The Pomp Podcast - #921 Alexander Leishman On Bitcoin As Major Political Force

Episode Date: April 18, 2022

Alexander Leishman is the Co-Founder & CEO of RIver, It's a Bitcoin-only company that allows you to buy Bitcoin as well as mine Bitcoin In this conversation, we discuss building a Bitcoin-only company, updates on the regulatory space, Bitcoin maximalism, and why this is the year that Bitcoin is establishing itself as a major pillar in our political system. ======================= Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp ======================= Imagine coinmarketcap - decentralized. 3X in valuation is 15 billion dollars from the current price. Cryptotoday.com starts at zero, at fair launch on 7th of March. No VC. No pre-sale. Team tokens locked.  For the people, by the people. For decentralized crypto. Visit http://cryptotoday.com and read the whitepaper for the details.

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All right, let's get in this episode. 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. We have our friend Alex from River here. How are you sir hey guys how's it going doing fantastic how are you it's great to be in miami i was gonna

say are we gonna convince you to move here at some point you know every time i come i stay longer and longer so at some point you just stay forever the math will work out that i just sort of end up here the rest of my life we'll see how we'll see when that happens all right uh you guys have been launching a ton of stuff at river um you have the ability to buy and sell uh bitcoin uh but you do in a very unique way, which I think is interesting in that you built pretty much, from my understanding, a fully vertically integrated, like custom Bitcoin only solution. Talk a little bit about like, as you guys were starting with the first product, like, why did you do that versus just go work with some of these other providers? Yeah, so we did things the hard way at River, we could have

built on a existing custodian that had all the licenses and everything, you know, that allows to get up and running real quick. Instead, we chose to go state by state, get all the licenses ourselves and build our own custody system. The reason for that is it gives us the longer term flexibility to build all the products that we want without having to rely on some third party to approve us or build something out that we wanted to see. It gave us full control over everything. We took the low time preference Bitcoin approach to this. And we've been really happy, um, with that because now, uh, now that we have that solid foundation, uh, we've been able to launch new, uh, really novel, innovative products like our new mining product,

uh, which allows people to, uh, buy Bitcoin miners directly in the river accounts and have that Bitcoin show up directly, uh, in their custody. We've abstracted away basically as much complexity as possible, um, when it comes to mining and because we own the full stack of, of custody, of licensing and we can hold our clients funds and transmit funds and you know uh and all that stuff we can provide the seamless experience when you think about the mining product why mining is it just your whole vision is like how do we help people acquire bitcoin and so buying is one component mining is another is that like a fair way to think about it so what we've seen in the last year has been a massive growth in the bitcoin mining industry especially in the

United States after China banned Bitcoin. And with that, we saw large institutional miners really scaling up in the United States, generating really, really large returns on their investment. And what we realized was retail didn't really have a great way to access these returns. And so we stepped in and decided we wanted to basically give Americans the ability to easily access these returns as well by buying this equipment, by passing through the economies of scale that we can provide by procuring this equipment in bulk, having large hosting agreements with our co-location providers where we host our clients' machines, and giving them access to cheap electricity, and give individuals in the United States access to these Bitcoin

cash flows. So Bitcoin mining, it's not a guaranteed infinite home run. it's a different risk return profile than just buying and holding bitcoin directly historically especially over the past year it's been a very lucrative investment and um you know we'll see what the future brings but uh it's you know there's been a lot of demand so far and people find it very interesting so when you think of mining uh this is uh i'm using river as my partner uh or my kind of infrastructure to actually mine it's equipment you guys bought you have somebody who's obviously providing the co-location but uh this isn't like you're just

simply hooking up to somebody else's mining equipment and kind of playing middleman like you guys are actually the ones who uh have have procured that equipment etc correct and when you're when you mine with river you own your machine so you own your hardware at the end of the day uh you you own a you know an asset a physical asset that actually lasts typically a lot longer than people would expect um uh and then that that asset that machine generates bitcoin cash flows for its lifetime. What we're actually seeing in the markets is the S9s, the older Bitmain models, are worth more in dollar terms today

than they were brand new five years ago. So the actual miner itself has stored value pretty well and throughout its lifetime has been generating a Bitcoin cash flow for the owner. What does your average customer look like right now? So the typical customer, well, I think the easier way to sort of describe our client bases is we have two segments. We have the mass market client who is a, they're typically a young professional. They have a good income. They're saving. They're

saving in Bitcoin. And they typically are also able to afford a new miner, which is right now the market price is around nine or $10,000. But you can buy as little as $10 a Bitcoin river if you really wanted to. And so that's sort of the, the, the average, the average client. Then we have our, our white glove private client here that serves, uh, sort of high, high value VIP, ultra high net worth clients. Um, everyone from, you know, finance people to athletes, to politicians. Um, and so that's a tier of our service sort of reserved for, um, you know, people with deep pockets. Gotcha. And when you think about the way people are coming in, They're coming in to buy Bitcoin and then discover mining?

