layer 3 technologies are being built on top of Bitcoin, the network.

So I always have to remind folks that Bitcoin is one word, but it can have two different meanings. It can be the asset that you hold, or it can be the actual technology computing network that is being described. They're both named Bitcoin, which doesn't help a conversation. And so in a world where people say, I want to hold Bitcoin, the asset, and then we're going to build layer twos, layer threes on top of it. In some of those situations, you may use Bitcoin for a medium of exchange, the lightning network, right?

You send Bitcoin back and forth. But now there is a proposal from lightning labs where they want to build something called tarot. and on tarot, they believe that they'll be able to actually build stable coins and other types of assets that are tied into kind of layer one and layer two. Again, it's a proposal, it hasn't been built yet and so we gotta see if it's possible

and when will it actually get built and what adoption looks like. But I think those are the three scenarios where Bitcoin ends up being a store of value but not much more. It's like either nobody wants Bitcoin at all, it's just a store of value and ends up serving like other store of values today

or the third thing is the asset is a store of value but the network and the technology stack ends up being used for other purposes, where maybe one of those is a stable coin on top of the security of Bitcoin. And therefore people use that for medium of exchange and Bitcoin as a store of value. Got it. And so can I ask about, you know, the notion of the HODL meme, right? Would you say that, you know, blue sky scenario, hyper Bitcoinization happens, it's a global reserve currency. Now do people switch from HODL to Spendl? And I guess the answer is, why would I ever do that if there's a fixed supply? Why would I ever want to spend my Bitcoin? Yeah, so there's a whole bunch of nuance here,

I think, first of all, HODL became this amazing meme, either intentionally or not. And it's a great rallying cry for the Bitcoin community. It's also a great punching bag for the non-Bitcoin community, because they love to be like, oh, look at these idiots, right? They're all talking about hodl what the hell is hodl whatever and so i think the level set the conversation is hodl is no different than warren buffett saying buy great assets and hold them forever that's the exact same message now of course warren uses a a full sentence and says it with a suit and tie on similar to my suit and tie right now uh but the bitcoiners say it on twitter in four letters and so like that is the same message is great assets regardless of whether it's bitcoin uh

real estate, stocks, bonds, whatever, if it is actually a great asset that is going to be durable over time, you do want to hold it for a very long period of time. It's a timeless investing principle. So I think that's really what they're trying to get at, uh, is this, you know, HODL ends up just being that timeless investing principle, uh, kind of in a more modern twist, uh, in terms of like the meme changing, what I actually think is a really interesting part of this conversation is there has been a degradation of quality around goods and services across the world, but specifically in the United States as well,

where the currency is being devalued. And so you can think of it as being cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And at the same time, whether people want to make a direct correlation or a direct connection or not, is that the goods and services have gotten cheaper and cheaper as well

in terms of quality. The idea with Bitcoin becoming truly digital sound money people will still spend it. They still need to eat. They still need to pay their rent. They still need to buy certain goods or services, but they would only spend it on the highest quality goods or services. And so in one argument or one viewpoint of some people in the Bitcoin community is that a return to digital sound money would actually force the producers of goods and services to increase their quality because it would have to be valuable enough for people to part with their Bitcoin, which has this deflationary structure to it. Now, again, will that happen?

Will it not? It's a theory. It's a thesis of kind of the future of the world. But I do think that I would agree with the analysis that the quality of goods and services is definitely degraded over time. And that if you were to return to some sort of sound money property, whether it's digital or not, people would naturally increase the quality of the goods and services they produce in order to get people to part with that money that would have more value in the future. Do you agree? I think that's partially true.

I think there are certain industries, sectors and product types where they do go cheaper. For instance, I think in consumer packaged goods, getting fewer potato chips in your bag of Doritos, right? At the same time, we have other things like flat screen TVs,

like anyone can afford a giant flat screen TV in their home that's better quality than a TV, the richest guy, like 10, 15 years ago or 20 years ago had. I don't follow TV too closely, so I don't know the timeframes on that. But the point is, I think some things get better, some things get worse. I actually think the most important things like education, housing, and healthcare, those are getting more expensive and those are not necessarily getting better. And I actually care more about that than necessarily my blender being one that's the only blender I have to buy

it works forever. So that's like more of a concern for me, at least existentially, than like the fewer amount of chips in a bag of Doritos, right? So the whole like shrinkflation thing, put that aside for a second. I agree that that's more like macroeconomic monetary policy, fiscal policy, inflation type driven stuff. So just set that aside for one second. What I think is interesting, use the TV as an example, because I think that probably illuminates it best uh there's two ways to measure uh the quality of the the good right one is hey is the screen better does it have better resolution do i have uh a smart tv or not smart tv like like the features and functionality of it has absolutely improved

if you were to take uh kind of you know your great grandparents television with the bunny ears used to get reception compared to a smart tv today in most people's homes it's like you're on a different planet right so like that definitely has improved but that's more of a technology improvement but to your point also like the television that that family had you know 50 years ago or whatever uh it's it lasted way longer than the televisions of today and so i think that gets at more of the quality now you could argue that the quality is uh partially uh susceptible to the technology so the bulbs and the tv go out because they're you know uh getting better resolution or whatever but i think that's really where people are getting at it you can also look

at food i think is a really interesting thing so uh safe dean who wrote uh the bitcoin standard the fiat standard uh he talks a lot about like fiat currencies drive fiat food and so the whole idea here is uh you know mcdonald's fries right as uh like that like the egregious example they used to be made one way now they're made a different way and how much of that is actually like you've degraded the quality of the food, even though you're still buying the same number of fries inside of a- I think we're aligned. I think we're totally aligned on this. I think the big question mark that I would have is, does the continued squeeze to improve profitability and margins, is that a factor of capitalism or is that something that's more mutable and actually

