The Pomp Podcast - #596 Jonathan Gheller Explains Bitcoin As The Best Central Bank

Episode Date: July 2, 2021

Jonathan Gheller is an entrepreneur and investor. He previously founded multiple startups, including companies that were acquired by Facebook and Google.  In this conversation, we discuss growing up in Venezuela, economic inequality, Silicon Valley tech companies, bitcoin, fixing the money, automated central bank, importance of censorship resistance, and the ideas of predictability and independence.  ======================= Let’s talk about Okcoin - one of the most popular licensed exchanges. Okcoin is the first to bring new cryptos to market, offering some of the lowest fees in the industry, an easy to use app, and Earn feature--you got to check out their brand new, beautifully designed app!  And as of today, they also became the first US exchange to list NEAR.   It’s easier than ever to sign up, buy and trade crypto in just 2 minutes on Okcoin with credit & debit cards or just link your bank account to the best new crypto assets. So get started, and go to okcoin.com/pomp ======================= NEAR, now listed on Okcoin.com, is an open-source platform that accelerates the development of decentralized applications overcoming high fees and slow speeds with its fast, scalable, low-cost, and climate-neutral blockchain protocol. This is why NEAR was recently awarded the Climate Neutral Product Label from South Pole. One transaction on NEAR consumes about 1300x less carbon than a similar transaction on other chains. Learn why NEAR is the infrastructure for innovation at NEAR.org (N-E-A-R [dot] O-R-G) today. ======================= Revolut is a finance app in the US and UK, that say they're the simplest way to access crypto. Sign up today at Revolut.com/pomp and make 3 card transactions to get $15, which you can exchange for any tokens Revolut supports. As usual, when you move your money from fiat to crypto your capital is at risk. See T&C's for details. Revolut is a financial technology company. Banking services provided by Metropolitan Commercial Bank, Member FDIC. Cryptocurrency services provided directly by Paxos Trust Company, LLC.

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Jonathan Geller is an entrepreneur and investor. He previously founded multiple startups, including companies that were acquired by Facebook and Google. In this conversation, we discuss growing up in Venezuela, economic inequality, Silicon Valley tech companies, Bitcoin, fixing the money, automated central banks, importance of censorship resistance, and the ideas of predictability and independence. I really enjoyed this conversation with Jonathan, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk

about our sponsors. First up is OKCoin, one of the most popular licensed exchanges. OKCoin is the first to bring new cryptos to market, offering some of the lowest fees in the industry, an easy to use app, and an earn feature where you got to check out their brand new beautifully designed app and as of today they also became the first u.s exchange to list near it's easier than ever to sign up buy and trade crypto in just two minutes on okcoin with credit and debit cards or just link your bank account to the best new crypto assets so to get started go to okcoin.com slash pomp again okcoin.com slash pomp next up is near which is now listed on okcoin.com Near is an open source platform that accelerates the development of decentralized applications, overcoming high fees and slow speeds with its fast, scalable, low cost and climate neutral blockchain protocol.

This is why Near was recently awarded the climate neutral product label from South Pole. One transaction on Near consumes about 1300x less carbon than a similar transaction on other chains. Learn why Near is the infrastructure for innovation at Near.org. N-E-A-R dot O-R-G today. near.org last but not least are my friends over at revolute revolute is a finance app in the u.s and the uk that say they're the simplest way to access crypto you can sign up today at revolute.com slash pop and when you make three card transactions you'll get 15 which you can then exchange for bitcoin or any of the other tokens that revolute supports as usual when you move your money from

fiat to crypto your capital is at risk but don't forget that revolute is a massive business and Europe and it has now come to the United States. Their assets in their crypto products has more than doubled in the last 12 months. Go check them out at Revolut.com slash Pomp. Revolut.com slash Pomp and let me know what you think. All right, let's get in this episode with Jonathan. I hope you guys enjoyed this one. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression

of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I have a very special guest today. My friend Jonathan is here. How are you? I'm doing great.

All right. I want to start with your childhood and growing up because you have a very unique experience that I think feeds into a lot of your worldview. But before we do that, I'm going to tell a story that I don't know if you remember this or not. We worked at Facebook together. You were the last boss that I had at Facebook before I left. And there was a meeting.

The details don't necessarily matter as much, but we were all in a meeting with some of the higher ups at Facebook. and there were some suggestions floating around as to things that we could do on Facebook to get more people to pay attention to the executives at Facebook. And one of the ideas was to put an interstitial over, uh, the, uh, the page. And a lot of people at Facebook were like, Oh, that's a great idea. Like, uh, you know, we can basically like, that's how we get people's attention. And it was very much like a data driven. Okay. There's going to be a certain number of people who see this, that click that then, you know, opt into this action, whatever.

all normal conversations for kind of a Silicon Valley firm. And all of a sudden, I don't know how we do the meeting. You're like, excuse me. So I'm not from the United States. And let me explain to you what used to happen in television. It's like the dictator of our country would come on and be like, now interrupting this programming.

And like, this is the thing. And your point wasn't so much like the social media CEOs or dictators. It was more of just like, hey, there's multiple cultures that use these platforms. We have to be sensitive to the way that this could be received. And I always think about that because I think you, probably better than anybody I know, understand Silicon Valley.

You've built companies, sold companies, worked at many of these tech companies, etc. But you also very much understand the world outside the United States and have been able to mesh that together. People got really angry in that meeting, if you remember. It was very tense. I do remember that. And I left one of those very important executives in that meeting. and i remember some other guys from the team you know kind of higher up in the hierarchy than me

saying i've never seen seen this guy he's angry ever you know 10 years of a company ever i was like holy crap yeah i don't remember that yeah i do remember them getting mad i was gonna leave that part out but yeah well tense you know there was a very tense meeting yeah well i think that there's uh let's have some uh hint of truth and everything right of just like yeah like that might not have been a good idea and thankfully we didn't do it so yeah okay um that's a tough job you have there i remember you had a tough kind of at intersection of a lot of things at facebook i was very i was very unprepared for that i was a 25 26 year old kid and um i was asked to basically interface with these people on a pretty periodic basis but also then to interact

with other executives and you know it's like a minnow getting thrown in with the sharks and you're like oh okay yeah i think i think what happens one of the reasons that job is hard is because if you if you're before that you were doing that if you were starting companies or just generally hustling you have an output mentality you're like how the how do i get stuff out how they're going to podcast out and your product out and your feature out and you're outcome oriented in a large company you have to be input oriented you have to go like so What do you want, VP of X? What do you want, VP of Y?

