The Pomp Podcast - 328: Pomp Answers Listeners' Questions

Episode Date: July 3, 2020

This is an episode of The Pomp Podcast with host Anthony "Pomp" Pompliano. He answers a bunch of questions from listeners about everything from finance to business to his personal story. =============================== BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. https://www.blockfi.com/pomp  =============================== Our second sponsor is choice, a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

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. Let's kick this thing off. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion.

This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, everyone. Bang, bang. This is a thank you listeners episode. What that basically means is I tweeted out and asked for questions. I literally got hundreds of questions. I'm not gonna answer them all,

but Polina has so graciously agreed to come on and help me choose the best ones, the best ones, the best ones, the absolute best ones. Before we do that, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. These sponsors today, one is BlockFi. As you guys know, I'm a super enthusiastic user and an investor in the company. They've got three products. They allow you to buy and sell crypto on their crypto exchange. They also allow you to deposit crypto and take out a US dollar loan. And then they allow you to deposit crypto or stablecoins and earn up to 8.6% APY in an interest-bearing account.

No-brainer compared to traditional interest-bearing accounts. There's risk. Go do your own research. Also, later this year, they're going to come out with a Bitcoin Rewards credit card. It's going to be awesome. Go check out BlockFi.com slash Pomp. Again, BlockFi.com slash Pomp.

Our second sponsor is a newer one that I'm super excited about. It's called Choice. they've got a new self-directed IRA product. You are probably listening to this and are part of the 7.1 million Bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not Bitcoin. That's okay. I was in that situation too, but no longer. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys with tax advantage dollars. So you can get a self-directed IRA called Choice that will allow you to buy Bitcoin,

own the private keys and use tax advantage dollars to do it too it's an absolute game changer retirewithchoice.com slash pomp retirewithchoice.com slash pomp lastly i write a daily letter 50,000 people read it for some reason business technology and finance is what i cover i break down the complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing my opinion on various aspects of beach industry, you can subscribe at pompletter.com. All right. Sponsors are out of the way. Thank you for doing this. Thank you. My hair's wild right now. I don't know. Okay. Some people are just listening. That's fine. Okay. What's going on? What's the first question? Okay. First question comes from Charlie Bleeker. At Bleeker Charlie. Let's talk about the process.

How much preparation goes into a podcast interview? Are your follow-up questions written now or do they come naturally in the moment how long did it take you to interview well uh for example no filler words stumbling etc i still don't interview well i stumble you do i stutter no you do interview well uh i appreciate the compliment i don't think so i think i can improve drastically i say um and ah and a bunch of stuff i say right um makes sense little kind of filler words so I can get rid of those. In terms of preparation, it varies. There are some that I do a lot of preparation, but majority I don't do a lot of preparation. I either ask the guest for specific topics that they think would be fun to talk about. I come with my own topics and questions,

but usually those questions, like I know most of the people who come on the podcast, so there are questions that I already had. And the reason why I'm asking them to come on the podcast is because I want to talk to them about something specific, whether it's them, an idea they had, a business they've run, a view of the world, whatever it is. And so part of the magic, I think of the podcast, Charlie, is that I literally just ask the questions that I have. I don't really worry about what does the audience think. It's my personal curiosity. And so far, that's proven to be super valuable. So I'll keep doing it. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. When I interview someone not that you guys care but like when i interview someone i over prepare and i have

to write out every question he doesn't do that he just jumps on and is like let's see where this takes us which i think is a great skill to have yeah it's just like a natural exploration of who is this person what are their ideas and why do they care about what they care about i love it but aren't you ever scared that you didn't ask them something that you should have asked them and then later gone back and been like oh i should have asked that but i didn't do my research no i just email them and ask them the question. The audience doesn't get to hear it, but like, I still get my answer. Okay. All right. What's the next question? TK at crypto TSK asks, who have you learned the most from? Who is your most requested guest that you haven't yet

interviewed? Um, who have I learned the most from? I'll keep it to somebody on the podcast. It's really hard to pick one person. I've learned so much from so many different people. um i would say that the people i've learned the most from usually end up having the most views because other people learn as well so if you think of just the top uh the top downloaded episodes i think it's like chamath uh raul paul uh mark yusko uh peter zahan mark cuban uh kathy wood like those are the people probably that uh everyone would seem that they've learned the most from. One of my favorites that didn't actually do as well as I thought it was going to do was with Keith Rebois from Founders Fund. I've known Keith for a little bit. I just generally think

that he's an incredibly intelligent guy. And the way that he kind of breaks down problems and the mental frameworks he uses are super interesting to me. So he's probably somebody who's not up there. And then another person that I thought was really interesting was Daryl Morey, the GM of the Houston Rockets. I really enjoy talking with him. So I think there's a lot of people in terms of, what was the second part of the question? It was, who is your most requested guest that you haven't yet interviewed? The most requested thing around podcasts, everyone keeps telling me to go on Joe Rogan's podcast as if like, I'm just going to call Joe and go like, that's not how it works. In terms of people who want a guest to come on, I think

i've pretty much got most of the guests maybe bill ackman uh is one yeah well nobody's asking me to interview beyonce oh i am okay uh but i think bill ackman's probably the one that uh i'm still working on trying to get him um they're open to it so so we'll see but uh he's probably the one that's the most requests that i haven't done yet so it is interesting that you know you've interviewed a lot of people and you just mentioned the ones you've learned from yet i have been on your podcast and i wasn't on that list we'll just keep going okay what what is the next question okay we'll have at this conversation later at michelle mclennan at mish mclennan is the mish underscore mclennan where do you begin in learning about bitcoin and what are the most

reputable resources on Bitcoin? I send people to three things. I say the first thing you should do is you should read the Bitcoin white paper. I tend to think that that is still today one of the best resources to understand what Bitcoin is and how it was intended to be used. The second thing that I send people to is Jamison Lopp has a fantastic resource page. I think it's lopp.net slash bitcoin.html, maybe. That is just a fantastic thing. It's got all kinds of links and videos, and it's just like a rabbit hole unto itself. And then the third thing I send them to is the Bitcoin Standard, the book that Safe Dean wrote. I tend to think that that is a great resource as well. And so those are the three things I tell people to start with. And if they can kind of

get through those materials, I think they'll come out on the other side very informed and kind of have a good understanding of not only uh what bitcoin is why it's important and what it's going to solve in the legacy system thank you for that question michelle next up is henning at at henning wow what a so it's the at sign at underscore henning h-e-n-n-i-g i like this question if you were 18 years old again what would you have done differently if i was 18 years old um well first what were you doing at 18 at 18 I had just gotten to college and I was playing college football and being a shithead student uh my entire freshman year I pretty much didn't know where the library was on campus to give you an idea that probably wasn't the smartest move um and then at uh 20 I

got deployed to Iraq so pretty much 18 to 20 was like a normal college kid and then 20 you know kind of went sideways there. Um, but if I could go back to 18, I think the two things that I would say to myself was, um, one surround yourself with people that have done what you want to do. Uh, that took me a little bit in life to, to understand that. And then the second thing that I probably would have done differently is I would have actually not gone to class. I would have done that even more of a bare minimum. Uh, and I would have spent way more time learning about the things that I personally cared about and would have used college as a way to do that. In terms of advice for my 18 year old self, I think I would literally just tell myself, go bigger, go faster, and don't

worry about making mistakes. I feel like you didn't worry about that. Yeah, but it was always kind of in the back of my head of like, oh, don't screw up. Because like, no matter how much of an independent thinker you are or like you don't care about other people's opinion you still are scared of like oh my god like for those who don't know uh out of school I started uh two separate companies and so never like went to a job interview or anything while I was in college but you're still like oh my god if these companies don't work like I have to have something to fall back on in a safety net and just like that fear drove me to do things that ended up being a waste the time. Interesting. At Steven. Just read their handle. At S-O-U-S-T-E-C-K-Y. At Susteki.

