The Pomp Podcast - 353: Peter McCormack on Bitcoin, Podcasting, and The World

Episode Date: August 4, 2020

Peter McCormack is a journalist who hosts two popular podcasts, What Bitcoin Did and Defiance. He previously ran an advertising agency and has grown to be one of the most recognizable people in the Bitcoin industry. In this conversation, we discuss Bitcoin, Roger Ver, podcasting, the pandemic, the recession, the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing response, and the US election. =============================== When the New Yorker magazine asked Mark Zuckerberg how he gets his news he said the one news source he definitely follows is Techmeme. For more than two years and nearly 700 episodes, The Techmeme Ride Home has been Silicon Valley’s favorite tech news podcast. The Techmeme Ride Home is a daily podcast, only fifteen to twenty minutes long, and every day by 5pm eastern its ALL the latest tech news. =============================== The World Series of Trading (WSOT) is the first of its kind to bring the exhilaration of crypto trading competition to the global stage. WSOT believes in the importance of empowering traders who embody the passion and power for crypto trading. This bi-annual event aims to champion the spirit of competition, fair play, and cultivate camaraderie among crypto derivatives traders from around the world with the ultimate goal of creating positive change in the crypto space. This year’s prize pool is a whopping 200 BTC. Sign up here: http://www.bybit.com/wsot_warmup? =============================== 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. Peter McCormick is a journalist who hosts two popular podcasts, What Bitcoin Did and Defiance. He previously ran an advertising agency and has grown to be one of the most recognizable people in the Bitcoin industry. Peter is also one of my good friends. In this conversation, we discussed Bitcoin, Roger Ver, podcasting, the pandemic, the recession, the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing response, and the US election. This episode was a lot of fun and I hope you enjoy it. Before we get into the episode though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.

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cultivate camaraderie among crypto derivative traders from around the world, with the ultimate goal of creating positive change in the crypto space. This year's prize pool is a whopping 200 Bitcoin. That's right. The World Series of Trading from Bybit is a crypto trading biannual event with a whopping 200 Bitcoin as the prize pool. You can go in the description of this podcast and click on the link there to get signed up.

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with Peter. I enjoyed it and I hope you do as well. 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. So what's up, Pomp? All right, guys. What's up, man? Peter. What's going on, dude? Dude, what's going on with you? Hey, this first time i've seen you since you've been married dude uh no thank you how did that go

uh it was fascinating i enjoyed it i'm excited we got married in the middle of the uh pandemic uh in new york city and it was just polina and i uh my brother was the minister or the officiant or whatever it's called and uh he started off the uh ceremony if you want to call it that with uh family friends thank you so much for coming and making the long trek to this momentous occasion hey well you saved a shit ton of money yeah oh trust me we're still gonna have like a a real um kind of bigger uh celebration it was gonna be small to begin with only 50 people so um not a not not a huge operation i've been to weddings that are like you know 400 people and you're just like, dude, are you doing this for yourself

or are you doing this for the 400 people who are here? I think they're usually doing it for the girl they're marrying. That's a whole other thing, right? Yeah. Because you were married before, right? Yeah, for three months. How did you do the wedding? We had a big wedding in London.

Well, not huge, like 80 people. We got married at Westminster Register Office where Paul McCartney got married, like a really cool place. and then we had the reception at what's it called um st pancras hotel which is uh king's cross station beautiful place but yeah that that didn't really work out for me hey you might you might even be longer longer married now than i was now only three weeks only three weeks so far uh what what uh what are your thoughts on bitcoin so far last night we're recording this on sunday i think we're gonna release in a couple of days

but uh last night bitcoin just absolutely ripping people's faces off and then dumping yeah well i thought it would at 12 i didn't know i've kind of stopped that whole play playing the kind of market thing and trying to tell tops and bottoms my my bitcoin investment strategy right now is accumulate hold and i've said i i wasn't going to sell any for unless i had to right dude but i wasn't going to sell any for three halvings we've had one recently so i got two more halvings i'm not going to sell any for so i've got like quite a long time horizon i thought it might dump at 12 listen i there was a time i had a fair amount of bitcoin back in 2017 and i fucked up and lost like 80 just by buying mining equipment and trading shit coins and just being a moron

and then like i stopped all that i sold all my shit coins i went bitcoin only and then in the last year i've grown my bitcoin stack by like 40 okay by yeah and and that means like i've got more than i had i i can't have less i'm not gonna lose any and therefore let's see where we are in 10 years so like even though it did dump i'm cool with that what about you i'm the exact same way i only accumulate i've been saying for a long time it's just a game of accumulation it's a fixed supply asset uh how do you think about like not necessarily portfolio construction but just like when you're buying bitcoin do you are you obsessive about like hey every two weeks on this day at this time I put a certain amount of money in? Or do you just kind of opportunistically acquire more

Bitcoin? So I only earn it now. Yeah. So I didn't explain that. Well, Andreas talked about it. He said the best Bitcoin you get is the one you earn, right? It's the one you earn. So a couple of things happen. You'll find this quite interesting. So what I do is like with my sponsors, I've always got at least one sponsor wants to pay in Bitcoin. And what I used to do is I used to convert 75% to cash to run my business pay my team and then keep 25 in bitcoin and that's why i was able to accumulate some then about a week and a half ago when bitcoin was like nine three one of my clients paid their bill and it was a quarterly bill and paid in bitcoin and i was like you know what i'm gonna leave this time for a couple of weeks i'm gonna see what happens and then obviously we've

shot up now so strangely i i'm not like thinking oh i'm gonna sell that 75 now because i'm in profit on that bitcoin i just leave it on my balance sheet so as i manage my business i have my cash in the bank cash out on invoice and then i have my bitcoin right and i might as well just leave that bitcoin on the balance sheet if that never goes below below 9300 it doesn't matter what happens yeah we're always ahead of 9300 that stays on the balance sheet and whether that goes to 20 30 40k bitcoin it doesn't matter so so yeah so i only earn bitcoin and i also i've i've earned to some playing poker this last few weeks yeah have you seen this poker game no what is it it's a chris organizer it's like a bunch of bitcoiners playing poker like charlie lee's there

who else comes to play his brother bobby's there sometimes luke martin's there so we play every thursday we play and i think i've earned like three bitcoin what what are the uh buy-ins it's like 0.3 bitcoin like it's 0.1 but you need to have 0.3 it's a 0.1 sit down yeah and then you can you can you can rebuy so everyone says to have like 0.3 we've been paying for like i think 13 14 weeks i'm like three bitcoin up that's not bad yeah so it's all earned bitcoin i only i only earned bitcoin now and like i say i've done about 40 up this year and that's what i'll continue to do and like i thought it would dump at 12 the 12 seemed like a number it would and also we went up we went from 9 2 to 12 pretty quick like we were overbought right yeah well i don't really pay

attention so much to all of like the underlying daily metrics. I know some people watch like RSI and kind of all that stuff. So I don't know kind of what all that was showing, but we definitely went up very quickly from, you know, nine, 9,500 to 12,000. But I mean, look, it's one of these things where there's only so many assets in the world that go up 20, 30% in, you know, a week, literally dump $1,500 in seconds and then recover $700 in, you know, a minute later. Like, yeah it's just you know bitcoin is bitcoin you can't play that shit anyway listen i got a question for you there's something else we should have done before that all right i want to talk to you about roger veer all right let's do it you of course i want to talk to you about that okay so

firstly i didn't listen to all of it and what i did listen to actually it seemed okay it was better than i expected that the reason i didn't listen to all of it is because it was nothing new what every time so i had it on and i kept going back i was like i've heard all this before so i will give it 10 minutes to come back and i was like like i've heard it all before from him so i didn't listen to like the last half what did you get out of it so obviously uh when obviously i agreed to uh to do this uh and roger agreed to do this it's not a secret to him or i that it would be uh heavily scrutinized right and because of that i took it you know overly serious right more serious that i normally take things uh when i do these types of interviews and i reached out to some

