The Pomp Podcast - Ryan Leslie, CEO of Superphone: How a Grammy-Nominated Producer Became Hooked on Crypto

Episode Date: December 4, 2019

Ryan Leslie is the CEO of Superphone and a Grammy-nominated producer who has worked with the likes of Kanye West, Beyonce, Britney Spears, and more. In 2014, Leslie launched Superphone to help enterprise brands acquire, retain, and engage with mobile customers in a new and impactful way. Investors in Superphone include renowned VC Ben Horowitz, TechCrunch's Josh Constine, and Kanye West. In this episode with Anthony Pompliano, Leslie discusses his journey from attending Harvard at the age of 15 to becoming a world-renowned musical artist and entrepreneur. Pompliano and Leslie dive deep into their early Bitcoin stories, including how Leslie first heard about Bitcoin through Coinbase’s CEO, Brian Armstrong. 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.

Whoa, before we get started, I want to go over the four sponsors for this episode who make all this possible. They're fantastic, so go show them some love. The first is the best URL in the industry, Crypto.com. They're a crypto platform with one goal, driving mass adoption. That's why we're all here, right? To get every human on earth a digital wallet and to get them using digital currencies. Crypto.com is helping people do that through buying, earning, lending, and a new card payment. Everything you could want is at Crypto.com.

They've been longtime supporters of Off The Chain and recently announced a new exchange. So go help them out, download their app from the App Store, or visit Crypto.com and tell them POM sent you. There's nothing better in the world than a company helping to drive global adoption of this new technology. Another part of global adoption is making sure that we secure the various blockchains with computing power. CoinMine has built the best consumer experience in mining. Hands down, no competition. If you want to help secure the blockchain and get started in mining, you can go to coinmine.com. Order a CoinMine, it'll arrive at your door, and you simply take it out of the box, plug it in, and connect to your Wi-Fi.

You'll be mining your favorite crypto in five minutes or less. It is honestly magical. I have one running right now here in the office, and it's super quiet, it's got no heat, and every person that comes in the office asks, what is that? Every single person asks. It's a CoinMine. The best part to me is that the CoinMind comes with a mobile app that's super slick and the company continues to push over-the-air updates to the device that add functionality, add tokens that can be mined, or increase the efficiency of the device. Similar to how Tesla does car software updates over the air, CoinMind's sending these passively to thousands of CoinMinds around the world on a periodic basis. Pretty damn cool.

When Farboot and the team pitched me on the idea of an Xbox or PlayStation-like box that could mine cryptocurrency in your home, I was immediately sold. I invested in the business, have a device personally, and keep telling people to go to coinmine.com so they can save a lot of time if they want to get started mining today. And CoinMine has a partnership with our third sponsor for this episode, BlockFi. BlockFi is one of my favorite companies in crypto because they allow users to deposit their assets in a deposit account and immediately start earning interest. Think about it. If you keep your digital assets on an exchange or in cold storage, you aren't benefiting from any yield on the asset. With BlockFi, they allow you to deposit crypto and then get paid interest on a monthly basis in crypto. Deposit Bitcoin and want to get your interest payment in ETH?

You can do it. Deposit Bitcoin and want to get your interest payment in Bitcoin? You can do it. The rates at BlockFi are currently some of the best in the industry. You can earn 6% interest on Bitcoin and you can earn up to 8.6% APY on GUSD deposits. I'm an investor in the company and think BlockFi is building really important and compelling infrastructure.

So go check them out at BlockFi.com. Again, that's BlockFi.com. And that brings us to the last advertiser of the episode, eToro. These guys have absolutely crushed it over the years. Their founder, Yoni, was one of the original Bitcoin OGs and has been ahead of almost every trend in crypto. He built eToro to help people buy, sell, and trade cryptocurrencies, but he added a few twists, social trading, copy trading, and virtual trading accounts. Social trading is a feature where every asset available on the platform has its own separate social feed where people talk about the asset, share trading ideas and analysis, and even include various charts or graphs. Virtual trading accounts is targeted at beginners. If you're just starting out and want

to try trading with play money, eToro will give you a virtual account with $100,000 in it to test, learn, and get comfortable. And so then that brings us to copy trading, which is by far the coolest feature. This allows you as a user to select any other user's portfolio to copy. If you see someone on the platform you like, you can set your account to mimic their trades. They buy Bitcoin with 5% of their portfolio, your portfolio buys 5% Bitcoin. They sell 50% of their Ether position, your portfolio does the same thing automatically. Copy trading is awesome, so go join the 10 plus million other traders on eToro and start trading all the most popular cryptocurrencies today. They're one of the largest companies in the space, and you can get started by going to

eToro.com. Again, that is eToro.com, where the entire team is ready to get you started in just a few clicks. And don't forget, go subscribe to the Off The Chain daily newsletter. You can go to offthechain.substack.com. I write a letter of news analysis and opinion every morning that goes out to more than 40,000 investors. See you there. What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Ryan Leslie is an American recording artist and record producer from Washington, D.C. He has produced singles for a number of prominent artists

in a variety of genres, ranging from R&B and hip-hop to pop and gospel. In 2011, he was nominated for a Grammy. Ryan graduated from Harvard University and has made a big push into entrepreneurship in the last few years, where he's the founder and CEO of Superphone and Next Selection Lifestyle Group. In this conversation, we discuss graduating from Harvard,

what it is like producing music with Jay-Z and Kanye, how Ryan discovered entrepreneurship, what his big idea behind Superphone is, and then Ryan tells us a bunch of awesome behind-the-scenes stories that you don't want to miss. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion.

This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I got Mr. Ryan Leslie here. This is going to be too much fun, so we're going to try to keep this clean and try to keep it where we have not as much fun as everyone at home. So thank you for coming on and doing this. Oh, we're going to have a great time. Thanks for having me.

All right. First of all, let's just start with the music stuff. I think most people know you as a musician for all of your music. Walk us through, how did you frankly just kill it in music for so long? Yeah, I moved to New York City on an unpaid internship in 2003. And this is five, six years after I got out of college. Well, I went to Harvard, right, of all places to have a start in music, Harvard University, right? I told my dad I wanted to do music. And, man, ended up back on his couch. I graduated in 98, was on his couch in the fall of 2002, and caught a little opportunity, unpaid internship in New York City, 2003.