What do you think about a hybrid monetary policy, like using a neutral hard asset like Bitcoin as collateral for central bank currencies? Seems like a win for everyone, including Bitcoin. I think that we will see that happen, but it will be a stepping stone to kind of a hyper Bitcoinized world. And what that basically means is there was rumors already that Venezuela's central bank was putting Bitcoin and Ether into their reserves at the central bank. I do not know if that was actually true or not. It was a rumor that was floating around. It probably is pretty hard to confirm either way. But I think that that will happen in the future. They put gold there, so why would they not eventually put Bitcoin? And I think we'll see everyone from the countries

that operate on the fringe, like the Venezuela's, the Iran's, North Korea's, and are kind of sanctioned prone to countries that are superpowers, whether it's the United States, Russia, China, et cetera. And so I do think that it'll happen. It's just not the end state. It is merely a step in the direction of eventually Bitcoin rising to be the global reserve currency. At can Jimmy play? Can Jimmy play? I don't know. Jimmy, can you play? if the price of Bitcoin is less than $17,000 at the end of 2022, what do you do with your BTC investment? Hold it in C or invest in other things? So this is my personal thing. This is

obviously not investment advice. For me personally, what I'm going to do is the investment that I've made in Bitcoin, I will not touch as of right now. Of course, if information changes, like, I don't know, Bitcoin gets hacked or something crazy happens, then I'll reevaluate. But right now I look at it very much like a venture investment. It's either going to be worth an incredible amount more than it is today over whether it's years or decades, or it's going to be worth very little and worth much less than it is today. I tend to obviously think it'll be worth way more. But when it's a venture investment, what you basically start to learn is you don't want to be your own worst enemy. And so I'll basically allow the investment to play out. I have a super,

super long time horizon. I've basically made the investment and forgot about the money to some Biggery and we'll see what happens. At Chris Vonheim. Ah, Chris. Oh, you did a podcast with him. I did. What have you changed your mind about over this crazy year and why? Could be a personal one or an economic viewpoint? That's a great question. I would say two things probably I've changed my mind on. The first is definitely from an economic standpoint, the Federal Reserve's power to inflate asset prices and how fast and strong they can do it. So we've seen a complete dislocation between the economic realities on the ground with stock prices. We have stocks hitting all-time highs, yet there's 45 plus million Americans that are unemployed. All of

that type of stuff you guys have probably heard over and over again from me and others. And so i think the way that i look at it is uh that definitely underestimated how that would work uh oh look at this i'm gonna i'm gonna get a little light going here you're blinded but okay it's all right um hold on a second guys making my hair look even more crazy well they don't have crazy hair um all right so that's first of all then a thing that i think personally um i've spent a bunch of time going back and forth on should companies raise venture capital? Should they not? Who fits in what bucket? And I think that the more time I've spent thinking about it, the more that I realize most companies should not raise venture capital. And not only should they not

raise venture capital, but actually the venture capital could kill them. And so I don't know if that's not why I've changed my mind as much as I've gotten a much deeper conviction in it. And it's caused me to change certain actions that i take uh both from an entrepreneur standpoint but also from an investing standpoint do you have a personal one a personal one plena and i have survived uh being locked up for four months together so that's pretty good i didn't change i didn't change my mind yeah i was gonna say that's actually a lack of change my mind oh interesting okay um all right i could have changed my mind okay i'm like i'm out see you so at andre simon 20 has a concern isn't a btc standard just replacing the one percent elite gold standard

proved not to be good i think we need to change the system slash engine not the fuel still i like btc and i believe it will change a few things but not enough so i think that we actually believe the same thing he is saying something that uh is a little bit short-sighted in the sense of I believe that Bitcoin changes the system. It's not just changing the fuel, it's changing the actual engine. Because ultimately what you're doing is you're doing two things that are very important. One, you're removing the human nature involved in managing money. So literally you're going to remove the equivalent of all central banks around the world. There is incredible power and there's a structure and ownership that comes with those central banks. And so by removing them,

you quite literally are changing the system. The second thing that I would say is there is a kind of ripple effect or a cascading effect by changing the money. Or as my friend Marty Bent says a lot, he says, you know, fix the money, fix the world. Basically, by fixing the money, you fix a lot of other things, everything from the overconsumption in societies to literally wealth inequality gap, all that kind of stuff. And so it's the single point of failure in the legacy system that causes the most damage and so if you can basically fix that or improve it i think bitcoin does that you then can also kind of have the ripple effect of improving all the other things and so it's the ultimate changing of the system or improving of the system very interesting at caveman cj

what is the most simple yet profound statement about bitcoin that you can tell someone to make them a believer my favorite one i don't know if it's the most profound or anything like that My favorite one to tell people is, do you think the system's broken? And most people will say yes. And then I tell them, Bitcoin is a peaceful protest about leaving that system. And they immediately go, what do you mean? And it's intriguing enough to get them to ask questions and try to understand it more. And so I like to go down the path of like, hey, this is a protest of the existing system done in a peaceful way, because it's just enough kind of revolutionary and intriguing and kind of pulls on certain emotional strings to get somebody to ask questions and dig deeper. But at the same time, it's still accurate enough to clearly articulate this is something that is outside of the system or something that is going to be quite different than the existing system. There's a whole lot of systems that are broken, just FYI. Okay. At Grant's Own, what's your bare thesis for Bitcoin? Does unlimited QE help or hurt Bitcoin in the next three to five years? The more money they print, the more bullish it is

for Bitcoin in my personal opinion. My bare thesis is, and I've continued to say this for a while now, the number one way that Bitcoin suffers or ultimately ends up being not valuable is from a self-inflicted wound. And so that can be everything from literally a software bug is introduced in the development process. Obviously, there's a lot of things in place to try to mitigate those, but that's one possibility. Another possibility is that there's some sort of Bitcoiners that participate in like a 51% attack or something like that. Again, unlikely, there's things in place to try to mitigate that, but that's potential. And also we've seen in history how that hasn't worked. And then the last thing that I would say is the bear thesis, I'm not going to

put this in the bear thesis category, but it is a potential bear thesis. So I actually don't think it'll be a bear situation. Many people do, is outright banning of ownership in the United States or elsewhere. So if the US government said, hey, we're going to ban ownership of Bitcoin, obviously that would have a short-term negative impact. I personally think it would have a very, very positive long-term impact uh but nobody knows for sure and so some people would put that in the bearish category i'd put it in kind of the neutral to positive category um but you know hopefully we never find out uh malquist 19 how did you get your lady into crypto asking for a friend she's not into crypto that that's the truth uh i understand i appreciate it yeah plena one