And you're like, well, if I phrase it like so, are we all in agreement? And can we take that to the higher ups? And you were, I remember, in a role that had a lot of that. That was very painful. That was very painful. I think. I always, to this day, say it was nine, it was, no, three months, give or take, in this specific role. Yes.

and uh i got into the role because basically some of the executives were like hey we think that this guy would be good at this because he had done some other stuff yeah they went to uh my boss's boss at the time i remember hey can we talk to him about doing this and they were like no and like we're still gonna talk to him yes yeah so it wasn't much choice yeah did it it was awesome you know got to interface all these people really good people i learned amazing people i learned more than i've ever learned in a 90-day period i learned i still to this day believe i learned more in that role than anything else but i was very unprepared for that yeah it was brutal it was good people to work with they were they were they were hardcore good talented you know to this

day i will still i think that this is probably true there's nobody better than that team that in terms of uh and we're talking about some of the earliest facebook employees that have you know risen up to the ranks and still are in charge today uh the combination of product analytics growth like like everything together yeah you could give them any problem in technology and they got a shot they're amazing very resilient really hard working there's good people but yes all right you're not there anymore yeah that's fine well we're okay we're both i learned that's fine but there was many walk-in talks that we did where it was like hey listen all right so here's the deal i remember consensus yeah i was learning as well with you to be honest i don't know what i

was doing yeah you grew up in venezuela which uh i think uh with some of the background knowledge of being able to say that in that meeting of like hey let's maybe cool it a little bit here uh what was that like it's interesting i grew up middle class in in venezuela and that's actually very comfortable to some degree you know i my both my parents worked at a kind of state-owned companies my dad worked at the oil state state-owned company you know it was a top 10 company by market cap for a while my mom worked at the uh kind of the uh alcoa like the you know steel state-owned company um it was a good comfortable life but it's also a you know very unequal society and a very unstable society and i got mugged growing up several times my mom

got mugged growing up several times and get out of the car and the car goes my dad got mugged several times and i would negotiate with guys like take take the shoes don't take the watch or whatever just like don't don't leave me hanging that my brother got um what's called express kidnap you know like for a couple of hours well they grab you coming out of like um i didn't coming out of this isn't even where we lived it was like a coming out of i don't know mountain view in california a really nice neighborhood at 8 p.m on a tuesday from like imagine cvs and they're like we're getting in your car and he was kidnapped for a couple of hours and my brother my brother was very effective persuading them that we have no money i don't

know what you're gonna take and my brother remembers distinctively the thing that shocked him the most is that by all material accounts those guys were better off than him it was like your your car is better your shoes are better your jeans are better your what your glasses everything you guys are the cool kids i should and he's like let's take my debit card and just take whatever it won't it won't be much and they were very disappointed um i got mocked by police once growing up growing up i was in a red light and they got in the car and they like drive and and and and i remember my mom used to own a small shop where she sold um after she left the state company she sold like lottery tickets and had the money for the price and i'm like you cannot touch

that that's my mom's and that's someone else's you know these guys are police they're like we won't we won't take that and they were so angry at me because i had i remember 20 bolivares which just like nothing in my wallet and they're like i can't believe that's enough and we get we ran out so it was a lot of crime and a lot of insecurity um at least there's honor among the thieves there is oh they can be very kind yeah and then uh and then um there was a lot of political turmoil um and then kind of financial turmoil right um you know when i grew when i was born the exchange change rate was 4.3 so 4.3 bolivares for one u.s dollar okay by the time i was like eight or nine i can recall what i could remember this it was 16 so forex basically right by the time i left

college it was a thousand right now so i kind of lost track here but i think i want to say that because they debased the currency twice and changed names with this kind of and basically when you're talking about debase not just like printed more like literally they took zeros off the end of the currency but that's right yeah rename it so like it was a million boliviar or whatever analysis a thousand right and so and you're like where'd the zeros go and they have this kind of over we were talking before about over having overconfidence and like the perils of our confidence right these guys will call the debased bolivar the bolivar fuerte the strong bolivar that's one stronger has less zeros right right so i want to say that on the bolivar that

i grew up on the week the weak one the weak one this guy um right now i think the exchange rate would be three billion wait what three billion i think it's 30 000 but then three billion on you know yeah so the week on the week one yeah yes so before they took all the zeros off it literally went from four to three billion well it never really showed the ticket three billion because it was debased. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yes, if you anchor on that believer, if you anchor on that believer

and go all the way to today, it's $3 billion. So there's a lot of change, right? To give people who just to like hammer the point home, if you wanted to buy $1 as a kid, you needed four of the local currency. That's right. And you would get $1 in exchange. You go to the bank, hey, here's four, give me one.

Now you'd have to show up with $3 billion. That's right. And they literally would be like, you'd be like, how do I carry that? That's right, that's right, that's right. And now, this happens in Venezuela. I haven't been there in a while, but it happens in Venezuela. You can see this in Colombia as well, in the frontier, in the border.

Even the newer bolívares, which also have been debased and kind of weakened a ton, they're used for... Like art. Yeah, arts and crafts. So they'll do like a purse made out of the bolívares. So they'll make a little plane or... They're worthless, right? Growing up in that environment, do people know?

Like, do they realize it or is it just like, oh, that's how it is everywhere? That's a good question. I'm not sure to what extent things are being realized. I do think people realize inflation can be seen. And I remember having conversations as a kid in the streets where, you know, you see inflation in two ways, right? One way is things get more expensive. the other way is that products get uh refactor to maintain the price but be less less quantity less quality whatever it may be so i remember uh this chocolate that we like growing up that

kind of kept the price for a long time it just got tiny right from this to this so it you know and people know right and they know it doesn't kind of the price is the same what you get is different right so you can also do that right uh and a lot that happened a ton right and we kept getting you know you know the bags of chips with like less and less the loaf of bread just becomes one slice right and so all of that keeps happening so people are aware and people are aware of the kind of purchasing power that's something very real what i don't think people realize fully is that um is how inflation is an indirect tax on the poor that's a piece that I'm not sure it's visible because what happens is that if you live in a country that is highly

inflationary and you're able to save in a strong currency for local expenditures inflation is actually beneficiary in the sense that you know if it's like if the if the if the things get debased but your your savings get stronger you can come back and then buy more and so you're purchasing power and your quality of life doesn't get that affected. If you're saving in the local currency because you can't take money out or you have a lot of expenses, then it's a

pretty clear tax. And I'm not sure people follow that. I think the other thing that happens is that inflation is an amazing indirect tax for governments because they can divert responsibility. So they can say, look at the chocolate factory.

