The Wolf Of All Streets - The Death Of Paper Money: Anthony “Pomp” Pompliano, Founder of Morgan Creek Digital

Episode Date: August 4, 2020

Anthony “Pomp” Pompliano is arguably the most well-known figure in the bitcoin community. He is the co-founder of Morgan Creek Digital and runs a massive media platform, anchored by his Twitter, Podcast, Newsletters, and YouTube account. From serving in the military to interviewing some of the world's wealthiest, smartest and most innovative people, Pomp cannot be "put in a box." He consistently stays ahead of the curve and competition. Anthony Pompliano and Scott Melker further discuss Twitter as Tik-Tok for intellectuals, eating ice cream in the Iraqi desert, the intellectual dark web, truth over consensus, the great financial education awakening, mining ethereum at $10, bitcoin evolving from arcade money to hard currency, the death of paper money, beating the cards you were dealt, bitcoin’s multi-decade plan and so much more. --- ROUNDLYX RoundlyX allows you to dollar-cost-average into crypto with our spare change "Roundup" investing tool, manage multiple crypto exchange accounts in one dashboard and access curated digital asset content and services. Visit RoundlyX and use promo code "WOLF" to learn more about accumulating your favorite digital assets when making everyday purchases and earn $4 in free Bitcoin. --- VOYAGER This episode is brought to you by Voyager, your new favorite crypto broker. Trade crypto fast and commission-free the easy way. Earn up to 6% interest on top coins with no lockups and no limits. Download the Voyager app and use code “SCOTT25” to get $25 in free Bitcoin when you create your account --- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe.This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

I'd like to thank my sponsors, Round the X and Voyager, for making today's episode possible. We'll hear much more about them later on in the episode. What's up, everybody? This is Scott Melker, and you're listening to the Wolf of All Streets podcast, where twice a week I talk to your favorite personalities in Bitcoin, crypto, finance, art, music, sports, politics, basically anyone with a story to tell. This show is powered by Blockworks Group, a media company with over 20 podcasts in their network. You can check them out at blockworksgroup.io. Now, if you like the podcast and you follow me on Twitter, then you need to check out my brand new website, wolfofallstreets.io. You can also join my newsletter there and follow

everything that I'm up to. Now that we're done with all that, let's get into what's important, and that is today's guest who definitely needs no introduction, but I'll attempt to give him a brief one. He is a co- of other things going on. And he's spoken to the biggest, brightest, wealthiest names in the world. So, Pomp Man, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to be here. Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. So, I just touched on it, but you do like five, six, seven newsletters a week. I don't even know you do five podcasts a week. You do lunch money, you're live during the day. How do you possibly put out this much content and do anything else? I think the key to it all is I've intentionally structured my schedule in a way where pretty

much every hour is devoted to a piece of content. So, for example, in the morning, I will spend 45 minutes to an hour writing the newsletter, get that out. I then will spend about 20 to 30 minutes on lunch money. I've already pre-recorded the podcast. And so we get the audio and the YouTube videos from that. And I'll spend a little bit of time kind of just promoting those around. And then I'm pretty much done. And so that's like less than two hours of my day right there. But just super, super efficient with how to do it and how we've structured it and kind

of distribute that content. And then I pretty much at this point interview people that I want to talk to and so there's days where I've recorded four or five podcasts just because that's how you know how the cards fell and there's days where you know I've gone multiple days in a row without recording it and so I just try to make sure that I get five out a week there I get the five newsletters out and then we get the five lunch money shows done but I was actually just telling a couple of friends like, I got more time, man. I sleep eight hours a night. I work out every day. And then obviously I do all the things with

Morgan Creek Digital. And, you know, at some point I'll probably add more stuff. But for now, it's kind of just muscle memory and I'm enjoying it. So we'll keep going. Yeah, you definitely are a lot more efficient than me because I do about a half as much and it seems to take me about five times as long to do it. But I think a lot of that kind of, as you said, it sort of becomes muscle memory. I'm newer to it and it takes a lot of time

to sort of get there. I don't even think I'm efficient. Like that's the crazy part. Other people are like, you're super efficient. Like I know I waste a ton of time. I played on Twitter today for an hour and 10 minutes probably. Like, just doing nothing, right? So, like, I just wasted time, but I was enjoying it, so who cares?