understands uh much more than most people obviously she just hears me blabbing about it all the time two is uh she grew up in eastern europe and literally when she was growing up uh her home country of bulgaria went through their own version of hyperinflation um and so she and her family uh experienced that and then the third thing that i would say is uh we take a very um interesting type of, uh, investment strategy between the two of us. Uh, I take lots and lots of risk and, uh, we've consciously made a decision for Polina to do, uh, as little risk as possible in her portfolio. Um, and so, uh, so far, so good. Yeah. I think just if you're talking about getting her interested in it, I think that, um, just explaining it in a way that makes sense and

has it explains the practical applications of it helps okay um at woa naz it's at woa but his name is noah you see so i got confused i know okay so woa naz do you see did you see anything in the army that changed your perception of your country yeah i think any soldier who's ever, uh, gone to combat zone, uh, basically starts to see war for what it is. Um, there's an agenda and, uh, that's true of every single war ever in history. Uh, some of it is, um, very much, uh, explainable and kind of, uh, reasonable. Um, then there's other times where, uh, people are just like, why are we here? What are we doing? Um, and I think that, uh, that is an eyeopening experience, especially for a 20, 21-year-old soldier who kind of joined for what most people

would say are like the quote-unquote right reasons of patriotism and things like that. And the second thing that I would say is war is this really weird place where you see the best of humanity and you also see the worst of humanity. And sometimes you can see that in the same moment or in the same day. And so I think you just get a lot of kind of whiplash in terms of the extremes of humanity, uh, it can leave you very jaded. It can leave you actually very positive on humanity. Um, and so I think that's probably one of the things that, uh, was most interesting was just like, I mean, I came back and I, most people who know me know that like, when I came back, I was like, I could die at any second. Like I'm going to have the most fun ever

in life. And I just, I didn't necessarily go wild in the sense of like people think like partying and doing all that kind of stuff. But I just took this approach of like, I'm going to live life to the fullest. And a friend of mine used to say in high school, anything worth doing is worth overdoing. And I kind of take that to heart of just like that. I tend to agree that that's a pretty good way to look at life. Well, I disagree with that. But what I will say is he never gets stressed. I worry about every little thing and you just never worry, which may be your best quality and stress does not affect you in the same way that it affects other humans. Is it because you keep that in the back of your mind i i've talked about this before i basically compartmentalize

things and i evaluate every single potential stressful thing or threat or whatever as can i die no it's not important but that's tough right why because there's so many things that are not imminent death but you still get stressed about like family family's health family members health like things like that that you know you worry about i can't do anything about it so it's what's your control yeah just am i gonna die no okay then i can't stress about it maybe i can uh you know talk to them or whatever i just don't get stressed why would i get stressed these are the conversations we have guys um okay patrick calany at p calan naley sorry i butcher that at p calan naley serious question i really like this question can you dive into i read the internet would love

to know how you find, filter, and consume information. So for those that don't know, Plina and I do a daily YouTube show. And there's many times where I don't know the topics beforehand. Plina will start talking about something. It's so annoying. And I'll start rattling off stats or intricacies of the story. And she'll look at me and say, how do you know that? And I'll always respond in a very arrogant and obnoxious way with, I read the internet. And so what that really means is I just spend a lot of time consuming information. And I try my best to make sure that it's high quality information. Obviously there's no filter that's perfect. In terms of where I get that information. What's your best filter? Yeah. Yeah. Where I get the information,

I would say there's three main sources. So one is I have the advantage and pleasure of talking to many of the smartest, wealthiest, most successful people in the world for the podcast. And so many of those people I've met before and then bring them on the podcast, but there's plenty of people who I'm meeting for the kind of the first time as well. Um, but those conversations are incredibly, uh, valuable in terms of just being well-educated and well-read and kind of understanding many parts of the world. Another thing is, uh, on Twitter, um, I follow a lot of people, uh, and I pretty much have, you know, kind of mentally in a very loose way, categorize people of like high signal, low signal. Some people I literally follow just for the memes. Uh, and I

don't take anything they say too seriously. Some people I follow, uh, literally from like a competitive analysis standpoint of the companies we're uh invested in or something like that and then some people i follow because i think they're incredibly intelligent and i literally turn on notifications and when they tweet i want to see what they're saying um and the last thing i would say is i read a lot of uh newsletters um and podcasts listen yeah i listen to podcasts too yeah but the newsletters i think are much more uh kind of informative in terms of like current events and what's going on and analysis and things like that the podcast to me are much more uh they replace something akin to like business school, if you will. So, uh, I want to hear people's

stories. I want to hear how they did certain things, why they made certain decisions in their past, how they worked out, will they do things differently? Things like that. And so podcasts I listened to are, uh, Joe Rogan, Tim Ferriss, Jocko Wilnick, uh, Eric Weinstein, uh, Patrick O'Shaughnessy's invest like the best, uh, 20 minute VC, Harry Stebbings. Um, there's a whole bunch of them, but those are all, can you share the newsletters you read? Uh, newsletters that I read the ones that i open every single week without fail uh one is the profile for sure the profiles is uh both because she would hold a gun to my head and also because i actually enjoy read the profile.com uh that's the one that i read uh for sure every week uh a second one is i uh

read peter zahan uh pretty much every single day i think he's pretty good um plina is going to kill for this. One of the people who I think is very intelligent, plenty used to write a better newsletter, but doesn't anymore. No, this is not true. He has a great newsletter. Is Dan Primack at Axios. Don't act like I... I think Dan just has a very nuanced way to look at the world. I really enjoyed Josh Constantine's work. And then there's like a bunch of other ones that I don't actually subscribe to. What I do is I wait till people that I know are high signal, tweet them, and then I go click and read them. And so I basically am waiting for like other people to filter the ones that are the highest

quality. And then when they tweet them, then I go read them. But I just know who those people are that are likely to one, have a good filter and to also, uh, tend to share the things that they read. Sorry. Can I just dig into that a little bit more? Sure. Okay. Um, how do you identify somebody as high signal? Uh, it's somebody who, whether I agree with what they're saying or not, it's obvious that they have a very strong mental framework for how they think through things. And actually another thing would be people that I've seen change their mind in public is a great one. And then a third thing I would say is something beautiful about Twitter is like, it's not just kind of your best self put forward. So somebody may say something and

people will respond and then they get engaged in a conversation and you can pretty quickly tell like oh that person is intelligent or like that person had a pr person write that tweet and like literally i don't know like they just have water in their in their skull right like there's no there's no brains in there um and and so i think that uh you can just kind of triangulate it there's no like science to it's more of an art but uh once you get to that point then you're just like hey what are other smart people i know reading um and so that's what i want to do ben uh thompson's a strategy obviously that's like a no-brainer uh i read too jane parish i like yeah foreign i'm sure i read on sunday also like all right okay um at matt 0 16 7 1 4 0 4 uh you recently

went on the bill burr burt podcast bill burt podcast what is it bill burt podcast i thought it was burr his name is bill burr but then he's a co-host sorry okay was bill burr more receptive to Bitcoin at the end than you anticipated? Nuanced answer, but a lot of people don't remember this. Bill Burr was an absolute animal back in the 2008 crisis and coming out of it. He was just roasting the Federal Reserve. Go Google or go on YouTube and type in Bill Burr Federal Reserve,

like hilarious takedown to the Federal Reserve. So he's actually very, very well versed in finance, the Federal Reserve, monetary system, things like that. uh he doesn't let on as much uh which makes it funnier um but he's very intelligent obviously burt was much less up the curve uh and he i think he even said that in the podcast like he was just learning and was super fascinated by everything um in terms of the receptiveness i did not expect bill burr to say on the podcast like you know screw it i'm gonna go buy bitcoin that uh yes you obviously listen oh no i and then uh in terms of burt like burt very quickly grabbed on to

things that are nuanced in terms of mining and things like that. So I generally think that people who would reach out to me and say, Hey, like, will you come on and talk about Bitcoin? They're open minded already. There's some level of interest or intrigue. But to see kind of how far down the rabbit hole they went so quickly was awesome. Cool. At Travis Regler, you were, Oh, what are you doing? Cleaning the screen. You were in the military before. How did you pivot to a job at Facebook. I'm trying to learn programming to pivot to a software engineer and I'm finding it to be difficult. Um, so I didn't necessarily go from the military right into, uh, into the software. I don't know why this light's being weird, but it's okay. Um, in terms of, uh, how