is dependent on the variable of the money supply being a certain size. Because I don't think we know until we run that experiment, but is it not? I mean, a business can only go so far with that as well before consumers go, you know what, I'm not going in here anymore. So for example, I think a good example is probably Shake Shack. We both love Shake Shack, I think. And they're really what McDonald's used to be. And now they're a premier brand. Now they're a lot more expensive than a McDonald's burger, but at the same time, the quality is there. So the notion of fiat world giving us all low quality things, I don't know that that's right. One thing you said before I was on with the previous guests, she was saying something about, you guys were talking about

inequality a little bit. And I think that's probably more the crux of the issue, because if you're really well off financially, you can afford the nice burger, you can afford the Tesla, you can afford these high quality things versus people on the lower end of the economic spectrum can't. So I guess I don't know the answer that you're confident on. I'd be curious to see if there's any experiments that have been run or any sort of modeling against how a fixed money supply would change the quality of goods. Because what an interesting thing to try to understand, right? Like we all want better quality things. We all want, you know, our lives to be improved. We want services better. So, um, yeah, I, I think understanding more of that and how you can

run such an experiment would be interesting. Yeah. To think about, um, you know, America has become so, uh, consumption based and, uh, so much of it is driven. Uh, I think, and I think many people in the Bitcoin community would argue, uh, because ultimately, uh, you are financially incentivized to get rid of your money, right? Like, like they are quote unquote punishing you. And we can argue over how big is the punishment or whatever. Uh, but you're incentivized to get rid of the cash and whether you're an investor or a consumer, that is the financial incentive. Now, I think to your point, the wealthy not only have enough money, but they also, I actually think it's more of an education gap more than anything. They understand that just

because you're financially incentivized to get out of cash, doesn't mean that you have to go consume stuff, right? You actually can go and invest in things. And the idea of investing is that it will outperform kind of inflation and you'll end up actually getting more dollars or dollar value over time. But consumption in America, it's not just monetary policy driven, right? There's obviously a whole bunch of reasons why this has happened. But I do think a huge piece of it is we have essentially put the economy on steroids around consumption. If we were to return back to some sort of sound money system. And again, the gold bugs will yell and scream and say, it's going to be analog gold. The Bitcoiners yell and scream, say it'll be digital gold,

right? Just for a second, just think of the principles of sound money. It's outside of the system and no one can go ahead and create more of it. In that environment, what ends up happening is exactly what happened on the gold system. The money gets more valuable over time. It actually grows with kind of the cost of goods. And so you don't actually have a world where today, an average American family take away the historic inflation we're experiencing just in a, you know, pre pandemic, everything around them was getting more expensive and likely they weren't actually making enough money to keep up. So it's the feeling of the rat race. They can't get ahead, all this type of stuff. If you instead were able to go to a system where now the value of the money

that they had, one is they don't have to go into the financial markets and become a professional investor. Like it is insane to me that we ask firefighters, teachers, accounting managers, marketers, people who are consultants, et cetera, go to work every day, be as best in the world as you can at your regular day job that you probably enjoy doing. And Oh, by the way, go home on nights and weekends and become a professional investor because now you cannot save dollars and reach financial security in this country. Like that's insane to me. Well, I would push back. I don't love, I agree with you. I don't love the fact that we are pushing everyone to become individual stock pickers and individual investors. You and I both know it's very hard. Most people are going

to underperform and we want people focused on their craft, not everyone just making speculative bets and nobody making things, right? So, I mean, you know, I think your advice to young folk is certainly, you know, you guys like to stack sats, which just means average into Bitcoin, right? But we've had that sort of mechanism through things like averaging into Vanguard, which is an index fund or, you know, a basket of safe dividend stocks. So, you know, there are things that you can do without being Warren Buffett or without thinking about it. You can have, you know, money invested at a regular interval. So you're not, you know, trying to time the market or get fancy. So we, we do have mechanisms for those things. I think a problem, you know, over the

pandemic and in the nineties was people do get sucked up into speculative mania. So actually this, this translates into my next question for you. So I don't know how much we want to talk about this, but I actually am amused right now because, Pomp, you were basically very early, earlier than most of these VCs to the idea of Web3. And I remember your tokenize the world mantra. And so you were ahead of a lot of these guys. And now you've taken a look at things and have sort of said, you know what, actually, Bitcoin's the winner in the space. And there's some fun experiments but um i'm curious how you got there and what your thoughts are on this you know like admittedly it's it's a vc backed bubble web three and and so there have been a lot of

interesting conversations online but like you were you were sort of ahead of it and then you went through the process and now you're back out the other end and are like okay you know bitcoin is the answer we don't need this whole baroque just sprawling empire of 20 000 dog coins and whatever else is happening there. So, uh, man, there's a lot here. Uh, there's a couple of things. So there's probably, it's not just, uh, tokenized the world. Uh, it's with the NFTs. I mean, most people forget in, uh, 2020, I mean, I wrote a huge piece and I said, Hey, this is going to absolutely explode. I think the market cap was like less than $50 million, uh, in the entire space. Uh, and I pretty much called it in terms of, in that piece, I said, ferocious, it's going

to end up being one of the best digital artists in the world. Ended up selling $20 million of art over the next year or so. So like, I don't wanna necessarily say that I've got like a crystal ball or anything like that, but I just spend a lot of time talking to people who are on the ground and you can kind of feel the world shifting sometimes, right, and you can see like,

oh, there's a lot of energy going here, there's a lot of people, a lot of capital starting to build up in one area. And so that's more so what I try to understand is as a market observer, where is people's time, attention, and capital starting to flow and likely that will continue for some period of time.