people i got some ideas in terms of what i should uh should ask about on top of that i also got you know quite a bit of feedback from the audience on twitter etc and frankly 80 90 percent of the comments were very much like scammer right it's like oh okay like fine if that's your opinion whatever but like why right and that's what i was trying to get at was like kind of get to layers two, three, four, five of the argument. And some people were able to clearly articulate that. And so, first of all, to Roger's credit, I asked him a lot of questions I think people want answers to, and he didn't not answer them. Really, he answered the questions. And so, things like his portfolio construction, his thought process behind why he did certain things,

what it would take for him to come back to Bitcoin and identify or admit that Bitcoin Cash didn't work and and things that, you know, it's very hard to have a conversation with somebody about what is obviously sensitive topics when you're being combative with somebody. Right. And so, you know, you and I have talked about a bunch of times before. It's just like that's not my style. Right. Is I'll bring people on. I'm going to be respectful. Hopefully they'll be respectful back. And are there times where people say things and maybe I don't push back as much as somebody who wants to be combative? We'll be sure. But at the same time, you know, that's kind of what the audience is there for, right? They let people know on Twitter, whatever. And so I actually

think that my biggest takeaways were, one, you can't deny what Roger did in the early days of Bitcoin, right? And for Bitcoin. Two, he has a very rational thought process behind a number of decisions he made. What I do think, and I said it to him, is we just have a difference of opinion as to whether that was a good thought process and decision making or not. And the part that, again, you got to give him credit for is like at the end, we kind of wrapped it up and said, all right, there's two views of the world. Here's why I believe my view. Here's why you believe yours. Ultimately, neither one of our opinions matter. The market will decide.

And so far, the market is deciding that Bitcoin is the winner and will be the winner. And Roger is basically betting on the fact that that's going to change in the future, but understands, you know, that that may not happen. um and so if that is kind of the path we go down then i think at some point he would he would come back to bitcoin yeah it's kind of i yeah i'm not sure if he'll come back to bitcoin i'm not sure i think he will hmm i asked him that before and he said he said he'd probably go off and do something else i'm not sure he will i'm not sure but you know i have um let me go let me go back a step there's always nuance to some of this stuff right yes and especially when you're doing an

interview and i know what you mean about the combative stuff when i did the brian armstrong interview i knew there were a group of people who wouldn't like it and they made the decision to dislike it before it happened and the reason i knew that is like there was some really good progress in that interview yet what they did is they found the bits they didn't like picked it out and just complained about it so i know i knew those fuckers wouldn't like it beforehand and you know whatever to them but but you have to construct an interview in a respectful way and you want a bit of to and fro you know i know it right but the thing about and about roger is like i actually have some sympathies for him for some old stuff right so i have some sympathies for him

bitcoin became something was different from what he expected but that does that all the time bitcoin does that all the time to a bunch of different people right and you just have to accept that and he couldn't accept that but he was so sold on this idea that bitcoin is kind of cash cheap fast payments and it just became something else something possibly far more valuable now some people always say it's that i i think it's disingenuous if you look at the bitcoin white paper if you're gonna scream about how great satoshi is and this gif he gave to the world i think you have to be honest and look at the white paper he talked about online commerce he talked about cash so i think i i think you have to understand that some people believe that's what

they were building and then perhaps it was both things perhaps there's something else so i had some sympathy about that my biggest issue and this is actually more towards roger it's kind of like when do you move on from this dude like when do you accept what's happened and just move on like focus on bitcoin cash stop fighting you're not you're not going to change bitcoin by shouting at it anymore yeah but but i think that that that was kind of like when i went into the interview and um yeah i talked to him beforehand before he even did the interview and i think both of us because we knew it would be so heavily scrutinized and all the stuff like we both kind of just wanted to feel it feel it out of like are we both going to be respectful here you know kind of where do

our differences lie and really just make sure that it would be frankly worth our time to record it and also too for the audience to to listen um and i think the piece that was very clear was it's kind of like when you're a kid and let's say you've got a sibling if you're nice to them for the majority they're going to be nice back right if you go over there and you know with a wiffle ball bat whack them in the head like you're gonna end up on the ground brawling right like like it's kind of like you know you especially if you're the older person right or you're the person who's kind of um initiating something and so same thing with an interview right if you get on and all of a sudden you're just you know trying to get somebody with gotcha questions

and poke them and and catch them doing things whatever it's like yeah sure of course they're going to be on edge. Of course, they're going to be overly defensive. Of course, they're going to be a little bit more aggressive back. But if instead you just say, look, I just want to go through all of all of this. And I actually want you to walk away from this saying I was able to put my thoughts and ideas on the record and also be able to hear the other side. And so a couple of times during the interview, I literally asked him, I said, hey, OK, you just described what you believe uh and you just described you know for the let's say the block uh dispute you just described why it something else happened what is the argument of the other side of the table like

can you flip around and basically tell me the people you disagree with what's their argument and to his credit like yeah he can actually very in great detail explain not only his argument but also he can explain the argument of the people that uh he disagrees with and i think that is a sign of not only one intelligence and kind of emotional intelligence, but also three is just like he understands the problems. Right. And that's kind of where I think, you know, people who listen to it, they're like, wait a second, like this is a conversation that Roger hasn't had before of just he's showing that he understands there's two sides to this argument. He's betting on one side, there's people betting on the other side and the market's going to decide.

Right. And so far, the market has leaned not in Roger's favor. But I think the other piece that people have to walk away from this and you know he talks about it but but doesn't quantify it is he says he's a bad trader right and and so if you kind of back out of that like he lost a lot of money doing this right so kind of his belief in something came with upside and downside and so far he's experienced the downside and you know to his credit like he talks about that right and he was very kind of transparent about it and and forthcoming and so it's you know one of these things where people are complicated creatures, right? We're just human. And so there's things that you can like about somebody. There's things that you can disagree with or not like. And in

Roger's case, I think that there's a lot of people who are trying to put a binary good or bad label on. But if you look at it from the historical context, there's a lot of people who wouldn't be here without Roger's work in Bitcoin. And then on the same side, there's a lot of things that um you know i asked him about specifically like using bitcoin.com but people buying bitcoin cash and you know again he described his thought process as to you know what they're doing or the logic there and people can decide whether they think that's an acceptable answer or not but i think that's the the key is just people are complicated figures right yeah i wonder how it plays out for him like i said i had a lot of sympathy for for early the early things he did

he did a lot of things to help bitcoin and i i have some sympathies for for things not going his way but obviously a lot of that gets eroded away over time where you just see somebody repeating the same arguments yeah causing a bit of trouble a bit of mischief etc um but i'm not like the type of person who's just going to sit there and just be like hey to you i fuck you i want everything to go to shit for you you know so and i understand why some people have they've got you know real ptsd around what happened with uh secret 2x you know there's a real fear of a takeover of bitcoin and and you know roger's involvement in certain things around that period of time but i just wonder how it'll play out for him because i don't think bitcoin cash has much of a future

he has i think it has a future of something that can be traded but you know i think it's very hard to build a cryptocurrency that lots of people use regularly you know bitcoin is kind of amazing that it is used so regularly you know i actually strangely enough i actually do use bitcoin quite a bit now i'd probably do in terms of send and receive 15 to 20 transactions a month now and that's actually just yeah using bitcoin because it makes sense in all those occasions but i don't use anything else i don't have a need for anything else i could imagine a very rare scenario where i may use monero but just because i'm too much of a moron to use bitcoin in a private way but i don't really use other cryptocurrencies and i wonder if people are using

perhaps bitcoin cash a bit out of a desire to keep it going right give it some kind of energy but ultimately i just kind of i i think it's do you know let me add another thing in there as well i just did um a guest on a show today they want to do a bitcoin segment and they said try to explain bitcoin and i you know i did the whole it's just like gold but digital if i'd have been trying to explain it as a way of doing payments and censorship resistant payments i think i would have struggled because everyone right now can benefit from a digital code especially with all the money printing but do do people really care about censorship resistant payments i don't i don't think i don't i think in an ideal world they would have it but they

don't really care i mean day-to-day everyone is just spending money normally so i just i i think the project screwed long term yeah i mean look i you know and i i told roger on it that obviously we have a difference of opinion as to the future outlook of that and and frankly it's something the market's going to decide. So it is what it is. The part that I think people have to remember is one of the mistakes that many investors or market participants will make is they look at something as a snapshot today. And so this is the Paul Krugman, the internet will never be more important than the fax machine type stuff. This is looking at Bitcoin in 2014 in a single point of time. And what I think that technology folks are very good at doing, because they've seen the