And 30 days into my internship, landed a meeting with Puffy. Puffy became my manager. He managed me from 2003 to 2005. I learned really everything I know about the music business really from A, reading a book called All You Need to Know About the Music Business, and then B, actually having two of probably the most polarizing and at the same time most exciting executives and just personalities in the music business as mentors.

And I was Sean Diddy Combs and Tommy Mottola, man. And so that first year or those first two years, I worked with everybody. My first record was a record for Beyonce on the Bad Boys 2 movie soundtrack called Keep Giving Your Love To Me. And then over those two years, just worked with everybody, Britney Spears, Snoop.

And really, that was directly correlated to the fact that when you're working in Puffy's Camp, you have access to every project. You can touch really any project that's happening. So that was really my training ground. And then in 2005, I started to realize that the Internet was going to drastically change the way music was both discovered and distributed. And a partner of mine by the name of Rasheed Richmond introduced me to the MySpace music charts at the time. and he didn't just introduce me to the charts he also came with a game plan and that game plan was that he actually was like yo i can control the myspace keyword and i said well what does that even mean he said well look myspace isn't bidding on their own keyword because they're already the

number one organic google search result for the keyword myspace but we can own two through eight organic based on some seo sem and so man i took my girlfriend at the time we made a myspace profile for i made a song for her and over the next three months she went from zero to 650 000 friends based on this little google algorithm hack and uh man that song was called me and you and it went on to be top 10 in eight different countries and my previous mentor ended up signing cassie uh and she was the first artist to have a one-to-one correlation between social following in sales. So 650,000 friends on MySpace, 650,000 units sold. 650,000 friends on MySpace, 650,000 units sold. And that's when I really knew that I had a real passion for disruption

and being able to sort of turn the entire model for the music business upside down was really kind of that first foray for me into just technology and the marriage of technology and creativity. And so I went on to consult Puffy on how to grow his MySpace profile. And then Puffy and Cassie fell in love, and I never made a record with her again. And, man, that was a great time because they say out of heartbreak is born great inspiration for art. I made two albums, and man, the second one was Grammy nominated, continued to produce for a bunch of folks, worked on Kanye and Jay-Z's Watch the Throne, did a bunch of sessions

with them. Man, you know, I just, I still just been having a great time. I got a bunch of questions in here. Let's go, let's go, let's go. Let's start with, what was the job that you were coming to Unpaid Internship? What were you supposed to be doing when you first came? Yeah, so what was happening is that, you know, Puffy had a team of producers that was called the hitmen and uh puppy's got a favorite line that says take hits from the 80s and make it

sound so crazy the issue with taking hits from the 80s making it sound so crazy is that when the song blows up the people that produced the record only get a sliver of those earnings because the original copyright owners whether it's such a lion's share exactly because they they own the copyrights right so the producer that i was working with his name is young lord said look man you know can you actually play original chord progressions instead of me having to sample them and i said yeah sure of course i can't and so that's what i did that's what i that's what i came to new york to do he had drum beats and drum loops and was looking for dope chord progressions that he could place on top of them so that when a record hit we could actually legitimately split the

earnings instead of having to pay a third party and so that's what i did that's that's what i that's what i came in again what's uh what's uh puffy like oh he's he's he's amazing man uh he's amazing what's the first thing you remember about him man to be honest the first thing i really remember about puffy is that he had so much of a presence and influence on harvard's campus and i had never even met the guy you know and so and the presence and influence that he had on harvard's campus was that you know just you know an hour away in new york city was this music that was moving all the parties moving all the social events that was the soundtrack really you know that bad boy era was really the soundtrack to my whole college career so meeting him finally uh was

really just like i really felt like i already knew him and he really was everything uh he had every element that i expected him to have you know an incredible tenacity an incredible work ethic uh an incredible sort of discernment for the kinds of people that he wanted to have around him and uh and a real love for music and a real love for entrepreneurship and he really exemplified i think what you know my homie asap ferg is is continuing to bear the torch uh for and that is just like that Harlem hustler mentality man and so when I moved to New York out of when I when I first came I was in Young Lord's Crib so when I moved I wanted to move to Harlem because I wanted to move to that epicenter of what you know that hustle that I that I'd always admired

and had had a chance to actually work closely with uh in Puffy's Camp yeah uh there's a song what is it uh Bad Boys for Life I think where they have the music video they're riding the bikes down the street yeah i remember that was just a hit yeah yeah yeah you're a little bit older than me but i just remember listening to that over and over and over again so inspirational man so you you know when you see when you see everything that's been happening for for listeners if you're unfamiliar go go back and check out those videos and then for more modern day just look at what the asap mob is doing asap rocky asap ferg and you know those kind of party starting records you know dress and fly you know nice and smooth with the ladies all of that you know that's that's

everything that you know cameron jim jones all those guys just goes back to this idea like music sets culture yes right and i think a lot of people uh they're used to listening to music a lot of times you're actually listening to stuff you don't even realize what it is you just you've heard the song before you've heard the you know the beats whatever but uh music definitely sets culture and i think now what we're starting to see is musicians that are realizing whether it's kanye or others saying look i'm not just a musician i'm not this one-dimensional person yeah i can actually go and do other things yeah right and uh because i think um there's a lot of people who are musicians who can do other things there's not a lot of people who do other things that can be musicians right

that creativity and that skill set is uh uh could serve you really well when you break out of just music and go to other things right absolutely absolutely what what um what's the one artist that you worked with that uh you got a great story for us that people probably haven't heard before man like what's your favorite memory working with all these artists listen i would have to say working with kanye and hove on the watch the throne sessions was legendary legendary life changer for me just because i mean we started in bath england at peter gabriel's studio and mind you that studio already just looks like a spaceship so you can imagine me pulling up and playing some beats for Kanye

and then having communal lunches or dinners with Hov, it's Beyonce, it's Kanye. And this is all before the Watch the Throne album. So we just knew that something incredible was brewing and just to be part of that process was incredible. But I remember one night in Australia because we ended up doing, we did Bath, England, we did Paris, we did the Mercer,

we did Sydney Australia and so there was this big mansion in Australia I went out to check them and at the time Oprah was broadcasting her show from I think the Sydney Opera House and Jay-Z was a guest on the show and uh you know I stay up really late I taught myself sort of Dymaxion sleep when I was in college just so I could add more hours to the day and so one night it really was just me jay-z an engineer in the living room of this big mansion in australia and uh he said you know he looked over at me and i don't drink but he's you know having a drink i had some ginger probably something and he says look you know who's going to catch up to me and i said what you mean and she's like look i started my day you know i went out um i did the oprah taping you know i

