The Pomp Podcast - #732 Bringing Bitcoin To Every U.S. City w/ Mayor Suarez & Jack Mallers

Episode Date: November 28, 2021

Francis Suarez is the Mayor Of Miami and Jack Mallers is the Founder & CEO of Strike. In this conversation, we discuss "Pay Me In Bitcoin", Miami's Bitcoin Adoption, and the what the future looks like for Bitcoin and American city adoption. ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp ======================= Compass Mining is the world's first online marketplace for bitcoin mining hardware and hosting. Compass was founded with the goal of making it easy for everyone to mine bitcoin. Visit compassmining.io to start mining bitcoin today! ======================= Do you want a new job in the bitcoin and crypto industry? You should go apply for hundreds of open roles at http://www.pompcryptojobs.com or sign up for our training program at http://www.pompscryptocourse.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. Now let's kick this thing off. Jack Mallers is the founder and CEO of Strike. Francis Suarez is the mayor of Miami. In this conversation, we talk about PayMeInBitcoin, all the work that the city of Miami is doing to adopt and embrace Bitcoin, and how Jack and Mayor Suarez both see the future unfolding. I really enjoyed this conversation with both of these gentlemen, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is LMAX Digital. LMAX Digital is the number one institutional crypto exchange.

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to actually apply and get the job, we have a training program that you can also go ahead and check out. If you go to PompCryptoCourse.com, pomp with an S crypto course.com. You can go there. It's a three week intensive course. We teach you everything you need to know about the industry. And then we hand you off to the HR teams at various leading companies. We've worked hand in hand with those leading companies to create the curriculum. So we know this works. People have been hired at everywhere from Coinbase,

Gemini, BlockFi, Kraken, Anchorage, BTC Inc, Strike, and many, many others. So if you want an open job, go to pompcryptojobs.com. But if you want to go through the training program, go to PompsCryptoCourse.com and we'll see you there. 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. We're gonna bring on both Jack and the mayor and we're going to have them talk about paying people in Bitcoin or accepting their salaries in Bitcoin.

So I think Jack and Mayer, I think we have both of you guys here. Come on. Yes, sir. Bang, bang. So now listen, this couldn't be more exciting for me because we have the mayor with obviously the backdrop of Miami. It's beautiful, nice weather, always summer in Miami, summer Fridays. And then we have Jack who is in cold Chicago in an empty closet.

So flexing though. All right. So let's start with Jack. You first talk to us about the pay me in Bitcoin feature that strike has rolled out. How does this work and why are people using it? It works just like a direct deposit product is that when you line up your paycheck, you can go to JP Morgan chase bank. You could go to chime. You could go to strike and strike allows you to toggle and convert any percentage of your paycheck into Bitcoin so that the salary that you earn from working a wage can be paid in half dollars, half Bitcoin, 75% Bitcoin, 25% dollars, 100% Bitcoin. And the point in that is that saving accounts are dead. It costs more for a bank to custody your dollars than they'll give you yield. So how do you save money? And can you

get paid in commercial real estate? Can you get paid in precious metal gold bars? And we wanted a product for the individual consumer to say, hey, I want to save my non-working capital in Bitcoin because it's the best savings technology of all time. And that's it. It's really dead simple. You hand your form to your employer. And from then on out for the rest of eternity, you can get paid in Bitcoin, whatever percentage you want. Now, Mayor, you obviously got into a little competition, a good competition, in my opinion, where you said that you were going to take your next paycheck in Bitcoin. And then the mayor elect in New York City said, oh, yeah, you're going to do one. I'm going to do three. And then I think you've come back over the top

with, I'm going to take all of my paychecks in Bitcoin. So talk to us a little bit about getting paid in Bitcoin, how you think about it personally, and then also the potential to eventually do this with other people within the city's employee base. Yeah. So first of all, you know, a while back, you know, I pledged that I wanted to allow my employees to get paid in Bitcoin, allow our residents to be able to pay for fees and taxes in Bitcoin, which we're still working on, and then eventually potentially hold Bitcoin on our balance sheet. So we've accomplished step one already. Our CIO, Mike Sarasti, was the first city of Miami employee to use Stripe and to be able to get paid in Bitcoin. I said, you know what, I'm going to, I got to, I got to follow