pattern so many times, is they're able to understand what this thing is today, what are the structural components of it, and what foundation does that lay for it to evolve over the coming 10, 20, 30 years. And to me, we all like to debate the merits of what can it do right now this second. But when you kind of say, hey, look, that's not the right conversation. Instead, it is the structural components. There is nothing more powerful, valuable and exciting, in my opinion, than that structural component of Bitcoin. And it really just comes down to three things, right? One is it has a fixed supply, which, you know, as we talked about the money printing two is uh it's fully decentralized so the decentralization is actually the you know

then kind of the the ramification of that is censorship uh resistant payments and kind of all that stuff but decentralization is a structural piece and the third thing and probably the most important in my mind is it has market adoption and i think one of the key pieces uh that those who are not students of history on a technology front miss is the best technology does not win Right. That is a complete fallacy. It is what gets adoption. And you can go back to the VHS versus Betamax. You can go all through history. You can go through all these different things. But money specifically is a belief system. It is a network effect business. Right. And it's very viral in the sense of you send it to people and kind of do all this stuff. And because of that, I think that Bitcoin actually has a much bigger advantage than people realize. Nothing to do with the technology. It is simply the market adoption. And that's frankly one of the things that Roger and I kind of came to an agreement in terms of where our difference of opinion lies. He believes that technology is important. I believe that market adoption is important in the early days. And we'll see how it plays out. But that's kind of one of the key differences in opinion. do you think he got anything out of it do you think because i haven't i might go and watch the rest of it now but do you think by the end of it he left with any you know a change of opinion of

his any potential insights into where he should look at things differently or do you think he just came to replay his message and will have left exactly the same um i don't think that uh again i didn't approach it as like let me try to convince you like we were pretty clear during it in terms of, I didn't want to get into some, you know, argument or even really debate. It was more of just like, let's outline, you know, quote, unquote, the facts. And there were people who scoff at the idea of facts, right? But just like, what do you believe? What do other people believe? Why? Here is the, you know, kind of different options somebody has. And why do you believe you're right? And why do you believe, you know, why do other people believe they're right? And I

think we did that. Hopefully what he got out of it is, one, I think that somebody who is in the position that Roger is in, he really believes in the ultimate goal of a digital decentralized currency being adopted globally, right? The disagreement is on the path to get there, but kind of the finish line, I actually think that Bitcoiners, Roger, and many other people all agree on that. And I think that people who are seen as either controversial or, you know, just there's a lot of backlash, right? And kind of negative feedback. They just want to be heard, right? And I think that in many cases, Roger, when he's been asked to do interviews or whatever, because of the environment in which the interview gets done, it's just turns into this argument and

kind of is very unproductive and he's actually not able to articulate why. And so that's my biggest hope is that everyone was able to just clearly understand like, hey, here's why. And, you know, look, frankly, when I was going into the interview, you know, I even told Polina, I was like, well, this either goes one of two ways. Either this is going to turn out great or this is going to be an absolute train wreck in terms of people are going to listen to this and, you know, be mad at me and kind of do all this stuff. But you kind of know that going into it, right so you kind of act accordingly um and you know well the ones who are mad at you though they're they're mad at you before it's done and that's that's the point of this stuff and also

it's the difference between what is an interview and a debate they are two entirely different things some people want to debate but they don't understand an interview is about constructing a series of questions to take you through almost like a timeline of a discussion and it's it's constructed very differently from a debate but the ones who didn't like it made that decision because you did the interview so that that was my whole point up front was there was a bunch of people when i said the day before i was going to do it all you know upset and freaking out stuff and i just responded a couple people say hey just wait till you hear it and then and then if you don't like it knock yourself out right then like yeah all of your criticism is fair um and again

to some of those people's credits you know after they listened to it they actually were like you know what this is actually pretty good like i actually thought it was you know valuable and um i haven't heard roger articulate ideas in this way but whatever so to me like that's a win right um and i'm sure there's some people who don't agree with that but that's fine you know you obviously can't please everybody and no move on right i mean there's times i've i've thought about uh interviewing roger again and people listen to this like oh you're just turning back into a shitcoin podcast you just and the point is is that like i would interview i like interviewing a range of people i like interviewing challenging people i like interviewing different

you know i just interviewed stephanie kelton who wrote a book about mmt and she is a proponent of mmt and that's not a pro bitcoin idea and a lot of people disagree with that but i really enjoyed doing that and there are times i've thought of doing the roger interview again well i did a second one once but sometimes i'm like i just can't be bothered to deal with the backlash at times and i know i should and most of the time i'm all right but sometimes i'm just like i just can't be bothered to deal with the backlash but me as an interviewer like i don't know if you think like this i try to explain to people sometimes whilst it's a bitcoin podcast it's not a podcast just to cheerlead bitcoin it's to provide content entertainment to challenge to critique it's to do

a bunch of things right and sometimes you almost want to get on what is considered i'm going to say quote or quote the villain because the villains sometimes offer a different perspective again it goes back to some of my favorite questions to ask people are, what would it take to change your mind on X, right? So you just articulated why you believe X, what would it take to change your mind? And it literally comes down to, do they understand the opposite argument? And so I think you're right in that when you bring somebody on who has that opposite argument, you're exposing people to a more holistic picture. That doesn't mean necessarily that they're going to change their mind, but they're now better informed to understand the counter argument, right? And we

live in a society that's so uh like divisive right and it's just like hey let me go my echo chamber and just kind of yell and scream that i i fear people actually don't have the intellectual rigor uh to analyze situations because they're not used to understanding the counter argument and i think that's a crucial crucial part of of really making any uh kind of analysis or argument yeah i mean And also, it doesn't matter what medium you're following content on. It can be YouTube, it can be the news on TV, it can be the radio. The journalists out there aren't just interviewing the good guys. Sometimes they're interviewing the villains, the bad guys, the enemies.

I think a lot of people would like to hear an interview right now with Gisle Maxwell. She's a bad human being. She's most likely an enabler of paedophiles, possibly a paedophile herself. But I think somebody would like to hear an interview with her. She's a bad human, but they want to hear her side. But it seems we get into this world of Bitcoin and people don't want to hear from the bad dudes or the people they perceive as bad dudes. Completely agree. What have you seen with the podcast during kind of this whole virus situation?

Have downloads gone up, gone down? Have the guests changed? What's been different for you? Yeah, yeah, good question. So they dropped it first. I had a big drop. at the i think it was like yeah i can tell you i think it was like at the end of february just when it started to kick off when it just started to get a bit weird i um yeah end of

february i had a big drop in february and march were you know just levels i'd seen like a year ago but then because i couldn't travel i focus on the podcast focus on the guests and then i've seen growth again i don't know if the growth is i think a couple of things went on i think people weren't going to the gym they weren't commuting and they'll sit and watch in netflix and just kind of like just not consuming podcasts as much and then i think what happened was life got a little bit back to normal and then i think we got some new people come in who are kind of interested in bitcoin because all the crazy shit going on and then also i've just like focused on trying to get like you know top guests on as well so now i got back in growth i've just done the numbers for

last month as a another record month i don't know if i'm anywhere near you at the moment because you've been absolutely flying dude yeah well we also have different strategies right i i um you know i make no secret about it mine is a volume game and uh i try to have as many conversations as i possibly can uh because to me the the podcast um i think some people take the approach of like i'm going to make sure that every single episode i do is a hit and meets you know kind of the standard of in terms of the guest and the depth of the conversation, whatever, I think my promise to the audience is a little bit different, which is I'm trying to learn as much as I possibly can. And so my, you know, quality bar in terms of maybe audio or some other things may be a little

bit lower than others, but it's because I'm replacing with volume, right? So whereas if I record an episode and it takes, you know, two or three days to edit and get perfect. And if I wanted to do transcripts and show notes and kind of all that stuff, I just couldn't do the volume that I do. Right. Or I'd have to have a massive team to kind of crank all that out. I think there's other people who say, well, I want that stuff. And therefore I'm only going to do one or two conversations per week. And so, you know, ultimately like you kind of find the audience that wants what you want. Right. And I think that's the beauty of, uh, of podcast is that there's so many different styles there's so many different show formats um people will

so when you rebranded you started doing a little bit more you started getting some guests on who weren't even like anything to do i'd say even finest did you have like a sommelier on oh yeah my friend dustin yeah yeah so i mean look but part of this is you know again i want to learn Right. And now take Dustin's a good example. So Dustin is a guy who literally got interested in wine as a server at Ruth Chris Steakhouse, you know, 20 years ago or whatever, ends up going through the entire process, becomes a master sommelier, works at a number of the best restaurants in the world, and then becomes the wine director at Eleven Madison, which was voted the number one restaurant in the world. And then he left and he started a retail wine business called Verve Wine. And now it's working on a restaurant and kind of all these other things. But a lot of people are like, well, what the hell could you learn from that guy if you're not interested in wine? And I think there's kind of a couple of key pieces, which is one, every single place that guy's worked for the last 15 years, there's been this obsession with perfection.