You just touched on it, but Twitter is kind of the center of your whole universe, right? I mean, I find that it's that way for me. I mean, it's a huge time suck, but really important. I've noticed that, I mean, you have your DMs open like I do. You interact with people. You respond to people. I mean, how do you manage to do that? And how much, I mean, I know from my own experience, how much trash do you have to sift through to actually get to the relevant and important things that are on your Twitter account? Yeah. I mean, look, there's definitely tons of noise, both, you know, direct messages and also just kind of in my feed. I'm again, pretty efficient just out of experience. But I would say that Twitter is probably the most valuable tool. Like, you know, I've told people I'd pay a hundred dollars a month to use Twitter if they went behind a paywall. Just because one, access to information to access the people. You know, some of the people that I've met through

Twitter, or they would fall in the bucket of like, wow, I can't believe that that person would respond or kind of talk to me or whatever. And just, you know, whether they're in a different industry, the same industry, you just, they're kind of on a pedestal to you. But also on top of that, like, I've been shocked at the people that I've discovered that I previously didn't know, right? So kind of people who aren't super well known, but just incredibly intelligent or interesting. And so it's just a really, really valuable tool. And then in terms of distribution of content, I mean, just nothing beats Twitter. I joke sometimes and say that it's like the TikTok for intellectuals, because the TikTok algorithm gets all of this fame for really kind of driving

virality. But really, Twitter was kind of the original person or company that figured this out and they do it for more information or intellectuals. Yeah, I think there's a question. So I was one of the accounts that was targeted during that hack not too long ago and had the experience of being off Twitter for a couple of days. And I have to admit, it was like debilitating, you know, more so than I would have expected. But I know that you also had an experience recently where you were removed for a couple of days. Can you tell me what happened? And I guess what you sort of learned from that experience? Yeah. So I've had either two or three situations with Twitter. One was a self-imposed one where it was maybe two years ago or a year and a half or whatever

it was a while ago. I basically said, look, like I just knew that I was spending way too much time on it. And so I decided to take a two week break. And I, you know, announced and said, I'm going to leave Twitter for a couple of weeks and I'll be back. And it was awesome. Like I started leaving my phone at home. Like I was doing all kinds of, I was really living on the edge. But, but, but no, it was just,

you know, kind of nice to kind of get away and stuff like that. So I think when it's something that you are opting into and you kind of have some thought behind it and a reason for doing it, it can be really powerful. On the flip side, I've also been on, you know, kind of the suspension side or the, it's not really de-platforming. But in the most recent example, what happened was I responded to, I think it was Mike Bloomberg's tweet. And he was talking about all kinds of crazy stuff. And I was like, hey, Mike, if you want to learn about Bitcoin, you should subscribe to this newsletter about Bitcoin. And all of a sudden, you know,

nothing happened for probably two hours. And then all of a sudden it was just like an attack where it was almost like I was getting reported by a bunch of political bots or something. Bots, yeah. Yeah, and it was like, it all happened at once. And next thing I knew, like the account was frozen. And so, you know, luckily I've got some friends who either worked at Twitter or still work there. Um, and I was kind of just reaching out to him and say, look,

I don't know what's going on. Like, I have no rush other than just like, this is annoying. Right. But like, can you guys look into it? Uh, and so ultimately they came back to me and they're like, look, somebody just manipulated the reporting, um, kind of automated system. And if you get enough reports about something in the right way, you basically can free somebody's account. And so that's what it happened. And so it took, you know, I don't know, two hours, three hours for them to kind of get the account restored.

But it was definitely one of these things where you're like, you know, most people in the finance world don't get exposed to that every day. I think that's much more something that happens in the political world. So one lesson was like, don't tweet at political candidates and joke around in the comments because you can never know what's going to happen. And the second thing was just like, I don't think that there is a good solution there, right? Because if they don't have those systems, then how do you actually report bad content and all that kind of stuff? So just, you know, kind of one of the things that happened on the platform, I guess.

You were able to get it back. Like, I guess in my situation, I had this fear of the unknown, like, what if I never get back on Twitter? What happens? And so I think the lesson to me was about sort of, you know, you mentioned de-platforming, but not depending on one centralized service sort of for my entire, you know, career to some degree or all the things, because listen, I'll admit like Twitter drives the interest in the newsletter, it drives the interest in the podcast, it drives people to YouTube and all those things. So without it be a big challenge. And that sort of lit the fire under my ass to, you know, centralize my own stuff to a website and things like that. I mean, did you ever have that fear that Oh, shit, like this is gone? Or like you said, was it kind of