him. I got to, you know, like Jack would say, you got to lead by example. And, you know, and so I decided to do it. And then of course, Eric Adams, I think the mayor of Tampa, the mayor of Jacksonville, I think Jack was telling me he's up to six mayors already across the United States are taking uh either all or some or some percentage in bitcoin their salaries you know when i started talking about a bitcoin in terms of uh you know in terms of paying our employees a percentage or whatever they want to like like jack said it can be whatever whatever they want right you know bitcoin i think was like at 40 000 so you know it's gone up 50 uh you know people talk a lot about the volatility particularly people that don't like bitcoin for whatever reason they like

to talk about the volatility but they don't talk about the year-over-year gains which is crazy i understand how they can talk about one thing without the other, which is really the more relevant statistic. Right. And so, you know, it's amazing. And with inflation certainly being underreported, as we all know, you know, it's an important hedge and it's becoming the base currency for many, many people. Jack, when you think about folks getting paid in Bitcoin, this obviously serves as kind of a de facto dollar cost averaging, right? Every time, every week, every other week, every month, whenever I get paid, I'm just converting into Bitcoin. Talk a little bit about the power of that and why that's so important. Yeah. Well, first I didn't

say happy Thanksgiving. I'm on this show. Thankful as fuck right now, the mayor, the man and the pomp brothers. I hope everyone's having a good holiday. Yeah. All right. So let's go on a little bit of a rant. Inflation, 6% according to the CPI, but housing is my favorite metric because everyone needs a roof over their head to live, uh, 24 and a half percent in the United States. So let me put this abundantly clear and not in a word salad speak. If you watching this are not getting a 25% raise every single year, housing is getting more expensive than you are earning income. So you are not making progress towards owning a home. Okay. That's a huge problem. How many of you, your family, your friends are getting a 25% raise every single

year to keep up with how expensive housing is getting? And so are you fucked? No, you just cannot save in dollars. That's a very known thing, whether it's housing, your kid's education, vacation, cars, everything that's a hard asset that's hard to obtain is getting more expensive than you can earn. So you have to change the way you save. And what's very unique about Bitcoin pump is it's the most accessible savings technology of all time. Traditionally, you'd have to buy a big chunk of real estate. You'd have to find a way to store gold. You know, maybe the Ken Griffins of the world, the big hedge fund managers, maybe those guys can go get New York City, Manhattan penthouses and store their wealth there. What about me? What about the mayor's

employees? What about the everyday individual? Is there an accessible, scarce monetary policy that's predictable, that lives external of any central party, that we can even get a penny of our paycheck in. And yes, it's Bitcoin. And so for me, the whole power of the product is that you don't need to convince your CFO. You don't need to work for a special company. You don't need to be a hedge fund manager. This is an asset that works in the best interest of everybody. It has no bias. It doesn't care towards any certain type of wealth class. It is the most fair, free, open savings technology and human history. And so all we're doing is letting you line up your direct deposit and you get to decide what portion of your savings should be allocated towards Bitcoin.

But Pomp, what if I tried to build a pay me in gold bars product or a pay me in commercial real estate product? Get the fuck out of here. It'd be impossible that things natively digital, it's divisible into a hundred million pieces. You could store it on your phone. You could store it for yourself. It's an absolute no brainer. And so we've got a dozen mayors. We've got NFL athletes. We've got the biggest musicians in the world. But I also have you want to know one of the biggest companies of paycheck to our service, Uber. You got guys that are trying to make a living wage and outpace inflation and work their way towards owning a home. And they're driving Uber and an ability to save the when the richest in the world like Michael Saylor makes a buck, the Uber driver