I got there. So I was in the army. Um, and then I went back to school basically after deployment. And at that point, I decided to start a company. We claimed that it was successful, but frankly, it was not nearly as successful as we wanted it to be. And it was kind of a great learning experience. I basically didn't lose money, which was a win in my book at the time. The second company that I started then went much better. And that really allowed me to kind of springboard in. So what I would say is, there's two ways to build a resume that can get you into one of the tech companies, uh, large tech companies. Uh, the first is you can go the traditional path through education, or the second thing is you can build things that they find

interesting. Um, and they being people who work at the companies, uh, and that's essentially how I got in was, uh, I'd built some tools around, um, social data that, um, uh, people at Facebook had, had found interesting. And so I ended up getting the, uh, the job that way. Okay. Uh, GNN, oh God, Glasgow, besides regulation and opposition from the banking industry, what do you imagine is crypto's biggest hurdle to widespread common usage for individuals and businesses time time for just takes time like you're literally asking people to go use new products or to go use new money it takes time to build trust like it's only 10 years old gold's been around for 5 000 years the u.s dollar not backed by gold's been around since 1971 like

this stuff just takes a long time and um you know that's a super shitty answer in the sense of people want it to be immediate, but at the end of the day, it literally just takes more time. And so I think that people have to kind of have something called urgent patience, which means on a day-to-day basis, you have to have a sense of urgency and get things done and keep iterating and building and shipping products and kind of really pushing the pace of innovation in the short term, but also understand and be able to zoom out and have kind of the intellectual honesty of like, hey, this isn't going to happen overnight. Like Bitcoin is a multi-decade play and you have to be comfortable with the fact that you've got to work your ass off every single day in the short

term in order to earn the right for Bitcoin to be successful over decades. So what I found interesting is that last year we were in Bulgaria and literally my grandmother, who does not speak English, and Anthony were talking through me as a translator about Bitcoin. Like she knew more than I think I expected my grandmother in Bulgaria to know. So do you think that... Just so people know, she's an accountant and her boss is at work she works at a pretty large you know a pretty large corporation her boss is at work uh we're mining bitcoin and so she basically like they had told her about it but she's in her 60s no uh yes yes she is she's in her 60s and she lives in bulgaria uh literally like in the suburbs not suburbs like on a farm basically uh and um plinth is laughing

because it's a villa uh and um she knew about bitcoin and like and didn't know just like oh i've heard of bitcoin like was able to explain to me like oh my bosses are mining with computers to earn bitcoin things like that and so i think again like that that's that is an outlier like most people in bulgaria probably don't know about bitcoin no but my question was do you think that adoption is gonna vary based on geography like different places do you think it'll the time the time that it takes to adopt it is significantly shorter in some of course like if your currency fails tomorrow all of a sudden you're like shit i need dollars or what's the next best thing yeah right and so of course there's things that can happen to accelerate it but but overall on a

global basis if you kind of average everything out it's just going to take time uh at jimmy mac 257 what company are you investing in that you think can create the must-have app that can drive complete mainstream crypto adoption? People hate this answer, but it's Bitcoin. I ultimately think Bitcoin is going to be the killer app. I think Bitcoin is going to be the most popular product. And there will be all kinds of things built around it, whether it's wallets, it's exchanges, every piece of infrastructure you can imagine, neobanks, the whole nine years, payment processors, whatever. But ultimately, Bitcoin is going to be the core of all of this. It's already done a fantastic job over 11 years. I think it's only getting started. It will continue.

and I'm pretty honest with the idea that I believe Bitcoin will be the next global reserve currency. And the whole idea is that we don't need humans in order to kind of control or manipulate the currency. We can have a programmatic, transparent, well-understood monetary policy. And I think Bitcoin provides that.

Okay, I like this question. At Satoshi underscore fever, if Paulina's portfolio outperforms yours, will there be trouble in the household? Polina will be a billionaire before me. Fact. How do you know that? Somebody today. But I do believe in Polina more than she believes in herself sometimes. No, that's not true. Sometimes it's true, but I appreciate you believing in me because I believe in myself. Okay. Anyway. So we always joke that, um, I, there's some

products that I use that he has never heard of. And then they like get sold for a crazy lot of money. It's not just some products. Polina has been an early user of like six different companies that end up going on to be billion dollar companies what are they millennial women glossier rent the runway stitch fix uh drunk elephant what was the one canva canva was like the earliest user um yeah you're using canva in like 2013 14 13 oh i don't know whatever whatever but like so it does go to this whole idea of like millennial women or younger girls tend to actually be uh on top of these trends uh they gossip a lot so they talk to each other and they spread stuff through word about well gossip being like word of mouth they just spread stuff by the way guys

gossip too it's just they just gossip about dumb shit like what's the score of the football game they don't talk about like yo dude did you see the new face wash i have yeah no totally and glossier used to be a cult blog before it was ever a company so if you knew it through that you know also i was uh an early subscriber of the skim like all that stuff what's next next ready yeah wait where was i oh no okay we're recording this at nine o'clock so those who are watching the video and think that we look tired it's not that we're tired oh i don't look tired at all i look great at louise guillaume question who are the five non-obvious people you have consistently read and followed for over a year in terms of valuable signal or

perspective in any category also choices don't have to be twitter or podcasts this is really hard because the people that i've probably followed for a long time like over a year on the internet they probably get discovered by most people like i was early investor no no but just like so here's a good example of somebody who like recently lots and lots of people started to pay attention to uh blake robbins at ludlow ventures uh blake has been on top of media consumer technology gaming like a bunch of things um and uh i've always just kind of like uh i met him i don't know a couple years ago always thought he was a very intelligent guy again great mental frameworks really understood things um was very personable uh was willing to admit when he changed

his mind like all the things that i look for in people who i think are intelligent um but now he's like you know was recently on patrick o'shaughnessy's invest like the best podcast uh he's met pretty much everyone in venture everyone likes him so like he's kind of no longer like a secret commodity if you will um in terms of like his thoughts and ideas um in terms of other people that i think are interesting um can i nominate can i say morgan housel morgan housel is fantastic yeah but like again like he's like a known person now right so like most of the people who end up being good end up getting exposed and exposed in a positive way. Like Shane Parrish is another one, right? Like even you, right? Like when you started three years ago, nobody knew about the profile. Now,