Right. And just absolute everything has to be perfect all the time. And so there's this like rigorous process and the way they think about the customer experience and like all of that stuff. Two is he's a highly successful person. Right. He literally has built a business. Right. He's worked at some of the most successful businesses. And so I think you can learn from that. And then the third thing is he's just got a very unique view of the world. Right. He's interested in finance and technology and all this stuff, but he operates in a world that many of us don't know. and then you kind of overlay on top of all of it he's one of 200 of the best people at his craft in the world there's only like 200 master sommeliers in the world and so you look at that

and you're just like yeah i want to talk to that guy like and you know i cheat because i know him pretty well uh and talk to him regularly but when he comes on the podcast my hope that people take away is not like you know what's his favorite wine it's all those other lessons and so i won't have those people on every day but to have one on every once in a while i think provides value and you know between you and i and the uh the five people listening to this uh i don't care if they don't like it like it like this is for me to learn and people just get to listen what's your what have you what's your like big plan like because i know i'm i know exactly where i'm going i know my strategy i know what i want what's your strategy well my end goal is just to be able to make any

content i want any day and not give a fuck if anyone wants to listen you know a bit like how rogan does comedians he does mma but then he'll just do random people like he but like mma and comedians is his thing and he does the other stuff and he just does what the hell he wants i i kind of want to get to that point i want to do i want to interview rock stars basically people who play the kind of music i listen to i've been interviewing a few porn stars recently they're always entertaining i want to do more of that i want to do finance and corruption really they're just every day just make whatever show i want knowing i'm making enough money and not give a fuck about what anyone says on twitter like that's the goal and that's what i'm trying to build

towards and i'm gradually getting to you know i do the bitcoin and the finance and the corruption stuff through bitcoin and defiance i am about to do my first i'm doing a four-part documentary about a rock band called the ghost inside starts next week they had this crash it's a cool story actually in 2015 they're screaming heavy metal band pomp right and they just released their album and they broke out into the billboard charts which is unheard of for that type of band then a year later they're in a fatal bus crash and it takes four years for them to get back to play their next concert because they're so fucked from it so i'm doing a four-part thing about that but like i am i'm i'm putting these like little markers around of the things i want to do and

then trying to get it to all kind of converge like but i know i'm i'm i know exactly where i'm going with and what i want to do and bitcoin is one of those things but like i'm wondering what's for you what what is your goal i don't know if i necessarily have a master plan i think the kind of guiding light if you will is uh i'm just going to do the things that i enjoy and that i find fun um you know i joke all the time but it's not really a joke where i just say look i create a lot of content i enjoy doing it if one day i wake up and it's not fun anymore i will stop that day. Like I will not spend a single day doing this if I'm not enjoying it. And so there could be a day in the future where I wake up and I go, I'm not writing the, uh, the email

anymore. I'm not recording another podcast. See you guys later. It was a great run. You know, I'm out. And, uh, you know, look, I hope that doesn't happen. Right. Cause I genuinely do enjoy this stuff. I've learned a lot. Um, I've met some amazing people, but, uh, but, but I think that's kind of like my first rule is I don't want to spend a minute doing something I don't want to do. The second piece is I think that the world is changing, right? And that change, I think I am one of many people that are kind of living that, you're another, where the brand or the thing that people want to pay attention to is an individual, not an organization. And so if you kind of see that play out, is that starting companies? Of course. Is that creating content? Of course.

is that kind of doing other things that individuals used to do. I think so. I just don't have some like master plan. I just know that, you know, we're moving to a world where people want to subscribe to individuals, right? And all the content stuff definitely helps with that. All the social media stuff helps with that. But ultimately, you know, I don't look at this as a content game. I very much look at it as building a massive, massive audience. And then when you have the audience, you can figure out what are the things they want, right? And how do you solve problems for them and do things like that. So I'm pretty transparent about the fact that there will be companies that we create in the future and things like that. I have no clue what those are

today, but I'm not really worried about it until some idea comes around or somebody writes to me and says hey i really want you to do x and i can't stop thinking about it and then we'll go do it all right let's get into that weird world stuff because and that's an interesting point because i think uh i think it's a i think we could say we're all let's go five six months back we're all kind of on autopilot prior to the pandemic right you know the world's ticking along we're all doing our thing we know there's like some problems in the economy the likes of yourself and caitlin long and travis cling and raoul powell have all been saying the same thing but i you know always believe we'll just kind of be okay and now we're at this moment in time which is like

history's being rewritten i told my son i said look there's going to come a time when you have kids and you're going to tell them about what happened in 2020 and the pandemic how the world shut down because it's completely unprecedented in our time but i kind of get this feeling we're not going to come out the end of this pandemic and it's back to normal i think there's going to be a lot of expectations for a different kind of water maybe it will be maybe it will be a normal world or maybe we'll go to a more authoritarian world or maybe we'll go to a world of more liberty and that that i don't know but i feel like we're living through that moment now and i i don't think it's going to be a smooth path i think a lot of weird and scary shit's going to happen over the

next few years and i've got like a mixture of fear and excitement about it all uh a bit more on the fear side because revolutions are always bloody but also a bit more excitement because hopefully we can dismantle well not we i mean hopefully some of the the the bullshit stuff around government and finance and central banking begins to be dismantled but it's a weird time dude Yeah, I mean, you know, it really depends on your perspective. And the thing I keep telling myself is we live in the safest, most prosperous time in human history. Right. And generally, the trend is that that will continue. And are there short periods in certain geographic locations where that's not true? Or you kind of reverse course, of course. But overall, humanity continues to get better, continues to get safer, continues to get more prosperous. And I think that that's like one thing in the back of my head that always just like, yeah, just chill out. The world's going to keep spinning.

At the same time, I do think that in these moments of uncertainty and chaos, there are things that happened in history that are not just in history books. And what I mean by that is, you know, I always ask people like when you've read about the American Revolution, right, as an example, like there was a bloody war and that set up America and kind of freedom. And everyone knows the whole story. What makes you think that there won't be more American revolutions in the future, not necessarily involving America, but that type of situation all around the world? And again, it doesn't mean that they're all going to happen tomorrow all at the same time. And, you know, there's going to be mass chaos and it's going to look like the purge. But it does mean that, you know, history repeats itself. And so do you think currencies are going to fail in the future? Of course, we're going to have currencies.

Which ones? When? All that stuff is hard to tell. Is there going to be violent conflict? Of course. Where? With who? When?

That's all up for debate. That's all up for a lot of kind of people smarter than I. But I think that even with those things happening, we will continue to live in a better and better world. Technology is a big piece of that. And so it's one of these weird situations where I don't worry so much about kind of the big picture stuff. I'm aware of it. I obviously talk about it a lot. But when I go to sleep at night, I just worry about myself, right?

