The Pomp Podcast - Conner Brown, Stanford Law Student: Why Politicians Should Love Bitcoin

Episode Date: November 11, 2019

Conner Brown is a Stanford Law student, and frequent Bitcoin Twitter commentator. In this conversation, Connor and Anthony Pompliano discuss smart contracts. common misunderstandings of Bitcoin, why every political candidate should love Bitcoin, and the relationship between open source software, power, and the institutions of the modern day. BLOCKFI-----BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. CRYPTO.COM-----Crypto.com is a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. With the vision of "cryptocurrency in every wallet", the Crypto.com App offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well designed UX and high security. It is the best place to buy, sell and pay with crypto. COINMINE-----The Coinmine One is like an Xbox that turns your electricity into Bitcoin. You just plug it in, connect to wifi, and tap on the crypto you want. It’s so easy anyone can do it. Everything is controlled from the Coinmine mobile app and the Coinmine keeps getting better with over the air updates that add new coins, features and services to your Coinmine. Visit coinmine.com/pomp to get a Coinmine and earn crypto for powering a new world. ETORO-----This episode of Off the Chain is sponsored by eToro, the smartest crypto trading platform, and one of the largest in the world. Join 11 million other traders and create an account at etoro.com and build your crypto portfolio the smart way.

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Again, that's etoro.com. Get VIP access to Bitcoin and crypto markets today. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I'm sitting here with Connor. We are in San Francisco right now.

Thanks so much for coming up to the city and doing this. Yeah, thank you so much for having me here. It's really an honor to be on your podcast and be able to talk. All right. So I think a lot of people have they've seen your tweets. They know that you are quite bullish on Bitcoin and a lot of the things that are going on in the ecosystem. But they don't know much about you to start. So a little bit about your background and kind of how you got to Stanford and into Bitcoin. Yeah. So it's it's been a long journey. So I'm right now I'm on my last year of law school at Stanford. um i'm originally i just went straight through from from undergrad i studied philosophy and sociology and then um i decided that you know a lot of the things i was learning about uh were pretty pie in the sky and i wanted to sort of make more of a tangible change and to me that

seemed like going to law school um and sort of looking at you know where the actual you know power structures are um but you know when i was in law school i wanted to sort of look at the most innovative, you know, new types of law. And so when I heard about this thing called smart contracts, then I was naturally sort of drawn to that. And I think over, you know, the past, you know, year and a half now, I've been sort of digging through this and trying to take a first principles approach and just stack up the arguments. My background is in debate and figure out where the arguments are for, you know, what the strengths and weaknesses of these systems are and where the value is. That was sort of what I really, really cared about. And ultimately,

while I was, you know, initially really excited about smart contracts, they seemed like a really novel approach. I became pretty disillusioned with them. But in the meantime, I found Bitcoin, which was much, much more interesting, actually. So that's kind of how I ended up here. All right. So before we go into Bitcoin specifically, let's talk about the smart contracts. Kind of what was the dream, if you will, and then kind of what took you off that path or maybe got you to be a little bit more bearish on it than you initially thought you would be? Yeah. So initially, smart contracts seemed like sort of the natural evolution of, you know, we have all of these written paper contracts or, you know, we have all these

lawyers who are working all these hours on drafting up these long contracts. And wouldn't it be great if we just removed all that friction and if we somehow, you know, just had it all automated by a computer and computers took care of it? And I think that's a pretty sexy idea because is law is, you know, pretty much universally hated, seen as greedy middlemen. And, you know, a lot of that is true in a lot of ways. There are a lot of inefficiencies in the law. But I think that while a lot of legal structures are inefficient, there's a lot of very important concepts that are sort of overlooked and thrown, you know, you kind of throw the baby out with the bathwater with that sort of critique. And so I think initially I had that hope of sort of

making things more efficient. But when I dug into it, you know, a smart contract is really not anything more than code. And while code is extremely powerful, it really has only very specific logical parameters that it can encapsulate. So it can, you know, perform whether or not something is true or false based on the parameters that are fed to it. But that doesn't mean that it can handle the nuance of what a legal contract really represents. A legal contract at its most basic, basic level is a meeting of the minds between two people. So if Connor and Pomp want to enter into an agreement and we want to, let's say we have like a, I'm going to be selling you something and we're entering into a contract and you're going to be purchasing these on a

recurring basis. There's a lot of things that I might put in that contract that could trigger certain clauses or could trigger different things. And the smart contract approach would say, oh, that's great because we can just write a nice little logical function that will trigger if one of these clauses happens. But the real world is much, much more sticky and subjective and gray than black and white. Yeah. It's almost like the smart contract is only as good as the input and the structure of the contract itself, right? So like if you create something that's so binary or black and white, one, you're counting on accurate information being inputted into the contract. And And then two, you're counting on the fact that you, at some previous point in time, understood fully the entire situation so that smart contract can encapsulate all of that information and make a decision that ends up being accurate or correct.

The problem I think you're highlighting is, one, it's almost impossible for you to understand the full situation in advance. And then two is if you can only get contracts to make binary yes-no decisions, that leaves a lot of edge cases, et cetera, that are either unaddressed or two, even worse, neglected. And when they get neglected, that's usually where you see the issues pop up. Is that fair? I think that's exactly right because you have this nuance that a smart contract just can't handle. If I'm writing a contract, if you read a legal contract, all throughout it, you're going to see the words material. You're going to see the words reasonable. how does a logical true false function parse out reasonableness or these sorts of things but do you

think that the use of material reasonable etc because those are human constructs and left up to be very subjective kind of determinations that's actually the wrong way like it's almost like if you flip it on its head right so if we try to fit smart contracts into the current legal structure you get these challenges yeah but if you flip it you say no actually the fact that everything isn't black and white in the legal language, and we should move towards black and white, then smart contracts are almost a better way to do law rather than the subjective version we have today. I think that's the dream, certainly. And I think that's how it's pitched. The problem is that you and I both know the world is very great. And like I said, contracts are a meeting

of the minds. And you and I can both think that we agree on something. We can totally shake hands and think like we're 100% in agreement and we will have different subjective understandings of the world. And that's why, you know, when there's a contract dispute, you need to have something like a judge because, you know, a judge, if it was really that simple, then we would have contracts that are written in black and white language and a judge would say, okay, this is how this is resolved. It's pretty simple. But, you know, it's much more difficult than that. You You have litigation that goes on for very long times for very, very high dollar deals because, you know, when you're weighing these things, you have to think about justice and