makes a buck too. And the Postmates delivery, man, right? Everyone is in this together. And so that it was so intuitive to me of let's just make this as accessible as possible to the people and allow them to outpace inflation because inflation devastates the poor more than the Ken Griffins in the world. It's really that simple. Mayor Suarez, there's not very many people who'd lay it out better than Jack does. I think that what he's been able to build is obviously a very unique type of product, but talk to us about the challenges, right? I, you sent me a picture or you tweeted a picture. So I remember seeing a picture of you right after you had gone, uh, and you looked exhausted because you had gone and tried to convince people to allow the employees to get

paid in Bitcoin, put Bitcoin on the balance sheet, accept Bitcoin for payments. Like this is a very hard task to do. Uh, and there's a lot of bureaucracy and there's a lot of kind of rules that need to be changed or looked at again. So maybe just talk about like the difficulty in doing that, which I think really highlights why strike specifically allows people to get the same direct deposit and auto convert it into Bitcoin rather than have to maybe jump through kind of all the bureaucracy that you're dealing with at the city level. Yeah. Well, I mean, first of all, I was exhausted when I did that video. It was a Thursday night. And, you know, it wasn't like the ideal time to post a video and the metrics, which is another thing that people don't understand.

People don't understand how many people have Bitcoin or are a part of this community. It's massive. It's far, far, far, far, far greater than what people actually believe. So that's been a lesson to me that's been proven time and time again. But the resistance has been plentiful. I remember when I first started talking about Bitcoin, I had people telling me, you're going to ruin your career. This is a Ponzi scheme. Stop talking about it. I've had all kinds of people come to me and tell me all kinds of things. And so that's part of it. I think the other part of it is there is a bit of a generational issue. My dad was a really smart guy, two graduate degrees from Harvard, 72 years old, mechanical engineer, you know, he struggles

understanding the concept. Because remember, they grew up in a gold-backed-based world, right, currency world, to then a, you know, central-backed, bank-bank, full-faith-and-credit world, fiat world, to what we're going into now. And so, it is an abstract paradigm shift for them. And then I think the third thing is, is that generation that is struggling to understand it is by and large, the generation that's in power. I'm an anomaly. I'm 44 years old, mayor of a big city. I'm not the prototypical guy. You know what I mean? I like to say that I'm at an interesting inflection point in my life. I'm young enough to understand new technology and old enough to do something about it. And so it's a unique opportunity for

me, which is why I think, you know, I've been able to lead so much on this because I get it. and then it's just about evangelizing it so uh it hasn't been easy um i've been blessed to have people like you pump and jack and others that have created either products that are supportive of it or or educated me on it and giving me ideas on things that we can do to keep you know the volume up because i think a big part of this we've talked about this from day one it's almost been a year you know it's about about mainstreaming something that we know uh can empower so many people can democratize investment for so many people so uh it's been a an incredible run we have some more exciting things that we're going to announce uh soon uh you're going to really like and i think

jock's going to like too and uh we're just going to keep the momentum going it's a lot of fun joe john what questions you guys got for these guys all right jack you got some ahead jack yeah i just want to put it one more way because i really want people to understand this shit if 25% year over year, this is my favorite way I explained to a family yesterday, 25% year over year inflation for housing. That means compounded over the next three to five years, housing will double. So if you hold dollars, your house, your dream home that you got bookmarked on Zillow is going to get 25% more expensive every single year and doubly as expensive every three to five years. Now, if you hold Bitcoin, what are the Bitcoin metrics? Bitcoin is averaging appreciation of

over a hundred percent year over year. So that means everything around you, if you hold Bitcoin is getting half off every single year. So your dream home, which was a million bucks and then was 1.25. And then five years later, it's $2 million. Decade later, it's double $5 million. It's getting more expensive. Dream home in Bitcoin used to be 10,000 Bitcoin. Then it was a thousand Bitcoin and it's 500 Bitcoin. A lot of people's dream home in America is less than 100 bitcoin less than 50 bitcoin and four years from now it's probably less than that so what asset do you want to hold and say that if you hold dollars your life gets more expensive at a shocking rate if you hold bitcoin it's half off all year round baby it's half off your whole life