They're making the chocolate smaller. that's not right or look at the coffee shop the coffee now is 10 times more expensive that's not okay you're exploiting people and so it's very easy to like divert responsibility for the indirect tax and so it's very very popular for governments right it's very useful to them you're talking about venezuela you could be talking about the united states yeah in terms of inflation affecting the poor, in terms of the diversion of blame, in terms of the arguments of exploitation, minimum wage. I mean, all of this stuff is the exact same in the two countries, maybe on a different

level of severity, right? But systematically, it's the same thing. That's right. I think the other lesson that you get from the US that is less apparent in a place like Venezuela, but I think is very important, is that when you... This kind of graphs are very popular circulating around the Internet, right? When you see the lines of inflation, you're like, well, car, you know, flights have gone really cheap or cars have gone really cheap. But look at education or look at health care.

And then if you look at those costs and you look at who's impacting them, you can see how regressive that tax, the inflation is, like who's actually paying that bill. And it's not being paid equally. It's being paid very unequally. And the poor suffer more, right? Because those are the things that they spend more money. As a percentage of income, health care is a smaller expense than it is for someone who's poor. And so if that goes up, you disproportionately hit the poor population. There's a study that I will try to find again.

I'll put in the show notes for everyone. That looked, I think it was in the UK. So not in the United States, but in an English-speaking kind of developed nation. And it looked at after the 2008 financial crisis, they basically broke down the socioeconomic kind of ladder into 20% buckets. So top 20%, next 20, all the way down, right? And what it said was, by their estimation, coming out of the 2008 financial crisis,

the bottom 40% of people in their country were experiencing somewhere between 6% to 10% inflation levels. So when you think about that, the official numbers to maybe 2.5%, It's kind of a blend across society, 10% every year things are going. I mean, you just can't keep up, right? It's that feeling of everything going up. But I always go back to like the system is doing exactly what it's designed to do. They want to devalue the currency so people spend or invest and keep velocity of money

going. It's just only that like half the population knows that and acts accordingly, right? They buy assets, they do all this. everyone else is just trying to do their job and eat right i mean there's no uh understanding of economics there's no understanding how money works there's no understanding of what i should do to protect my wealth or grow my wealth or anything it's 45 of americans don't even own a single investable asset and so it's actually the education gap seems to be what exposes people more than anything because the system's doing what they designed it to do right that's the scary part

That's right. And if you look at, this is true in a place like Venezuela, like in the U.S., more so there. Imagine you're in Venezuela and imagine you have excess income that can be turned into savings of $75. How do you turn the equivalent in bolívares to $75? What's a financial system that provides that, that saving? How do you do that without being charged $25 in the transaction or whatever that might be? Same here, right? I mean, part of the problem is that it is hard through the financial system and even to save lower amounts over long periods of time. It's expensive. And the system is geared towards debt way more than savings. And so there's great products to leverage up. There are not that many great products to kind of save up.

There's new stuff and a lot of the most kind of cool, interesting stuff in fintech is trying to solve for that. But it's education plus infrastructure. When you think about a theme in the world, you've written about before, like the dissipation of power. Like this whole idea that maybe the last 50 years or so, there was the concentration of power. How do we create more efficiency? Seed in politics, Venezuela is like the perfect example. There's many other countries where consolidation of power leads to bad things.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely all that. But you're also seeing in corporations, right? And I think one of these pieces that you wrote was this whole idea that when you have 100 small two-person companies, you have to negotiate contracts. You have to become transactionally efficient and all this stuff. It actually just makes sense. Like, why don't we just put all the 100 different companies of two people into a 200-person organization, and we'll create top-down hierarchy. And now, all of a sudden, we don't need to negotiate every time we need to do a transaction. Like, it's just internal.

And so we can create efficiencies and get this. But it's centralized. it feels like the world is rejecting this a little bit or trying to head in a different direction with this dissipation of power. How do you look at that today? Yeah. So I think the one thing that I would say that is interesting to consider for people who are kind of strong advocates of decentralization and diffusion of power and so forth is kind of what you're saying, that centralization is really valuable. It has a bunch of things. You were referring to a pretty famous book in kind of microeconomic literature called

the theory of the firm and so this guy goes through like the logic for why firms are created and companies are created which is kind of what you want to walk us through and that that's i think exactly so so it makes sense to do that right um let's just walk that argument four steps ahead and just see see how it plays out and why that becomes an issue like well that now is concentrated right so now maybe they are underserving a subsection of the market and so you and i get together like well we're gonna fight the big company we're gonna serve this kind of small niche um turns out the company controls kind of distribution channels turns out that the company can kind of underbid uh products or overbid on products to kind of get us get us out of the of

the marketplace and so so so now it's hard to compete and hard to serve this kind of subset of the market that needs serving and so now regulation is issued and ensued and so laws get put together to help us kind of fight but what turns out is that laws are hard to follow and so more laws are built to protect the core law maybe you get a constitution

but then you're like well we got to protect that so we got to put some laws and then you're like well you want to protect those as well and you put more and this is I mean this is a history of kind of liturgical practices in religions as well right like I'm Jewish and it starts simple and we get a ton right and and this idea in judaism exists of like defense of the law which is our laws to protect

that's all uh and this happens on like the civil society as well and so you you you bring in government to protect the little guys so they compete with a big guy who became big for arguably good reasons but then perhaps not so much after a while and then the laws in itself they become big and the guys who issue the laws can are nested in so now you're like at that point where you're describing where you're like oh the the system is becoming a sclerotic it's like not moving right and so uh you know the guys at the santa fe institute has this idea called like the edge of chaos and they're like you know we live in this kind of in this kind of edge where you know people go bankrupt and people die and we suffer and yet this is where still things happen if it's

too uh too rigid and too static and too concentrated and centralized stuff doesn't happen change doesn't happen improvement doesn't happen if it's too kind of gassy you know and kind of and dispersed no coordination is possible it becomes really really hard so there's like some place where you want to be and so and so to your point um you know the u.s in the last 30 years has been you know the single power in the world that's really unusual right just like you know history wise um and i think it's pretty patently obvious to everyone right now that china is a real contender and and and you look at that in corporations to your point you see like strong concentration of power on subsections of society and commerce and so forth and so and so sometimes

you have to work to kind of concentrate more power because it's kind of too diffuse and sometimes you have to work to kind of diffuse it to diffuse power and i think a lot of what i think i think we're called for call on to work on is to diffuse some of this and i think you can work on a bunch of different verticals, but there's too much concentration and not enough change and innovation and kind of improvement. And we have to diffuse, I think.