Now, to your point, if you look at something like the tokenization component, uh, my, uh, kind of loyalty, if you will, to that idea has remained completely steadfast. I fully believe that we are going to get a transition from, uh, uh, into a third kind of regime. Now, what does that mean? When I originally came up with this idea, I gave a very simple framework, which was, uh, up until the 1970s or eighties, we had a completely analog asset world. That analog asset world meant that there was physical stock certificates, there was physical

bonds, there was physical deeds to your home, all that stuff. When we got the internet, we transitioned over time from an analog asset world to what I call electronic asset world. So the electronic QSIP based world. Now this means that we have centralized custodians, we have centralized clearing houses. What you actually are trading around is a QSIP, which is a string of letters and numbers on these centralized databases. It's not analog, so it's better than that, but ultimately it's still heavily centralized. Now, my theory, which I still hold is that we were going to transition from electronic Q-SIPS to something that was more digitally native, right? And at the time, the only thing really that was out there was, could you basically create,

people were calling them security tokens at the time. Could you create tokens that would end up actually doing this? Now, to be clear, there is zero innovation around the actual asset itself of if it's Apple stock, it still represents one Apple stock. This was more of like a backend, super nuanced, like financial plumbing, uh, analysis of like, man, I bet you these people would really love to be able to trade faster and cheaper, not have two day settlement times, be able to do it internationally, like all this stuff. So it's kind of like nerdy type things. I just probably was, uh, uh, a little bit more, uh, at adept at, uh, presenting it as an idea in like the tokenize the world kind of marketing message.

But what I will say is that I have zero loyalty to like where it got built. At the time, most of the technology that is either now available or is being built and kind of been proposed on top of Bitcoin was not there. So at the time it was like the only places that people were even experimenting with this stuff was on Ethereum and talking about some new chains

and things like that. I think that these ideas that we're talking about in web three, I 100% think that they're going to get built. I heavily question whether they're going to get built with the current technology sets that people are building on and also doing it with the current kind of incentive systems. So I'll give you two- And also adoption. I mean, little pesky thing there that- Well, adoption I think ends up being a function of does it work? Is it structured correctly? How do you fund it? Like there's all these elements that go into it. And then if you can do it correctly, then the adoption ends

up being kind of the result, right? But I'll give you two examples. So stable coins is a great example. I think it's pretty hard for people to argue that stable coins, which again, are just tokenized fiat currencies. So the whole idea of tokenize the world, one of the things that you're tokenizing is another asset, which is a fiat currency, stable coins. Got it. Okay. How do you do that? You back it one-to-one. It is a digital token that is backed by fiat currency sitting somewhere in an account. We can argue over which ones are better, who does better auditing. Forget all that. Stablecoins is back one-to-one. We have seen the world is going to use those. There's like $150 billion of market cap or whatever it is today of stablecoins.

Now, the question that I think that a lot of folks probably should be spending time on is not, are stablecoins going to be a thing or not? Again, is it going to be a central bank digital currency? Will it be a private company? Will it be some sort of decentralized thing? Who cares about that part of the conversation yet? It's just where is it going to end up getting built? And I think that now what you're seeing is the Bitcoin community via the proposal for Taro through Lightning Labs is saying, well, wait a second. If we are going to have these digital assets that are going to be these tokens, why would you want to build it on any other foundation than the most decentralized, secure foundation.

And again, I don't know how this is going to play out, but what I do know is that the idea of tokenizing a fiat currency, which we call stablecoin, that five, 10 years ago, eight years ago, whatever it was, that may have been seen as something that may or may not happen. But what I do know is if I take a fiat currency on most crypto exchanges, not all, but most, and I wire money into the crypto exchange,

I touch a stable coin. They keep it in the stable coin until I go ahead and I purchase whatever asset I'm going to purchase. And so in some way, we get this world where like, okay, now again, you can argue that real estate is not going to get tokenized or stocks won't get tokenized, whatever.

But like, we already now see that there are other assets where the world is going to adopt it. And so I think that what the competition is going to come down to is not, are we going to have these assets or not? It's actually, where are they going to get built? And my big question to most people building outside of the Bitcoin ecosystem is why is your system, your technology, your stack superior to build on top of? Some people think they have good

answers. Some people don't. What I think is encouraging about the space is there's somewhat free market competition and we're going to see what happens. 20 years from now, you and I'll do this and we'll be like, hey man, stable coins ended up being a thing. Here's where they got built and we'll have this whole like really smart analysis in hindsight as to why that is the specific place that it got built. I don't think that we know today where it's going to end up winning. Sure. And the stablecoin concept, you know, Pomp, I'm a digital marketer, just like you were back in the day, like that sort of technology to allow digital payments to be seamless and fast and not have to go through, you know, Visa or, you know, another, you know,

process, although Visa is actually a pretty good company and they're pretty fast about processing payments and with security. So I really like Visa. But the notion of a stablecoin actually makes a lot of sense. I think the concerns of stablecoins are some of the bad actors in the space that either with malintent or perhaps just not thinking through some of the impact of algorithmic stable coins or supply or demand side pressures or, you know, any number of things that cause, you know, a death spiral in a stable coin where people think their assets were stable. And look, I think most of that, all of that's happening on all the Ethereum-based stable coins, right? So we haven't seen, you know, there's definitely a lot of controversy around

uh tether for example but it it hasn't imploded yet and so um this is a really important point right and i think that uh there's no simple way to say it so i'm going to just say it kind of as raw and bluntly as i think uh will uh resonate with people both sides of the debate have reached levels of insanity it's kind of like politics right where like the republicans pulled so far one way and the democrats pulled so far another way there's a bunch of people who show up and they're like, you both are insane. Right. And they're just like, this is crazy town. And so I think that if you bring that to, uh, kind of the, the Bitcoin, the pro Bitcoin audience, and, uh, let's say the anti Bitcoin audience, it has now been pulled and pulled and pulled and pulled to