fairness and reasonableness and all of these sort of higher level concepts that can't be reduced to code. And while you can abstract some of that away, certainly, you're not going to get much more functionality than like a vending machine. And that's useful. But is that going to, I think specifically the promise of smart contracts is while we can take the entire financial infrastructure and put that into smart contracts. But this goes back to financial contracts are contracts of trust, right? If I'm entering into an agreement with

you, let's say we're doing a credit default swap, right? And I'm trying to make sure that you're a trustworthy counterparty. There's a lot of things that can go wrong in a credit default swap. We can have a lot of disagreements on what does it mean to default? What does it mean to be late on a payment what does it mean for all these different triggering clauses of the payout happening and how much of those uh the nuances and challenges are disagreements between you and i like think of it as the two parties in the transaction versus there's external forces that could be macro or or micro but those external forces can change in real time what you and i agree on right it's almost like um you know if you look at a contract a lot of times there's

multiple subjective, if-then type scenarios, right? So if you do this, then you're allowed to pay on this date. But if you prepay, then, you know, you do something else or whatever the scenario is. To me, it feels like a lot of times those external forces at play, there's a lot of renegotiating, right? There's a lot of kind of rewriting contracts. There's ways that some of this stuff plays out that again you just can't pre-predict and that's part of the problem right or at least that's the challenge i don't know it's a necessary problem it's just a challenge no i think that's totally part of it you know you have contingencies that just can't be accounted for in black and white immutable software yeah like uh what sort of hedge fund would ever enter

into an immutable contract when you know what happens if their lead trader goes skiing and you you know, has like incredible brain damage and now they can't quite make the decisions they were and they have to enter into some contingency plan. Would it be fair to say that if you look at the body of law today, there are very distinct areas where smart contracts will become pervasive quickly in the sense of it's very black and white. It's very easy to implement this. And there's very little controversy in that implementation versus other areas where it's so subjective that smart contracts are going to really struggle to be implemented. So kind of the implementation isn't even black and white we get some areas that get automated in law and some that don't or do you

feel like this is going to be either the industry adopts smart contracts or they completely uh deny them i mean i i think in a way smart contracts are what we've been seeing like software's eating the world and smart contracts you know when when i go and buy my airline tickets like it's it's a smart contract in the sense that it's just a one-time deal and like i type in my my credit card info or hopefully i pay with lightning um and then i just boom it spits out the ticket and that's basically a smart contract. It's a little digital vending machine. Why that needs to be on a blockchain, a little bit unclear. And I think that we'll increasingly see that and things will get more and more efficient in that direction. But a smart contract for complex financial agreements

where I need, I mean, if I'm giving you a loan, I need to know who you are. I need to know why I trust you. And that's something that is incredibly difficult on smart contracts. And I think a lot of the hype is, well, we're eventually going to get to identity. We'll eventually be able to sort this out, but we haven't quite solved identity yet. Yep. And you know, that is a incredibly difficult problem because identity isn't just knowing who you are because all identity is relational, right? You might be a pomp to me on Twitter, but you might be someone else to your family members, or you might be someone else to your government. Right. And so who you are, Your identity is relational, and that's really important for a contract because that is how you manage enforcement.

How do I enforce a contract against you? I always think about this as like almost pseudonyms, right? Of like you have you and like who you actually are as a human, but the way that you interact with colleagues in a corporate environment versus your significant other versus like maybe you play baseball on the weekends with your friends or whatever. you're actually different people to all of those different groups uh they see you as the person you're acting at in that scenario is who you are right so like your significant other however they see you acting in that situation that's who they believed you to be right if they then see you uh acting how you act in the corporate environment with your corporate colleagues they a lot of times say is that what you do at work right like it like it's almost like they've seen like a

different side of you that is very contrasting to your original identity. We see that in human relationships. It becomes very weird when all of a sudden now you have software to address all of those different identities in a way where let's tie it all back to one individual, but we have to account for these different identities in contracts, et cetera. Totally. And I think that goes to the idea of this, you know, we're going to have DeFi, we're going to decentralize finance, But, you know, if I'm Morgan Stanley, right, and I'm trying to determine if I want to lend shares of a stock that you want to short to your hedge fund, then I need to know who you are because I need to assess your credit worthiness.

What are your other contracts? What is your trading history? Who are you as a counterparty, right? And identity is very, having a stable, not synonymous, but true identity of who you are is very important for me assessing your credit worthiness and actually making a deal with you in the first place. If I don't know you, I'm not going to trust you. And trust is very important in making these things more efficient and kind of like being, you know,

greasing the wheels of commerce because, oh, you've done a lot of these transactions. And I know that if things go south, then I can enforce a judgment against you in the United States. And so your identity is actually very crucial. Having a pseudonymous identity doesn't give you those same guarantees. I can't know if this is the, you know, the 20th time you've tried borrowing with me and you screwed me over 19 times and now I'm supposed to trust you. I can't know who you are, where you're domiciled. So I can't know where to get a judgment against you. And so because of that, I have to fall back on, all right, I'm going to over collateralize everything. I need to lend you a hundred dollars. I need 150 up front

just to make sure you don't run away with my money. Well, and to some degree, that's what banks do today, right? Who do they lend money to? People who don't actually need the money. Yeah, totally. If you need the money, they don't want to lend it to you because they're scared you won't pay back. Yeah. And even when you don't have pseudonymous identities, when you just have your actual identity and real credit score with like peer-to-peer lending, like LendingTree, LendingClub, you know, those things went so far south because people just run away with the money. And it's really, really hard to have trust. And that requires rigorous identity. And I know that's not sexy to decentralize all the things, you know, sort of apply the cypherpunk ideals to,

you know modern finance but lending finance is a trust-based interaction yep and it is you know money bitcoin you can take trust out of it and you actually have a much much better product yep you take trust out of lending so i don't know who i'm giving my money to and you're going to have a nightmare on your hands yeah well it's only a nightmare if you don't have the over collateralization right like one of the things that uh i'm really interested in the spaces so So if I put Bitcoin, let's say I take $100 worth of Bitcoin and I put it into BlockFi or one of these other platforms, and I receive $30 or $50 US dollar loan, right? The trust is – or the need for trust is minimized because it is so over-collateralized. They have control of my asset or collateral, and then I'm able to take a loan.