all of a sudden tens of thousands of people know about it. Right. So it's like, if you do something on the internet for long enough and have consistency of high quality, like eventually you get discovered. And that's like a really weird thing to say. Cause most people think it's like around like old musician or a performer or something, but it's also true of like intellectuals as well. Okay. At Dylan Coke 2, if BTC is to exceed a 10X return, do you think that stifles innovation in the short term because entrepreneurs would rather stack sats than start a business? No, I think most entrepreneurs, especially in the venture world, they're using other people's money to build the businesses. So they're not necessarily going to not use their money to start

a business. If anything, if Bitcoin ends up appreciating a ton in US dollar value, it'll bring more and more people who want to build products around Bitcoin. So it actually will lead to more business creation rather than less. Lane or Ian Dunn, 24. What happens first? Giants win another Superbowl or humans on Mars? Damn. Damn. I think humans on Mars. Ian, come on, bro. Come on, man. Don't be coming at me like that. Giants are going to win another Superbowl. Don't worry. We got Daniel Jones, Saquon, game on. Let's go. By the way, if the giants go eight and eight that means they got a shot to win the super bowl if we do really well in the regular season we're getting bounced first round of playoffs yeah you get bounced that's

right um okay oh do you think the light is like that because i moved i don't know at bully-esque son at bully esquire oh sorry that's not what it says okay you know the guy you call crypto bully this is a parody account oh my god crypto oh but this is not the crypto bully oh well it's his son so um at a pompliano will you run for presidency in 2024 no uh i like my private life um i have zero interest in politics but uh i would love to be first lady or what i will say is uh i believe that somebody's gonna win on this ticket and uh if somebody put a gun to my head and said you had to run what would your strategy be um i would not run as an individual i would put together a team and I would run as like, as a team. Well, here's what I would say is, okay, here's the president.

Here's the vice president. Here's, uh, every single person that's in the cabinet here. Like here's everybody. And then I would go to the debates and they asked me a question about national security. I'd say, listen, I understand enough about national security to answer this question, but actually I have this expert who's on my team. I'm going to defer to them and delegate this. What do you think? And what I would do is basically I would bring the smartest people and the most experienced people in the world together. And I would say to the American people that, look, you're not voting for me, you're voting for this team. And I'm not arrogant enough to believe that I'm an expert in all these different things or the best, most well-versed. Instead,

I'm going to build a team that together, we cannot be beaten by anyone in the world. Yeah. So to add to that, one interesting thing you've told me is that when you worked at Facebook, you genuinely believed that the company was successful because it brought in some of the smartest people at the time around a table and was able to iterate on many things. Can you talk about the importance of having like a team of incredibly smart people? When people respect each other and they know that everyone there is intelligent, like people would literally say things like, well, you got in here, so like you're not an idiot, right? And when you respect each other and you are all bought into the goal of solving a problem, it's incredible what can

happen. There's very special things. I think politics is a great example where what you do is when you build that team, you actually build it in a bipartisan way. So you literally have Republicans, Democrats, and independents all on the team so that there's no kind of party politics or any of that stuff. And you basically just show up and say, listen, here's the deal. We as a team all believe in these core principles, and we are going to do everything we can to accomplish these goals. And any problem that comes up, we feel like we have the intellectual horsepower and the experience and expertise on our team to solve it. And by the way, if you think you as an individual who we are running against is smarter than us, knock yourself out. But as the American

people, are you going to vote for a team of experts? Are you going to vote for one person? And I think that somebody will win with that strategy. I don't know if that's in 2024 or beyond, but I just see that being a very, very strong strategy, especially in the world that we live today with digital media. At GlamSats, explaining Bitcoin to people is challenging. What's your advice? It's money. That's it. Money is a belief system. So is Bitcoin. That's why it has value. And then literally, I always go to the Monopoly example. So many of you probably heard me say it, but I basically say, look, when you play Monopoly, there's four people sitting down at a table. Everyone puts their bank balance in front of them, right? All of their money. Then there's

a bank where there's no actual banker, right? Somebody in the game is just close to it and they are doing everything. But the reason why monopoly works is because you can see every single transaction that occurs, all of the transactions between people and also the transactions with the bank. And it's simply because of transparency. If you play with somebody who puts the money underneath the table, then all of a sudden everyone thinks they're cheating. So you say, hey, put the money back on top of the table. Same thing with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is essentially a digital version of that transparent system of transactions. And it's just done in a super secure way that is backed by the strongest competing network in the world.

And what I saw monopoly example. Yeah. It's just super easy. Like people, everyone's playing monopoly, right? And if you haven't, then like you're missing out. Yeah. Like get, get together. Okay. Um, at rye three done, what is your least favorite part about having a podcast? Least favorite. I got no complaints. Like even the things that are when I walk behind you in the kitchen. Yeah. Like, I mean like the, even the parts that are like less desirable are still Awesome. I literally have no complaints at all. I say it all the time. It's the most selfish thing I do. I learned so much from the podcast. I record the conversation so other people can hear it. But ultimately, I'm asking the questions I'm intellectually curious about. And so it's super

self-serving from a learning perspective for me. I'm very thankful that all of you listened to it. Literally, thank you. That's why I'm doing this right now. I'm trying to answer as many questions as I can. But ultimately, there's nothing that I can complain about. I got a pretty good life. you do have a great life um at c gloda who outside of your john did what's up man he's been on podcast oh cool who outside of your immediate family has most influenced you in life and how so i saw this this little uh cheating here um now plin is my family so she doesn't count um but what i would say is good cover for not answering me what i would say here is um the most influential people are actually people that nobody would recognize. Um, when I went to, uh,

Iraq at 20 years old, um, there was a number of guys who, uh, it sounds cliche, but like, they literally forced me to grow up and like, not necessarily become a man, but in the sense of, I was a 20 year old, like shit head kid playing college football, uh, going to class barely. Um, and like wondering like, when's the next party. Right. Uh, and then I was thrown into this environment where I deployed, uh, with a number of guys who are much older than me, many of them kind of in the early to mid thirties, uh, they had wives, they had kids, they had mortgages, like they were, you know, grownups, uh, in my mind. Um, and I used to give them shit like you guys are old, but really what they ended up teaching me, uh, is they taught me about personal

responsibility. Um, you know, frankly, they helped keep me safe. I hopefully kept them safe. Uh, and they basically just gave me this edge of like, no bullshit. We get things done, uh, and we're going home. And I think that that like mental fortitude or, um, mental sharpness and kind of strength, uh, hopefully I still kind of use it today, but you know, guys like, uh, if they're listening, they'll get a crack out of this. Um, but guys like, you know, uh, Tony Weber, mickey lee stormer uh cash you know cash i like that name yeah we're not gonna use his real name we just use cash um okay you know uh there's all kinds of guys like literally i can think of so many and i'll just use them because they were probably the ones i was the closest with uh

but i think they're probably the most influential in that sense that's cool i like that second best to me but yes i like that um at deep pop off oh pop off seven have you been in bulgaria if yes what did you like the most and please don't say the identical donkey carriages on the streets uh yeah i've been to bulgaria a couple of times i don't know what three four times now um and uh the part that i like the most is it's what i like about everywhere like humans are human so you can literally go anywhere in the world uh i don't speak though i i don't know what i know i know five sentences, seven sentences, something like that. I can basically say that Polina's annoying me. I can tell everyone in her family, I love them. I can tell every woman in her family that