the extremes where you have a subset of the Bitcoin community who literally, I mean, yesterday we're going after people who have probably defended Bitcoin publicly more than all of them combined. right and trying to like take their heads off and be like you're not a real bitcoin okay uh fine then you have the like anti-bitcoin anti-tether you know whatever crowd who like they've been yelling and screaming about stable coins for how long now three four five six years and they literally were so caught up on like tethers a fraud tethers this tethers this that they missed the one that actually blew up. Like if you actually weren't so like be, you know, being insane and religious about it and you had just constantly reevaluated the market, actually they

probably would have got it right. It's just that by the point that, uh, the one that blew up, they were still yelling about the other one, which is backed one-to-one according to the documentation that we have today. So my point in this ends up being humans are humans. They're doing this in politics. They're doing this in finance. They're doing this across society. And a huge piece of it is social media and kind of mainstream media, all the things that people can talk about. But what I do think is really important is if you're going to look at this entire space, you have to ask yourself, are you looking at it from one of three angles, short-term, long-term price, or I'm sorry, short or long-term price or fundamentals. And then what I'll call a Western

world gamification or rest of world human impact. And so short or long-term is pretty clear. Like either you're looking at like what happened yesterday, what happened today? Oh, it went down. You know, I'm a critic. I'm right. Oh, it went up. I'm a bull. I'm right. Okay. That's fine. I think most people who end up being pro this technology are very long-term thinking. The second thing is price or fundamentals. It's fun to look at price. I'm just as susceptible to anybody else. It goes up a lot. It's exciting. It goes down a lot. Like you're like, fuck this sucks. Right. But at the end of the day, if you can keep refocusing on the fundamentals, I think that there are very specific technologies. Uh, and Bitcoin is the best example where it

continues to gain adoption. It continues to get stronger from a computer network standpoint, security, all that. But the third one I think is actually the, the important conversation because it eliminates all the bullshit, which is when you evaluate this, are you looking at it through the Western developed market, like financial market gamification lens? That's where you see people on Twitter yelling and screaming. Is it an inflation edge?

Is it not? Is it this? Is it this? Is it like, at the end of the day, that conversation almost doesn't matter. I think that what ends up being the lens that's very difficult for people in the developed world to look through is the human impact component of it.

and so when you look at that that to me is the story but guess what there's no uh metric that moves up and down on a day-to-day basis that measures like is it getting adopted more is it having impact or more like that's a 10 20 30 year story that over time i think will become clearer and clearer and the places that where we're seeing the early signs of this happening are the exact places that critics can point to and be like that's not real you know el salvador only has six million people, six and a half million people in our population. Oh, I heard that the politician is a bad guy. And it's like, look, does that just the canary in the coal mine and now eventually a bigger country will go do it? Or are they the only example? Time will tell. And to be clear,

I actually, I don't hate at all the idea if, I thought of it, I thought of this before sort of Bitcoin in a sense, being a little bit of QE for, you know, inquisitive technology geeks around the world who decided to buy into it. And it's probably entrepreneurial people. It's probably people who have taken their gains and are doing interesting things. So that was actually always a cool thing to me because you saw a lot of very wealthy people like Jack Dorsey, et cetera, even giving Bitcoin grants away in South Africa. How cool is that? I mean, that's something I think no one should, no one's going to get upset about that part. Back to your point about Wall Street arguing narratives anything with a chart there's going to be narratives around that humans wrap

their mind around um for me i i think that bitcoin is most interesting as a cs project and also as a marketer the whole notion of you know getting this global community to come together and rally around open source is like fairly nerdy and cool like if you stripped away all the you know fiat versus Bitcoin versus Ethereum, Dogecoin drama. Like if you were to just look at the actual organization without organizations, I think that that's super interesting. And I guess to that question, I'll just ask one more on the Tether thing. So Bitcoin's this beautiful decentralized network, and then Tether is fairly centralized, right? So I think a lot of the Tether FUD will go away at some point when at some point they're big enough and Bitcoin, Bitcoin even being

decentralized is big enough that it has to play with all of the rest of the world. Right. And that's like a good thing. That's like something that I know you've been talking about for a while where, hey, Bitcoin is going to be on everyone's balance sheets. You know, institutions will adopt it. I think for that to happen, like the level of transparency in the space is going to probably need to meet certain standards. And so with that said, it's probably net positive if Tether ended up being a massive fraud, like having that happen and be out in the open and having Bitcoin reprice discover, like that would show that Bitcoin's anti-fragile. I think you'd get a lot of net new buyers on that dip. Like I actually don't think Tether going down would be the worst thing

in the world if it happened. So, or a lot of people are like, oh, if Tether blows up, it will die. I'm like, probably not. Like what if it could be a cleansing for the system? So I'm spinning you a bullish thesis on if tether does turn out to implode and yeah so i don't have any more information on tether other than what everyone else has right uh i think that going after um the stable coins where there's one-to-one backing right and again i don't have the data uh in front of me i could look it up but uh if you look at tether and look at usdc everyone's yelling and screaming about uh tether okay well usdc is growing in popularity so let's say that if in six months. And again, I'm not claiming this is going to happen, but let's say in six months

that USDC, uh, surpasses tether in market cap and tethers importance in the world goes down using the market cap as a proxy. Again, if that was to happen, would all of a sudden the tether truthers all turn around and be like, USDC is not back. Like, like it's like a stupid argument. And I think that what we're watching is that there is a high, high degree of overlap between the anti-Bitcoin, anti-Tether, and anti-Tesla crowd. And what ends up happening is those three things are breaking people's brains from the legacy financial system because they all have aspects that they hate. The anti-Tesla crowd and the pro-Tesla crowd are especially crazy. I actually think they're crazier, like more at the extremes than the crypto people.