And when you do that, I think that is a very kind of sobering, calming effect of like, am I good? if i'm good all right like i'll keep figuring it out for me and i can't you know affect what a central bank does or what a country does or um you know prevent a war from occurring like if those things happen they happen and and i'll respond along with everybody else accordingly but but it ultimately is just like you're like in control yourself right and so just worry about that i think there's a slight i think i've got a slightly different outlook and i tell you why because when i go to bed i have to think about two little people as well so i've got a 16 year old got two years of school left and he has a choice of kind of university which i for obvious

reasons don't want him to go to because yeah he's not going to be a doctor he's not gonna be a lawyer so he doesn't need to he's got creative skills and i've got a daughter who's 10 and so i have to go i go to bed worrying about the world where they're going to be in in say you know five to 10 years time so you know but can you change like that's like and when i say i worry about myself like obviously i worry about myself polina you know my brothers my parents like you know there's a small group of people that i include in worry about me but like can you change the world uh in the sense of uh reverse course from any of that happening no no of course not but there's that there is at that point like i don't vote right just i just got no interest anymore but people

say well people say well if you don't vote you can't influence and democracy is based on the fact that enough people do go and vote you get that kind of consensus from it you know for if we look at something like global warming if and i'm you know a huge hypocrite because the amount i fly etc but if we all do nothing and if you believe global warming is caused by humans then it will get a lot worse if you think i can't individually make a difference so you have to do a little bit and i just think i think the thing with kids is not that i think can i change the world and make it a better place i i obviously i can't but are there little things i can do to make the part of the world i live in a better place and maybe that's maybe that's first starting with the

the boundaries of my house can i do things in that to make the world a better place for my children can i you know then outside that boundary around my friends and social communities and then you know so what are the things we can do better but i just i do worry i do worry for what kind of world we're heading towards and what opportunity they will have and it's multiple things pomp like it's not just you know it's you've got to think about opportunities because of ai and automation you know what kind of what kind of career should i be kind of nudging them towards so they have opportunity what kind of things should i be exposing to them in the world and telling them not to worry about i mean maybe just tell them to avoid politics yeah but i but i think that like

This is a perfect example. Right. So take global warming as a as kind of a talking point. Right. Yeah. We don't know what's true. Right. And people get very sensitive about this, but I can show you studies on both sides of the argument. And also I can show you studies that are very compelling from very well-respected people that would disprove the other argument. Right. So kind of there's tons and tons of data, tons of studies. And ultimately, I'm not a scientist. Right. And so my ability to sift through all that and find, quote, unquote, the truth is little to none. What I do think is you can simply say, well, if it's true or it's not, is my life going to change if I basically default to it's true and I act accordingly? I don't think that that's going to necessarily be a bad thing. Right. So I can basically act as if it's true, even if it's not, my life isn't going to materially change. And if it happens to be true, then I kind of did my part. Now, what is doing your part? And I think that this is the kind of, maybe not inaccurate thinking, but it's where people, because we're human, they want to feel like they have something to do, right? And so one of the most popular things around global warming is I'm not going to fly. OK, if you don't fly, do you think the plane's still going to fly?

Of course it is. Right. And so unless you're going to get enough drop in demand to remove 20 percent of flights for an airline company, you choosing to fly or not is not going to change anything. right and people don't like that answer because it feels like no i can have you know i can have an impact right like where they were constantly told you can have an impact you can do something but i think that where you can have an impact is it's less about uh on the micro level for a lot of these world problems like no you actually can't change an election as an individual right you're part of a much bigger thing you can't change global warming as an individual right by just simply not flying or something like that, where if you want to have an impact, I always tell people

stop being on the defensive side and go play offense. And so if you want to change global warming, like go build a company where you can get access to lots of resources to actually have a material impact on a macro level. Right. If you want to change politics, voting is something that you are one of millions that are going to do. Right. So actually, if you if you go vote or you don't, it's not going to change the election, right? In many, many cases. But if you want to change the political thing, then go run to be or go work on a campaign, right? Like there's almost this feeling of you've got to be much more strategic and I think intelligent about the impact that you want to have. It's not, you know, did I put things in a recycling bin or not?

Because the dent that you can make in the problem is so small. If that's the thing that you really care about then like then go actually work on it and the problem with that is uh one you find out that uh if there's more friction now all of a sudden people don't really care right like it's easy it's easy to like hey yeah like uh okay cool i'll put in the recycling bin but if you want me to like go somewhere on saturday and like actually do something that really matters like oh i don't care about the problem that much and the second thing is uh there's only so many problems you can focus on right so if you sit somebody down you say what are all the issues you care about like they'll have this laundry list of things, everything from, you know, social justice

issues to environmental issues to whatever. And then you say, okay, but you can only work on one, what's the one issue. And you find like, they actually probably do have the one thing they care about more than everything else. But it's like, all right, then go devote your time, energy and resources to that one thing, and actually make an impact rather than trick yourself into having, you know, little to no impact on a whole bunch of things. Right. So I think that the focus uh it's a really big piece of it yeah look i i know you're right i know you're right and it's just i don't know i just think about it differently like we've lived through ourselves like we're a similar age we've lived through probably the best time ever right as you said

more prosperous more opportunity it's cheap to travel the world like i think i went to 18 countries last year we've lived in such an amazing time where technology is incredible relatively safe in the countries we're in i just feel very lucky to do that but but i i've got a feeling like definitely the next decade is not going to be as good there is going to be this sharp economic impact i mean what was that what was the gdp for like nine percent eleven percent in the u.s like annualized uh oh uh the drop in gdp for q2 is uh negative 9.5 which is 32 32.9 percent uh annualized uh yeah so what was it the great recession was 6.5 percent yeah but but here's the thing right so like and again this is where you start getting into the nuances all the of this

stuff is we had a 9.5 percent drop in actual q2 gdp yet billionaires made over half a trillion dollars uh in the same time right yeah but we know why well but but here's the whole thing is you can't stick a black and white label on the situation. Because if we keep heading in the direction we're heading, it actually will be a fantastic decade for a lot of people, right? And it'll be a horrible decade for another big part of the population. And so let's just say for the basis of this conversation, it's 50-50, right? 50% of people are going to do fantastic because they're the ones that own investment assets. They know how money works, all that kind of stuff and the 50 that live paycheck to paycheck have only cash savings no investment

assets they're going to suffer like you can't say oh it's going to be a bad decade if i don't think that's going to happen what do you mean well i don't think 50 of people are i know you said for the sake of conversation but i don't think 50 of people over the next decade are going to have a great time at 50 they're going to struggle i just think i think it's going to be an aggregate drop for most people like it's going to be so we're going to have a lot of people out of work a lot of people struggling to get by you know we live in a country where whether whatever you think of socialism or social safety nets we have them we have people who rely on welfare programs more people are going to rely on that but the government's going to have less money and i think

we're going to see a lot of social unrest well i mean we're already seeing that especially in the us so i don't see it playing out like that that's the point like i am prepared now for a for a tough decade coming. But in my mind, I don't think that that's different. Right? Like, like, that's just a natural progression of a society, which is so in the United States, for example, 40% of government spending is on people over the age of 65. Right? So kind of a lot of money is spent on an older population. Obviously, the baby boomer generation is going to continue to feed into that. And there's many people who think by 2030, the amount of money spent on people over age of 65 out of the government budget would be 50%. So, you know, kind of 25% increase over the

next 10 years. That is just natural in terms of your demographics get older, right? You're a big part of your population. Now, with that said, you kind of have two options, right? Is either one, if you want to continue to have the economic boom that let's say over the last, you know, 10, 12 years, like you just moved to a different country, right? So if you get really scared, Like you can move to a country where the economic prosperity shifts. Right. And people will debate what that country would be. But that's fine. Or what you can do is you can understand structurally how it works. And if you understand structurally how it works, there are going to be people who do really, really well if you're right in the scenario that you described. And I think that's the key piece is this is not a access type situation. This is simply an education problem, right? Which is people don't understand what is happening.