But to your point, there's very few people in that situation who, you know, it's a very nuanced use case where I have enough collateral to post in that scenario to then receive a 30% to 50% LTV loan. Normally, it's the exact opposite, right? It's, hey, I want to buy a house. I put down 10%, 20%. Somebody gives me 80% of the value of the home, and then I'll pay it off over time. There's no collateralization there, and that's where identity becomes important. That's exactly right. And so the overcollateralization, like, it has some use cases for sure.

I'm not saying it has zero, but is it going to replace the wheels of finance? Not at all, because you're going to see two options. You can either tell us who you are, and maybe you post 20% or 30% collateral at a clearinghouse, or you completely over-collateralize, and it's almost impossible for you to even make money. Much less, how do you start a business where you need financing to start a company, but you have to give me more money than you already have just to get the loan for the company? I mean, that can obviously never work. For sure.

So I want to switch gears a little bit. You've done a bunch of writing and tweeting recently about like the common misconceptions of Bitcoin. And we're talking about trust earlier. And frankly, I think about there's this idea that even like the most hardcore Bitcoiners trust certain narratives. Right. And so that doesn't mean that the narrative is right or wrong. It's just that there is definitely consensus thought around certain ideas. I want to start with one that you recently wrote about.

Bitcoin is not deflationary. Right. So what did you kind of what was the point of that kind of talk track for you and kind of why you felt compelled of like, hey, this narrative is something that a lot of people have consensus around, but it actually might not be true. Yeah. So there's a couple of these floating around. And I wrote that piece specifically because, you know, you hear this talked about a lot, especially in mainstream economic circles, sort of this specter of deflation that's haunting the economy. And central bankers are doing everything they can to prevent deflation. And so deflation is seen as this pretty negative thing. And so I wanted to sort of write this article to say, you know, it's easy to say Bitcoin is deflationary in terms of, well, prices are going to go down.

But if you look at the actual monetary supply, the monetary supply is not decreasing. So in a very strict sense of deflation and inflation being decrease or increase in the base money supply, Bitcoin is not deflationary. It's actually constant because it levels off to that 21 million hard cap. Okay, so this and this is a nuanced piece of it, right? So there's a separation. I think the first is the disinflationary monetary supply schedule. So this is the amount of Bitcoin that is getting injected into the circulating supply, right? So there's 21 million, we know as a hard cap of kind of total supply. But today, we just crossed over 18 million that have now been put into supply. And that'll continue to accelerate or increase over time. But actually, it won't accelerate or increase over time. But the amount every 10 minutes is going down every four years, et cetera. Smaller proportion. And so that disinflationary monetary supply schedule is different than what you're talking about, which is you're addressing the total supply, which is that $21 million. Now, I think a lot of people will say that, yes, that's true that the total supply is $21 million, but it's, quote, unquote, deflationary because every time someone loses one, it gets destroyed, et cetera.

It's essentially being taken out of the supply. Your point, I think, is, yes, it may get taken out of the circulating supply, but that doesn't change the total supply. Is that accurate? I would say, actually, even further in that, while coins are being lost all the time, the highest amounts of losses are in the very earliest days of Bitcoin. 20 years from now, the amount of Bitcoins lost per day is going to be much, much lower. We're going to have incredible custodial solutions. We're going to have complex multi-sig. We're going to have multiple spending scripts so that even if, you know, worst case scenario, you can still redeem it in a couple of years and you can bring those coins back online.

We'll just be much more professional. And so there might be less coins hitting the market and less mine per block. But at the same time, we're losing less. And so that actually kind of reaches this sort of equilibrium. And I think by the time we roll around to 2140, the concept of losing hundreds or thousands of coins, which might actually still happen today, much, much more in common. And eventually, you know, maybe it's not 21 million is the final cap we reach. But let's say it's like, you know, however many are lost. Let's say it's around 18 million or 17 million is like our final, you know, amount that hasn't been lost.

Then the point is that it does reach a constant. It reaches an equilibrium. And that can be, you know, sort of this base measurement system for our prices. And that having a nice, stable constant for our prices is very important in the same way that a meter is important or all these other measurement systems, that money is just the measurement system for prices. Yep. I think that's fair. What are the other misconceptions that you think people kind of have consensus thought about but may not be accurate? I think that another thing that really comes up a lot is this idea of intrinsic value. And this is actually pretty prominent in both the gold community.

It's prominent in popular understandings of why money is useful. And it's also popular in other sorts of, you know, well, you know, ETH is going to be more valuable than Bitcoin because it's going to have all these use cases. And we need these use cases for the Internet of Things and for supply chain. But, you know, when it comes down to it, a money has monetary properties that make it valuable. It's scarce, durable, verifiable, transferable. And those monetary properties are very important. its intrinsic value, its other use cases are sort of the trade-off for that. And so when you talk about, you know, well, gold can be used in all these other industrial use cases, that's actually

a net negative to our money. Okay, why? Explain why. Because it goes back to the idea if we want our monetary base to be relatively pure, right? We want it to be a nice, solid, constant measuring stick for signaling to market participants about prices. And if we have this other industrial use case that's taking gold for other sorts of uses right and putting it in aerospace or um all these other jewelry uh dental equipment you know whatever it might be then you're using it for a non-monetary purpose and that can actually create distortions and so when we have for the first time in human history a pure monetary object then we can sort of get these distortions out of our pricing mechanisms and use it simply as this is a way of communicating prices honestly. And I think that

what we're seeing, you know, right now we're in San Francisco. Housing here is an absolute nightmare. And that's because people don't have, you know, sort of a great store of value thing. And so we use other objects for their monetary purposes. And we create other distortions in the economy because now housing is skyrocketing because we need other monetary objects. We need to kind of take their monetary properties and use them as piggy banks instead of as homes. And so you see other distortions for monetary like things. And then that just wreaks havoc on local economies because we don't have the sort of pure money that is separate from all other use cases. And I think this is part of like Murad's argument, right? Which is that we're asking

individual market participants to have a job that drives income. So whether you're a teacher, a firefighter, an investment professional, whoever, there's a very small subset of those people who also are financial professionals. So everyone else who's not a financial professional ends up going to work. I'm a teacher. I go to work every day. I teach these kids. I get paid my income. And now because of the structure of the financial system, you're asking me also to be an investor and understand how to manage my capital because if I leave it in cash, it will actually devalue over time. So I need to be able to invest it somewhere. Do I do that into real estate, into stocks, bonds, I don't know, I have to either hand my money over to