just like, it's fine? And did that make you feel like you needed to centralize your content? Uh, yeah. So I, um, ran one of the growth teams at Facebook, uh, for Facebook pages. And, um, with that, we had seen, uh, the organic reach of, uh, small businesses or kind of Facebook page hunters go down and it wasn't like a malicious, uh, intention of ours. It was just, there's more pages, there's always so much room in a newsfeed, kind of all the normal things that you would kind of guess as a platform matures. But those businesses were getting hurt, right? Because they were getting less and less organic reach. And so in 2018, I pretty much like kind of had in the back of my head, less about deplatforming and more of just like, naturally,

these platforms can take away organic reach over time, and you have no way to kind of had in the back of my head, less about deplatforming and more of just like naturally these platforms can take away organic reach over time and you have no way to kind of combat that. And so I knew that like getting out of the platforms would be important. And I basically started with an email and then I went to the podcast and then to YouTube. And at this point, like I've got a pretty big audience on those other platforms. Twitter is still the biggest, but those other platforms kind of over two years biggest. Um, but, but those other platforms kind of over two years, I've been able to build them up. And so I always, you know, say that, like, I don't know if you can ever become like resilient to de-platforming on your biggest platform, but you can definitely do things that would, um, drastically mitigate that risk.

And I think I've kind of reached that point now. Uh, but by no means, you know, I would be super upset if all of a sudden my Twitter account went away. And it would be detrimental from a content perspective, because it does drive so much traffic. Yeah. And you talked about you kind of started with the newsletter move to the podcast. So it was sort of an organic growth as you expanded. So I guess that touches on the fact that you're not overwhelmed, because you've grown it in a manner that's comfortable and works within your lifestyle. But I have noticed that you kind of went from being branded as off the chain to now the Pomp podcast. It's obviously intentional.

Is that because you're trying to like expand your wings beyond the crypto community, go the Joe Rogan route, you know, like compete with the big boys on a big level? I mean, is that the thinking behind that? Is that your ultimate goal? I definitely don't have a master plan. Never have. And that's worked to my advantage in most cases. Maybe it's been detrimental in a couple of situations. But the way that I really looked at it was a lot of this got started by accident. So when I was starting the email, it was basically, I just wanted to write an email. I enjoy writing.

Yeah, it could help with some of the diversification off Twitter. And I came up with the name Off The Chain. And a lot of people thought it was blockchain related or whatever. I actually thought it was hilarious because as a kid, me and my friends would always say, man, that's off the chain.

Everything's off the chain, right, same, Yeah. And so like the fact that that had anything related to blockchain and people didn't get to like the double entendre was hilarious to me. And so basically being a smart ass, I chose that name. And so, uh, when we, uh, I went to start the podcast, it was like, well, what name do you use? Like, well, let's just use the same name, right? Like literally no thought, like just go try this stuff. And I would say like part of my greatest advantage is I'm willing to just go and smash the gas pedal and like, let's figure out what happens if walls come, you know, in front of us, like we'll just literally smash through them. The detriment or the downside to that is you don't have the master plan. And so at some point I realized like this is a very

crypto specific name. It's very crypto specific audience. Some guests were hesitant about coming on because it was so crypto specific. And then also I have like a ton of other personal interests, right? So I've actually invested in more companies outside of the crypto space than in the crypto space over kind of the time I spent full-time investing. And then I've got a ton of other interests outside of just finance, right? Whether it's business technology, whatever it is. And so I said, at the end of the day, like, I think that the two most important things moving forward in the future is going to be one, building these personal media companies, which is you as the individual are at

the center and you have all these different properties and people subscribe to you. And then two is I fully believe that the most defendable thing in the world is building a community of like-minded individuals. So it's not about building an audience where it's just the information goes one way. It's much more about kind of building a community where everybody feels like they're learning together and engaging. And that's really defendable, right? And so that's essentially what I tried to do. And I said, well, what is the thing that is most central to this? And it was me. And I said, at the end of the day, that's what I'm going to win or lose with. And so let's change the name. It'll, you know, kind of be short-term painful,

but that's fine. But over the long period of time, I actually don't think people care what the name is. They just want to know if it's anything good or not. Yeah. It's not like they're going to stop following you because you changed the name or they're going to lose interest or, yeah. I mean, I think it's a, it's a strong move and definitely uh it's it's hard to be uh put in a box when you're not a person who has that sort of type of personality i mean i think probably the greatest criticism i receive on a daily basis on twitter and beyond is shut up dj shut up music dude what do you know about trading what do you know about crypto you know what i mean i'm like i'm not allowed to like care about other stuff i like sports too you know about crypto? You know what I mean? I'm like, I'm not allowed to like care about other stuff. I like sports too, you know, it's whatever. But I, yeah. So I think