We got to get you more on Twitter. Listen, the Tesla people are crazy, but there's nowhere crazier than the Bitcoin, crypto, Twitter, the whole thing. But here's the reason why I say that is like the high overlap between anti-Bitcoin, anti-Tether and anti-Tesla is because these things stand for so much of what they've been trained to not like, right? And so this whole idea of a open source project that shows up and grew at one point, it was over a trillion dollars in market cap. That is insane to these people. They're like, this is this is crazy. But what I was going to say, so, you know, one thought I had while you were talking is so it doesn't seem like if a lot of the Bitcoin maximalists talk about this, that Bitcoin is, you know, a discovered thing. It's like gold. It's a commodity. We discovered it. It's a discovery. It's not something that we made. It's not a company. There's no head. So the notion of regulating Bitcoin itself obviously doesn't make sense, but it probably does make sense to have regulations around the stablecoin ecosystem. I think it's like if you're going to put your money into something that is stable, you know, there should be guide rails. And the reason is when those implode, they can have effects that spill over into other aspects of the financial system.

And, you know, the someone who was told to put their life savings in this thing that was going to generate 14 percent a month or whatever now loses, you know, the hundred thousand dollars they had and they can't get FDIC from that. Like that's like heartbreaking. Right. So maybe it's the decentralized aspects, you know, you wouldn't want government to screw with and they couldn't anyway, right? But the centralized aspects and the sort of people who want to build products on top, like regulation there actually might make more sense. Is that, do you agree with that? So I think there's two separate components. There's decentralized and centralized, uh, where you and I think we'll see directly eye to eye is that most of the people claiming to be decentralized, uh, are, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say they're confused. Uh, but probably, uh, it ends up being more of a marketing term than anything. Uh, when you think of Bitcoin itself, I always remind folks, the U S dollar is not regulated. Like there is no regulation on the

US dollar. You cannot put the dollar in jail. You cannot financially find the inanimate physical piece of paper. It is a unregulated piece of paper, right? Because it's an inanimate object. Now, what is regulated is the people and companies that transact in it, hold it, use it, et cetera. And the same thing is true in the Bitcoin community. Bitcoin is the equivalent. It's like a digital inanimate object, right? In the sense of you can't put Bitcoin in jail, you can't find Bitcoin. But what you can do is you can regulate the companies and individuals that transact in it, hold it, all this stuff. And so at a very, very high level, all of the old rules apply. Like if you commit a crime using Bitcoin or dollars, you get in trouble if you get caught, right? If you

don't pay your taxes, you get in trouble. If you do nefarious things or bad things, if you commit fraud, whatever, like you're going to get in trouble. The question becomes, where is there a difference? And so something like commodities versus security, right? It seems pretty clear Bitcoin is going to be labeled as a commodity. Regulators are openly saying that publicly now. But if it had been labeled a security, that would change the way that the people and companies that transact in Bitcoin would be regulated. So I think that's an important part of like the Bitcoin regulation story. Now, the point you brought up about stable coins, I think is again, kind of a signal of what's to come. And we saw Gary Gensler on CNBC earlier this week talking about the idea

of disclosures. He was saying, listen, your bank deposits, they have to have disclosures. What are they doing with it? The money market fund, they have to have disclosures. What are they doing with it? And it's so that people can underwrite the risk that they're taking. And so at a minimum, whether people like it or not, and I'm not here to comment on whether I think it's good or bad, I do think that we are going to see a significant increase in the amount of disclosures that have to happen from certain corners of the industry. Now, stable coins is the obvious one. Crazy, crazy promises to retail investors. All right. How much more time do we have left? Keep going. I got time. Keep going. Awesome. Awesome. Okay. I have more questions. So,

all right. Explain to, so imagine, take like your average family in America and, you know, they go to, you know, church every Sunday, they go to the park, they go to their vacation home, you know, they live their life. They've just heard about Bitcoin. They're learning about the notion of decentralized currencies and, you know, they kind of get gold and they get the internet they use facebook whatnot etc etc um can you can you explain bitcoin mining to someone like that pretend they know nothing about bitcoin like the absolute least amount can you do it in like 20 seconds or 30 seconds i'm just curious because that has always been something that when i talk to you know friends and family about like they can't quite rock in terms of why it's

important or how it works? Um, well maybe like short, short version of the mechanism and also how it works. Cause I think so. Yeah. So the best way to think about, uh, currencies is that the country that has the best military has the global reserve currency. And it's always been about offensive power. If you had the best offense in the military, you then got the global reserve currency, hence America, US dollar. In a digital world or in a cyber world, it's all about who has the best defense. And therefore, whoever has the best defense will end up being able to put forward the global reserve currency. Now, what's unique about Bitcoin is that Bitcoin is the strongest computer network in the world measured by the computing power that is running it, right? That's

underlying it. And so therefore, this thing that is really an open source project, it is not a country, it is not a company, it is not an individual, is the strongest computer network in the world, which means it has the best defense. Therefore, Bitcoin ends up, in many people's eyes, rising to global reserve status, whether it's the only one or one of global reserve status in the world over time. Now, how does it get the strongest computer network in the world? Well, you can take one of two paths. You can take a centralized path, similar to Amazon. Jeff Bezos sits in a conference room and he says, we are going to invest $1 billion. We're going to build a data center. We're going to buy computers, put them in there, and then we're going to run

them and we're going to point them to do whatever computational work we want them to do. That was the top-down centralized view of building out computing power. Bitcoin instead says, you know what we're going to do? We're going to issue an economic bounty or a reward. Anyone in the world who plugs in a computer and starts to run our software, we are going to give out this reward approximately every 10 minutes. And so it started out, it used to be 50 Bitcoin every 10 minutes, and then got cut in half, went to 25 Bitcoin every 10 minutes, then 12 and a half, eventually 6.25 Bitcoin every 10 minutes. And so the whole idea of mining is simply that there is a economic reward. It's like a carrot that's stuck out there every 10 minutes. And people around the world say,