somebody else to do it for me, or I have to understand that. And one that's a pretty big ask, and probably one we shouldn't be making. Yeah, it's nearly impossible. But also the second thing is, imagine if the unit of account was something where you could just simply leave your wealth into that asset, and it wouldn't be devalued away, and so therefore the quote-unquote savings mentality would work, because you can simply continue to stack that amount of money that you have and kind of save over time. Right. Totally. Totally. What other misconceptions

do you think are out there? I think another big one is simply the, I don't even know if this is a misconception, but it's something that frustrates me a lot. And it's simply the idea that people have this sort of natural immune response to hearing ideas that seem too good to be true. And I think this

is what causes a lot of apathy for Bitcoin. Because I've talked to a lot of people about Bitcoin and in some ways I've almost stopped trying to talk to my friends or my relatives about it because people have this sort of ingrained immune response. Like if you're listening to the radio and you hear about this amazing real estate deal that just sounds too good to be true, you're not going to look into it. Of course not. Because you know, we all know these things are just scams, right? And so Bitcoin, when you're talking to

someone actually can sound so good because it is such a revolutionary breakthrough that it causes people to naturally turn off because you know it's kind of like a scaling solution to being uh subjected to so many advertisements day in day out um that it causes people to sort of like not subject it to rigorous logic because if you did that for everything if i went and heard the radio ad for the amazing real estate opportunity and i tried to like logically parse through why it's a terrible idea i would be spending every day all day well and i think also it's such a big idea that it's also scary right it's the idea of like hey we could replace money with something that's better yeah that's like so asinine in many people's mind that they're like nah i think i like

the current environment like it's safer it's there's less chaos there's less uncertainty uh i just want to go buy some food and like i don't care what you guys are talking about this money thing um and so it's the combination of uh a big scary idea with the it almost sounds too good to be true. And when you put those two things together, the human nature, we've been conditioned over time, is really what you're talking about, to reject those or kind of turn away from them and kind of stay with the comfortable, certain, you know, kind of path forward. Totally, totally. I think that's, and it's frustrating, but that's, you know, the way of the world. Early adopters is a real thing. Yeah, no, for sure. For sure. All right. So you've got

a bunch of ideas around Bitcoin and politics. Yes. The thing to me that I want to kind of caveat caveat this part of the conversation with this uh there are people who absolutely hate bitcoin think it's the worst thing in the world they want to ban it etc both in the u.s government and other governments uh and then there's a lot of people who are supporters right so so it's not so much uh the the government you know kind of air quotes is over generalized as being negative towards this because there are a lot of people who are actually supportive and proponents and want to see adoption etc why do you think that the presidential candidates whether it's trump or others should like Bitcoin and actually should be attracted to it rather than trying to fight it?

I mean, I honestly think Bitcoin is just such a win-win-win for all politicians because you can, you know, you can look at Bitcoin through each of these lenses and, you know, separate from which side of the aisle you agree with, no matter which side you're on, Bitcoin is a massive boost to, you know, your message. So like, let's say you're Trump, you have a very strong sense of nationalism of an America first mentality. Um, and you know, being an early adopter of Bitcoin is just such a massive boon for you. If you want to be one of these early adopters, you know, like we said, uh, if, um, you're this, this first mover, if, you know, imagine if the United States builds up, you know, substantial position in Bitcoin, um, you know, maybe a hundred thousand

coins, a couple hundred thousand. I mean, let's, let's say a big position. Yep. And then suddenly announces all right we've built up a massive position in bitcoin we think it's the future yep that announcement alone causes like a 10x return yep i mean i mean it would just be so overwhelmingly massive yeah uh in the response that you could see this like if america does take this leadership approach just from a pure uh like profit margins principle like you are making a massive return like instant return on your investment yeah well in part of this uh i keep saying and if somebody out there is listening wants to build this please dm me on twitter or something. But I think it would be powerful and funny at the same time for somebody to build a

scoreboard and literally put like the U.S. and China on a web page and keep track of how many Bitcoin each country has, right, or add other countries in. And you can kind of back into it probably by how much they've seized, right, because that's pretty much how they're all getting it today. But over time, right, you kind of keep track of, look, there's 21 million of these things. what country is, kind of has the biggest position or is most bullish, but you use the proxy of how many Bitcoin do they actually hold on their balance sheets in order to measure that. Again, you can see them doing this quietly and not announcing it. And then there's some announcement, whether that's the US or some other country. Or you can see like what we're seeing in China today,

where they just come out and say, look, we think blockchain, so not just Bitcoin, but blockchain is the future. We're going all in on it. And that kind of like gave the green light for everyone. okay, like, now let's go, right? Let's start announcing what we're doing, et cetera. Exactly, and I think that's where the competitive advantage comes in. You know, if the United States says, well, actually, you know, you might want to be using blockchain for surveillance and, you know, restricting your citizens' personal liberties,

we're going to use it to make ourselves great, to make ourselves rich. I think that would be an incredibly compelling narrative. It even lines up with, you know, the founding fathers' ideas of letting people interact how they want and being free from, you know, centralized control. And I think that you could spin this in a very pro-America, America first move. And, you know, Trump really, really cares about jobs, about the economy. And, you know, the truth is a lot of the manufacturing jobs, they're not going to come back.

Right. There's other places that do it better. But mining is something that no one really does incredibly well yet. I mean, we're still super, super early. And what if we, you know, did a big Bitcoin mining initiatives, a push towards, you know, reinvigorating the Midwest with mining opportunities. And, you know, we love our oil and natural gas industry and we know the massive benefits that Bitcoin can bring to making previously unprofitable and unsustainable or non-environmental energy and natural gas industries. and bringing those online because now you can use Bitcoin to, you know, capture that and profit off that extra energy. So it is a win-win-win for the American workers, more jobs, more profitable sectors of the economy. And overall, it might even get America out of this, you know, sort of debt crisis that we have looming