It almost feels like moderation is good, right? Yeah. Too much decentralization, eh, maybe that doesn't work. Too much centralization, eh, maybe that doesn't work. And there's this like happy medium. But it's not just,

okay, everything is halfway centralized, decentralized. It's more so there's certain things where decentralization is really, really important. And then there's certain things where centralization is really, really important and society is trying to figure that out as we go. Yeah, I can imagine if you think of yourself in different times of history

being kind of consistent in values and principles and at some point yelling, break the kingdom, you're on your own. And some other time of history saying, let's bring the kingdoms together and let's consolidate. And I think you probably are remaining principled by doing things that seem very opposite. i do feel that we're at a point where a lot of like let's break the kingdoms

feels important to me right i tend to agree yeah uh bitcoin is interesting because um it's doing some of this yeah very unique way uh still an untold story or kind of an unfinished story but we'll see what happens you are should be like a poster boy for having sympathy for what bitcoin trying to accomplish come from venezuela hyperinflation there's concentration of political power you've seen um kind of this play out through your lifetime across many different verticals how do you think about the asset itself and i'm cheating because i know that you think it's important but just like like what is the framework you use to evaluate it given that you could use so many different frameworks yeah um well i'll say this perhaps on some historical context and

so i remember the first time i heard about it was by a colleague which actually was actually ex-Facebook and joined my startup before we joined Facebook. And, you know, like a bright, strong libertarian. And it was like, this thing is the future. And I remember thinking, you know, the typical concerns around kind of government regulation and, you know, and the laws that provide coinage and all this type of stuff and getting really concerned. But, you know, I also remember, I remember growing up in Venezuela, one of my professors

is a guy called Leopoldo Lopez, who's become an important member of the opposition. He's now in Spain and went through hell on earth on some of the government's prisons. And I remember in a class that I had with him, he was like, the importance of an independent Fed, or the equivalent of the Fed. The importance of an independent Fed. And a lot of the kind of traditional economics have argued for this, have argued for like the Fed should aim to control inflation, to have an inflation target, which should be independent of the fiscal policy.

So one thing is how much money we're going to spend as a government to achieve the government goals, and that should remain independent of the Fed goal, which should be to manage inflation. That's really hard for it to happen, right? Independence. The independence. But it's important. We recognize that we need predictable monetary policy for the agents to act in the best interest of themselves and the economy. If the monetary policy is unpredictable, then it's very hard to plan inventories, it's very hard to control import-exports, it's very hard to price things. And so I think just from a practical standpoint, before a lot of the kind of cyberpunk libertarian philosophy that gets behind Bitcoin that made Bitcoin possible,

I think the idea of like same predictable monetary policies, I think is a non-controversial position among many economists. Basically, what you're arguing is if you take widely accepted kind of consensus view, traditional economic viewpoints like predictability, like independence of the Fed or central bank or whatever, and you apply it to the lens of Bitcoin, there's checks. That gets you 30% there. Yeah. That gets you a third there maybe. So monetary policy is transparent and programmatic. Programmatic and predictability are just two different words that mean pretty much the same thing. A programmable is just like the strong incarnation of predictability, right?

Yes. It becomes highly predictable. Independent. Yeah. Decentralized. Those are, again, you know, two different words for two different industries, but basically, you know, rely on each other or kind of related to each other. That's right. And then if that gets you 30%, what's the rest?

Yeah. So I think the rest is that you realize how hard it is to accomplish that. And you realize that the monetary policy of a nation is really powerful, that it can be used as a diplomatic tool in other nations, that it can be used as a domestic policy tool to pass a bunch of money to a bunch of people or whatever that might be in a way that is not organic. organic. So that one piece is that you realize that there's a bunch of incentives in that system that go against that ideal and that push against it. That's one piece. And the other piece that is important is that, and I grew up and to a large degree, I remain kind of very kind of liberal, kind of almost to the left in many issues. But I think one thing that Hayek and kind of the father of libertarian economics has right

is that price conveys information, right? Price is the way we discover truth in the market. And so if you tinker with prices because of foreign or domestic policy objectives, you're not just indirectly taxing the wrong people. You're not making it also hard. You actually screwed up the market mechanism. And I've seen in practice efforts to subvert the market mechanism

for like a top-down mechanism, and it just does not work. It's really, really, really bad. This is not only the history of Russia, but you can just see it, whatever this happens, just top-down, it's just pretty hard. And so I think that is like the other third, which is like prices are really, really important and the incentive structure is against it.

And I think that all kind of checks. I think the last piece is the piece that you realize is that this thing cannot be censored, cannot be controlled. So it means that no one can grab power over it. And so going back to the other point, is that when you look at this concentration of power, what Bitcoin has is it has the property of diffusion of power. No one has to be in control.

And that's a notion that is very scary and very... It's not clear if that's going to work or not. I mean, we've tried full concentration of power. That doesn't quite work well. We tried kind of market plus governments, and it works better, but it has a bunch of issues. But this idea that we can effectively take something that we want it to be predictable

and that we force it to be predictable and it cannot be controlled by anyone else, it's insane. And so I think once you see that and you see that it's possible, it's really a different world. And you see examples of all of that. I mean, there's a bunch of news on the news right now on kind of miners being the platform and kind of- China.

In China. I don't see anyone coordinating the migration of those machines somewhere else. And yet. It's happening. It's happening. They're being migrated. The hash power has dropped dramatically.

Is the network threatened or unsecured? And so I think the magic here is that we've come up with a way of effectively diffuse power without becoming chaotic. but the opposite there's no concentration of power and we get full predictability i think when you see all of that you're like well to your point still has to play out but you're like this is a worthy experiment if nothing else it almost feels like when you strip away sentiment right and you kind of say shut twitter off stop looking at the u.s dollar exchange price shut the television off

like just look at the actual stop refreshing the app yeah like all these things right just like Like time out for a second. Yeah. And you just look at it from a pure structure standpoint. It's got to be one of the most beautifully designed kind of valuable things at that viewpoint of technology in a long time. Like maybe the internet, right, is probably like the other big one where you're like, okay, like there's kind of like this distributed system where people all kind of work together. Information can flow back and forth. And yeah, there's some centralization here or there that actually makes it work and whatever.