And because they don't understand, they're going to get hurt. If they understand what's happening, they can make very easy decisions to actually benefit from the situation rather than be hurt by it. And so if we can change that education, you know, what percentage of the population is educated on this stuff if you can increase that percentage you can actually shift it from a negative situation to a positive situation that's just very hard to do yeah i get it i don't know perhaps i'm just seeing it differently from you because it's little things like i said about the kids like i'm thinking i remember i had this company at this agency in london pump and we

used to put out a and this was we're talking seven years ago we put out a new job position and it'd be say a junior and we get 80 to 90 applications for one role and it'll be people with degrees and a first and second or third and i'll tell you a funny story actually one guy who got one of the jobs just came and knocked on the door and just said look i've seen the jobs up can i just talk to you about it and i was like yeah of course and he got the job there and then and another guy did an application as an infographic who got a job but the point being is we got a lot of applications we just had a thing in the uk there was a role for a receptionist at a thousand applications like there's going to be fewer jobs available a lot more people going for those jobs

so i'm in that place i'm thinking right i've got kids leaving school in two years and in eight years you know if they're not going into higher education what are the skills they need what are the skills they're going to need to be have an opportunity to get an interesting job you know a well compensated job or even a job they just enjoy because it is going to be competitive and the workplace is changing yes and no right which is i think that there's going to be less of the same type of jobs but there's going to be much more of the new type of jobs and what i mean by that is so so think back um there's a point in time in uh in the united states where 98 percent of people were farmers right obviously that's not true anymore and so i i don't know what the

number is two percent five percent you know whatever it is now but that's not like all the jobs went away. It's just that those people went and found different types of jobs. And so if you look, you know, again, let's call it 20, 30 years out, what are the things that are going to be in high demand? Well, obviously, anything around technology will be incredibly important. And so you can kind of just go through everything from design to computer science to, you know, analytics, like all of that type of stuff. Those jobs, if you go and you talk to companies, many of them will say, we can't find enough people, right? And that's why they're paying them so much money. And they're doing all this kind of stuff. And so I think that it's very vertical specific. And

unfortunately, kind of what you're highlighting is the people who are out of work right now tend to be service, hospitality, you know, kind of lower socioeconomic status, you know, kind of the people at the lowest end of a corporate ladder. And those jobs are heavily commoditized because there's a million other people who can do the same job. And so you put out a receptionist and you get a thousand applications. If you put out, I need a self-driving autonomous vehicle engineer, you actually don't get any applications and you got to go try to find somebody at another company and recruit them to leave. Now, it's not fair to say, hey, Peter, your 16-year-old should learn how to be an autonomous driving engineer in the next two years if he's not one

interested in it too, hasn't already spent time doing it. There's challenges here. But I do think what it hints at is as a society we are going to have to retrain entire generations with new skills for those new jobs it will happen it's just how quickly does it happen and who are the people who get retrained versus the people who get left behind again like these transitions that just happen over and over again in history sounds pretty you know bleak but that's just what happens yeah i guess i guess you're i'm not even saying optimistic versus pessimistic although i'm being pessimistic i think you're just saying it's just the way it is shit we'll figure it out shit we'll figure out it it's a thing where i generally believe humans solve the problems that they face

right uh and that's part of the beauty of the human race uh but also i think that uh we have a lot of recency bias right we always think that like what we're going through is different than what's ever happened before. And there are differences, right? For sure. We've never had a global pandemic when the internet allowed information to, you know, kind of be disseminated so quickly and then have a federal government willing to step in and respond with quantitative easing. So there are nuances in there that are different than any global pandemic in the past. But at the same time, like there's been plenty of civilizations that have dealt with some sort of, you know, massive public health crisis. And so what we need to be smart about

is learning from history at the same time, understanding what are the unique advantages we have today, uh, in a situation. I actually think one of the crazy things is in past retrainings of a society, we didn't have the internet, right? And so like, it's a massive advantage for us. Now, are people going to be self-starters? How do we deal with the cost structure for that? How do you get certification if you're not going to a university? There's things that need to be figured out in there. But I generally believe that entrepreneurs will figure that stuff out. They're the people who solve the problems in society. And so we should encourage as many of those people to step up and do that as possible. Everything from just emotional support

to capital to other things as well all right man we need to do some bitcoin in before we finish this all right what do you got you started there but i wanted to talk about roger no you tell me what do you think's going on right now look we we had a 2017 you know 2018 we we went through some good times then then we have this bear market that seems to go on forever now like we seem to be back on the rise the timing seems right in that we seem to be coming out of a bear market and also you know there's there's definite signals within the market for why people should be investing in scarce assets i'll say that broadly because i still believe gold has a role to place this play despite what other people think but like what do you make of what's

going on before i answer that and i forget if you listen to my podcast you should go subscribe to peter's podcast what bitcoin did he has awesome guests and he's awesome as you can tell so please go subscribe and vice versa if you listen to peter's podcast go subscribe to mine that's the whole point of us doing a joint podcast no no once you subscribe to mine you don't need pumps anymore fair fair fair it's so funny you know i troll you know i troll the fuck out of you i love it yeah but like some people don't get it they like think they think it's real well you know you know what you have to say to those people oh we're having fun you won't like it right like all right come on tell me about bitcoin what do you make what do you make of going on that

uh this was the easiest call in history and and i say that half joking but last year i wrote multiple times in may june and july about we are ending we're getting near the end of an economic cycle right we've been in this long 10-year bull market all the stuff uh and at the end central banks only have two tools to deal with uh that downturn they can manipulate rates so they can print money. And I said, look, I think that they're going to have to do that at some point in the coming months. It is likely that it is going to coincide within a 90 day window of the Bitcoin habit. And so one of the things that I wrote was dropping rates, printing money and the having all occurring around the same time will serve as rocket fuel for Bitcoin.

Now, there are plenty of people who are going to hear me say this thing like, well, how did you know a global pandemic was going to happen. I didn't, obviously, right? Nobody knew. But that simply served as the catalyst to drive the end of the bull market. So there was already a bunch of issues. You had inverted yield curves. You had all the repo market gyrations and kind of structural issues. You had an all-time record high of CEOs leaving their roles. There was a bunch of these issues or alarm bells going off all through the end of last year and into the beginning of this year. So we were getting towards the end. It was just a matter of what was going to be the thing that accelerated that or caused it to happen. And so now what we see is a world where

gold, Bitcoin, real estate are all going to do really well, right? Because you simply can't print trillions of dollars of a currency and have no impact on that currency. And so guess what? We're literally seeing the exact theoretical kind of impact of quantitative easing become reality. They printed trillions. The dollar got weakened. And when the dollar weakens, asset prices all explode. It's not because all of a sudden the business is worth more money. It's literally because the dollar is being devalued. Same with Bitcoin or gold. There's not much that's changed from June 1st to July 31st with Bitcoin, right? The halving had already occurred. It's pretty much doing exactly what it's supposed to do. What's changing is one demand, right? So there is some change in demand because of what's going on in the macro environment,

but also the dollar is being devalued. And that's where you get an explosion in price. And so I tend to think that that thesis from 2019 of they're going to continue to keep rates low, they're going to print money and the halving occurred. I think that 2021 is going to be absolute chaos in terms of a very high volatile upward price movement of Bitcoin. But ultimately, it doesn't matter. The US dollar value of Bitcoin doesn't matter. This is a game of accumulation, and it's going to end up being what percent of the 21 million Bitcoin do you have? That's what I think of. I don't worry about the US dollar value.

all i continue to think about is what is the number of bitcoin i own divided by 21 million and when you think of it that way all of a sudden you start to realize do i own more or less than i did yesterday or the day before the week before or whatever and if you have that mentality kind of a bitcoin denominated mentality i think you'll end up doing pretty well well yeah i mean i i never think that i've actually got particularly a large amount of bitcoin but if i looked at the gold market and my percentage of bitcoin was in the gold market I'll be like, fucking hell, I mean, I'm good here, right? So this is a better map.

And look, here's what I continue to tell people. Name to me a business that was analog and got digitized, and the digital version is smaller than the analog version. It doesn't happen, right? And it's because digitization brings all kinds of advantages. It's a market-expanding technology. And so, you know, there are people who debate what the size of the gold market is, but let's just use easy numbers. Let's say that it's $8 trillion.

That puts Bitcoin at, depending on how many are lost or stolen or whatever, you know, $400,000, $450,000 U.S. dollars today. Do you think that Bitcoin's only going to be the equivalent of the gold market? I don't. No. Right? It's better. It's going to capture more market. Now, when does that happen?