that sort of, you know, definitely happened. So your backstory, I heard that September 11th had a huge impact on you and somewhat put you on a path to where you are today to some degree. Can you talk about that specific event and the decisions that led you to make and how that brought you to where you are now? Yeah. It's been a long time, obviously. And I was pretty young, but it's one of these things where when I tell the story, like I know my memory is probably lying to me in some form or fashion. But the way that I remember it now is I was in eighth grade on September 11th, 2001. And I knew something had happened because basically everyone at the school was acting really weird and no one would tell the kids anything,

but like there was kind of this chaotic feel or whatever. And I lived in North Carolina at the time. A lot of kids that I grew up with, their families were from New York, New Jersey area. And so there was kind of this added element of like, extended family or even immediate family kind of living in the area, working in the area in Manhattan, whatever. And so long story short, you know, teachers wouldn't tell us anything, parents come pick us up and get home and we're watching it on

TV. And I remember like, turning to my mom and just being like, what happened? She was like stunned or whatever. My brothers were all there. And at some point, I talked to my dad about it. I can't remember if it was that night or late, you know, a couple days later, he basically was like, look, people came to the United States, they tried to kill Americans. And as a eighth grade boy that's filled with testosterone, you know, etc. It was just like, well, that's, you know, screwed up, like, we should go fight back. And so I pretty much told myself, at that point, that like, the path of going down the military was something I was interested in, but I didn't really know what that entailed. I was too young, I couldn't sign up, you know, all that kind of stuff. And so fast forward to when I was 17, I went and I basically signed up, I graduated a semester early from high school, all my friends

were in school, I basically had the spring semester in the summer before I graduated a semester early from high school. All my friends were in school. I basically had the spring semester in the summer before I had a report to play football in college. And so I walked into a recruiter's office and I was like, hey, I figure you guys need some help, you know, kind of in a super egotistical, arrogant, you know, 17 year old kid who wants to go play with guns, right? And he was like, yeah, we need a lot of help. And, you know, here's all the different things you can go do. Ultimately signed up for the military, through the army, and then ended up getting deployed when I was 20 years old to Iraq, spent about a year there and had my 21st birthday in the middle of the desert. And, you know, all of my guys were nice enough to go get me some ice cream. That was

the big moment. No drinking, but you can have a little bit of ice cream. And look, it was probably one of the better experiences in my life, not because of necessarily what we did, but I think just the exposure that I had and the lessons I learned. And it probably, you know, materially changed the direction of my life in the sense that I was a 20-year-old, you know, materially changed the direction of my life in the sense that I was a 20 year old, you know, basically a shithead kid who was thrust into a leadership role in the military, in a combat zone with a bunch of guys who are much older than me, kind of in their, you know, late 20s or early 30s. And I had to learn a lot of lessons kind of, you know, by just getting thrown in the fire. And ultimately, I think that those types of situations make you

much better over a long period of time. I think it did that for me. So you, I mean, you effectively made the decision when you were like 13, 14 years old that you wanted to go defend your country. And as you say, I don't think you have the same perspective, maybe as an adult. And you said that it was a valuable experience. But seeing what you see now in this country, politics, all the things, I mean, do you feel like if you go in the military at this point, that it's truly defending the national interests? Or do you feel like you're more kind of advancing the interests of the country? Yeah, you know, look, I always remind people that if you want to find pacifists,

go find people who went to war, right? Most people who have gone to war are very much leaning towards pacifists. And even kind of the most hardcore guys, if you talk to a Tim Kennedy or Marcus Luttrell or any of these guys, they'll be the first to tell you your job as a politician or as a private citizen is to do everything you possibly can to not engage in combat, right? But when we reach that point, you're going to send me and I'm going to go do my job. And my job is something that most people in America don't want to hear, right? They don't want to think about, they don't want to understand that. I think it's a George Orwell quote that's like, you know, most people sleep peacefully at night because there's rough men ready to stand, stand ready to do violence on their behalf,

right? I think that that's kind of the way I look at it is like, look, having a strong military is important from a defensive standpoint. But once you go to a combat zone, and you kind of see everything that's going on, and there's plenty of times we're sitting in the middle of Iraq and saying, what are we doing here? Yeah. And it's just, you know, people get upset if somebody says that or whatever. But everyone's experience is different. So there's some teams that go and they're able to do things and operate in certain areas at a certain period of time. And it's like, that makes a lot of sense why we have soldiers there and why they're doing that specific thing. But there's also a lot of other soldiers who are sitting there saying, I'm not one of those people in that location at that time that makes sense.