spent some time with with my lady on the boat i went and did uh i opened for you too and now i'm at the studio and uh everyone else is asleep except for you and i am already where i am so who's going to be able to catch up to me work and man that was just such a impactful moment for me because that's the kind of work ethic to which i aspire and uh you know i think there definitely is in everyone's pathway to success there's always a sprinkle of luck but i also believe that you can reduce dependency on luck by having a great work ethic and having a great amount of that work ethic being invested in building the right relationships look i talk about all the time there's people who are good at something and then there's the select few that are great right whether it's a basketball

player a musician right entrepreneur or whatever right you can be good by rolling out of bed yeah There's some people who just look, you got lucky, you won the Ovarian Lottery, you're 6'5", and you got a 44-inch vertical. You should be able to dunk, stuff like that. But Kobe Bryant is notorious for, one of my favorite stories is he was at a pregame before the game, and he goes out on the court, and Jay Williams, the famous Duke star, said that he was out there shooting, and Kobe came out and went down the other end, and they're on opposing teams, so Jay starts shooting. And Kobe starts shooting. And Jay Williams is like, I had already been out there for about an hour,

so I did another 30 minutes or whatever, and I leave. And by the time I leave, Kobe Bryant is breaking a sweat, and he's shooting, he's shooting, he's shooting. And I walk inside in the locker room, go out and play that game that night, and Kobe put up 40 points or something. He walks up to me and goes, man, Kobe, how did you do that? You spent an hour and a half before the game doing this or whatever. And he goes, man, I wasn't leaving that court until you left

just so you knew you were in my house. Right? That's what it takes, man. And it was just, he was playing a game before the game even started, right? And he was out there and he was working, he was doing all this stuff. And so it's that idea of you take somebody who even then, Jay-Z, had a pretty big lead on people in terms of what he was doing, and for him to say things like, who's going to catch me?

Yeah. We shouldn't be surprised at what he's doing now, right? No surprise. And where he's gotten to. Because you had a front row seat to some of that hard work and then kind of seeing that path. No surprise. No surprise.

And proud, proud, proud of it, man. And, you know, I feel like especially for folks who really get it out the mud, as they say. Right. So you really come from nothing. And when I say come from nothing, we're not even talking about starting with nothing. But we talk about generationally prior to when you arrived on the earth, you maybe even had a negative poverty cycle. Yeah. You know what I mean? so to see that and to see that kind of success and to see that that that it can be replicated is really i think one of the greatest motivators for the work that i do every day for sure what

what's kanye like oh man he's he's amazing as well i mean one of my favorite things he says is uh tell me a genius you know that's not crazy yeah i agree i agree i agree and i think also man just uh from a taste level and uh just being a uh for what i've observed just being around kanye is just a voracious appetite for knowledge and also once he's formulated his perspective and point of view he's very very true to it as an artist and I think that authenticity has served him extremely well across all the different platforms where he's been creative and I think he's bred that in his camp so when you look at what Virgil's been able to do at Louis Vuitton and Nike and everywhere else that he's actually been able to touch creatively that's all from I think being

fostered in that environment of just like creativity artistic authenticity and i think kanye really uh was a was a game changer and continues to be a game changer in that regard he fascinates me because um i i was i was joking at first and then people started sending me articles that say it might be true uh that kanye is a billionaire right and it's because he owns yeezy uh and my understanding owns 100 of it but he's got some kind of rev share deal with adidas on it but on that the dude sold over a billion dollars worth of gear yeah right yeah you could say adidas helped them whatever yeah you don't do that by accident yeah exactly no it's true it's true it's true it's true it's true so yeah i mean listen to be in the company of those

greats uh to work alongside to be respected as a peer to be respected as a co-creator to be respected as someone who was valuable in the creative and business process is uh is is an accolade that i don't take lightly i take that uh uh with the with a great deal of uh of pride and responsibility you know for sure yeah so we met a couple years ago and and i told you then and i reminded you today that um the very first time i ever heard about you knew about you anything was i saw a video on youtube of frank some some madman sitting in an apartment right in new york and you had a cup of change, so little coins,

and you were shaking it and that turned into a part of a beat and then you went over and you started playing on a keyboard and it was literally you were making a song. What's the video called? The video's called Ryan Leslie, I Gets Money.

I Gets Money. If you want to take a look at it, it's on YouTube. Just do the search, you'll find it. You're a Grammy nominated artist, all this stuff, and I know you because of this viral YouTube video. Yes, yes, yes.

And I think that's really just a testament to the fact that you have to be an early mover on social channels in order to actually win in that arbitrage and so for me the minute i discovered that youtube was available and it was free i was one of the first guys on that to go there platform you know to the point where they knew who i was sending me t-shirts and all kind of other you know merch and gear and swag just because i was one of those folks that not only was I using the platform, I was using that platform in a way that was disruptive, you know? So seeing the actual, how the actual beat is being made, I think really, really fathered a lot of folks today who are doing that so that they can get some exposure for what

they're doing. For sure. So you've got a whole nother part of your life. But before we get to that, I've always wondered, somebody who's got the musical talent that you have, do you just walk down the street with beats in your head like are you sitting there just thinking like like man i heard that noise you know i heard that bus door closed that could be part of you know this beat or whatever or is it more of you've got to have a really concentrated focus let me go into a studio and that's where kind of all the magic happens listen my dad told me a story that i don't even recall he said uh when he was in college uh he brought i was already around when he was in college so he and my my mother were at actually the salvation army training college okay in atlanta

georgia and uh he says that he gave me a quarter or something to go get a soda so mind your soda was only a quarter back then and uh i didn't come back and so he's wondering like okay what's going on with ryan like this the soda machine is right in the hallway right down the hall you know where did he go he comes to the soda machine and i'm like hey dad the soda machine is making a beat because it had a rhythm to the whirring. So I'm sitting next to the machine just bobbing my head. Instead of getting a soda, I'm hearing music. And he said, look, you know, this kid is going to have music in him.