That might take 50 years to happen. But when you think of it that way, you're like, okay, again, don't worry about the individual day-to-day price movements or any of that stuff. Just look at the underlying structural kind of foundation and then look at how does technology evolve. This is a technology evolution story in terms of market adoption and things, and we've seen it play out over and over and over again. Airbnb, biggest hotel, doesn't own any hotels. right uber biggest taxi company but doesn't own any tax like we've seen this happen so many times uh and i don't think it's different this time what's the equivalent like bitcoin the biggest bank doesn't own any branches yeah or or in the sense of um if you think of bitcoin as

uh one day i believe we will say bitcoin is the largest currency in the world in terms of uh market cap and it will have no one controlling it. I fundamentally believe. My worry is I won't be alive to see that day because it may take that long. That's annoying. In my early 30s, let's say that I live a great life. I got 50 years. Is Bitcoin going to end up ascending to the global reserve currency status in the next 50 years? And will we see it could eclipse a 80, $90 trillion market cap. I don't know. But if you said to me, between now and the rest of human history, you know, humans, future potential or, you know, future years, absolutely no question in my mind, that's going to happen. It's just will it happen my lifetime or

not. And so by the way, if it doesn't happen in my lifetime, still being along for the ride is going to end up being pretty good, I think. Yeah, because it's like, we're along for half for the lifetime right like of getting there of getting there like the next yeah i'm pretty sure with my 10-year thesis in 10 years time i'm gonna be very happy with my investments i think my kids are gonna be even happier and want me to to die because they're gonna have all my bitcoin but i think we're gonna be happy all right man well listen look what will it take to change your mind you said this at the start what's gonna take to change your mind are you following the defy stuff you're like fuck that now all right so hold on we need to settle this for a second i'm not against

defy at all i actually think it's going to be super super valuable again again it's like when roger and i talk about a digital decentralized currency ended up being adopted globally super important thing it's going to happen that's you know quote unquote the finish line or the goal or milestone or whatever it's just how do we get there that's how i feel about the defy stuff So DeFi, and I think part of my issue with how it's being categorized right now, is the Ethereum community thinks that they have a monopoly on that terminology, right? They're using DeFi as a synonym for Ethereum, and it's not, right? And it's why I say things like Bitcoin is the most valuable DeFi application, and they all freak out. What do you mean?

Whatever. Decentralized finance, right? the core of finance is money. And the most decentralized, most valuable application that is decentralized is Bitcoin. So it's intellectually dishonest when they say, no, it's not. And ultimately what they're saying is that they're upset, right? They don't want DeFi to actually be successful anywhere else other than Ethereum. And so we've made plenty of investments in companies that are building on top of Ethereum that support Ether, that use some version of a decentralized application or do something, right? So again, don't listen to what

I say, just watch what we do with the money. And we're making investments. So we obviously think that there's value there. But I'm not convinced that DeFi is an Ethereum only thing, right? Obviously, Bitcoin, it proves that. And so what you end up getting is you end up getting this religiousness about DeFi that completely ignores reality and also is intellectually dishonest when talking about it. And so what I think is going to end up happening is that is going to be detrimental to that entire space. What I hope occurs is that there's enough people who are rational and who kind of understand the structural pieces and that it ends up not actually mattering, right? But if Literally, you can go – I tweeted the other day and said Bitcoin is the most valuable DeFi application, and literally it was like a bunch of ETH trolls just being like, you're an idiot.

You don't know what you're talking about, whatever. Do you understand what the definition of decentralized finance is? Are you triggering Bitcoiners and ETH heads at the same time now? No, because I think that Bitcoin people have this belief that if something came along that had more market adoption and had better core kind of aspects to it than Bitcoin, they want to see a digital currency succeed, right? And so I don't think actually that Bitcoiners, for the most part, are married to the idea of Bitcoin or nothing, right? I just think that they're very, very convinced that Bitcoin is the solution. And by the way, the market has validated that. Yeah, OK.

On the DeFi side, many of those people I do not believe actually are DeFi or bust. I think that they're Ethereum or bust. And I think that's very dangerous. so what would it take to change your mind that bitcoin is the only i think that there's three yeah there's three key things so one is uh a self like a very serious self-inflicted wound in terms of some sort of bug or something introduced in the development process of bitcoin right so no no i'm like i'm like the other way i'm saying what do it take to change your mind that like bitcoin is the only thing you should focus on and put money into me meaning what would it take to convince me to do

something else yeah just forget all these shit coins oh you're saying what would it take to convince me that bitcoin is the only thing worth putting money into yeah oh i mean look that's what basically what we do we we hold no tokens in uh from an investment standpoint uh other than bitcoin right the the actual investments that we make are uh bitcoin i own nothing other than bitcoin and so i thought you were putting money into device stuff you've been into companies into companies into companies right so like that that's my whole thesis uh is bitcoin will be the next global reserve currency don't know how long it takes but that's going to happen and then what actually the value that accrues is into the infrastructure right and and so it goes back

to the same example of like if you invested in the seed round of kraken or coinbase or any of these companies and bought bitcoin on the same day the equity investment actually has outperformed the just holding Bitcoin. Interesting. So when you look at it from that standpoint, it's like, okay, hold on a second here. Now, you can invest in 10 early stage startups and nine go to zero, and you got to make sure you're in the one that actually does that, right? So there's some nuance to it. But it's just a belief that infrastructure is always a very valuable kind of profitable strategy. And then Bitcoin is going to be more valuable in the future than it is today. That's my belief right and so are other things going to go up of course like it take uh ethereum for

example right or ether everyone's yelling and screaming about how it's going up in value so much well yeah of course because bitcoin is going to lead in terms of bitcoin having and the money printing and all this stuff will move and then the market well the smaller market cap assets will just move more in US dollar terms. But I think that what it shows is those people are looking at this from an investment return perspective. I think that the Bitcoin community, like you said, they're not going to sell. A number of Bitcoins that have not moved in over a year is like 64%, 65%. It's the highest it's ever been. They're not going to sell. And so it doesn't matter what the percentage changes if you're not going to sell. Because ultimately what you're

doing is you're denominating how many Bitcoin do I have? I don't hear a lot of people in other assets in the crypto world talking like that, right? And so what ultimately ends up occurring here, and I think it's very important, is when you look at a market, when things go down, the blue chip, large market cap assets move down the least, right? And all the small caps, they fall really fast. When you then go into a bull market, the large caps, they move the least, right? And the small caps explode up in value. It's a market cap thing. And I think that's what we're seeing in crypto. So if you said to me, am I surprised that whether, I'm not even going to name some of the other ones, but there's plenty of them that are exploding. It's of course,

Because if I took a million dollars and I put it in that versus a million dollars in Bitcoin, of course, I'm going to move the market much more of the small cap asset because it's simply got a smaller market cap. And I think that's what we're seeing play out. Again, not a bad thing. It's just that if you're a student of history and understand how markets work, like not surprising. I think we get a new all time high this year. I could see that. I don't know if it's going to happen. Like, you know, look, the only thing have you said any sort of anything around price other than all time high by the end of this year?

no because it's so difficult you know i was having this conversation with my son yesterday it was like like i said look there's people who think the price can go to you know 30 50 even a hundred thousand dollars he's like he was like would you sell something i said well that's a really tough thing because you could sell at 50 and it goes to 100 so i just don't sell i just i just know that i a bit like you said you you know what's your percentage i just need to know i need to have as much of it as i need and then i'll sell it when i have to sell it and that's what i'll do because i have to sell at that point until then i i won't but i i think we're going to a new all-time high this year but i think if it happens i think it probably happens before the election which i

know sounds soon but to be honest based on the previous time we went from 12 to 20k it was pretty easy um but i think it happens before the u.s election because i think i think the stock market has to stay at a high value for donald trump which means yes and i mean they're negotiating in another stimulus package right so i just think there's going to be a lot more money trillions more printed before the u.s election and then i think we'll get a new all-time high before the election because of that and i think people are very aware now i think the gold price has been very helpful because i've been telling people about the bitcoin price they don't care tell about the gold price they understand and then you talk to them about bitcoin bid digital gold

in terms of where it can go i've got no idea i don't know what like happens to liquidity so say if bitcoin's at like 100k and somebody thinks shit i've got one bitcoin i'm on 100k and they might want to sell it i don't know if that people have that kind of like psychological reaction to it and therefore you've got a lot of selling pressure i don't understand all that stuff all i do think is i think we get a new all-time high before the election i could be wrong and i think next year is going to be fucking crazy what about you so the short-term stuff's much harder obviously uh the only number that i've said is i do think we'll hit a hundred thousand u.s exchange uh you know price or value by the end of 2021 so december 31st 2021 will have hit