you don't gotta do shit black friday in perpetuity so i'll leave you with that all right what questions you guys got i love it and i love the energy you're bringing jack this is just what we needed. I sent him some Cuban coffee from Miami to Chicago. Trust me, he doesn't need any more coffee. I don't know what he puts in his veins every day. He's like ready to just flick everybody off and get to work. All right. What questions is good? Jack, so you were talking earlier about the mayors, obviously the celebrities, the athletes, the entertainers who are using this product and understand kind of what using Bitcoin as a savings account can do. But as someone who has been working on this for a long period of time and talked to a lot of retail traders or

kind of just everyday blue collar workers. Have those conversations changed? Are more people understanding this? Are more people looking for this solution? Just talk through kind of what you're seeing on that side. Yeah, I think inflation is a trending topic right now. I think whoever, the central banks, the nation state, your local government, everyone's kind of lost pulse and grasp of the narrative. I think the narrative is in the hands of the people right now. And there's a lot of speculation, whether that's because of COVID. There's just a general distrust and the authority period in your boss, in your local government. And you're, I mean, it, it is. And so I think people are genuinely scared. And I, and I think it actually is a really concerning

time for the market at large. I think the federal reserve has perverted risk tolerance across all assets and you're seeing shit like Shiba Inu coin trade at premiums. And that's really sad. It's because people are fleeing for the exits and they don't know where to run and they don't know where to hide. And I think it's scary. And so I think it is my job to try and guide people and give them accessible tools to what we believe is right, which is a sound, safe and principled savings technology. And that conversation has extended to the biggest athletes in the world. There's a very popular golfer who tees off at 4 p.m. Eastern that may get that paycheck in Bitcoin. So really prime time folks to my neighbors. I mean, it's a problem we all face

is if you have capital that you intend to save, how do you save it? And so, the numbers I'm seeing on my dashboard, we just hit an all-time high today in the payday direct deposit metrics. I mean, it goes up every single day. So, I don't know if that answered your question, but I'll say this. It is uniquely a problem that everyone in the world faces. It is. Money is the most viral product of all time. And it's a product that will perpetually be in demand. And so it's weird that the president of El Salvador, Aaron Rogers, and the guy that dropped me off at my Thanksgiving with Uber are all cheering for each other and all trying to solve the same problem. I don't know the last time that that was a real thing and that that was the case. And so, yeah, that's my answer.

John. Yeah. Thanks, Jack and Mayor Suarez for joining us today. So my question would be, Mayor Suarez, can you just talk about the regulation and kind of what's going on in that conversation? If you've heard anything that is either just good or bad and what you think about regulation in general in the space? Yeah, I mean, so what I think of our regulation is that we have to be very careful as a country. China has given us a tremendous gift by banning Bitcoin and banning mining, which which will allow us to do it in an ESG friendly way. Most miners in America that I've talked to, that I've spoken with are ESG conscious or or carbon neutral. So this ESG issue has, I think, been overblown for a variety of reasons. We could do a whole show on that. But I think that's something that as a community, we need to communicate better because, look, there's a lot of threats to Bitcoin. There's a lot of people that feel threatened by Bitcoin.

And so it's important that, A, we all communicate, continue to communicate, continue to build our platforms. B, we have to evangelize to the generation that right now is still predominantly in power. And that generation doesn't quite understand it and doesn't quite know what to do with it. They kind of see a lot of the good. realize how many people are getting it. And I think that's, that's a big part of it, but I think they're also afraid, you know, look in this country, we quote unquote, protect people from themselves. Right. And so what does that mean? That means oftentimes we're stripping away the ability for people to make money on the, under the premise that we don't want them to be defrauded.