Or did you see an influx of people who wanted the mining and then they're finding the other products? It's both ways. We really get both. Mining has actually attracted a lot of people who historically haven't really been into Bitcoin because they see it as an unproductive asset, an asset that just sits there and doesn't do anything, in quotes. And mining, they're actually much more able to reason about it

from an investment perspective. An example of this is guys who are used to investing in real estate. Things that generate cash flows, they can do the math. I put this much up right now, here are the cash flows I'll generate over the coming months and years. That's a paradigm that they're much more comfortable with, allocating capital to. And so mining really appeals to people looking at that.

We find mining clients actually fall in two different buckets. One is they're thinking about Bitcoin-denominated returns, the Bitcoin-native type of people, and then the guy's thinking, what is going to be the return on my dollar investment? And so those guys actually come into Bitcoin through mining, typically. Yeah. I know you guys were at the Bitcoin conference. What was your takeaway from the conference?

I thought it was amazing. A 25,000 person Bitcoin 2022 was, it's showing the level of interest and growth that this space has seen. I mean, I think we all have been to, you know, the years ago, these small conferences where Bitcoin was still very much a sort of nerdy sort of niche interest and to see where we've come from that has been incredible and we had a booth there and it was also just really humbling

and great to see all the customers both existing and future customers come up to us and say how much they love our company and just to see all of the great work being done in the space by all of the companies at the conference was really cool. Yeah, the framework I have in my head is I don't forget what year it was but maybe 2018 2019 something like that uh when the bitcoin conference in san francisco part of it was in the uh parking deck right to the miami beach convention center like yeah like you know

started at the bottom and now we're here and i think it's a testament to one the the bitcoin magazine btc inc uh you know team and just like they've grown immensely and uh kind of up their game but also the audience uh continues to grow as well in terms of people who are interested in of stuff absolutely and then in the the the diversity of types of people in the audience everything from the the techie engineer crowd to um so now there's a hugely growing art uh sort of contingent at the conference there's a big like art delegation there of artists and creators um you know every sort of group of people under the sun was there it was pretty cool yeah um i know that you've got uh lots of thoughts on lots of different things so i figure we'll just go kind

topic to topic and go through as many of them as we can um we're hilariously all laughing at putin price hikes which just feels like they really think we're stupid is that your general take on this like what is going on yeah yeah i mean i mean it's so obvious i mean and the sad thing is like it's like this this spin on the narrative is probably working for them but um I mean, it's really hilarious to think that you could print, I don't know how much it was, $7 trillion out of thin air and then blame it on Putin who invaded Ukraine a few months ago. Blame this multi-year inflationary trend and upswing on that

is just absolutely absurd. Yeah. Do you think it's working? Do you think the average American is like, yeah, it's Vladimir Putin in Russia? I don't know. So our bubble sort of in the Twitter sphere is obviously much more clued in on the root causes of this stuff. I really don't have enough insight into sort of the recent conversations people outside of that bubble have been having about it.

I would guess it's working a lot less than it used to. I think people have heard the word Russia and Putin for like five years now as like the source of all of our ills as a society and are starting to probably get pretty tired of it. Yeah. So that's a good point. Is that like, yeah, he got blamed for politics. He got blamed for inflation. He got, you know, just at some point people were like, this guy must be a genius. Yeah. He literally has just got our number every time. Yeah. And, you know, that's not to say that, you know, the things he's up to are, are good or anything like that. Um, I don't think that's the case either, but, uh, you know, it's pretty silly that, you know, the United States, the most

powerful nation on earth um is is you know our leaders are constantly blaming um blaming things they don't want to happen on you know some guy halfway around the world uh who doesn't it doesn't make any sense yeah and what is your thoughts on inflation right now like we saw the 8.5 percent number uh i'm assuming you don't think that that's the real number but like how do you kind of read this. Yeah. You know, I, I agree that 8.5% number, I don't think it's actually reflective of what most consumers have experienced over the last year. I think we've all seen the prices of whether that's, um, rent, whether it's food, uh, go up substantially more than that. Um, you know, I think there's also a lot of shrinkflation that people are not, you know,