I am going to buy a special type of computer. I'm going to plug it in the wall. I'm going to take my electricity. I'm going to convert it to computing power. And I'm going to essentially rent it or I'm going to give it to this network. And based on doing that, I will get a piece of the economic reward over time. Now there's a bunch of nuance in there, but now all of a sudden, rather than have that centralized viewpoint that required a CEO with a vision and capital and all the things to go and build the Amazon data center. Instead, you have this fully decentralized system around the world where I don't know the name of 99.99999% of miners. I have no clue who they are, where they are, or anything. But guess what? They are working to protect Bitcoin's network.

And so when that occurs, what you get is a very unique system where miners, all they're doing is they're just pointing computing power at the same place. And then because there is such a high degree of defense, which means it's very hard to hack or attack. Now, all of a sudden, you continue to get Bitcoin doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is just simply producing these blocks of transactions approximately every 10 minutes. And that idea ends up being what makes Bitcoin so valuable. I love it. So, you know, you explain that very in a way that's easy to understand for someone who gets computers. One of my thoughts with basically the notion of explaining all this, and I guess you have to explain all of it with the Fed and existing money systems, is it is a little

complex and baroque for the average person to understand. And I guess maybe to your point, they don't even need to understand how the mining itself works. They just need to see that they have cash app on their phone and they can you know send money to someone else for for a contractor work on their house or whatnot but you know who you know who understands inflation people in america don't understand how inflation works you go to argentina there ain't a person in argentina that don't understand inflation yeah i guess they're forced to huh right because because it's a it's a everyday reminder right and so like you know this is we have that right now we have that right now with gas prices everyone sees it you know every day right i mean it people uh people

forget all of a sudden gas prices go. And now, by the way, they may not actually know the true answer. It may just be talking points that were fed to them or whatever, but how many people in America, if you just walk down the street in any American city five or 10 years ago, and you ask them about inflation could even tell you what that meant. Like what is inflation? Now there's a way higher percentage of people because it's a problem that they have to deal with. And so, uh, we had an 11 year old kid come on the show one day. Uh, he just happened to be here in the office. He's a family member, somebody who works here. And, uh, I said to him something about inflation and he immediately started talking about it. Like I was like, this kid's smarter than most

economists. It's just like, he, he just, and he probably, again, it's a somewhat of an anecdote, right? Because obviously, uh, his brother talks about it a lot, like all this type of stuff, but like, that's what ends up happening in these other economies, Argentina. I don't know what the latest inflation numbers are. But at one point, I think six months ago, it was like 50% annual inflation levels. You know what inflation is if you live in that environment and every day you go to the grocery store and the prices are different. Yep. And so we fully agree. And I think that no one can make the argument that a poorly run government and poorly run state that's been fiscally irresponsible, you know, should get to, you know, we should look to them for

guidance on what we're doing. You know, but there are other countries, obviously, like us in the UK that at least to date have, you know, managed growth via fiat currency pretty well to get to this point. So I also think, you know, one other thought that I had, I was having a conversation with Jack Dorsey last summer about this. I own a Bitcoin because of a conversation with Jack. I figured I couldn't, you know, have intelligent thoughts with others about this without having skin in the game and, you know, going through the process and learning all about it. And so I actually think it's a positive thing to run multiple economic experiments at once because we don't know what we don't know. Right. So like Jay Powell said today, hey, you know, we didn't realize that inflation wasn't going to just be transitory. He literally said this out loud. So they actually did think that inflation would be transitory.

So for better or for worse, I think that we have to have this conversation that maybe our leadership is not so competent. Maybe Bitcoin is an answer. Maybe something else is. Maybe how we're, you know, like you like to talk about these forever wars. I think those all need to be stopped. Transitioning to energy independence also would help. I guess there's like a myriad of things happening at the macro level at the same time right now that are all being done poorly. Just one thing that I'll say is I don't know that simply switching to a fixed money supply would solve everything. I think it would be an interesting thing to try some more. And so I think we should pay attention to these nations that are adopting Bitcoin, what that's looking like for them. I guess it's too new of a thing to say how it's

worked out, obviously, since, you know, there's still price discovery happening with Bitcoin and it's not, you know, at the stable state where I think, you know, it could make a lot more sense for areas to try out. So here's what I would say, right, is that you can't solve the sins of decades, if not centuries in a couple of weeks. And I think that people forget the central bankers can't do it. The politicians can't do it. And the technologists can't do it. And so what you have to do is you have to approach all of these problems from a first principle standpoint. And so if I said to you, Hey, let's go try to create a digital sound money in the mid two thousands, there are very few people who had been like, that's going to improve food quality, right? They'd been like,

dude, you sound like Alex Jones, right? Like that's, that sounds insane. Well, what happened is that somebody went to go create digital currency and they over 40 years of research and development that went into digital currencies, all of, uh, kind of the cypher punk, uh, ethos, all of the things around proof of work, even the creation of TCP, IP, all that stuff. Eventually someone cracked the code and we got Bitcoin. Then the rest of the world started to study it. And we're only 13 years or so into this whole exercise. And what I think people are starting to realize is, oh my God, this is the first principle solution to a lot of problems in the world because now I can trace back and say those problems were actually rooted in the

corruption of money. And I'll give you one other example that I know that I think, or I think will resonate with you. Facebook and Google have tried for a decade to bring internet to people around the world. They've tried drones. They've tried hot air balloons. They've tried driving trucks on the streets they've tried everything possible from mesh networks to literally trying to become aviation companies none of it has worked at scale sustainably elon musk doing it yeah elon musk is now creating a satellite network around earth that will beam the internet down to people and so in a way spacex which started out with no ambition whatsoever to bring internet to the world they simply wanted to be able to launch a rocket

and re-land it to bring the cost of rocketry down has backed into a first principle solution to how do we bring internet to everyone around the world in an affordable way. And so I think that's very similar to what happened with Bitcoin. Is Bitcoin, the true innovation of Bitcoin around the creation of a blockchain

that would allow for a asset in the digital world to not be double spent is backing into creating all these other solutions or all these other kind of tertiary impact. And that I think is what gets people really excited about it is like Bitcoin solves this. It's a great meme. Directly, no.