And so to that end, fast forward to today, my crew, you know, we ride around New York. And I think one of the most fascinating idiosyncrasies is that I ride in silence. Other people listen to the radio, listen to podcasts, listen to music, so I ride in silence. And the reason I ride in silence is that when I'm in transit in that way, I actually hear music that's fully completed. So I don't just hear, like you said, maybe a door closing or back when I was a little kid, maybe I heard the Coke machine whirring and I could hear a beat that way. Now I actually hear fully formed compositions. And so my process in the studio is really racing against my mind to actually bring to fruition the fully formed compositions that I hear in my head. That's crazy that you basically, you come up with the music in your mind and then the challenge is actually trying to get it from your mind into the audio file right before you forget it or you mess something up or whatever.

Yeah, and I think there are a lot of parallels between that and product designers, right? So just the idea or app developers or startup founders, right, is that they have this concept and not only do they have a concept of a solution, they actually are envisioning a future for the world and how their solution actually fits into the way the world will work in the future. And so for me, as well with music, man, you know, when I'm when I make a record, I'm making a record looking towards timelessness. Right. So when I made that record with Cassie, that record still lives to this day. We still get sample requests and clearance requests on that record to this day. It's 13 years old. Right. And so I always look at that. I always have an eye towards sort of the timelessness and being timeless means you have to have some sensibility of what you believe the future will be. For sure. So the music career is pretty well documented.

Right. If you're a Grammy nominated artist, you can't hide. But you've got this whole other side of your life, which is as a tech entrepreneur, right, an investor. Maybe tell us a little bit about what you've been doing on that side for the last decade or so. Yeah, well, I mean, it's really related. So, like I said, we built a very huge social following for Cassie. And then all of a sudden, all those followers just migrated away. And I thought to myself, man, you know, we invested so much to earn the equity in that social platform. And then it just disappeared as people migrated off.

So we used to be able to send a bulletin to 650,000 people and there was conversion and there was, you know, there was engagement. And now because those people have migrated to another platform, we send a bulletin and there's crickets. And so I thought to myself, man, it would have been so much more prudent for me to collect phone numbers, because even though that's a retro social handle, it can be retrofitted with modern technology. And so that's an experiment that I embarked on in 2013. I gave my phone number out to 550,000 people on Twitter, and man, it really was the birth of the platform, which is SuperPhone today. And so what I really wanted to do was anyone who sent me a text, I wanted to know who they were, because obviously I didn't want to have just a feed of unknown numbers, so I built

a simple automation chain that says, look, somebody sends a text, you don't recognize the number, just hit that person back, say, hey, I don't recognize this number, I'd love just stay in touch please add your information to my phone second i was doing a lot of business on shopify so i wanted to check whether they had purchased and in the event that they still had yet to purchase send them a recommendation to do so and then also trigger at the time of purchase trigger a thank you and so that was a simple automation chain step one two three number one put your info in my phone number two once i have your info check and see if you've bought recommend that you buy and then third thank folks and man it the results of that sort of

experiment were staggering 35 000 of my 550 000 people actually texted me every single one of them because of the automation chain that was built received a reply which said hey put your info on my phone 33 000 of the 35 000 opted in by entering their info on my phone and the sales conversion was just literally just unbelievable, right? 50%, 17,000 of the 33,000 who received a link to purchase actually bought. And then I basically had my most financially lucrative album cycle run straight off the iPhone, straight off of text. And so I knew at that juncture that I was on to some future way of engaging an audience and that led to an audience of one Ben Horowitz who went on to be the first investor in Superphone and that really was because Tristan

Walker was an entrepreneur in residence at Andreessen at the time and set up the meeting and man Tristan's from Atlanta too Tristan is actually from out here he's in Atlanta now he's In Atlanta now, okay. Yeah, he sold his company, Walker & Company. I was an investor. Ah, congratulations. Yeah, sold it to Procter & Gamble, and now he's in Atlanta, continuing to just keep it hot down there.

He was just on the cover of Fast Company. They did a whole special article, series of articles on Atlanta. Paul Judge, they featured. He's also an investor, angel investor in Superfone. So, man, I like that Atlanta crew. Yeah, so SuperPhone essentially, you know, when I first saw it, the first thing that jumps to my mind is you're building a CRM tool, right? Absolutely. Which essentially allows you to put people in.

They can kind of self-qualify themselves, right? They can give you whatever information they want. And then what it allows you to do is know who they are, when you're communicating with them, and really break down the friction to communicating with these people. And over time, it's really evolved into the ability to set reminders, right? Do kind of all these more what I consider like 200-level or 300-level type actions. But at the end of the day, we have CRMs or other tools from every other communication platform, email, social, all this other stuff. Text message is still incredibly powerful, and there was nothing like this. There was nothing like it.

And trust me, I had the money. I could have just paid for it. And so the absence of a solution, even, you know, with the amount that I was willing to pay and the absence of that solution really created the need and the necessity for me as an innovator to bring this to life. And man, listen, I started out with giving my phone number out to 550,000 people just this summer. Miley Cyrus gave her super phone number out to 95 million Instagram followers. and listen the fun of building a platform that you could watch to sit back and scale and watching all those phone calls come in and all those texts go out and zero down downtime and you know high fiving with the developers that we could have done 10 of these concurrently was just you know

an exhilarating feeling and so i think ben really was the first i mean i had never started a business or i mean outside of a music business i wasn't a startup founder at all ben was you were entrepreneur hold on i'm not gonna let you off the hook come on yeah yeah yeah being a musician a producer all stuff right you were an entrepreneur it might not have been in a for-profit corporate environment like like a true startup right but you're an entrepreneur yeah for sure and i think ben really is an oracle in there i mean listen he's on the fours minus list for a reason and he basically said look ryan what i see in this and really our exchange was pretty simple i just gave him my phone number put my phone on the table and said look send me a text and i'll sell you my

album i won't touch my phone and it was pay what you want the album was only twelve dollars and he you know he paid fifty dollars for it so i was like oh i'm already up in this meeting right and then he went on to say look i love the i love founders that solve their own problem and you should really really consider productizing this because you have a deep knowledge and sort of unique and uh the moat around this business will be that you are uh a founder who is building a product that you have very very specific knowledge on how to solve this challenge and so man he was right you know he was absolutely right and so yeah shout out to ben horowitz for being the first to invest that that's awesome um all right we got to talk about bitcoin got to you