that, that people are noticing at the grocery store, they're just paying the same, but getting less for it um and so i don't think that number is reflective uh at all in sort of people's out-of-pocket expenses and the increase in people's out-of-pocket expenses but um you know i i don't i don't know how this ends uh i'm not some sort of economic genius i don't like the economy is an extremely chaotic system and a complex system um do they do they raise interest rates and sort to get this thing in check. Uh, and it causes some, some, some pain to the economy, but you know, they have the, they have the, uh, discipline to do it. I don't know. Um, I don't know how this plays out. Yeah. Um, I don't know either, but it definitely feels like, uh, they don't have all

the tools that they used to be able to use, uh, to the severity. Um, and also if they go to use some of those tools, uh, we're way later than they normally would have used them. And so if you're delaying the use of them and also they may not have the same you know potential impact it's kind of a bad situation then you get into like the pick your poison like inflation or recession right and i don't know if there's right answer there yeah no it we're we're in a terrible position and you know it's not and we're we're not we're not i think you know people also to be intellectually honest this isn't something that we just got in ourselves into overnight either. You know, this has been building for decades of profligate government spending and

sort of the political incentives that basically force the federal government to be extremely financially irresponsible. And those root causes are not even close to being fixed. So whether it's this cycle or sort of, you know, over the next few decades, I think we're, you know, I think it's pretty obvious this isn't going to end well. Yeah. What is the intersection of Bitcoin and politics look right now i know that uh you and i have seen each other a number of different events where there's various candidates that are uh interested in bitcoin or whatever like how do you read that right now i think bitcoin is i think 2022 is the year that bitcoin is establishing itself um as a major pillar um in our political system uh i think it is a it is a major rallying

point for all sorts of people who have been frustrated by the inadequacy and the failures of both political parties. I think on the right, what we're seeing is that this is the first thing that conservatives have where they can rally and say, here's a future we want to see. Historically, the right is the party of no, it's the party of slow down, don't do that. Bitcoin is giving the right the chance to be the party of speed up, run to this. This is new and interesting and civilization changing. I think that's a huge underappreciated paradigm

that's happening right now. And then on the left, I think a lot of people on the left are increasingly frustrated by the focus of the Democratic Party on issues that frankly just don't impact the lives of the vast majority of people in the United States. The identity politics stuff is getting to such a level of absurdity. And I think most rational people are sort of asking themselves,

have we lost the plot on the left? What is this actually doing to improve the lives of ordinary people? And increasingly these more moderate, I would call them candidates, are also aligning themselves with Bitcoin because it represents decentralization. It represents a concept that they can get behind where focusing more on your local community, taking power away from this failed central government system that isn't improving a lot of the ordinary person and putting the power back in the hands of the people and enfranchising them. when i think about a lot of this it does feel like and people should talk about it but it does feel like now you have to be pro bitcoin um or or i don't know if everyone will be pro only bitcoin

right i think what politicians will basically do is like hey we don't want to pick a technology so they're going to say pro crypto whether we agree with it or not like they're going to end up being pro bitcoin and crypto probably is the way that they'll frame it um but that's becoming a necessity like at this point we're now getting to uh a situation where like if you're anti whether you're anti-bitcoin or anti-bitcoin in crypto or however you frame that conversation you're probably going to battle uphill to get elected or to stay in a seat because the user base and the people who are interested in this stuff is just getting too large and too wealthy and too influential to ignore and continue to kind of shit on is that how you see it yeah i agree um if you

look at just cryptocurrency ownership across you know in the united states it spans political boundaries um it's neither a right-wing thing or a left-wing thing it's sort of almost sort of shifting um you know shifting the political debate a little bit of it's bringing people's attention to sort of hey you know this whole economic freedom thing uh really helps accomplish what what both part some of the sort of concepts both parties want to achieve um and everyone is everyone I think it's a generational I think this split is actually generational I think it's sort of the old guard

versus the new guard in both parties and the new guard is winning Can Bitcoin bring together the parties? Could Bitcoin be the issue that ends up actually uniting politicians on both sides of the aisle in America? I don't know