And so nobody wants to be defrauded. We don't want people to be defrauded, but at the same time, if you take away people's ability to risk capital, you're taking away their ability to make a return. And so that's something that as Bitcoin, you know, becomes more and more prevalent and of other kinds of crypto technology, you know, we have to really be conscientious of it. You know, when people are able to stake their Bitcoin and get 4%, 7% yield, 10% yield, I mean, you know, you're getting the appreciation that Jack talks about, but you're not only getting the appreciation, you're also getting a yield, an interest yield on top of the appreciation, right so you know there is no other financial product as he said that that gives that there's

none and then and so the question is are we as a society and as a country going to stifle innovation or are we going to lead into this new what i call technological industrial revolution right by embracing the kinds of technologies that are going to create financial freedom for more and more americans in a democratized fashion by the way it's incredibly democratized and not just for americans for central america south america obviously we see what's happening with el salvador panama's looking at it a lot of countries in south america and africa so i think ironically the the underdeveloped country or the some would argue is a third world country they're the ones that really stand to benefit the most when you look at the inflation rates

in those countries i mean they are like 50 and above right i mean they're crazy crazy inflation rate. So, you know, I think I saw Venezuela was like 5000 percent or something. I don't remember the exact number, but it was a crazy percentage. Obviously, it's a communist country. So they just print their money and deflate their currency. And that's the problem. The problem is you have human beings controlling these institutions and they're making public policy on the basis of what's best for them as individuals, not what's best for their country. And that's why people are fleeing fiat currencies left and right and becoming more and more Bitcoin holders across the world. Well said. I completely agree, Mayor Suarez. Mayor, you don't know this yet, but John

has told me and he's told people on this show that he's waiting for you to decide to run for governor or president or decide what your next career move is. And then if you'd be so kind, he'll just go ahead and take over as mayor. He's got some ideas. He's come visit my office. we need good people in public service i think that's something that our generation i think now when we see this bitcoin debate and we see how regulation can stifle innovation and can hurt people right it makes you really really appreciate why it's necessary to have good people in public service so i definitely think you know getting in public service is something that i totally recommend it's a hard business um it's not easy uh you have to have thick skin i know all of you

guys do, but, you know, but, but, but I recommend it because we're, listen, we're a billion dollar business. We're a billion dollar entity with 4,500 employees, four labor unions, and all the international problems imaginable. So it's, it's not an easy, easy thing to do, but we need good people to do it. I appreciate you and the way you have represented the people of Miami. I think you've done a very good job. All right. Last question. Then I'll let you two go. Jack, talk to us about Twitter tips. That seems to have exploded. I think you and I were sending money back and forth to each other yesterday as a messaging service. What's going on with Twitter tips and how that's going? It's going well. I think, listen, Bitcoin is a monetary network.

It's the only inherently global accessible asset monetary network in human history. And so internet companies, there's going to be a tremendous amount of demand for internet companies to service monetary products to their users. Twitter has 500 million active daily users and they're all over the world how do you sell them a monetary experience without bitcoin uh and you know what they i think the more important narrative problem we've talked about this offline is what they started um now every internet company and every big companies call my phone um and so no it's going well why would it not you have instant free global cash final payments and tips um and so we're working with twitter on how to make sure that that can be outside of just our service we

don't want to be the only one supporting and how they can make it extensible to everyone in the world. And then I'm working with other companies on how to plug in. There's a world not far from now, where your Twitter can tip someone on Instagram. Your Instagram account can tip someone on TikTok. My TikTok account can go check out and buy my Starbucks. And what does that tell you? That tells you that there's a singular monetary protocol that can achieve settlement cheaper, faster, and more global than anything else we've ever seen. The last time we saw that form of consolidation in any industry was the internet. The internet is free, instant global communication for the world. There's not many internets, there's one. The Bitcoin and Lightning

Network is free, instant global monetary settlement for the world. And there's not going to be 250 of them. There's going to be one. And we're starting to see that consolidation for money as a service and as a product. And so Twitter was the first, it won't be the last. It's going well. I appreciate it. Can we get a little pawn to E4 just for the people? There's a chessboard back there. You want me to get up and move the pawn? No, no, no, no, no. All right, listen, I appreciate both of you.

Obviously, Jack, you're doing a fantastic job with Strike. Mayor, you've done a fantastic job as well. Continue to push this forward. So we will definitely continue to bring you guys back. But thank you guys so much for taking time out of your weekend to do this. And as we continue to say, just pay me in Bitcoin and the world will be a better place. So I appreciate both of you. Love it.

Love you guys. Thanks for having me. Take care. Thank you.