were early man you were super early yes sir right uh when's the first time you heard about bitcoin I heard about it really in like 2012, 2011, and really it might have just been just an article I'd seen in passing. I maybe read some article about some engineers buying pizza or something like that. I thought, yeah, that's funny, and really didn't pay much attention to it. Ben actually was the one that introduced me to Brian Armstrong and Fred, who were the founders of Coinbase. and i was sitting at one of ben's barbecues and brian you know says look you know you should take this seriously and just to get you on your way i'll send you some bitcoin so he sent me some bitcoin and coinbase and uh there i was you know with my first cryptocurrency holding yeah and uh

you're up you're up in that uh meeting as well now right yeah we got to figure out what this is you go to meetings with people and all of a sudden they're giving you money every time that's right That's right. At the time, it was like five dollars worth of Bitcoin. But I mean, you know, that's definitely grown over time. And so, man, for me, I'm always interested in really any project or any interest that I have. I really throw myself into it. Right. So when I decided I wanted to do music or I wanted to learn piano, I was practicing six, seven hours a day to the point where my little sister was complaining to my parents. Hey, Ryan's hogging the piano. Not only is he hogging the piano, he's terrible at it. Right. And he's playing that thing for six, seven hours a day. So when I really decided, like, OK, look, you know, I believe that, you know, maybe it's the universe or some cosmic whatever it is that's saying, like, I should really pay attention to this. I said, look, let me try and experiment. And what's the best way for me to amass as much of this cryptocurrency as possible? So one of the first forays was just adding some way that people could actually buy my digital album with Bitcoin.

And so there was a plug in at the time for Shopify. So I did that. And I think if you look at the headlines, even 50 Cent, you know, I probably put him on to that as well. I mean, I put a lot of folks on to this. GZ50, you know, Nipsey Hussle, the late great Nipsey Hussle, talked to them about cryptocurrency. So what's their reactions? Right. I mean, these guys are titans of the music industry, even today, right?

And you come to them, you're like, hey, man, there's this new currency, right? This thing called Bitcoin. Are they like, hey, Ryan, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever? Or is it like, tell me more about it? No, I think the real marker of any great entrepreneur is the tolerance for risk, you know? And so for me, and you know what's actually a little crazy when you think about the tolerance for risk is that for me betting on myself, I feel like it's a very low risk proposition just because I believe that I'm built for whatever I need to do to be successful. I'm built for

whatever critical and crucial elements are necessary for me to be successful. And that's because I keep the promises I make to myself. That's how my confidence has been built. I make little promises to myself. I keep those promises. I build confidence. And so I believe that the real marker of any great entrepreneur is the fact that they have that kind of risk tolerance and when they feel that gut they bet on it and so for me when I talked to those folks about it they never really gave me the kind of pushback of like you know I'm not interested let's try this right and maybe they just dip their toe in the water right before jumping in I'm the kind of person that really jumps in so that my story can have some real credence and gravitas and validation so i

can't just say hey you should try this because i think it's cool you should try this because i've actually gone through the entire process i've learned and you can learn from my learnings and actually accelerate your roi based on my learnings right and so that's why i try to share as much as possible i believe that my knowledge should create a runway so other people can have an even more explosive liftoff skirt skirt want to know who has the best url crypto.com that's right crypto.com they're a crypto platform with one goal mother mass adoption that's why we're all here we're trying to get crypto in every wallet crypto.com is helping people do that through buying earning lending and card payment everything you could want at crypto.com go help your boy out tell

Pomp sent you. Download the app or visit crypto.com. Pomp's got you always. Ever wanted to get into mining and didn't know how? Don't worry, your boy Pomp's got you. Everybody got some electricity and Wi-Fi. All you got to do is go to coinmine.com. You buy a CoinMine. It's like an Xbox or a PlayStation that helps you turn your electricity into Bitcoin. That's right. You purchase it. It shows up at your doorstep. You pull it out of the box. You plug it in, connect to your Wi-Fi, five minutes or less you're mining bitcoin all you have to do is control it from the mobile app they provide and then you receive over-the-air updates that add new coins and new features on a consistent basis kind of like how tesla does over-the-air updates and updates the car software

just you're updating your coin mine consumer mining made easy that's right go to coinmine.com tell them pomp sent you and thank me later one more word from our sponsor blockfi their new interest account allows you to securely deposit your Bitcoin or Ether at BlockFi and receive 6% annual interest paid monthly in cryptocurrency. This rate actually compounds. So you receive a 6.2% APY, which is very attractive given the alternatives. So you can actually take your Bitcoin, you can deposit it with BlockFi and get paid an interest rate of 6% in return. Go check out BlockFi.com slash Pomp. Again, BlockFi.com slash Pomp to sign up and start earning interest on your crypto today. You nailed it, man. I've never met a successful person that doesn't believe

in betting on themselves. Yeah. Right. I mean, again, you can go any industry, whether it's business, athlete, musician, whatever. The common theme across everyone is, listen, I know it's going to be hard. I know it might actually even be pretty close to impossible. Yeah. But it's me. for sure right if i bet on me then we'll see what happens but all the way you know and i think part of it is actually in uh one of my partners i talked about this before um it's not so much an arrogance of hey i'm betting on me because i think i'm better than everybody it's the exact opposite actually it's the i'm betting on me because if this doesn't work i only want one person to blame absolutely right and it's i don't want to count on somebody else to be the person

that something i'm doing fails i want to be able to count on myself being the reason why we win or lose right and i think again you see you know the stories of these athletes who get in the huddles hey give me the ball yeah you know play we're running we're playing we're running the play give me the ball yeah yeah for sure for sure and so i would say the the biggest bet that i met that i made was uh to introduce bitcoin or the concept of bitcoin to folks that were actually paying me for my services so at the time those services were you know whether i was doing hostings or doing concerts etc i wanted all my advances to be paid in bitcoin and you just go to them and just say hey i don't want dollars i want bitcoin yeah what do they say man i got

screenshots on whatsapp where people like what are you even talking about like what is what what is this like you know you don't want dollars and so yeah man it's so much easier to just make your yeah yeah yeah and i mean i i was very very clear i said look this is this is how i want to get paid uh and so yeah i had a a great deal of shows and and uh appearances and all kinds of experiences for which i was paid at bitcoin um and it was a very significant amount in in those early days and i've just held since then yeah that's awesome what why hold like what would just deep conviction hey this is gonna be worth more in the future did you forget about it what was kind of the thought process behind holding yeah i think really uh first and foremost i think just the culture

of uh of what i've observed and sort of just watching folks online that are excited uh i mean it's wild man it's a combat zone out there it's total you know what i mean twitter is wild yeah these people who believe right right and you see it every day they just Right. That they really, really believe. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, honestly, you know, there are definitely opposing and polarizing viewpoints on cryptocurrency and Bitcoin, particularly because it's the most prevalently sort of widespread, widely recognized currency. But I think really I think there are there are a few indicators to me which definitely gave me the confidence to just hold on. One of them was the overstock deal. Right. Right. So the fact that you can buy anything on overstock with Bitcoin. And then also just the fact that, you know, I'm really just fascinated with just this concept of of value exchange and value exchange that's trustless. And I believe that, you know, beyond just the concept of Bitcoin itself, just the fact that you can assign value based on its its appearance on a ledger.