they're beautiful. I can ask where the bathroom is. I can say no. You can say yes. Yeah, I can say yes. And I've got down the fact that Bulgarians, when they are saying yes, they shake their head left and right. And when they say no, they're nodding up and down, which is the opposite of Americans. So I'm pretty well versed for an American dude. But I think that just from a human perspective uh it doesn't matter if i speak the language or not like you can just get along with people um and uh it's pretty cool just to see kind of that humanity in uh in other countries he struck a friendship with my grandmother's like 85 year old neighbor uh who has all sorts of animals in his thing and he always asks about him and yeah that's my guy but the uh the second

the first time i ever met him i don't know if we heard those story but the first time i ever met him i was sitting in her grandma's villa not her farm but the villa and all of a sudden i heard a commotion behind me and you know i'm an american dude i just jumped up and was like what the hell is going on and all of a sudden here comes this guy uh you know relatively older um kind of bumbling in and he's got a uh a wheelbarrow and it's covered with a piece of tin on top of it and the guys literally got on like adidas slides sandals a uh sweatpants um like kind of an old looking jacket and a, uh, a hat, like a winter hat. And, uh, you know, it looks like me, maybe he didn't shower the last couple of days and he comes in. And so like, I didn't know who he was

and Polina wasn't standing there. So I couldn't be like, who is this guy? And all of a sudden he's got this grin on his face. He's just looking at me and he's like hype. And I'm like, okay, I think this is like a friendly situation. Uh, and then her grandmother comes and Polina comes all stuff and they're like, Oh, he's the neighbor. He's the neighbor. Um, and they're like help with the wheelbarrow yeah help with the wheelbarrow so i'm like helping with the wheelbarrow what the hell is in this thing it's like pretty heavy and all of a sudden this guy like he can't wait till i get the wheelbarrow down into uh kind of like me at the door and all of a sudden he starts pointing at me pointing at the wheelbarrow and he pulls off the tin and in the tin uh underneath

the tin in the wheelbarrow was literally he had taken one of the sheep that he's it's lamb it's lamb oh yeah basically what he's done is uh he has literally since birth taken care of this animal uh and he killed it and cooked it because i was there so crazy it's just lamb oh yeah but like but the fact that like he was yeah he was so kind and like and he was so happy like literally he was happiest doing something for somebody else uh it was just a really cool experience they paid him for it but yes it was a kind gesture oh they paid him yeah damn they tricked him i thought the guy just liked me but he did he did he knew americans yeah now he liked it he liked the money okay i see how this works. At equity pool, what are your goals that you've set for your podcast,

YouTube newsletters over the next five years? I don't do five-year goals. Um, I pretty much only set goals, uh, for the year. And even that's like a stretch for me. Um, a lot of times it's just, you know, a month to six months, um, mainly because the world changes too much in five years. And like my personal interest changes so much like today I'm 32 years old. Uh, and, um, I have a fiance but not married no kids etc like when you're five years later your life is so different so how can you actually set a goal um that's five years away that's pretty hard uh and then second of all is like things change so like what's a newsletter today that platform may evolve or do something different so it's just really hard to set those goals in terms of uh this year the goals

were um to get the podcast to a million downloads per month we already hit that uh to get youtube to a hundred thousand subscribers, uh, which was going to be like a 20 X for us. Uh, we're at like 75, 76,000. So we're kind of ahead of schedule there. Uh, and the newsletter, I didn't really set any goals. It was more of just like basically just keep consistently pumping out the content every morning. Um, and to me, that's more of like a discipline and consistency thing. And so far we've kept that. So, so far so good for the year, but, uh, but I don't know necessarily what all of this becomes. Uh, I don't have some master plan. I just kind of keep rolling with the punches and making decisions on a day-to-day basis that i think is the right thing to do at james lack

six when you're up what are you optimistic about for 2021 and beyond that others may be more bearish outside of bitcoin uh i'm long humans in long america like i i generally think that right now a lot of people are looking around and being like man america is getting torn apart like civil wars on the horizon um you know innovation has gone out the window uh there's a incredible encroachment on civil liberties and personal freedoms, you know, all the things that you just see people talking about. Um, I agree with a lot of that stuff actually in the short term, but just over a long period of time, uh, I tend to be just very, very long American ingenuity, creativity, and entrepreneurial spirit. And so, uh, that's probably the one that right now, especially in

an economic shock, a pandemic, all this crazy shit that's going on in 2020. Um, I tend to be, uh, pretty optimistic over a long period of time. But what do you think that, do you think that, you know, especially if America becomes more closed off and we don't allow immigrants in as much as we used to, do you think they'll go to other countries and build businesses? I don't worry about that as much because I don't think that that's a long-term sustainable thing is to close off your country. I generally think that the internet and other technologies are globalizing the world rather than nationalizing things. Yeah, sure. There's certain, whether it's politicians or individuals or wealthy elites, you know, whatever that, that want different things,

but generally the trend is towards globalization. Um, and we also live in the most prosperous safe time in human history. Like if you look at the long-term trends, uh, that tends to be good to look at demographics, like Peter Zahan talks about this a lot, the demographics, the demographics of the United States are incredible compared to a lot of countries around the world. Um, and it generally is just summed up as like, if anyone's going to get through this, it's America. And if we can't then okay then everyone else can have a really hard time too that and by the way that's not like american exceptionalism in terms of like we have to win everyone has to lose it's more so like it's not a binary game and i grew up here i was born here i live here now and so i generally

want to see like my fellow citizens and my country do well uh it doesn't have to be at the expense of other countries i actually want to see everyone do well it just feels like uh i spent a lot of evaluating and analyzing america we have all the ingredients necessary to be successful in the future is this your platform for 2024 no you guys ain't gonna see me okay i i would like go to one debate and i would drop like six f-bombs and just be like you're an idiot and then then it works would censor you and then okay yeah and then they'd be like you're not invited back at i entrepreneur within a nascent industry that is attacking legacy systems for finance how do you position building your brand and thought leadership for blockchain crypto and entrepreneurship in general

yeah a lot of people ask me about this brand building stuff like i don't think about it i don't focus on building my brand no i just know you accidentally built or not accidentally but by writing a newsletter every morning that is your brand yeah but i i just the the lesson i have for everyone is just like just be you like i literally say what i believe and a lot of people censor themselves. I, if I say it, I actually believe it. And that gets a lot of people in trouble. Look, I've said things to people like attack me and get upset, whatever. Like, I don't care. I literally do not care. I'm going to say what I want to say because I want to say it. And you know, Flynn and I have both talked about this before, but like, I genuinely believe the

most, the utmost form of freedom is to have your identity tied to your personal name. So when somebody asks me, who are you? I don't say, Oh, I'm an investor or I've got this or that, or what, like the, those are things that I do, but my identity is tied to my name. Um, and I tend to think that that is, uh, you know, kind of quote unquote a brand, but really it's just the, just being authentic. And that's, what's been able to, uh, to put me in that position. Okay. How many more questions do we have time for? Uh, let's keep going. Okay. Uh, I promise answer as many as i could okay kimberly jonelle at you are the wealth what is your why i just want to have fun that's literally it i want to have fun and be happy i can attest to that like people

people in every walk of my life i had asked me this question that's genuinely what i want to do is uh i want to just have fun and be happy and other than that i don't care i still remember we were at this panel place and this uh bougie guy was like what why are you doing this like what's the point of all this and he was like i just want to be happy and he was like no like for real like i'm not joking like what's the point like would you actually want to get done it's crazy he was shook when i was like no see like you may not actually be doing it for this but that's literally it and by the way that also means like the day that i stop having fun or being happy like i'll just stop i'll literally one day i'm gonna wake up and just be like yep that's it