But indirectly, I think that it has impact on all these different areas where people are like, damn. Like, yeah, that does make a lot more sense than maybe it initially did when I first found out about Bitcoin. It would be cool if the whole Starlink or SpaceX Starlink network was powered by Doge somehow. I would love to see them figure that out.

No, you're right. And actually, something that I've actually said in the past about Bitcoin in particular, and I'll admit I was wrong on this. I think listening to Saylor on Lex Friedman's podcast was really interesting. So you said it yourself, right? We're only 13 years into Bitcoin adoption. So people have compared things like how quickly it took Uber to get from no one knowing it to ever inhaling a cab of the phone instead of side of the road with their hand in the air. And actually, if you were to zoom out and you were to take the most macro of macro perspectives and look at how long it takes currency regimes to change then actually even though the internet is an accelerant um i think something as serious and ingrained as money like you actually could make the you know 20 50 100 year argument and i know it's it might be one that doesn't come true in your lifetime

like it's one of those like maybe it's like this longer evolutionary argument that you're not going live to see come to fruition, but then does come to fruition. I think there's probably cases to be made there with digital disruption of things that previously weren't digital that are super ingrained. Another example is religion. So if you look at data, there's now the fewest amount of people believe in organized religion in America at any point in history. We're at an all-time low. and I wrote a sub stack post on this and why, and it's basically due to what is known as the spotlight effect in psychology. So imagine you're looking at a stage and there's a spotlight on a tree and all you see is that tree, but there's a whole, you know, big scene happening behind it.

And if you turn the lights on, you can see everything. And so the internet has done that for people's, you know, faith in God and them being able to see all these other religions, see you know how science says we do things but even with all of that like that disruption is like like a very slow trend line um and i just it's like an easy prediction to call i said i said it would happen uh 10 years ago and i've got some blog posts where i'm like it's going to be here and it's like it's like this really simple to see linear thing but it's still you know religion could be with us you know another 100 years 200 300 years for some people it might be forever at at the idea stage. So I'm just saying with money, you know, I do think people get it wrong

when they compare it to a mobile app, because installing a mobile app is such a, it's not the same thing as running an economy via, you know, via a certain, you know, methodology and certain plumbing and certain ecosystem, right? Yeah. What's interesting to me about uh, um, the difference maybe, uh, of, uh, timelines, like there's a timeline, uh, or a duration mismatch going on, which is, uh, you see it in the conversation, both the, uh, pro Bitcoin and the anti-Bitcoin crowd are literally talking about what happened in the last eight months, right? Like, like, like that's literally, we're all conditioned to from wall street. Of course. Like that's what we're conditioned to the financial markets. Absolutely. But also

we're just human. Like what's going to happen in 10 years? I can't imagine that. Well, guess what? I couldn't imagine that 10 years ago, right? And now here we are. And so I think that, uh, the people I admire the most in thinking about a lot of these technology cycles and in thinking of investing, they have the longest time horizons, the longest time horizons sound, uh, in today's age is like, can I think five years? Like I was talking to somebody literally the other day and And they were like, yeah, we're a long-term holder. We hold for three years or more. And I was like, man, okay, sure.

But I think actually what we're watching is probably a 50 plus year evolution of a thing that has never happened in the world before. There's never been a currency that has been adopted globally where there was not a country behind it. Right, if governments are going to be toppled, it's going to be like a multi-decade long thing. It either had a country behind it

or it was a physical asset, right? like gold. But outside of those two things, we've never seen this before. And so I think that is ultimately where we are going to have to be patient, but it's a long-term patience coupled with short-term urgency. Every single day, people around the world get up and they say, I got to make sure I'm mining. I got to make sure that I'm using self-custody. I got to make sure that I'm building my piece of infrastructure around the network or whatever, whatever your contribution to it is short-term urgency. But if you couple that with long-term patience, like Bitcoin 13 years ago gets started to today, go talk to people who were on the forums in 2010,

2011. We're winning, right? Would be their approach. I like the video of that very well-spoken fellow in the room to no one explaining Bitcoin. And he's actually like really thoughtful. I remember seeing that one, uh, years ago. Don't know his name. It is, uh, uh, I think what you're talking about is, uh, Andreas Antonopoulos. Uh, I think it's the person who's, uh, who's given the presentation and there's like four people sitting in the stands. Right. So let's talk about this. Uh, cause he's one last question. So ask your best one and then we'll, then I got to go. All right. Great. Um, so Bitcoin at a billion dollars is a small fun internet project with some nerds. Okay. Bitcoin at a trillion dollars is an industry. And so I guess my question is,

do you think it's time for some of the personalities in this space? You just said we won. I actually think that personally flipping from the toxic maxi mindset to like a, hey, this is going to help things and have like sort of flip from, I like when Elon said the other day, look, level, you know, heal the world. He said something positive like that. Do you think it's time now that it's grown up? Are they never going to get off that hill of telling people to have fun staying poor? What happens there? I think that there is a couple of different factions of the world when it comes to Bitcoin. There's some people, you know, maybe you put a Paul Tudor Jones, Stanley Druckenmiller, they're investors. They say, hey, I put Bitcoin into my portfolio.