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Go check out BlockFi.com slash Pomp. Again, BlockFi.com slash Pomp to sign up and start earning interest on your crypto today. And so you really hit on the kind of the nationalistic or, you know, America first type approaches to white Bitcoin. What about the other side of the aisle, which is more like kind of the Bernie, the Elizabeth Warrens, Joe Biden's, et cetera, even maybe the Andrew Yang's of the world? Like, how do you see Bitcoin fitting into those narratives? Yeah, no, Bernie and Elizabeth Warren should 100 percent love Bitcoin because, you know, Bernie and Elizabeth Warren are really cut from this Occupy Wall Street idea that, you know, we have these plutocrats that are controlling our political process. they're just you know um privatizing the gains publicizing the losses and so you know if you

start talking to them well what do you think allows them to do that perhaps it is the cantillion effect perhaps it is printing money that is financing the financiers right so i mean who should be against printing money more i mean bernie is like first in line because the people that are profiting off this and who um are reaping these massive gains are like we said the financial elite that have this, not only are they touching the money first, but they have much more deep financial knowledge. And I think that you can look at wealth inequality and a lot of metrics of inequality started to increase as soon as we left the gold standard in the early 1970s. So I think returning to a sound money, a sound place where workers can store their hard-earned

time and energy and it can't be diluted um it's going to be i mean it seems like such a natural um uh idea that comes from this sort of occupy wall street mentality of not trusting the people that are in money and instead i mean um it fits this criteria of this is the people's money you know this is built from the ground up a bunch of people just working hard um uh open source developers just contributing freely um a lot of those ideals are what's in the the bernie sanders movement. And, you know, when you look at the Federal Reserve Board, it's a bunch of white men that are sitting around. I think that it seems very natural that they would want to criticize this as being, you know, a racist or gendered institution of the Federal Reserve Board,

which props up, you know, the military warfare state that they criticize a lot. It seems to have a lot of the sticking points that they would want. And they could point to a lot of problems in the money printing business that align with their narratives. Yeah, for sure. And to me, it also feels like if you're a politician, there's what I'll call the policy angle, right? Which is kind of the, hey, this can actually help people who need help, right? I'm going to make some sort of decision here where the policies are implemented. Then you have what I'll call more the narrative benefit, right? Which is, this is the Andrew Yang, automation is coming, right? You know, Bitcoiners are cool. This is Trump America first. Right. And what you're doing is you're

benefiting from the highly engaged community that's already built there. Right. So it's just kind of a popularity contest type thing. But then the third thing is there is a technology angle here. Right. And when I go to the technology angle, I think, you know, look, the people who are 100 percent exposed to the legacy financial system and zero percent exposed to the new financial system right or this alternative financial system they're making a binary bet and if they're wrong they end up blowing themselves up right but if you are less of a binary person and you could say hey you know what as president i'm going to put you know 95 of our resources in the legacy system but there's this new thing and we want to have a hedged you know bet basically

here and if this becomes thing we want to be the leader we want to be out front we want to really dictate make sure that the american ethos are you know incorporated into this democracy whatever, but we're not going to go 100%, you know, into the new system, right? So it's kind of this balance and really trying to almost have a confidence level on each system, but making sure that you're going to be a leader in either system, regardless of which one wins. No, I think that is 100% the case. And this kind of goes to like the third approach.

You know, you have your left and your right, your strong political candidates, but you also have the establishment, you know, you have your Brad Shermans of the world who are, you know, they're not trying to beat around the bush. They know that they care about one thing, which is maintaining the U.S. supremacy and, you know, flexing our might around the world. And that's fine. And, you know, there's a debate to be had there. But even if you're Brad Sherman, even if you think that Bitcoin could eat your lunch, it could expose your country to weaknesses abroad, and it could start to erode your power, do you really want to take a zero bet against it? Do you really want to have nothing allocated to it?

It's sort of this, if it is so scary, then of course you should build a position. Of course you should protect yourself against it. Because worst case scenario, you spend so much time railing against it and defending the status quo that you're not playing the long game. And you let China build up a position when you didn't. And that puts you in an even scarier position. So you kind of have to address the realities as it is, and you can't just daydream about the yesteryears

where you had the complete monopoly over what people use for their everyday transactions. So speaking of politics, Bitcoin's one component of it, right? But when you look back at whether it's DeFi, whether you look at smart contracts, it's kind of all the other aspects of the ecosystem or industry. How do you see that playing into the political narrative? And especially as the presidential election comes up, you know, like, is it just a, hey, focus on Bitcoin if you're a candidate? Or do you think that the rest of this is just as important

and are things that they should be addressing as they kind of, you know, propose their plan for the country? I mean, honestly, that's a tough question. And I think that campaigns are trying to adjust their strategy towards this sort of new, weird, viral environment that we see. And I think that, honestly, that's what led to a lot of Trump's success is a brilliant campaign of viral, you know, things that he knew would go viral and would resonate with certain people through memes. I think meme warfare is the new sort of, you know, it's not going to be establishment media anymore. Right before this interview, we were looking at sort of the Project Veritas stuff, the Jeffrey Epstein stuff, and that's a really powerful new force that I don't really think anyone knows how to deal with.

So explain a little bit about what's going on there. So Project Veritas is this sort of, it's a campaign or it's an organization, a group that's trying to expose biases in traditional media outlets. And just this morning they released a video of, I think it's one of the hosts of an ABC talk show who was on a hot mic and she was talking to producers about how she had all this information about Epstein that people weren't letting it come out. and they were sort of trying to suppress the stuff that she had been doing for years and that she thought it was interesting, all this was coming to light, and people started to care, but she had been kind of pushed to the background for a long time and said no one cares about this, even though they had extremely damning evidence. And, you know, this is sort of this really strange outcome

that I don't think that anyone can do anything about, where you have, you know, as the Internet becomes more and more powerful, suddenly you can't stop people from saying things in the way that you could previously and so you have uh all new sorts of information and disinformation warfare that i don't really know how we we handle going forward but it'll be really interesting it's this idea that like viral content is just propaganda for the masses yeah yeah i think it is and and that's not surprising and and in a way we had it's not that there's more or less truth but there's just more sources of it um now that we're sort of entering this information age and i think it's overwhelming

right now and and hopefully it'll sort of get better but i don't know i think a lot of the things that we're seeing in hong kong and simultaneously in other parts around the world in in argentina and lebanon and catalonia and all these sort of populist movements that are now virally connected and can see their successes and failures in other parts of the world is another part of this um and it's sort of a broader shift that bitcoin is a part of which is a shift from you know the sort of cathedral environment of very closed systems and you know i was just rereading cathedral in the bazaar just a couple days ago and it was really striking how true not only it is from the open source software perspective but just for so many legacy

institutions uh whether it be um education or um or health care or a lot of these sorts of things that it's it's becoming more and more obvious that the the less um cathedral approach we take to things the more we open things up and say all right you can just learn whatever you want now i mean we've we basically made liberal or like like um like liberal studies degrees your your social sciences degrees those are basically useless now yep um when you can learn a lot i mean in college i studied philosophy i learned probably like five times as much just from reading online yep about philosophy than anything i learned in class how much of the college experience though in those liberal arts uh do you think are driven less about the knowledge that you

can obtain because you can go read that online and books etc and it's more about the um the kind of interactions with other people who are thinking about the same things it's the it's the debates it's the disagreements, it's like kind of the conversation around the information, which I would consider is the more subjective component of what you're able to get online. I think that there's a lot of glamorization, romanticism around this sort of thing. But the reality is a lot of kids don't go to class. Not many people really care. A lot of people just kind of show up for the credits.