And so kind of like, why are we here? And, you know, the crazy part about all of this is, I think that a lot of folks who end up going into combat zones, especially in combat roles, and kind of come back, what they have a belief in is a lot of American ideals, right? You get to see a failing country, you get to see what happens when kind of democracy and capitalism also falls. And for me, it shows up in, if you look at a lot of what is going on in the world today, it's like, look, I don't, there is a very real situation where people will go out in the street, they'll protest and they'll burn flags. There's people who say that's un-American. And what I

continue to tell people is like, there's a lot of people who went and fought for the right for people to say stupid things, to burn flags, to protest, to do all this crazy stuff. That doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what they're doing, but that's their right. And I think that one of the key pieces in today's society that's kind of getting lost is the freedom of speech is most important to be protected when you disagree with the person. Of course. Like, everyone's like, oh, freedom of speech is important if you say what I want you to say. But if you're saying something different, like, shut up. But it's actually, no, that's like the true test of how committed is a country to those ideals.

I disagree with what you're saying, but you have the right to say it. And therefore, I'm going to protect your right to say it. That I think is kind of the big moment. And, you know, people can argue whether we're succeeding or failing in that moment. But I think that's kind of some of the lessons I took away from it. It's interesting. I talked to Peter McCormick recently, you know, and obviously, like he's famously being sued by Craig Wright. And he, we kind of touched on these same ideas. And he said, well, I live in England and our libel laws are completely screwed up. And he was like, I would kill, give anything to live in your country right now and have the first amendment protecting me. Right. So, and he lives in England, right? It's

not like he lives in Iran. So I think that that's very important. And it touches though on like what's happening now, because I think that most people just blindly disagree in principle with everything that the other side says, whichever side they are on. And there really is no dialogue. I mean, do you see that we can get back to a place where we, where people actually do believe that the opposite side has the right to say what they say? I disagree with you. Let's come together in the middle. Let's figure this out. Or do you think that we've traveled so far to polar opposites that there really is no more civil dialogue in this country? Well, I don't think that there's two sides, right? And I think this is probably something that other people haven't looked at it through

this lens. But I actually think that both political parties are the exact same, right? And what I mean by that is just, I don't care who the president is, a Democrat or a Republican, go all the way back in history. They all say a bunch of things, make a bunch of promises, they get in the office. And not that I think that they were being malicious or lying in the beginning. It's just that you can be wide eyed and bushy tailed and think you're going to create all this change and kind of improve things. And then you get in the office and you get all the information and you realize, wait a second, like, this is harder than I thought. This is more complex than I thought.

This is more bureaucratic than I thought. There are entrenched incentives on both sides here that are going to make this very difficult. And therefore, they end up not getting it done. And so, I kind of just say, look, there's the political, you know, ballgame that plays, if you will. And whether you're on the Republican, Democrat side, they're all the same to me. And then when you bring that down into the individual issues, I find that actually, when you press really hard on somebody who claims to identify as a Republican or as a Democrat, what you realize is, they really are kind of a one or two party or two issue type of meaning, right? It's like, hey, I really believe in gun control, therefore I'm a conservative. Okay, do you believe and you say something that it would normally fall on like the democratic side of an argument and they're like, oh, well, I believe that too. You're like, okay, so you're more, you're identifying with a political party, not because you fully align 100%

with everything they believe, it's that the most important issue to you falls on that side. And that's why you go. And so again, this is all semantics, it's all propaganda, it's all divisiveness, it's whatever. And I just choose to say like, look, I have independent thought, I believe different things based on the topic, based on the information I have, based on the point in time, like that kind of critical thinking and independent thought, I think is severely lacking in today's society. And if we can start to get back to that, I tend to think like society will improve overall. And ultimately, that's why people like the Joe Rogans, the Tim Ferriss's, the Eric Weinstein's, the Bari Weiss's, like all these people, there are plenty of things to disagree with that they've said or done or whatever. But the idea that they have independent thought, and they're willing to talk about things that

have been determined by the majority of society to be taboo subjects, or kind of not politically correct or whatever, like, that is how you grow. That is how you discover things. That is how you kind of make progress. And so I think that that kind of counterculture, that, you know, intellectual dark web, whatever you want to call it, like is so important to American society. And that's ultimately why it's succeeding and gaining such a large audience is because there is a big portion of people who say, I want to get the opposite argument. I want to talk about these things that no one else is willing to talk about. So we kind of get to the situation we're in now with American politics and society.