right and that people are willing to exchange goods and other currency for that i think that you know at some point the dust will settle and there will be some value as long as people assign the value to and i think we saw this pretty rampantly in all of the icos that that were happening right you know everybody had a coin right um and for me i just kind of like watched from the sidelines because i've i was holding the you know the the the the main you know the early yeah the king right so for me i think it's just about i'm just very very curious about the uh about where it will all pan out if you will and uh at least for me as well in all of my other investments i was early in google apple amazon starbucks since 2007 2008 right and so and i just

just held right and so i think that uh i i think that warren buffett would disagree with me on bitcoin and he has i think very vocally disagreed uh that there is any value there but i think at the end of the day for me value is what people assign and so to the extent that there are i mean literally i had a phone call the other day so i was like man i want to buy four hundred thousand dollars worth of bitcoin you know and they were looking to say what exchange could i do this on you know what i mean so you can't you can't say that it's worth zero yeah if somebody's willing to give four hundred thousand dollars for some amount of them yes right and so to your point it's uh there's a marketplace right that marketplace determines the price right now

you can argue that uh the price doesn't match the ultimate value of the asset right but you just can't argue with that yes there's a price assigned to this that's uh being set by a marketplace that has pretty good liquidity yeah and it is what it is and when you think about you know just the the thesis behind bitcoin and just the fact that there is a restricted volume of the currency that's really where i think uh folks are really looking at this as sort of a stored value digital asset right and so to the extent that bitcoin eventually you know and i've heard people talk about this uh at various conventions and conferences to the extent that it it has the scarcity associated with bitcoin as the same scarcity has been associated with let's say gold

for example then really the price of a bitcoin could really you know right now it's hovering at somewhere 10 11 000 could easily you know my price target was always 25 000 right and then you know there are folks who have predicted that it could get to you know a hundred thousand a quarter million dollars a coin should it actually reach the kind of stored value assigned to it that gold has assigned to it and so you know for me i'm just i'm just watching man i'm just watching i'm enjoying the i'm i'm enjoying the uh the gains that i've already realized and uh and i'm just holding man you know uh you told uh jeezy yeah about uh bitcoin tell us that story yeah i did so ludicrous was having his birthday party 40th birthday party chateau in paris and well out kind

of the outskirts of paris and gz and i wanted to stay close to the city the metropolitan city of lights paris you know shopping whatever it was you and gz going to the eiffel tower together no no but maybe you know the cavalli store you know i'm saying uh because you know one of the freshest guys i know man snow you know ice cold with it right so bottom line i said look man you know one of my favorite restaurants is this uh this chinese restaurant called diep and so i said look why don't we you know invite some folks come and uh just chop it up have a meal and literally for like an hour and a half just sat down talked to him about it showed him kind of the growth of of um my holdings and uh just talked to him about just having some diversity in his investment

portfolio uh that included you know what some may consider a risky investment but which has you know over time i mean returned uh had a beautiful return yeah it's pretty cool that you get the opportunity to talk to people who uh who have so much influence right yeah you've got kind of your sphere of influence and then the people that you work with on a daily basis the music side uh same thing so you uh you've been beating the beat uh the bitcoin drum for a while now yeah so thank you from all of us yeah no no and just totally excited about it man just totally excited about and for me uh blockchain as well right so blockchain as well i mean right now it's super phone uh the thesis for me is uh really about trust and transparency and so you know

it's pretty polarizing right because when you put this in a romantic context right how many how many girls go through their guys phones right and how many are like okay nothing's going on show me your conversation with her you know show me your dms right and trust me i've had my share right and so with super phone what i'm what i'm building and potentially there could be a really beautiful blockchain component to this is the fact that every message could be stored on the blockchain and eventually you'll be able to build a relationship graph that tells you how close you are to someone because every message the interval between messages every phone call the duration of phone calls the interval between phone calls that will all be logged on a blockchain and

then you know you don't have to trust if you know hey there's pomp no ben horowitz i'm looking for an intro well just show me the relationship graph and if everything is actually logged on this ledger which is kind of applying the blockchain to a data set which i think is really really overlooked which is our our communication health right um we already have uh i would say services and apps which track our health in terms of how many steps we take or you know how many calories we burned right to be able to actually track that on a conversational level i think is really going to help to accelerate success whether you're a sale we're all sales people in some way right so if you're trying to get you know this girl to go with you to the prom then you you know or

get this girl to go on a date with you or whatever it is you're selling at some point and so the strength of relationships and the ability i think to put some truth and transparency to the point where you can have a trustless system around how close people are i think linkedin has tried to up to this point do it i think is really powerful and also from a music standpoint uh benji rogers who's also an angel investor in superphone uh started uh pledge music and uh you know came up with this concept of dot blockchain where the music file type like mp3 or wave is very very antiquated and so there's so much more information that can be stored around my latest recording and so once again that also i think there are blockchain applications for storing that data

the transfer of digital assets etc there's so much there that's really exciting to me around uh the blockchain for sure um this part of the uh automation series we're doing what's uh what's going on with automation what are you seeing there what's got you excited oh for me a man uh so much so much uh so automating relationships very polarizing very very polarizing topic so super phone has a has a feature called never lose touch and for me i utilize that feature to make sure that any time whatever interval of time goes by that i lose the ball or drop the ball with staying in touch with someone super phone just jumps in and sends a message now i've had some people that are just like yo this is totally disingenuous if you were really thinking about me then you would

actually open your phone unlock it search for my name type of text hit the send button because you're really thinking about me sounds inefficient right totally inefficient and so i'll be honest with you you know uh some of the most valuable relationships in my life have been enriched by putting this layer of automation that even though i might get busy i might be in my own world i might be working on music i might be working on super phone it's tracking these time lapses and is initiating conversations with me and the people that really care to be in touch with me they always respond and then folks that are skeptical uh they've blocked me they say hey look you know i don't even want to be until you put a robot on me and so i think you know yeah seriously yeah

seriously and so i think that um does that make you the robot king the robot king i will say you know world's most connected you know because once i meet someone and they get into my super phone i'm immediately tracking everything that i just discussed so how long does it take for pomp to respond to me how often do we have phone calls what's the interval between phone calls Does he use emojis? How many MMS does he actually send? Does MMS actually equate to some larger event that's happening in his life? After an MMS, does it immediately upswing to a telephone call?