A lot of people are just, you know, oh, I'm taking this required music class because I have to get my music requirement. I have physical education. Yeah, no one cares. But when you look at things like Twitter, like there's a lot of really, really interesting, just sort of like radical philosophy that happens on Twitter and these like crazy threads. And so Twitter I see is like, or, you know, similar platforms to it. I think Twitter is a good example of you can have the sort of open source education,

open source debate and discussion. If you really like these sorts of commingling of ideas, I mean, that's exactly what Twitter is. each tweet is about the size of something you would you would say in a conversation because a conversation it has natural back and forth and so tweets can kind of go back and forth but not only that you can have functionality that you can't have in a classroom because a classroom conversation is necessarily linear but in a tweet you can say something and then you can take all three responses to it and each of those can branch out and create their own debates and so when you take it online, you can actually have much, much more stimulating, valuable and free and

interesting because the people aren't forced to be there. You don't have a forced participation on Twitter. The people that talk on Twitter are the people that care. And I think Bitcoin has shown just how powerful this can be. That when you have an open source pursuit of truth, that you can resist corporate attacks. You can resist all these sorts of corruptions that sort of eke their way in. I think the UASF and the resistance of Segwit2x is an amazing example of how powerful these new academic institutions are. I would consider Bitcoin Twitter an academic institution.

And you're not there because of your tenured position. You're there because you make a damn good argument and people agree with you. and you sort of build up that following through, you know, just making strong logical points. Yeah, I think a lot about Twitter is a war of ideas, right? And like people that don't understand the nuances of Twitter think that it is a conversation. But what I've come to find out is it really is a war of ideas. And I use the words war of ideas specifically because what ends up happening is you get people who come with their own perspective on the world and the nature of Twitter is you have to post that publicly, right?

So you have to post this to the masses and then you have to sit and defend, right? So you go from an offensive position where, hey, this is an idea and then it's just an attack. And especially around Bitcoin where people are definitely, there's a camaraderie, right? Around like, hey, we all are going after the same thing. But Bitcoiners are very, very quick whether I like you or not. if you say something i disagree with like we are here to have that uh that kind of attrition right yes and like what are the best ideas what can survive the attacks and so uh it's the one place in the world where uh i feel like you can put ideas out to a large mass of people you can then

uh immediately like become defensive as they attack it you have to defend it right all this stuff but at the end of it all we all are there for the same reason right and so it's like it's like this very interesting um kind of like the salons of uh of you know many decades ago but do you think that the way we are communicating today is changing uh the way that people actually think and what i mean by this is so think of uh twitter right very short form kind of micro blogging uh think of memes right and kind of the way that we are able to meme things whether it's through text or visual or video etc like does the um the the communication delivery right or they almost the um the media format change the arguments does it change the way that we think

uh does it make us almost dumber or do you think that this is just us adapting to technology and we still have the same level of intellectual curiosity and depth it's just now we're just uh kind of fermenting that in a different uh form factor i think i i think it's uh it's tempting to say we're getting dumbed down and i think it's giving you choices you know um maybe things were were uh more rigorous or higher quality or like the average level of content or something uh previously and and you only had sort of like all right you have three tv channels and you can only listen to what's on there and you sort of get the the standard narrative yep um i think this internet has certainly given you the freedom to just purely just download garbage to your brain

but on the other hand it is incredibly liberating and i think can promote um people who are you know your your modern day da vinci's you know people who are the polymaths the satoshis of the world uh they now have the liberty to explore whatever they want to engage in incredibly rigorous discussion and debates and thinking through uh very very high level topics on 20 different issues uh 20 different fields um and it could be someone who just has an internet connection anywhere in the world and that i think we're going to see i mean it's it's it's crazy to imagine how powerful that is yep you know if in the past 500 years there have been thousands of potential da vinci's but only a few of them had access to the resources and the libraries that

made their ideas come to life and make these mass improvements well if we're democratizing that if we're opening up these conversations so you can join these salons whenever you want you can read these uh you know very important texts whenever you want maybe some people are going to download garbage but those people probably would have done something relatively useless it's the same thing like you could read the washington post or you could read the national inquirer right and you could have done that three decades ago exactly and so it was your your choice of information you actually have more choice now and not only do you have more choice but the thing i love is uh the the power shift from the institutions to the individuals right on twitter there is no difference

between an individual and the Washington Post, because at the end of the day, you may actually trust that individual more than the Washington Post, right? And that's not a knock against the Washington Post. It's just that the internet specifically creates the opportunity for authenticity. And when you have authenticity, that's where trust is going, right? And so I think that it's very hard for an institution to have authenticity because it's not a human, right? And it's a collection of humans. And so which human represents the authenticity? Well, you really don't have an answer to that right and so at that level when you are you know going back to the idea of pseudonyms when you're on a pseudonymous level the only way i can tell if

you're authentic enough is if you have a good logical argument behind you yep uh the credibility that many of these very powerful institutions have you know sort of uh rested on for so long is being called into question because here are people making very strong credible arguments and if that is a strong argument then it gets retweeted and it goes viral and you know you sort of see this power dynamic come into play where you can't simply just be a traditionally credible thing. You have to back up what you're saying with strong arguments. Yep. And so when you think about kind of the, we'll call it the verification, right? There's a lot of similarities between the verification of ideas and content on Twitter as there is with