I'm not writing a newsletter anymore. I'm not doing the podcast. I'm not tweeting anymore. Like see you guys. And, uh, I'll keep doing that until, uh, until I stopped being happy or, or having fun. I don't think that's gonna happen anytime soon, but it's just generally how I feel. At Dakota's tweet, do what you're good at or do what you're passionate about. I think you generally are good at what you're passionate about mainly because you just spend so much time on it. Um, I don't know. Yeah.

i'm sure there's you know the outlier situations like hey i i'm passionate about basketball but i'm five six well like yeah sure okay but like you could do other things in basketball right you could be a coach you could be a referee you could you know be a sports analyst do whatever so i i just i think these are all like false dichotomies in terms of like what you're good at what you're passionate at just like just do the shit that makes you happy right and like whatever that is like i promise you you'll end up being good at it and the beauty of it is like for example uh with the profile i write this newsletter every sunday and i've been asked aren't you afraid that somebody's just going to replicate it and it's like because i'm so

passionate about it and because i know just how many hours i put into it and it's hard work i'm not afraid of that because i just i know that nobody would be able to do the work if they're not passionate about it the way that that that i am of course okay at jso vr trying to get my daughters 16 and 14 excited about blockchain and its future any suggestions on motivating them and the best platform for them to learn more about it yeah i again like i don't have kids so it's hard for me to kind of say hey this is what you should do young person yeah what i generally think the best thing to do is actually start with the problems um and if you explain to them things like what's going on in lebanon right now where they've seen the currency class more than 50

percent um i tend to think that's interesting the second thing is um part of me says like don't force them to learn about it right because i i think that it's really hard to do that instead what you basically want to do is you want to just give them the technology like young kids are so digitally native that they'll figure it out and so like just give them some bitcoin and see what happens and just watch for a little bit and i bet you that they end up figuring it out like going cash app or something um and next thing you know they'll start telling you like what stores accept bitcoin all this crazy stuff so i don't necessarily if there's like oh go read this book or do this thing um as much as it is just like introduce kids to it expose them to it uh and then just

kind of let them run wild like they're so smart uh literally kids come up to me all the time and i'm just like jesus like literally you know how to do things with my phone that i didn't even know existed right and i tend to think that i'm pretty well versed in a lot of this stuff so i think that's what i would do at james white neck same question you asked to end alex spetsky podcast what's one thing that you haven't seen yet that you wish was written about thought or explored uh this is going to be very controversial but i think that there's a massive problem with the mainstream media or legacy media right now um and the number one thing i think that could expose that uh and expose it not in like a attacking way but just an understanding i

actually think this is an academic issue this is not a like who can dunk on who on twitter um i think that the way that uh things have been covered um has changed drastically some of that is out of necessity from a business model that's been well covered um in a bunch of you know analysis and pieces and things like that uh some of it's also the changing of the platforms so obviously the way that you write is going to cater to whatever platform you're using um and what i would love to legacy is um a analysis on uh things like what words have been used sentence structures length of articles uh topics that are covered how frequently by what publications like just like a super deep data-driven analysis of how the legacy media has changed over let's say the last

50 to 100 years um and it's i want to make sure that it's clear that like i actually have an open mind and like that change i could be sold on the idea that it's actually a positive not a negative It's not necessarily that it has to be a negative outcome because of it, but I do think that there's been a big change. And so it's one of these things where I think a lot of people, including sitting next to me is a former journalist at a very well-known publication. It just feels like we don't have a good understanding of the data of what's changed. It's all anecdotal. What would that help or tell you? So one of the things that I've seen that got me thinking about this is, I won't say who it is,

but somebody showed me a study of the use of what they categorized as like woke words or left leaning words. So literally like the word woke, right? For example, they analyzed after the New York times put up their paywall, how many more times they started to use those words. And there was like an explosion. It wasn't like, Oh, 20% more. It was like, it's because they're catering a thousand percent more. Yes. So what ends up happening is the explanation, whether it's accurate or not, uh, that was in this study basically was explaining that, um, well, if you have a paywall, people pay you, you're going to write to keep the subscriber rather than write things that they don't like, cause then they'll unsubscribe. And so naturally it

just pulls you in a direction, right? So left-leaning people start writing more left-leaning stuff, right-leaning people start writing more right-leaning stuff, whatever. And so you kind of get pulled to the extremes um my guess is that that's like a very small difference uh and part of this is like from me looking at it with an open mind it's like until we have the data it's really hard to make kind of um conclusions on like here's what's happened right or like is it good is it bad it's not it just feels like it is different um and it would be actually interesting to see like the data show us that it's not different right but like the fact that we're humans and we're idiots and we're really bad at predicting the world and understanding the world we need the

data to understand what's changing so i think seeing that would be interesting ah you think it'd be interesting nice uh frank the bull and one what happens when central banks balance sheets explode uh i mean we've seen this you know many times before uh but look at the end of the day every empire falls every currency fails um that's inflationary and so i think what we're going to see is the same stuff happen. Like we, again, live in the most prosperous, safe time in human history. And hopefully that stuff doesn't happen in my lifetime. Like it's super selfish. I don't want to see world chaos, right? Like I don't want to see the US fail. I don't want to see the US dollar failing, any of this stuff. But at the same time, like just history suggests that the trends

that we are following, we haven't learned from history, right? We basically have an inflationary currency that we continue to devalue. We've got a global monetary military complex that is amazing until it's not. And ultimately, you know, every country that ends up dominating the world ends up falling at some point. And so like, you know, I'm probably got about 50 to 60 more years in my life. Like, let's hold on to it till I'm gone. But, but, but I just generally think that eventually that stuff's going to happen. And so central banks balance sheets exploding, like is it really dead if we're not going to pay it back and i think it's hard to argue at this point 20 plus trillion dollars we're actually going to pay back the you know u.s debt and so

some people argue like it doesn't matter because you can always just print your way out of it some people argue that um you know literally you're going to default on the debt who knows but what i will say is just like i think that we're uh we're headed in the wrong direction uh rather than the right one at ulysses lf99 what keeps you going after the setbacks again i'm just uh just having fun like i the setbacks are yeah they're super frustrating in the short term but i always just kind of look around i'm like i got a pretty good life and i don't really work about worry about that stuff um nor do i get super stressed so it's kind of chill at e o n fitzgerald nine, what does the exit scenario look like for you? Can you retire from creating content? What

would you do if you're not doing this? And how do you literally one day I'm going to wake up and just stop. But like, what are you going to do after that? Just sit, read, hang out with my friends, hang out with Polina. So you genuinely do it because you want to do it because you're learning. Of course. I, everything that I do, but people forget like everything I do is I'm learning. So when I'm writing, I'm learning or exactly go read a bunch of stuff and understand it and kind of put my thoughts down on paper all that stuff uh the podcast same thing twitter like twitter's an amazing learning engine in terms of i can put ideas out in the world and immediately get feedback on them um you know everything is just learning and uh it's not that