I'll take it out. I'll put it in. I'll take it out. I'm just an investor. It's just one of many tools that I can put in the portfolio. There are folks that I will put into the builder exclusive category. I'll give a shit, but you probably don't even see them on Twitter. They're not like they're just building, right? And whether they're open source developers, whether they're miners, whatever, like they could care less about the kind of the nonsense online and they're just building. There is, uh, a world of, uh, pro Bitcoin people who end up, uh, talking about it a lot online who end up, uh, uh, kind of sharing their ideas. Sometimes they're right. Sometimes they're wrong, but they're willing to put themselves out there and talk about it,

but they tend to be fairly, uh, reasonable, rational, kind. They want to learn all that type of stuff. And then there's a subset of people who are just assholes. Like there's no other way to put it around it. Right. And I've said for a really long time that claiming that you are, uh, um, uh, only focused on one thing is perfectly fine. Like focus is an amazing quality to have. It's actually a superpower and many people don't have it in this world. So like I'm all on board. But when you then use that as an excuse to just be an asshole to people, right. what ends up happening is that a bunch of people just tune you out. And so we saw this happen. There was a lot of people who don't share their information or their thoughts anywhere near the

way that they probably should. And when they did that, they were yelling and screaming about projects or companies that failed in the space and no one listened to them. And the reason is because they actually weren't communicating. And this is not something that's unique to Bitcoin. This is true across all industries and all points in time. You can have the greatest ideas in the world. If you can't communicate them effectively, then it doesn't matter. You have to be able to communicate effectively. And so I always point, I don't want to name names of folks who I think are doing it right. Cause people will say, Oh, you didn't say this other person, whatever. But there are a number of people who from the outside,

most would say, Oh, those are leaders in the Bitcoin community. You'll never hear them go after anybody. You'll never hear them, uh, be derogatory towards people. You'll never see them, uh, attack folks like they are, uh, um, uh, positioning or, uh, uh, discussing these ideas from a position of maturity of effective communication, uh, all these things. They may behind closed doors be like, that's the biggest scam in the world talking about something like in their head, that's what they're thinking. But they understand that the effectiveness of your message is just as important as what the message itself is. We should give a shout to Neeraj. I think he's one of the most balanced voices in the space. And look, he could be doing comms at

any Fortune 500 company and he's chosen crypto to be the adult in the room. I think he's my favorite balanced voice. He's just such a great guy too. I think that that is, uh, uh, he's a great one. There's a number of others, uh, that are really great of, um, they're trying to do the right thing. And I think this is another key piece across this entire industry is that most people, many, almost all of them, good intention, trying to do the right thing. but there's a couple of folks who, whether they're intentionally trying to just cause chaos, all this stuff or whatever, or there's this like online mob mentality that is jump in with everyone else. And they're going kind of crazy or whatever, or they literally don't know what

they're talking about. I don't know what the reason is, but they act and talk in a way where you're just kind of like, man, that is not very helpful to the long-term kind of efforts of what millions of people. Now there's millions of people working together to push something forward. As someone who worked on, you know, you worked at social media companies early. Isn't this fascinating? Isn't this like really interesting to watch all the specific tribes play out? I don't think that Bitcoin or crypto is unique in this way. I think that this is just how human nature has always worked, sports. You can take somebody and you can literally be in a business meeting with them. Normal, right? Whatever normal is today, right? Like all good. You literally take

them to the bleachers in Yankee Stadium and they're ready to like beat up somebody. And you're like, what happened? Right? And it's, you know, you get all sorts of emotions involved. You get mob mentality like all these different things and by the way in that analogy i didn't tell you whether they were a yankee fan or they were cheering for the opposing team right like it doesn't matter it's just like that's how humans are and so i think that there is this element of uh human nature plays out on social media it is what it is uh i do though believe uh if you look at the people who've been around for a long period of time and they've kind of survived market cycles it tends to be the people who, uh, are here for the right reasons. And the free market kind of

does its thing and that's okay. It's not for me to judge or anyone else to judge what one person says does what just, Hey, let the free market play out and we'll see what happens. Totally. All right. Where can we, where can we send people to find you on the internet? Yeah. Um, I have a sub stack at, um, hot takes as well as, um, you can find me on Twitter at Adam Singer. I'm always available to respond and yeah, I'm pretty easy to Google. I think just like yourself, um, you know, I've got every social profile and pretty findable. Awesome, man. Listen, I appreciate you. Uh, you, you always have, uh, um, I'm going to, I'm going to describe it as, uh, maybe cautiously optimistic of you where you're, you have a healthy

level of skepticism, but I think that you also understand that like the trajectory of technology is headed in one direction. Yeah, totally. And I think, you know, I don't think it's good to have enemies on the bullish or bearish side of a sports team or a stock. And so I've, I'm trying to be ever, you know, nicer and more amicable. But what I actually like about UPOMP is we've disagreed in the past online and it got heated. And you know what, after that we shared a DM and said, Hey, actually it was probably a little intense and we both let it go. And imagine if everyone in the country could do that. I mean, how much better would things be? That is a, that's a very important part of all of this is being able to have conversations with

people, whether you agree or disagree with them and then move on with your day. I think that is super important actually. So I appreciate you coming on. Hopefully this was valuable to everyone else and we'll definitely do it again in the future. Thanks for having me. All right. Later, buddy. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you guys enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to palmscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry. It's a three-week intensive training program with over 50 events packed into

that three-week time period. Go to palmscryptocourse.com to learn more, and I'll meet you guys for the next episode. Thank you.