but when you look at this you're like i can't really think of that many other things that if this becomes what it has the promise to become will be more important right and value has kind of all kinds of you know subjective type things that you can apply like is it priced in boliviar's or dollars yeah but just it's almost like it was perfectly designed and and the word perfect i think is scary because nothing's really perfect but it does check a lot of these boxes and so it's maybe the best that we've seen so far out of all the monetary policy well i think so i i would agree i think it's a thing of beauty right from like a technological standpoint from a societal standpoint so it's it's amazing um but i think you i think in in i think you're right also in

the kind of description of making think think thinking it's perfect in so far as it's very narrow like it does one thing doesn't that doesn't do more and it's here's a clear meaning transparent predictable a permissionless not censorable monetary policy which is what i think there's some people who don't agree with this and some guys in the new york times will go and write about the importance of like active monetary policy and i would tend to disagree but i think there's a bunch of guys who are far from the crypto punk libertarian world that would say we need predictable monetary policy we need bands in which we can operate some flexibility maybe but some somewhat predictable um and and this bitcoin achieves this specific goal so to that

sense it's just very well tailored for a very specific thing and so maybe we'll find something better but i think part of it what makes it amazing is that it's not actually trying to do too much it's just really important how important is it that we just saw kind of the exact opposite over the last 12 you know 18 months or whatever with uh basically completely unpredictable uh monetary policy emergency interest rate cuts uh trillions of dollars of quantitative easing like it almost feels like we basically over the last decade or so have seen bitcoin gain adoption slowly but surely and kind of chugging along technology continued to work individuals were really kind of attracted to it then you start to get a couple of financial institutions that were

this is interesting and then covid hits you get literally just mass chaos complete uncertainty uh the most extreme version of the usage of a malleable kind of unpredictable monetary policy and then oh there's this other thing like just keeps doing what it does and so now it's like this black and white comparison of hey here's the extreme of one world and then here's like the other extreme essentially yeah and it seems like that really opened a lot of people's eyes so like oh maybe i can't even describe why but like this is interesting because this other thing is chaos yeah well that's i think i think there's one side of the argument that i would that that's against that or in front of that which is that i think and um that maybe the

bitcoin community tends to um i think understate the power of the u.s dollar the united states is an insanely powerful country uh it has a insanely strong economy so i think kind of the usd token whatever your government token i think it's it'll stay here for a very very long time i think the u.s has um advantages that china doesn't have it's an open country that accepts immigration that takes talent, that speaks a language that people can learn. Chinese is hard to learn. I think we have some disadvantages kind of military-wise.

We have like a long old platform that needs to be upgraded to fight more wars and so forth. But the U.S. is very powerful. So what that means is that like companies that can make a string of mistakes and that they're still there because kind of the core

business is so powerful and you see that in technology all the time, the U.S. can kind of screw up many things from now to the immediate future and remain, I believe, particularly as it pertains to the strength of the U.S. dollar. But I do think that when you look at what the dollar can buy and when you look at the purchasing power, particularly domestically, I think you're right. I think people are seeing maybe this is not the store of value that I thought it was. Maybe it's been kind of compromised.

And I think, as I said, I think it's a larger theme where the U.S. was the only country, the U.S. was the only dollar that lasted about 30 years. That's gone. I don't see the euro being particularly strengthened in that regard. As I said, the Chinese currency is tied up with a bunch of closeness in the Chinese economy. So I think people are looking for stable, predictable store of value. And I think Bitcoin can fill that role. That's in the U.S. If you're outside of the U.S., if you're in El Salvador, if you're in Venezuela, then because the U.S. dollar is used as a kind of diplomatic, kind of nonviolent intervention tool, then I think diversification out of that kind of may prove to be important for them.

And then the question is, going back to the U.S., what will remain for a very long time and hopefully forever, like a strong economy and an open society that takes on talent and so forth, how does that connect with the store of value? I mean, the U.S. has gold in Hornox and they're proud of it. I don't see them complaining about it, even though it has been kind of made illegal in a bunch of transactions in the U.S. I don't see why the U.S. cannot be open about this in the future. But I do think it opens their eyes, but I think the U.S. dollar will be okay. Talk more about El Salvador and kind of when you heard that news, just given that South and Central America, I think you understand to some degree just having grown up. And then Bitcoin and technology, I think you understand pretty well as well. And so you put those two things together. Most people are evaluating this from the American perspective, right? I look at it like, oh, this is amazing.

They're going to go give Bitcoin to everybody. how do you think of it is it a dangerous thing is it a positive thing is it like a wait and see and like there's action that needs to be behind the words or like just like what how do you evaluate something like that i'm not sure to be honest because i think part of the challenge for me is that um um i don't know how to judge the actions of a president that has a bunch of power and control of congress and when they do something around this i think it's not positive for society um but i i and i don't have an argument against any of this uh like a well-thought-out argument um but i i i hope that bitcoin gets in the hands of as many people as possible before

you know governments start to get involved just because i think the power of what it can be will be stronger the more kind of distributed and the more in the hands of more people and so i kind of get a little bit nervous uh but but i do think that um if i want to be optimistic i think the idea of a government uh thinking through the future and how they can participate in it and how can they kind of do leapfrogging i think it's important so i'll give you an example um in many developing nations there there never was a kind of phone infrastructure the way they had in the u.s or europe cellular phones effectively leapfrogged that into into where it is today that was important it was important to invest in those towers and not invest in kind

of cables under the ground because it allowed those economies to like get the iphone and get android and get apps and and and kind of really move forward and so i i do some of these financial institutions and services and kind of economy in these economies are are old and inefficient and expensive and unfair. And so what's interesting for me is that if the financial kind of systems of these countries can kind of leapfrog by adopting this technology,

I think that's really, really important. That's one. So I think Lightning becomes a really interesting part of that story for me. So that's one. And then the other piece is that I think it's important if these countries can get early

in a store of value that has some space for appreciation. If that's what happens, then I'll be excited for them to see take a little bit of risk that is not kind of country-threatening in any important way, but they have the ability to take risks that maybe the U.S. doesn't have and that they can benefit from that.