Bitcoin as money, right? This whole idea of like fully transparent system that I can verify every transaction etc do you think that that is uh that mechanism or model will permeate itself into all aspects of our lives where people will just demand the ability to verify uh or do you think that it will still be certain aspects of society where i just trust this institution or this individual and i don't need that ability to verify like does the internet break the model and require verification yeah or is that just on the extremes of maybe information money maybe one or two other areas i see this as sort of like a much longer shift um i think that you know in the 40s or 50s maybe we had strong trust but um as we've gotten better at peeling the layers back and seeing

what's actually happening in other parts of the world um i think vietnam war was like the vietnam war was a very big turning point for american identity because we started to see um the official narratives started to be questioned by okay here's real journalists on the ground here's what they're saying about kill counts here's what they're seeing about soldiers fragging their own officers here's what they're seeing about who's actually being killed all these were just like symbolic shocks to official narratives yep and i i don't see uh i just see this as being a progressive thing i think as time progresses we're going to see more and more questioning of official narratives yeah and instead we're going to see more um sort of populist i don't even know if

populist is the right word viral movements i think is the is the right one and i don't even know if it's necessarily democratic, because I think there's also some question about democracy as well going into the 21st century. Who's driving the narrative as well, right? I think like one of the things I've become really interested in is these ideas that, hey, there's this cause, right? So let's take two examples. One would be, quote unquote, Russia meddled in the election and they caused dissent between American citizens and they create chaos and controversy and that had an impact the other would be that um you're a political candidate i'm a political candidate uh you are going to have a rally so i through my campaign fund counter protesters to show up

right and i'm literally paying them to be there those two things seem pretty similar to me right and so it depends on it where's the line right so is it just another country or government we don't want them to do that but you and i meddling in with each other is okay because we call it democracy yeah um but where this all kind of materializes is like do you think that the ethos of bitcoin and bitcoiners is going to drive change in the world or do you think that simply the popularity of those ethos is the product of a change that's happening in the world right so like the causation yes i think the second one is right i think that this is that more i think this is uh definitely a shift towards uh distrust of any sort of larger institution money being one of

them education being another media being a third um and i don't think i i think honestly it's it's hard because i think that personally bitcoin has changed my perspective and so i can see them feeding on each other i think the reason people are drawn to bitcoin is this idea of you know it makes sense to have an algorithm instead of a person that i'm trusting and to sort of minimize trust. And I think that that's largely something that has come about more with a sort of peer-to-peer internet culture as people are becoming more cynical about the world. But I also think that Bitcoin realigns your values. It's definitely realigned mine, where I found myself much, much more skeptical of any sort of interference and any sort of tinkering or optimization.

instead bitcoin represents sort of this pure uh base where it doesn't matter necessarily what the numbers are it doesn't matter you know what the block size is uh there's there's some like wiggle room there doesn't matter exactly how many coins are but the fact that it is a unflinching just constant in my life and in in knowing what it guarantees me is something that is incredibly powerful. And I see that as being something that money is uniquely based on trust right now, and I think we could move away from that. Other things, it's hard. It's nice to take trust out of money, but you can't do the same thing with a lot of these other institutions that are going to be facing a reckoning. Because how do you remove trust from academic arguments? You still

need to parse out logic you still need to go through these other how do you remove trust from you know media or something like that eventually someone has to be selecting which arguments are good or bad and you have to to understand uh where the logic is coming from but um i don't know it's it's very deeply complex and so it's definitely complex for sure yeah and there's no black and white answer i guess really what ends up uh the way that i think about this is if you continue to use technology to break apart uh the corporations and kind of the trusted narratives and kind of all of this stuff and you end up hitting at like what do we what can we verify and if we can verify then we trust it um how that permeates because if you look at the major

institutions of our society these are all things that actually require the default trust so government money right you know uh media etc and if you start to break those down into i need to be able to verify. What you get is a world that looks very, very different. And my greatest fear is that there's a lot of pain between where we are and where we're going. And it's how do you navigate that pain? Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people, I think everyone knows something is wrong and it's not just a fear, it's reality. You know, pensions don't have the money. Our government's insolvent. The Eurozone is insolvent. China is just, you know, propping itself up on debt on top of debt on top of debt um you know all of these massive legacy financial institutions

do not have uh much runway left you know maybe it's 10 years maybe it's 20 years maybe it's two years i don't know who knows uh no one knows what this straw is going to break the camel's back but we know that something is going to have to give in these traditional systems and you know uh the sovereign individual is a fantastic book that talks about this sort of shift and how it's it's going to happen it has to happen because these things aren't sustainable much like the shift from you know the the power of the church and how it eventually became the sort of parasitic institution that eventually had to be cleansed yep but that wasn't a fun time yep um that was a hard time a very hard time for sure and that brought a lot of pain and i think there's no

clean way to get from where we are now to this sort of new open more bottom-up system without pain along the way because so many people are still relying on narratives that you and I both know are just bunk at the end of the day and you know when it comes down to people's I mean this is this is serious this is people's life savings this is people's pensions that they've been working for 40 years as a teacher because they know they're going to get that nice pension at the end of it and that's why they've been making these sacrifices and on the other end And they're either not going to get their money or the only way they can get their money is through massive tax increases on the other local citizens who have been planning not to have those tax increases and have been, you know, scrupulously saving and trying to make ends meet just to make sure they can have their retirement. And suddenly, are you going to raise taxes on those people to pay the pensions that need to be bailed out?

For sure. Or are you just going to print money and inflate away other people's savings? I mean, that's obviously the sexy political move, but that's also, and this goes back to what we were talking about earlier, inflation is one of the worst ways to handle problems in your society because it's so regressive. Inflation hurts the worst off because the people in higher level incomes, they can shield their money and these sorts of different financial assets. But the lower brackets of income. 50% of Americans can't afford $400 emergency payment. Exactly. Right?

Exactly. And they keep their savings in their bank accounts. They don't keep their savings in index funds. They don't have real estate. They don't have stocks. No, of course not. Of course not. And we shouldn't expect them to.

We shouldn't expect them to. But inflation then becomes this silent regressive tax that you can sort of scapegoat around and say, oh, it's all these different things except for what's actually happening. I don't know how any of these play out. And I think anyone who says they know how it's going to play out, you should run the other direction because we're dealing with monumental complexity. But I think what we do know is there is going to be pain, unfortunately, because, you know, we've been sold a system that's just broken and it's been running on fumes for a while and maybe it'll continue. But I see Bitcoin as a safe haven for that because I know no matter where I'm at in the world, no matter who is in charge, 21 million is going to stay. and that is something that is just unbelievably powerful looking at these long-term consequences

five, 10, 20 years down the road. Yeah, for sure. As we go to wrap up, what are you most excited about kind of over the next 12 months? Like, what are you paying attention to? What do you think is really exciting? Gosh, I think there's so many things

that are really exciting. I honestly, in terms of Bitcoin development itself, I'm just really excited for how the Lightning Network's being built out. I was just in Berlin for the Lightning Conference. Oh, awesome. How was that? Oh, it was fantastic.