100k we'll still be above it i have no clue but like that will have happened beforehand i definitely can see a world where uh the current administration essentially you know people hate when i describe this way buys votes by continuing to pump the uh the equity markets because it's not really pumping the economy it's the easiest thing they can do it's the best campaign that they can do right is if you're sitting there and 50 plus percent of the country says i'm getting rich right of course i like this guy right like i don't care about all the other dumb things or whatever everyone's complaining about like i my portfolio keeps going up so this guy is good for me right yeah um you know i think there's a lot of people who disagree with that they're not happy

that people think that way but at the same time uh i think generally people are very um kind of self-centered and they say, who's going to do the best for me? And the crazy part of all of that is there's a scenario. Again, I'm not necessarily convinced that this is the scenario, but one of the possibilities is they absolutely pump the asset prices going into the election. And as soon as the reelection happens, they basically take their foot off the gas and there's some sort of crash in asset prices. Possible, but who knows what's going to happen? I think that the beauty here is the one thing we know for sure is that they are only making 900 bitcoin a day right now and six months ago they were making 1800 and so demand just stays the same naturally the price

has to go up if demand increases the u.s dollar price has got to go up and if they're going to print money i think demand is going to continue to increase who wins the election i think trump wins in a landslide really oh yeah i don't think it's close to two reasons uh if you turn on american television right now nobody's talking about anything but trump it's the exact same thing that he he did before right he's just dominating headlines uh and the second thing is i think that the current democratic nominee is one of the worst people they could have put forward oh it's terrible you know i've got half a bitcoin on him losing on trump losing what's your argument for why he loses so i had it i've got it like about threefold right um i think the

timing of the pandemic second wave is terrible for him i think that's really bad for him i assumed i thought the democratic party would replace biden i just assumed they would because it's so obvious he's not the right candidate for the job i mean you know as everyone has pointed out he he can barely talk sometimes he's obviously got cognitive issues so i assumed they replaced him i kind of thought cuomo would get it and i'm not it's not that i'm a fan of the guy that's the other thing i have to be uh um say to people it's like i'm not a fan of the democratic party i thought trump was losing that's why my bet was i'm betting on trump losing it so i thought i i thought it was um i thought it would be mainly down to a better candidate coming in trump kind

of having his meltdown and basically the pandemic being very bad timing i'm not as confident as i was because it feels like biden's going to get the nod but i just assumed they would be replacing him i i completely agree i mean imagine imagine a debate between donald trump and joe biden you'd have to get out you'd have to get out the crime scene tape like he would he kills him and And by the way, that's not necessarily me saying that he's even going to say anything of substance, right? It's just he'll just literally bully the hell out of them. And he understands how to get the soundbite, right? And people, I think, are confused in like the debates or things.

They think that it's about who has the better policy. That's not what it's about, right? no it's it's basically who can literally overpower the other person and can get the sound bite and can make people laugh and be you know likable all this kind of stuff it's crazy absolutely crazy but that's just the world we live in i think there's another thing that doesn't work in trump's favor and i'm not into this whole like election manipulation and uh voter fraud i think there's from when i looked at it when i did my minutiae work there's things going on on both sides i just think i think people being able to or choosing to vote from home or having to vote from home

because of the pandemic that really suits the democratic party over the republican party from everything i've seen republicans want to get out and vote in person and democrats are more likely to you're going to see a higher voter turnout on mail-in votes with uh democrats and that's why i think trump's scared of that so that's another thing i could throw in there but look it's fascinating it's like i actually think that you're right in the sense of yes getting more democratic votes is bad for trump i think that i would argue more people will not vote so here's one of the things that uh i think people i think the argument is that if you have mail-in voting more people will vote i actually think it's the opposite which is although we all think it's easier to

get the piece of paper fill it out mail it in i think there's a lot of people who just want to tell me where to go right oh no i'm with you on that but i think i think once you make it a lower turnout you get a bigger drop off with democratic uh sorry republican voters if there's a lower turnout if it's mail-in voting it's worse for the demo it's worse for the republicans to because democrats are more likely to still use the mail-in vote yes yeah completely agree yeah so there's a lower voter turnout but it's it's skewed in one way but here's the crazy part is biden hasn't chosen a vp yet i know i know and so what i'm wondering is i don't think it's over yet in terms of their ability to switch him out or to make him the vp i think cuomo uh would be a natural

potential person for them to put in uh i think that he's got a very very big problem on his hands though in terms of there's tens of thousands of people that died in new york because of his decision to send covid patients back into the nursing homes and i think that the the republican party is sitting on that they have not hammered him on it yet and i think that if he gets put forward you're gonna see i mean they're gonna absolutely eviscerate him and say you know there's blood on your hands and kind of like go after them and the sad part is like why do i think that because i think that we haven't seen the mud throwing yet and like this is going to get really nasty and when it gets nasty there's going to be all kinds of accusations like you haven't seen

the bill clinton epstein stuff yet you haven't seen like all of this is is just kind of waiting out there you can see the ingredients and uh like starting in september it's gonna be like game on they're gonna throw everything at the wall both parties it's gonna be nasty and then we'll get to the election well i do hope the planes are flying because i want to be in the u.s election night i think it's be i want to be there for a few days i think it's going to be fascinating to watch i don't really have like i've got a bet but in terms of if i wasn't having a bet i couldn't honestly tell you who i would prefer i i don't i'm not a fan of either i probably i mean i naturally feel like i swing republican just because you know i like i like republican states a lot when

i've been to places like texas or when i went up to wyoming i just really liked it i've kind of felt felt really at home in those kind of places but look i don't know dude it'd be what it'd be i think they're all the same yeah and but i literally think they're all the same what's the difference between joe biden and donald trump i well it's not in terms of him i think the politicians are all the same but i like in terms of kind of like republican ideals it's a little bit more like leave me the fuck alone let me get on with work but okay so i agree that idealistically that that is what is happening but a perfect example is uh right now we're looking at a situation where the republicans and democrats both want to print trillions of dollars in the

next stimulus package right yeah on that i'm thinking more like if you ask me do you want to go and live in portland oregon or do you want to go and live in i don't know austin texas well i know austin's austin's got the same problems dallas texas i'll go to dallas right now um but maybe like i don't know like jackson hole yeah like i i would not want to go to any of these places where these crazy people are losing their shit and rioting every day at the moment i just it's a real turnoff and i i like portland i had a i've had a great time in portland i like austin a lot but i just don't want to be around these places it's surreal in the in the sense of that, you know, being a white dude who was born in America, grew up here, uh, was in the army,

the whole thing. And then you kind of see the videos. And I told Polina at one point, like, it's almost like you can't believe that that is America, right? Like you used to see those videos. Uh, I think I saw one, uh, from Portland, right? And I'm not an expert by any means on kind of what's happening there. So, so, you know, kind of no, no judgment in that sense, but, uh, what they showed in the video, if it was real and all those things you would expect to see in like a war-torn country you know somewhere else right they didn't have democracy and all this crazy stuff and you're just like man what is going on well at least in the in i guess in those places you think you you would understand what they want or what they're fighting about i've got no idea

what they what the hell they want there so anyway bro listen look i gotta go and uh i gotta go and make dinner for these kids all right well tell them i say hello you should do an episode with your kids i did a little one on um did a little one on youtube once my son the other day asked to buy some bitcoin really because he's been yeah because he's 16 he's been working he's earning a bit of money and i was like no man you don't need to do that you get all my bitcoin but uh yeah no he's interested they understand they understand a few things they um they know who satoshi is they know there's 21 million they're interested dude so hey they need some dinner that's that's pretty good that they know all that all right my friend if you listen to the pump podcast go subscribe to

what bitcoin did if you listen to what bitcoin did go subscribe to the pump podcast peter's a legend thanks for having me man pump always good to see you man hopefully see you in new york at sometime soon and say hello to that lovely wife of yours man and yeah go listen to pump but just if you don't want to listen pump just stick with mine because mine's a bit better see you later bro take care