So all of those data points are now in a platform where you can't do this on iMessage, right? So now all these data points are in a platform that makes that data actionable. And so for me, automation is key because of the scale at which I'm texting. I got 98,000 text conversations in my super phone. I try to do as little bot work in there as little as possible, right? Because that communication channel is so sacred. It's the most important real estate that's in our phones. so the minute somebody feels like a robot is in there they check out right and so uh to the point

that uh to the extent that people understand that i'm building and i'm testing i've had folks that have i've built really beautiful relationships and to be honest my relationship with my mother has even improved just because i know she's driving home from church on sundays so literally every sunday at 1 30 her time arizona time that phone call happens and it looks like my mom is calling me doesn't matter what meeting i'm in i say hey look i gotta take this call as my mom just to check in and our relationship has improved because of that so listen maybe i'm living in the future right and maybe in the future everyone will just accept this as a common practice but for right now it's pretty polarizing i am automating those portions and i'm automating

conversation initiation as opposed to conversation responses so this one i guess part of this too is um you know some of the sensitivities probably around text messages are the highest signal communication channel most of us have right maybe phone calls are a little bit higher but even with robo calls now right i don't answer a single call if i don't know the number yeah exactly and so somebody texts me i see it right um and i think that what you're getting at here is um you know this idea that if you automate the initiation of the conversation yeah really all it's doing is basically serving as an alarm it is right it is and it's saying hey you know you should be talking to this person. And, um, I think that there's this, uh, this study that shows, um, 150 people

is kind of like your circle, right? Yeah. But with something like this, right, you're able to actually expand that number, um, and, and stay connected to a whole bunch more people. And again, it's just, you don't actually have to communicate, you know, groundbreaking ideas to people, right? Just a simple, Hey, thinking about you. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. And also, you know, I am interested in automating mundane requests. So if you were to text me right now what's your email it's going to hit you right what's best email for you it's just going to hit you right back yeah if you were to text me right now hey where can i get your latest music it'll hit you right back because i believe that there should be some value delivery of

convenience so if there is a data repository that's just going to give you the answer that you need immediately i shouldn't have to actually you know i mean i think it was elon musk who says that we're limited by our thumbs the speed of our thumbs right i'm gonna hit you with a wild idea let's go humans are actually inefficient machines i agree right i agree and all you're doing is you're taking one machine yourself and you're replacing it with a more efficient more intelligent machine absolutely absolutely right when you look at it that way actually what you're doing is you're improving scaling my own intent i'm scaling my own intent right and so uh man i'm running a lot of businesses on super phone i'm running a lot of businesses on super phone whether it's for my

clients and customers or whether it's for me so like right now i'm running a an interactive wealth building club okay newsletter it's called wealth plan and listen you know there's a price point because i need people to value what i'm offering to them and it's really just runs i already basically created the entire brain trust it's 12 different lessons it's delivered every month And over the next year, when you subscribe to Wealth Plan, you will get to follow my financial moves, mirror my financial moves. A little bit of crypto, a little bit of real estate investing. It's not a solicitation at all. It's just a revelation of what I'm doing to the extent that you'd like to mirror it, right?

And so that is being done at scale over SuperPhone, right? And folks, if they want to text back because they have questions, I can differentiate in my text feed who's actually a subscriber, who's not. And I can give priority to the folks that are actually members of this interactive club. And so there are so many applications for automation in, like I said, I believe that the cell phone number is our most powerful social handle. I think that Instagram has been trying to definitely follow in that same pathway by allowing folks to make phone calls straight out of their DMs, video calls straight out of their DMs. as an influencer, so to speak, with 330,000 Instagram followers, that feature is not available to me because they haven't built the kind of management tools that would be necessary for the amount of phone calls and video calls that I would be receiving. So people can't call me,

I can't call them. With SuperPhone though, all the management tools are built. And so only people that I want can ring through. Only people that I want can actually receive responses organically from me but everyone else that wants to be directly in touch with me can do so so i think it's it's very much in the same vein of what you're talking about where i know the machine that i would like to be and i've attached technology to support that kind of uh scaled intent that i'm looking to deliver and part of this too i think is um we don't change our phone numbers that much right so not only is it kind of the most intimate social handle but but it also is long lasting almost every single one of my friends still got the same number from high school yeah

yeah or college yeah first time they got a cell phone right so so most of your friends probably got them when they were in college high school they never changed yeah and it becomes a part of someone's identity right and uh so yeah i mean listen i've always said this you know when you get somebody on text you're in touch with them as long as you keep the conversation current until they either block you change their number or die yeah you know you uh you making any music still hey man i'm always making music uh you know i really went from doing like 150 shows a year to just doing three four five shows a year i'm really a full-time 150 shows per year trust me when you love what you do it's not even work listen we recorded uh 150 podcast episodes in the last 12 months wow exactly

to the week wow and that was hard and all i had to do is walk in this room and just talk in this microphone and leave and there's no audience yeah doing 150 shows that is wild listen add the audience add you know screaming girls in the front row add wild after parties you don't like you don't like screaming girls or that's a that's a and all of it i'm telling you it'd be a lot more exciting right a lot more fun a lot more fun a lot more exciting so that was trust me i i never felt like it was working never felt never for a moment felt like it was work i was exhausted sometimes i had to have doctors come give me a shot in my back all that kind of stuff but i had a blast and now you know that that focus that energy that passion that excitement is is really

100 invested into super phone i really believe that the work that i'm doing and i'm seeing competitors come out and clone what we're doing as well and uh i think that's just validation that the work that we're doing is extremely valuable it's extremely important and for first movers just like i was a first mover on youtube the arbitrage opportunity is now so you sign up for super phone you have the ability to be ahead of the curve in terms of communication intimately at scale and the kind of personalization that the data from the context of a conversation provides I mean, it's very, very powerful. For sure.