i'll stop wanting to learn it's just that at some point i'll literally just wake up and be like this way of learning is not fun anymore i'm gonna go do something else all right question from shoe dog the millionaire at sh man underscore d why do you use a tornado emoji in your twitter bio uh i think i put it there because like tornadoes just kind of like go through places like screw stuff up and then just like keep on going like they're just like literally on a war path uh and they get where they're going and nothing can stop them um and i put that up there like years ago and i just was like i'm never taking it down and so it's been there so long i kind of feel like i would uh i'd be cheating on myself if i took it down at this point okay oh man what

company is my biggest stock position uh somebody responded to it already but yeah i'm not in the public market so my public stock i own is gbtc and my uh some of my retirement account um and i don't own any other public stocks okay uh i think you've answered this but what uh at king yeezus three what percentage of your own net worth is in cryptos um it's more than 50 percent uh and it's all bitcoin yeah yeah it's all in bitcoin 50 percent uh there's two financial systems so there's a legacy financial system and there's an alternative financial system the legacy system is an inflationary system with the u.s dollar as the core unit of account the alternative system is a deflationary system that has bitcoin as the core unit of account uh i believe that there is at

least a 50% chance that the deflationary Bitcoin-based system is going to be the new system in the future. And so I'm willing to take a 50-50 bet. It's a little bit more than 50-50 on kind of the Bitcoin world. And if I'm wrong, I understand also the risk that I will lose 50% of my net worth, but I'm comfortable doing that. I'm a relatively young guy. And I tend to think that i'll make it back pretty quickly so not worry about it at anwar adushay how will crypto relate with third world economies be it in wealth distribution or use cases i think everything like the system changes and so therefore you'll get a complete uh redistribution of wealth in terms of there's a lot of people who hold bitcoin who aren't necessarily wealthy in u.s dollars and

they did everything from earning it to mining it to buying it, whatever. And if it becomes a global reserve currency, there's a lot of wealth that will get created, obviously. But on top of that, I also think that there is incredible resetting of the economies. And so I just think that it is kind of all encompassing. And then the other thing I'd say is I also think Bitcoin is a market expanding technology. So if you look at Uber, if most people looked at it, they would have compared to the taxi industry at first, it ended up not only kind of attacking taxis, but then literally now people don't have cars because they use Uber all the time, right? And so it was a way to expand the taxi market or the total adjustable market was much bigger than people originally realized.

I definitely think Bitcoin is going to be much bigger than people realize. The total adjustable market is not just the money supply, but I actually think that the total adjustable market is all store value assets. So things like real estate, like art, et cetera, a lot of that value can get sucked back into a hard currency or kind of a sound money currency like Bitcoin. And so I tend to think that it's a hundred plus trillion dollar opportunity. We're currently sitting at about, call it $200 billion. So we got a long, I mean, it's 500X, but now 500X is not going to be a straight line. I tend to think that it's going to be incredibly volatile. And when I say 500X kind of is total addressable market, it doesn't mean that Bitcoin captures the entire

addressable market. It could only penetrate a small percentage. And if it does reach a high percentage of the market, it could take decades to do. So literally this could be a 50 plus year exercise. And so I say all of that. When people hear me say 500X type potential, don't think that that's going to happen overnight. Please don't make investment decisions based on this stuff. I have no clue what I'm talking about, all the normal disclaimers. But I do think that that's kind of the ultimate bull cases, kind of what the adjustable market looks like. All right. So I think we've gotten through most of everything. Awesome questions, guys. SuperMars87 asks, in-depth thoughts on aliens?

Yeah. I mean, I've pretty much shared this stuff. So I believe aliens are real in the sense that other intelligent life exists somewhere in the world or in the galaxy, I guess. I am personally fascinated with just the expansiveness of space. And my biggest question is not whether they exist or not. I think that it's a pretty mathematically easy to prove case that it is highly probable that they exist. We don't know with 100% certainty, but definitely very probable. My bigger question is just, are we on the same time scale? Meaning that do we as humans exist on this specific planet at the same time that intelligent life exists on another planet uh or instead do we end up living um at a certain time in kind of the the

timeline of all of these galaxies uh and the other intelligent life ends up living uh and existing it's just on a different time scale so you know they come 100 billion years after us and we never actually kind of cross paths who knows um super interesting to think about uh you know i had bruce fenton came on he's an ancient alien researcher and he said the two questions that every human asks during their life is what happens after we die and are we here alone i think it's a great way to kind of look at from a framework standpoint and the second thing is uh i've got a friend alice clocus uh who basically says all the time that uh probably at this point uh the most important discovery that could happen uh in human history is the discovery of other intelligent

life uh more so than figuring out how to solve cancer or any of that stuff not so much that it would have an impact but just it would drastically change the way that billions of people look at their life the world and how we relate to kind of space so i tend to think that people like tom delong and others who are spending a lot of time money and resources and mental energy on this are doing really important work and um you know that's why i ask everyone about it is because i'm just looking to learn okay final question uh good because i'm losing my voice at classic Karaz, what are the Westerners views on crypto adoption in Africa? And what is your overall view on the African economy? I think Africa as a continent is going to be one of the most

important continents. And it's mainly because most of the use cases in the United States specifically are more around speculation and as an investment asset. But actually, when you look around the world, there are many places and many of them are developing countries. Obviously, Africa has a lot of those where this is like actually needed on the ground in terms of having decentralized technology to settle value as a medium of exchange and also to serve as a true store of value where you can have 100 percent certainty that no one is manipulating that currency. And so from that standpoint, I tend to think that Africa is really important. Some people know, some people don't. I went to Nigeria about three years ago. I spent, I think it was a week or two there. And I was blown away. I was blown away by one of the demographics, how fast it was growing, how big the country will be on a population basis, how young it is, how technologically advanced it is. And also I was blown away just by, I think, the intellectual curiosity, again, of people. I mean, I literally went and watched a football match in someone's backyard at like a viewing center where they hooked up a bunch of TVs with satellites in their backyard and had

built like almost like a cinema, if you will, or like a watching state center. I went and I went to a betting area where literally people were betting on video games that were being played on simulation mode. I went to Computer Village. I went all these different places. And so it was just a really, really cool experience, I think, to see how people who grew up in a very different lifestyle than me on an entirely different continent, uh, that most people don't go to, um, you know, kind of what their life's like. And frankly, uh, it, when I left, I actually

wrote a piece, I think on medium or something, uh, that said like Nigeria is going to be one of the technology hubs of the future. Um, and I tend, I tend to think that all the trends and value, um, and kind of good things that Nigeria has going forward, there's a lot of other places on that continent of Africa, um, you know, kind of apply there as well. So super bullish on, uh, on the entire continent really awesome anything else that's it no all right guys do me a huge favor go check out blockfi blockfi.com slash pump go check out choice retirewithchoice.com slash pump and go sign up for the newsletter if you're not already signed up pompletter.com that's it appreciate you guys listening thank you so much to polina for helping

sorry that the lighting sucks the video quality sucks but we're doing our best here and uh wants to do this again and i'll leave you guys with one parting word which simply is just thank you i guess that's two words it's one saying just thank you guys for listening super super helpful to me obviously i really enjoyed kind of all the back and forth on twitter responses to the newsletter everything uh and hopefully you guys are learning a bunch so i appreciate it and i'll try to do these more often but uh just thank you