I don't want to be naive in thinking that we'll ever have some kumbaya moment I think that it's possible that it is an issue that people rally around. The alternative would be it actually causes sort of the dividing line just moves between, like there's a new, the line dividing left and right

changes its location and there's new issues people care about and maybe it's now like centralized, people who want more centralized power versus people who want more decentralized power um and uh and some people from each party sort of switch sides and switch alignment based on their their leanings yeah joe john what questions you guys got how much uh i'm assuming you guys look at kind of the broader market obviously for trends within your business and future growth and stuff like that but how much do you think that's going

to change over the next year like what are you guys projecting obviously some people think on a macro level we may see a recession and things like that but on kind of a smaller level we're We're obviously expanding the user base and everything. Just talk me through how you guys think about your business specifically and the growth that you might see. I've been working in this industry for the vast majority of my career at this point, really about nine years. The one rule that we always follow

is always be ready for the worst, but build. Always from a fiscal responsibility as a company perspective, be ready for the worst, but always build as if there's going to be a massive bull market tomorrow because that's when you capture the economic value that's when you're really providing the value to your customers

when things are going well you don't want to be the site that's down you don't want to be the provider that can't help your clients when prices are rallying but at the same time we also run the company so that we can keep building and stay heads down and focused during the worst of bear markets so that's the mindset we run with i don't know what the markets are going to do this year um but we're prepared either way that's how we think about it stay ready so you don't got to

get ready exactly exactly my question actually has to do a little bit something with that is like how do you prepare your business excuse me how do you prepare your business for that down year right like how do you keep if you have the trading volume like volatility is good for business but if you have a bank model then like you want more assets on your platform like how do you just prepare River for a down year? Yeah. So, I mean, there's, there's no simple answer, right? Down years are never going to be the most fun years in the world. Uh, but, um, we focus on building a company of, uh, having the highest leverage people possible. Right. So, um, we, we invest in our people, we invest in our automation to make sure that, um, we never need to get

too overextended, um, from a human capital perspective. Um, and we can scale up and down pretty flexibly and every person at our company by making them very high leverage and very high impact and only hiring the top talent we can do a lot more with less which keeps us leaner and nimbler

when you think about the business today like how big is it like whatever metrics you can share like how do you think about how big the business is yeah so we have so at our company we have around 40 people we've seen a seven we in 2021 saw a 7x um growth in our net revenues um uh from a size perspective um

you know we're still we're still not anywhere near sort of coinbase scale um but uh we are certainly on a trajectory where if we keep executing on our vision um we will get there over the coming you know five years yeah and i guess part of it ends up being as you're building this, you're pulling talent from the Bitcoin world, you're pulling talent from the tech world, and you're pulling talent from the finance world as well? You really do need different skill sets to be able to build a business like this because it touches on all three of those. Yeah, absolutely. We're just in the very early days of

Bitcoin itself. And one of the things that we are really leaning heavily into is how do we give our customers access to the next generation of financial products built around Bitcoin? And what those look like are products that build, that generate Bitcoin cash flows. Right. This is like sort of a, just people are just starting to explore this stuff. So we need engineering talent, we need finance talent, and we need the consumer product talent. Yeah. Have you talked about any of the other ideas that you guys are working on or thinking about yet? Well, one thing I can say is that we are investing very heavily in the Lightning Network. You know, our Lightning Node is one of the biggest

Lightning Nodes in the network. We think that there's huge potential long-term to build financial products on or around the Lightning Network, there's a lot of things happening. One just being the secular growth of the Lightning Network. The second being this tarot announcement that Lightning Labs put out last week, which is basically the vision of bringing assets to both the Bitcoin blockchain and the Lightning Network, which will enable decentralized exchange on lightning. Um, these are all things where, you know, exploring, looking at, we think are very fascinating trends. They're not going to happen overnight. They're going to take companies like ours, building out the infrastructure to make it happen. Um, so we're very interested in stuff

like that. Yeah. Uh, last thing I want to ask you about is, uh, open-mindedness in, uh, in the Bitcoin world. Uh, uh, we don't have to go into all the details, but there's been a bunch of, uh, folks who, uh, uh, maybe they're not so open-minded and maybe they, uh, uh, counterbalance that with uh also uh this level of toxicity which i've we rebranded we officially rebranded toxic to just asshole right and um what's your take on kind of the importance of open-mindedness yeah so um you know i think a lot of people assume just because we we focus on bitcoin um we you know we we were fundamentally anti everything else in the crypto cryptocurrency space. And that's just not the case. And I think there's, by no means all, and by no means the

majority, there's a small amount of people in the Bitcoin world who refuse to even sort of understand or sort of explore sort of why we're seeing massive growth in the DeFi ecosystem and in just these other altcoins or layer ones. And I think that comes from the historical, historically there was a lot of scam stuff happening in the crypto space lots of new tokens, rug pools things that really just were terrible for consumers

and that's all real, that all happened and there's still a lot of really scammy things but there are some really interesting trends that are with stable coins, with allowing people to engage in financial services in a