That would be exciting for me as well. Yeah. It feels like most of the folks that I've talked to from South and Central America, there's this cautious optimism, right? Hey, I see how this could be beneficial if it works out right. Any country in that entire region, there's always this belief that you continue to rise in power and then when you get the power it's kind of like what do you do with it right and probably more so maybe the african continent

but more so than anywhere else in the world south and central america has seen the negative sides of what can happen with consolidated power and it feels like when something like this occurs there's an argument of like oh this could be used in a negative way right and we'll see kind of if that's true or not but also then there's this argument of like the trojan horse like it doesn't matter if you're a good guy or a bad guy if you go and you help all of your citizens get bitcoin like you can't control it right and so like to some degree uh there's a diffusion of power yeah right just because you're literally using a freedom technology and you're giving it to everyone yeah um but this brings us back to this piece that you wrote of kind of this diffusion of power where

you talk about the idea of like there's basically three reasons why somebody ascends to power and it's they think that they can organize resources in society better uh there's a self-affirmation or they basically benefit from the perks of being powerful and in it you essentially lay out i forget who uh this argument comes from but it's like if you don't do the things that everyday people do very quickly you almost lose touch with the everyday people right and so i think the examples that are used are like you know if you don't make your own coffee if you don't you know drive your own car like all the stuff yeah for no other reason than just you don't do it it's kind of hard to relate to people who do that on a daily basis right the thing the thing to

realize at this for me is yeah there's this famous lord acton you know power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely kind of quote i think that's very true and i think i think it's very important to stay vigilant to that i think that's where i i've moved to in that journey to some extent where i'm like i'm just generally suspicious of power and generally suspicious and and generally kind of feel a sense of kind of compassion to some degree with people who hold a lot of power you see people who hold a lot of power in big corporations technology and otherwise always in impossible situations right like almost you almost they don't want the power and you see for example um jack dorsey at at twitter advocating for this blue sky project that

effectively and you see it takes power out of him and you see him on the uh on the interviews that has or whatever the subpoenas that has been uh asked to to attend to in congress effectively saying should we have i mean sure i should you have that much power should i have that much power and i think before that meant chaos and i think now that means kind of at the edge of chaos it's kind of crazy but but it works kind of the machines the mining machines will go where they need to go the beacons will go they need to go the exchanges will do what they have to do the nodes will do what they have to do the individuals will be sovereign and they'll make their own calls so so i i think there's something to that right where yeah we're probably probably the problem

is power and we now have a kind of anti-power or dilution of power uh dilution of power kind of technology that it's that's now available jack is so fascinating because i'm pretty sure he explicitly says around all the deplatforming shutting accounts all stuff he's like I don't want to be the one doing this right or like we basically this is not something we signed up

for right we have to do the best we can to do what we can in the meantime but the blue sky thing is kind of like how do we give the power you know elsewhere what's fascinating to me is for every one person like that there's a

hundred that they want the power yeah right and they're actively working to get the power and so it really um it begs the question like will it take technologists building the technology to diffuse power regardless of what the incumbents think or do we get to some point where people start to say you know maybe i don't need the power like like it feels to me that jack kind of raising his hand and saying you know we have to find a better way without us being the ones making these decisions that's going to be a very unique you know

kind of path most of the times it's going to just be more of technology taking the power regardless of what the incumbents think we'll see

I think it's like if I have to guess it's like think about Jack in a meeting in a content moderation meeting like I can't imagine

anyone enjoying that meeting right do you imagine that being pleasurable I don't know if Mark from Facebook is doing this

or you know Susan in YouTube I don't imagine this being fun I imagine this being really, really painful. And everyone knowing it's impossible. It's an impossible task. Yeah.

And it's unclear why it's been... For all the shit that these guys are getting, I mean, I'm on the side of Facebook on all of this. It's like, why are they being asked to do this? I think a modern society would have an API interface between the courts and Facebook. And I would go and say, I think this is harassment

and then we have we have we have content court we have we have laws for this we have amendments for this

we have we have laws that we have decided in a democratic environment that decide if that is harassment or not and if it's punishable

by law or not and so I would click and then some guy in court it would be a computer like okay now we'll go to court

and they'll be we'll see you see your day in court and they'll be judged and we'll decide I'm not sure why this is in the hands of this guy. Jonathan, why did you tweet this?

Okay, how did you feel when you got it? I mean, if it's worth discussing and it needs to be solved by a third party, then we have courts for this. And then maybe we need to hire more people in court.

And then content moderation shouldn't happen in a Deloitte factory in Pakistan. I mean, maybe it should happen in our local courts. My point is that I don't think they want this. The government doesn't want to take it.

Everyone wants to point fingers at each other. Which is the point that I'm making. Then maybe they should have a project, to develop an API interface between the courts and all these guys. I don't think the government wants to do that. I don't think they want to staff that up. I don't think they're capable of doing it.

I don't think they want to deal with the consequences. And so, I think Mark and all these guys, rightfully so, are saying, I think it's you. You need to tell us. I wasn't democratically elected, right? Yeah, what are the rules? And then we can apply. I can decide to kick someone out on my own terms, but if you're asking me to

kick someone and you're complaining that I didn't do it, then maybe you should. Maybe it's on you. Do you worry that when we get into that world, there is the nation state or the court system now choosing who gets silenced, who doesn't? Well, I think that's right. I think it's impossible. I think the nation state... That's just as bad as asking Mark or Jack.

I think the nation state model, it's not compatible with this. I think I almost imagine the world like the medieval times, but we have like the Amazon kingdom and we have the Facebook kingdom. and it spans across geographies. And so I don't think the nation state is the right tooling for this. I think Jack is right in saying maybe something like blue sky, maybe no one owns it.

Maybe you kind of choose your own adventure. Maybe you choose your own adventure, and it's on you. And I think we just trust people to make the right decisions. And again, maybe there are courts, and courts can, but this is not so centralized.

So I don't know. I think going back to the initial point, I would imagine, I don't know him, And, you know, I wouldn't presume that I know him by tweets. But I would imagine he doesn't like going to content moderation meetings. I would imagine that's a pain. And I would imagine he recognized Congress asking questions about bets they made among each other

and, like, showing, at times, complete ignorance of technology, which is scary, as he is a steward of that company, that he says, now we have a technology where a way of not concentrating power in this way. So I don't think people like power. even they want to have it at the end and it also brings up like is it so much that power gets eliminated or the power basically gets given to something that can't abuse the power right so bitcoin being kind of the quintessential example of like if you take the power from those that have it today and you uh make bitcoin more valuable and that becomes the global store

value let's say you didn't really destroy power right what you did was you just shifted it but you shifted it to an inanimate object that basically is programmatic it's transparent it's somewhat democratic and in terms of things could change if everyone agrees or a large majority of people agree but it's still powerful right i think the way to think about it is and i think people sometimes uh i think i think a weak vector of attack to bitcoin is when people say oh you told me bitcoin is gonna you know make some sort of like egalitarian financial world but see the rich keep getting richer or the richer or continue to gonna get richer of course i mean if you have money and you convert it and you buy the right asset and appreciate so bitcoin is not

gonna make the poor rich magically in some or none of these technologies but i do think it eliminates power in the sense that again very narrowly like if you are the chairman of the fed in the u.s and you are taking a bunch of considerations to decide what you're gonna do with your monetary policy with the interest rates. And some of them are in the benefit of some people. Some of them are in the benefits

of some other people. Today, or intergenerationally, may be good for us and horrible for our kids. To the extent that Bitcoin becomes like a true store of value the way the US it is in some cases

in the kind of balance sheets of central banks in other nations. That's gone. That's gone. The monetary policy for Bitcoin is predictable and non-changeable. And so that little piece of power, I mean, not fully, as I said,