What do you think the future of crypto is? Bitcoin. Oh, man. Where do you think we're headed? Man. Where are we headed? Man. Like anything that you think a lot about in the space or just more passive?

Hey, I kind of made my investment and I'm just going to let it ride. Yeah, no, no, no. I think really for me, I think, like I said, and we talked about it, I think a lot more about blockchain and just the ability to have that ledger and to have a trustless system. And I think a trustless system that's – yeah, I think a trustless system is really just – there's an invaluable – yeah, there's very – it's very, very tough to place a value on how powerful a trustless system is. I think that right now so much is manipulated by emotion, so much is manipulated by folks who have the gift of gab, so much is manipulated by headlines. And so that trustless system that gives the kind of truth and transparency that allows us to make more efficient decisions about where we want to go in life, that's really the piece about crypto and blockchain that excites me the most. And like I said, I'm looking to integrate it eventually into SuperPhone as well.

Yeah, I love it. Before I finish up, I let people ask me a question, but first we talk aliens. Okay. Believer, non-believer? Man, I have faith. I have faith. Same. I have faith.

I have faith. Yeah? I have faith. Yeah. You think they exist and we just never came in contact? Or you think that somehow somebody along the way came in contact and Area 51 and all this crazy stuff is true? I mean, I would have to dig deeper. i don't have to delve deeper to make you know formulate my own uh opinion on this i can say

that i've been wildly entertained by star trek uh growing up just because that's my mom used to love to watch that and and so like ryan leslie's never met aliens before no no even though just making sure listen there are there have been some people i have met that i'm like man you know they're out of this world they're otherworldly you know look some people say jay-z kanye all they're aliens right listen listen yeah true true so a question for you man uh question for you where do you believe that crypto is going well i mean what's the future give me give me more of a uh shorter a nearer term yeah i look i i'll look i have two core thesis right this kind of short medium and long term which is just bitcoin is real because it's people are going to trust

algorithms to store uh their wealth right just like you trust algorithms with google maps for directions or music recommendations all this stuff right um so it makes sense to me that eventually it'll permeate into our financial lives yeah um and the other is that every stock bond currency and commodity eventually gets digitized right yeah now in the short term uh i'm really really paying attention to a lot of these uh currency wars that are playing out and kind of more like global macro stuff and the thought process there is just we're literally seeing the perfect movie script play out for why bitcoin is important yeah right you know you forget all the politics whether you like the president you don't like the president whatever when they're tweeting about how

monetary policy should be implemented and you know we're gonna have a trade war and this person or that person also what you realize is there's a bunch of chaos yeah right and so you may like the chaos you may not like the chaos doesn't really matter it's hard to argue there's not chaos yeah and i really like it's a chamath the uh social capital says you know bitcoin's just like schmuck insurance right or kind of chaos hedge yeah and so the more chaotic the world gets there's some people who just say i want some percentage of my wealth to be stored somewhere that's super transparent that's trustless that doesn't have the chaos right and again i don't think that's going to be a hundred percent of every single person on the planet's wealth yeah

um especially on the short term but i think that kind of paradigm comparison between the chaotic world and the non-chaotic world to me it's just it's fascinating right and it's something that previously wasn't really available to people now it's here it seems to be working it seems to be getting adopted and yeah i i've now shifted to i don't try to convince people that it's real right here's what i say to them how sure or how confident are you that it's not going to work Are you 100% confident? Because if you're just 99% confident, you probably should get 1%, right? You know, you should line up how you think about your wealth and your assets with your

confidence level, right? Yeah, for sure. And so if you want to be 100% committed to the fiat kind of traditional legacy world, and you're 100% confident that this other stuff's not going to work, go ahead. I find it really, you know, few and far between the people who think that they're 100% confident. And so it leads to, you know, kind of these bigger conversations that I think are more important. Yeah. And I will say this as well. I'm I'm all about speed and efficiency. And I'll just I'll just be real. What's important to me is speed and efficiency.

So let's give you a case in point. I went to the bank. I wanted to, you know, give somebody twenty thousand dollars. Right. They don't have the same bank as me. So I go to the teller. I say, look, I want to give somebody $20,000. What's the easiest way to do it? They say, okay, well, there's two ways. You can do a cashier's check, or you could try to do a wire. But it's after 5 p.m., so it's after 4.30. The other bank is open, but we can't guarantee the wire still goes out today.

I'm just like, man, that's my bread, and I should be able to move it instantly if I wanted to. Let me be real with you. Literally, two different financial institutions. I did a cashier's check and because it was after 4 30 they were like look it's not going to clear the same day it was a Friday it wasn't going to clear till Monday I went back to the other financial institution took out 20 bands in cash went to the other financial institution they said hey look you know it's too much money you can't deposit that in cash to somebody else's account so I had to go and put the cash back in my account and I'm just like look to the extent that you were

just talking about the kind of efficiency look look how much time I just wasted and because I care about that person i did everything that i could do to make that happen but at the size of that transaction you know twenty thousand dollars the rings and hoops that i had to jump through in aml questionnaires and passports etc like i'm just about efficiency man i worked for that money i should be able to redistribute it as instantly as you know the irs will come in and seize it you Well, look, you store your money in a place that's closed more hours a week than it is open. Yeah. Right?

Pretty crazy to think about that when you need it, you may or may not be able to access it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. All right, man, listen. You've been killing the game for a long time. I appreciate you coming in and talking about all this stuff. Yeah. Hopefully people will start to kind of be warmed up to the idea of how long you've been in Bitcoin.

Hey. And you're one of the leaders there. So thank you from all of us for pushing that narrative with a lot of people with a lot of influence. For sure. And anybody that has unanswered questions, wants to reach me directly, I have a URL. You can leave your number. I'll text you right back. It's textryan.com.

Very simple. Just visit that on your mobile browser. Leave your number. I don't have to give you my number. You just have to know yours. You drop it in there. I'll text you right back. And so, yeah, just hit me anytime.

Textryan.com. Textryan.com. Man, you made it super easy. Super easy. Just leave your number. I'll text you back. Thanks, Paul. All right.

Thank you. Appreciate you. 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. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off The Chain.