decentralized ecosystem like collateralized lending, like uncollateralized lending, like having access to the dollar if you don't have an American bank account. All of these things are blowing up because there's demand all over the world for this stuff. And I think it's very short sighted to pretend that none of this stuff is interesting or important. And the only thing that could possibly ever matter is Bitcoin. And I just don't think that's the case. I don't think those people actually believe it. I think what they're doing is they're replacing uh intelligence with religion i agree it's a dogma and it's a it and what i've noticed is actually it's um it's a uh it it's a dogma used to almost fleece their

customer base and and uh try to um make just make money off of them it's really just taking the scam ico playbook and applying it to bitcoin maximalism yes and i think uh on top of that you can see it there's always two red flags to me one is people who uh yell and scream and pound their chest about they're ethical they're honest and they're transparent like the more that you say it usually the less you are right i always joke that like i've never met somebody in business that i greatly respect and like i'm an honest person yeah it's always a person that's lying it's always a person's lying to me he tells me how honest they are yep uh and then the other piece of it is um uh if you have very off-market product offerings meaning that if an entire

industry is coalescing around something uh fees is always like the one that i go to right if everyone else charges for to make it easy you know uh point one percent and you charge ten percent like why right and uh people always have reasons for it right and and every once in a while there's a good reason but usually what you find is uh the religion is wrapped around as you're saying kind of this uh extraction of value from the audience right and uh i think it is actually one of the most important things we need to pay attention to like we need to be very careful right and so um uh i continue to tell people that like being a bitcoiner is going to be one of the things that's like on the right side of history in my opinion but being a open-minded bitcoiner is going to

ensure that you constantly are staying on top of like whatever the next thing is because like the best example i have right now is tarot whether it works or not i know some bitcoiners think it's absolute shit and they're like there's no way this is going to work it's all you know nonsense i know some bitcoiners are like oh my god it's gonna be amazing let's just uh make the assumption that it works and you can now create stable coins you can do tokenization you can do all this stuff on top of lightning there's an entire group of folks who have said anything other than bitcoin is a scam and anything else nothing else needs to be tokenized if in that world we get stable coins tokenization all this stuff on top of the bitcoin network like i feel like people's minds

are going to be in a pretzel right like yeah like where where do i stand right and and i think a lot of this i think there's some of this comes from this sort of like sort of marketing dogma some of it also comes from a sort of a technical hang up. And they're saying, well, if you're trying to put a real world asset like a dollar onto a blockchain, then you're trusting somebody. So you're removing the need to have it on a blockchain to begin with. But I don't think they really realize is like one of the big values of DeFi is that it's basically a way to route around this extremely ossified system that we have. It's not a way to reduce trust. It's a way to route around an insanely Byzantine maze of rules and regulations

and infrastructure that is the United States banking and financial system. It's a regulatory arbitrage and it's a standard protocol that might not necessarily be the most perfect technically solution, but it's good enough. And that's just an objective truth because you just look at the growth and that's what's happening.

Yeah, I agree. Where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about River? River.com, very easy. And then my Twitter is at Leishman. Is there a good story behind getting River.com? Yeah, so we used to have a different name. I won't say what it is,

but we got an angry cease and desist letter with our original name. Hence why he won't say it. That's why I won't say it. But our domain name was .financial. So it was honestly a pretty crappy domain name anyways for what we wanted to build, which is a really great consumer brand.

And so we saw it as an opportunity to build a .com, get a .com and get a name we loved. And we worked with a domain broker and came across river.com. We saw it was for sale. We were like, there's zero chance we could afford this, but let's just see. And the price actually, it wasn't cheap at all by any means,

but it was within budget, which shocked us. seeing like voice.com sell for like 30 million dollars or whatever around the same time yeah and um so we we snagged it up and uh have not regarded it for a second good thing michael sailor wasn't on the other side or you'd been paying 30 million too yeah exactly exactly yeah no luckily luckily the seller was a bit um yeah less bullish on river.com and voice.com amazing all right well listen thank you so much for coming we're definitely gonna have to keep doing this as uh once you move to miami then uh then we'll have you come in all the time for sure uh i think that i guess your building is pretty cool and if anyone who's interested uh in being

able to buy bitcoin mine bitcoin uh or any of the future products they build go to river.com and check it out there thanks so much for listening to today's episode i really hope you guys enjoyed this one make sure you're subscribed on apple spotify or your favorite podcast player and if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the bitcoin or crypto industry we've got you covered. Head over to palmscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry. It's a three-week intensive training program with over 50 events packed into that three-week time period. Go to palmscryptocourse.com to learn more and I'll meet you guys for the next episode.