I believe the US dollar will continue to be very strong, but you've taken some of that out. And who has that power? Really, we gave the power to an algorithm. So the algorithm is really powerful right now. And so when you think about that, it's this weird world where you're basically giving power. Like I always go back to just like,

the robot overlords are here and we love them. Yeah, right. And you let the algorithms do everything from tell you what content to consume what direction to drive down the streets right to what search results uh to where to eat to what happens with the monetary policy i find that argument to be completely kind of non-threatening to me i mean i think we are made to be bionic from the get-go but we also have an extension but what i mean by that is that we came up with tools

very quickly. At some point we stopped scraping the earth with our nails and we invented a shovel. And without the shovel a bunch of stuff would have been impossible. So it is an inorganic extension of our body for all sense and purposes. You could not function without

the clothing and the heating and the cameras. And these are like true inorganic extensions in our body. So I mean bionic in the sense that I don't think we're fully our biological matter. I think we are all these things that we, you know, Steve Jobs has this kind of beautiful, like, called

computer is the bicycle of the mind. It really is, like, your mind works differently and gets wired differently and moves faster and to different places through the technology. So I don't see why it's a bad thing to depend on the cell phone to give me the weather and I don't see why it's a bad thing if we agreed,

as we said before, or not everyone agrees, but many of us agree that monetary policy should be independence from fiscal policy and predictable that we make it so by using computers i i don't find that threatening at all i don't think it's a bad thing yeah what i think is fascinating is as we do more and more of this across our life do we basically take power from humans and continue to give to algorithms it's actually probably a pretty good thing like imagine um somebody recently told me that uh they're they have a father who's older i don't know how old he uh and he still looks at uh map quest before he goes on a trip yeah and he tries to memorize all

the turns yeah and they're they get in the car with him like hey is that better you can use the gps right he's like no no like i i got it yeah and so pretty you know uh uncontroversial to say like no using the gps would be better but as we do that more and more people just have to get comfortable with the fact that like the algorithms have the power but if they're decentralized no controls them because i think that's the problem right now is when you think of like big tech right like let's take the argument that against the technology companies yeah it's not so much that the technology has power it's that somebody controls the technology so if facebook was completely decentralized and nobody controlled it how many people would really be mad at facebook

yeah i think a much much less amount of people are mad it's very useful that mark is a human and it has a face and you can point at it. Bad guy. Yeah, it's very easy. Right? Very unfair also, I think. And I think that when you take that out of the equation, like in a situation with Bitcoin,

there's nobody to point to. I think that's true. I think the other piece, related to the pointing, which is right, there's no one to point to. But I think the other reason is that it affects, I think what follows from that, I guess, is it appends our model for responsibilities

and liabilities so here's an example that i used to hear before that i think is interesting you know algorithms are getting more into health care right and if you think of from like a machine vision standpoint reading a two-dimensional black and white image is not you know it's not harder than having a car drive itself just to put it that way right and and so and so you tell people and you're like well the best human a radiologist or whatever it is analyzing the image will make 10% mistakes, 90% accurate. And then let's assume the machine is

97% accurate. 3% will make mistakes. So the machine is better than humans. Right. If the human makes a mistake, who's responsible? The human. It's very simple. We have legal code that supports ways to manage this and ethical conduct and moral rules and

so forth to deal with this. He'll say sorry. It'll be a bunch of stuff that will happen, right? Emotional and so forth. Or gaslight us. Yeah, yeah. Now there's the algorithm making a mistake. Who's responsible? Even not having who to blame is problematic

from an emotional standpoint. Now, is it the creator of the algorithms to blame? Will he lose a medical practice? Will he be judged for malpractice? It's very hard from our models to figure out who to adjudicate responsibility. Now, unlike Google Maps, where you can imagine Google being a nefarious actor,

re-routing you from what it seems to be, you know, a low traffic kind of green path outside of the highway to kidnap you and take your car. They don't seem to be motivated. They don't seem to care too much about you and me, right? To go and do that. But you could imagine that. The same way you could imagine that for healthcare. Bitcoin is pretty dumb from a computational standpoint. It's not going to reassess, you know, it'll just, I mean, you could not predict potentially like the hashing power but it's being used at some point but it's like a one you know one derivation from the kind of core algorithm that kind of it's mining at a certain rate on certain blocks on certain time and that's not so it's actually actually almost dumb meaning i find the monetary

policy of bitcoin to be way less threatening imagine being a macro economist or a macro hedge fund manager and you're waiting for mr powell or whoever is a fed guy have you seen disguise reading the conference room or the conferences yeah yeah have you seen that like the it's what's what tie what color tie did he say the word dovish or not it's hysterical it's astrology for grown men it's it's it's sad it's astrology for grown men that's exactly right so you're gonna tell me that that's more reassuring than a dumb algorithm that i told you in advance what's gonna do and it's telling you predictably what's gonna do on something where you want something extremely predictable so i would argue that i mean the machines are coming

it has a bunch of implications that are serious and we should be concerned about them. I think people should look at Google Maps and see how much we trust them and how insignificant we are, each of us, to Google. They don't gain anything, you know, doing anything to us. They appreciate us opening the app, but that's pretty much it.

That's pretty much it, right? Please click on our ads. But to the extent where algorithms can become kind of making these more important decisions for us, you're right. The fact that it's not controlled, that it's open, that it's inspectable, that's your thing.

You can see the code for Bitcoin. You can see it running. And the fact that it's not controlled by anyone, it's actually pretty powerful. You're right. You could also argue that, go back to the algorithm that is analyzing the 2D image, and with a 3% error rate, if it was open source, it probably would be improved over time. Oh, 100%. Right?

Just get more and more eyes on it, right? 100%. And then all of a sudden, you put a couple of million of dollars as the reward. Right? Right. And I think the other point is that it has a path to learning and improving that may be close to a human. I mean, you look at a lot of the stuff that has happened with DeepMind and the Go games. The puzzling thing is the path that they take to win.