Everyone there was really, really interested in building. I also went to the BlockStack Conference, and it was a completely different mentality at the two different conferences. One was very interested in ideas and theories and what can we do beyond Facebook, whereas Lightning Conference was here's what we're building, here's how it works, here's how we expect this to work six months from now here's how this is going to be an integral part of a brand new financial infrastructure and this is only going to get exponentially better and here's new layers on top of this and here's the research we're doing and you know they're they're not pulling punches they're not trying to dumb anything down and the people there are

ridiculously motivated at making things not making money um and that's a very very different approach And it's the open source ethos of the best things are going to be built when people who care about them are building them and not people who have $7 million and they're trying to think about what's the best way to allocate this. It's people that just want to build stuff. And so what's happening at Lightning, specifically with different ways of routing, so atomic multipath payments, so you can break up different routes. So if I want to send you $10, I can send it $5 through two different channels instead of one $10 channel. Massive improvement in Lightning UX. And I think at this point, we're beyond proof of concept. We're really building this stuff out, and we're not just theorycrafting.

We've done it. We've basically finished replacing the Federal Reserve. It's just a question of time. We're just waiting for these things to come to fruition. But all of the difficult questions, the innovations are there. It's just a question of, you know, iterating, iterating, iterating and making this all happen. And in the context of the macro backdrop, that is sort of the one thing that helps me feel confident about the future. If we didn't have Bitcoin, it would be much, much darker.

And, you know, I don't even like to think about that, honestly. What's the most important book you've read ever? Most important book I've read ever. um honestly the first thing that comes to mind is a it's a nicha reader by rj hollandale who put it together and it's basically a collection of nicha's philosophical writings interesting was really really important for me um going into college because you know nicha was kind of this philosophical uh person who just blew open traditional understandings of philosophy and said you know all these guys that are put in these brilliant philosophy chairs and all these high

institutions they're wrong yep they're just preaching about stuff that you know isn't shouldn't be accepted as truth you know and that truth is much much stickier than a black and white good and bad but that all these things are much more great and i think that that mentality of questioning whoever the truth, whoever claims to have an understanding of truth, questioning that has been really important for orienting my politics and my view of the world and turning it more towards what really Bitcoin represents also, which is we should just let people do what they want we should uh trust in people's opinions to um you know whatever they voluntarily choose to do and i think it also helped me sort of parse through uh mainstream economic understandings of

bitcoin versus where does the logical argument stack up and if you can make a good argument it doesn't matter what titles you have what credentials you have um but um the the where you should go is is where the the logic structures are yeah for sure uh before i end i always let you ask me one question but we talk about aliens uh believer non-believer honestly aliens i am very disappointed in basically all modern representations of aliens okay um because you know if you look at star wars or you look at these you know popular understanding or even even uh what what people claim was here at at the roswell stuff yep uh the aliens are always very very humanoid you know they have arms they have legs they even have eyeballs the idea that aliens will even have the

same sensory organs as humans um you know we we come from a nice clean little genetic line going back all these millions of years to our ancestors but over the years we've kind of develop certain sense organs eyes ears you know whatever it might be and and most animals on earth have that but there's no reason to think that other alien species will have the same way of even interacting with the physical forces of the universe so i think we could get a lot more creative with our aliens but i definitely think they exist just statistically they have to exist yeah i mean let's just be real uh i just want to see some more creative thought in aliens that's fair what uh what one question you have for me to finish up one question i have for you

it's really hard pump no question is perfectly fine makes my job easy um i would say what is your i'm curious um what is your favorite podcast in crypto right now aside from your my My favorite podcasting crypto. Man, that's really good. So I can't pick one. I'm going to pick two. And it's because they come at it from very different perspectives. So I would go with Tales from the Crypt, Marty Bent, Matt O'Dell, and then Peter McCormack for what Bitcoin did.

I think both of them – one is much more individual-focused, right? So like when Peter is interviewing people, et cetera, he just did one with Nick Sabo that I thought was fantastic. That was good. Um, yeah, he, he's got a number of other ones that, uh, that, that I would highly recommend. Um, and so it's, it's, to me, I get to learn a lot from somebody that Peter's asking questions to and kind of talking about, uh, when it comes to Marty and Matt, uh, their, um, uh, their, their, what do they call it? Rabbit hole recap, I think is what it is.

Uh, to me, the part that I like about that is you get to follow their thought process, right? And so it's like, you're, you're hearing them constantly sharing like their perspective on the news and uh i think that what i find valuable to them specifically is they come from a much more um kind of bitcoin centric uh earlier time period right where uh they've just been around for much longer than a lot of people and so they have kind of historical context of bitcoin specifically uh and then they have a very specific perspective on the world right and that perspective is not actually very widely shared by a lot of people um and they're just entertaining right and

So when you kind of, like, wrap all that together, for me it's, like, it's enjoyable, but it's also educational, and I learn a lot from it. And so I actually think that's one of the biggest problems with podcasts today is a lot of people are very focused on making them educational but not entertaining. And that's always my advice to people is, like, hey, if you're going to do some sort of content, like, make it enjoyable and entertaining and then make it substantive behind it. But I think that first part gets left out, which they've obviously done a great job with. And so those are the two I would recommend. Awesome. Yeah. All right, man.

Listen, thanks so much for taking the time to do this. I think people will enjoy it. I'm sure plenty of people will be mad at us about talking about politics, Bitcoin, and the social constructs of the world. I mean, that's what we're here for, right? But thank you so much for having me on, Pump. Exactly. Where can people find you online if they want to reach out? The best place was just on my Twitter.

It's underscore Connor Brown underscore, and that's Connor with an E-R at the end. Somebody had Connor Brown, just had Connor Brown. Yes. We need to go track him down, man. Give it back. One of these days, I'm going to get it. All right, man. Appreciate it.

Yep. Hey, everyone. Pomp here. If you like this episode of Off The Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, Spotify, and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review, and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off The Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars.

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