And that's kind of partly how they win. Because the guy looks at it and goes like, I don't know what strategy you're following. But they found this kind of, you see this also on, I don't know if it's this company called 3D Metal. It's also a Venezuelan guy, by the way. And you see that they kind of programmatically build pieces that have to, you know, perform a function in a machine. And they end up looking kind of alien. They're not what you would imagine. The algorithm finds a path of like optimal weight and cost and whatnot.

That is not what you expected. So I find that amazing, right? They'll find solutions that we're not finding. It's, I think people have jumped all the way to the conclusion. maybe it was facebook where they had like two algorithms supposed to be like talking to each other or something they're like shut this down we don't know what they're saying like terminator style like whatever microsoft had an issue with this like a bot that went nuts on twitter yeah and when you kind of see you're just like look uh sure there's risks here whatever yeah but most of

this is pretty simple and i think your point about like get rid of all the noise just focus what exactly this is it's a predictable monetary policy and that's pretty powerful on its own it doesn't need to have all the bells and whistles and this and this and what no it's just this is what it does yeah and i think in the case it's like what's sophisticated about bitcoin is not the monetary policy it's actually very simple what's sophisticated is your is the protections that have put in place so it's permissionless that it cannot be censored and it's very hard to attack that's what makes it amazing actually the actual monetary policy is what we all want very simple very very simple yeah before i let you go because i know we're running out of time here

um when you think back over your career in technology what's like the one or two biggest lessons that you've taken away that you think people in the bitcoin crypto kind of decentralization world could uh benefit from are there specific lessons whether it's around you know building teams building certain types of technology uh servicing user bases like what do you think are like one or two really big lessons that you're like you know what if i'm at one of these companies right now i'm building one of these projects here's two things that i think is like pretty applicable across the board let me see very simple question yeah yes yeah i think one aspect that i feel more confident saying is that i think when new technologies come i think a broad mistake in

kind of technology businesses is that we tend to try and fill market holes we see the market and we're like, why don't we have a Uber for dogs, right? And that type of game, you know, dog walkers are important. It has the same type of supply and demand, et cetera. And that type of kind of thought process, kind of very kind of system-wide to an application, sometimes yield good results for sure, but often just yield unproductive things

because that type of thinking often is the opposite of what like, you know, PJ and YC guys would say, which is build things people want. And so sometimes that market hold is there for a good reason. No one cares, right? And so particularly when the new technology comes, you know, we start learning to do things with like deep learning and some kind of machine learning stuff.

A bunch of the applications built around that are built because it can be built, not necessarily because people kind of want any of this. What happens with crypto to some degree is that it allows for a lot of things to be built that were not possible to be built in the past. And I don't know if that's avoidable in any meaningful way, but certainly I think a good reflection is to think,

well, am I just tinkering with the technology because I think it's cool and because I see the system and I find a hole and I think a plug goes there? Or do I actually have some sort of validation for demand and to understand what demand is coming from and to understand the customer needs and that type of stuff? I think that's one. And the other problem, which I think it's kind of, I think there's many camps around this, but I think one of the problems that I've seen, particularly with crypto, is things over-financed, right?

You know, a lot of money is very problematic. You and I have talked about this before. It's the idea that you can starve a company or a product by not having enough money, but you can also suffocate them, right? Right. Literally give them so much money that all of a sudden they don't worry about money and very quickly they spend it all. Yeah, sometimes you have to stop taking money

even if it's being offered to you. And that's very hard. That's very important. And I think that's true because, again, people who would argue against this point would say money is not always available so you should take it while you can. There's some truth to that.

I think the counter argument which I'm trying to present is that, and this is true of corporations and of individuals, is that when you have more money than you know what to do with it, you tend to start making silly decisions. You start not seeing trade-offs. Trade-offs get obfuscated by money.

And so you throw money out of it in the hopes that the trade-off would kind of go away. But the trade-off is like in the middle of the consumer experience of the product. So you have to go fix for that, not just throw money at it. Or you may kind of grow too quickly and kind of get the wrong user base.

And then there's like the practical implication that if you're a shareholder or like a token holder and have an equity holder of an asset that has been, you know, vastly overpriced, then, you know, it's like a highway where you just start taking exits out of the highway, right? And you're like, well, now I have to get the tank to make it all the way from Miami to West Palm Beach

because I took all the exits out. And that seems sometimes, you know, there's some value in burning the bridges for sure. But I think you calculate. You're like, okay, it's very far, but I know the jump that I'm making. I know what it's going to take and you know what I mean. so it almost feels like uh rationality is uh the holy grail right it's if you can rationally

assess what if people actually want probably you're going to build something valuable you can rationally think through under value or underfunded versus overfunded right you kind of find that moderation and say hey this is what we need right um if you can kind of think through all these things it really just boils down to and i think one of the things that you do so well it's just like the clear thinking right and kind of the rational thought ends up being an advantage when the world is so irrational or people around you are so irrational i think also i think it's an issue of like sticking to first principles right which is what lets allows you to say as we were saying before you know divide the kingdom in one epoch and then like 200 years later say you know

unite the kingdom and you're being principled and that you haven't really changed them i think the same thing happens i think you can be widely risk-taking and bold in kind of your vision and the product making and what the technology needs to do or the thing you're trying to achieve in crypto or otherwise and then be widely conservative on the management of your funds until you know what to do with them and i think you have to be able to like and it's and it's not i don't think that's in conflict and i think it's a certain perspective which is the one that i would warn against that make you think those things are in conflict and you're like well if I'm super bold.

I'll take all the money. Then I'm like, well, maybe not. Maybe yes. Sometimes yes. I mean, if you're Uber and you're competing on the ground, maybe you do that. But even then, maybe you overextend yourself. And maybe you shouldn't have gone to Asia. You should have stayed here.

Maybe yes. Maybe not. You know, who knows? They own a bunch of Didi and maybe that was a brilliant idea. But my point is that sometimes the correct thing may be to take all the money in the world. It often is not. And I think in crypto, just because how things are, it may be problematic. I tend to think that you're right.

there you go good where can we send people to find you on the internet or read more of the stuff you write um what's your twitter account my twitter account yes okay jay geller so that's j-g-h-e-l-l-e-r all right and then when you write i i started a little blog geller.co so g-h-e-l-l-e-r.co all right you're not going to say it so i will it's very very good uh heavily heavily underrated I've tweeted a couple of times you have a few of them you bring a lot of people

because I actually find them valuable so I highly suggest go to Geller G-H-E-L-L-E-R dot co and they can read it there

yeah and then follow them on Twitter oh my god thank you for doing this yeah that's fun alright we'll do it again in the future yeah let's