Yeah, I've heard Joe Rogan talk about it a number of times. He always sort of touches on the criticism that he gets when he brings on someone with a crazy view, like if he wants to talk to a white supremacist or if he, you know, one of these crazy, quote unquote, crazy people. But you really can't have a dialogue unless somebody has the balls to invite them on and actually confront them and talk to them, right? So, I think that there's a place for people like that to give a platform. That's the criticism. You're giving a platform to this racism, this whatever, but you can't really dispel it without discussing it. I mean, do you see yourself going sort of that shock jock route

at any point starting to interview really controversial or fringe people on the podcast or on YouTube? Yeah. Well, I think, first of all, you've got to unpack like, why are they doing that? And it's because they're able to, right? And then why are they able to? It's because they've built these personal media companies that make them uncancellable. I don't care how hard people try. They cannot cancel Joe Rogan. Why? Because Joe Rogan has a bigger audience than all of the mainstream media. He's bigger than the television shows. He's bigger than the written media. He is what those organizations wish they could be. And so therefore, he is uncancellable. Now, you can argue whether that's good or bad, but that's just where he has gotten himself to. And there's plenty of other people in similar

situations. And they're not all, by the way, white male guys who've done this. They're not all politically related. They could be in sports or they could be in other industries as well. What I think ends up being important is those conversations are trying to get at truth and not consensus. Right. So I've been saying this a lot lately is like society seeks consensus over truth. But I actually believe the smartest, most intellectual people seek truth over consensus. They don't care what the consensus is. They want the truth. And it is impossible to get the truth if you don't understand multiple perspectives on an issue. And I think that's kind of what you're talking about here. And so,

the balance that somebody has to do is, can you talk about it with various people without coming off as, I agree with who I'm talking to, right? But also, you don't have to be confrontational and sit there and lambast somebody and yell and scream at them and argue and be divisive yourself. And so, that is a very much an art and I think kind of a learned art as people do this. I've had plenty of people on who I think would be considered quote-unquote controversial, but you kind of work your way into it, right? You don't start out with the white supremacist because you're absolutely going to get steamrolled, right? Instead you go and you do like a John McAfee who's like pretty controversial,

but he doesn't really hold kind of non-politically correct views in the sense of race or religion or, you know, these like super, super sensitive topics. And so I think that again, it comes down to you need to have people in society who want to find that truth and are willing to have people in society who want to find that truth and are willing to have hard conversations or uncomfortable conversations. The key to it all is setting the right expectation. So being able to say, I am talking to somebody who many of you disagree with. I'm specifically having this conversation because I want to understand their perspective

that does not make me sympathetic to what they believe, that does not make me a supporter of what they believe, but it also will give me now more information so that I can analyze the situation more holistically and hopefully get closer to the truth. I think Eric Weinstein does a fantastic job setting those expectations in a lot of his podcasts. And I think you'll start to see more and more people doing that. And because it is such a divergence from what the mainstream media is willing to do or the legacy media, you're going to see kind of a continued popularity of a lot of this like intellectual dark web world. Because it's just people want that information and they can't find it anywhere else. And so now they've got to go find it with these kind of alternative media organizations. Roundthex.com is one of my favorite companies in the entire crypto space. What they do is take all your small purchases and round them up to the nearest dollar and invest that spare change into any of over 30

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or search for Voyager on the iTunes or Google Play Store and get $25 in free Bitcoin when you use the promo code SCOTT25. That's investvoyager.com, promo code SCOTT25 for $25 in free Bitcoin and start trading today. So these alternative media organizations are basically a form of defiance, I guess, against mainstream media. And I think we can all agree, segueing into Bitcoin, that that's sort of what Bitcoin is for the financial system. Can you talk to me about your, I guess, your Bitcoin story, how you found it, why it's so important to you and why it's really become such a central part of your life? Yeah. And I would even argue that just to go back before we talk about Bitcoin, I don't know if the alternative media sources are actually the defiance against the legacy system or if the legacy media systems are the defiance against the truth. Like you almost have to look at it and say like, who is providing more propaganda today,

the mainstream media and legacy media or the alternative sources? Again, I don't actually know, but I think that like that is a question that a lot of people will be upset or uncomfortable when they're asked that question. But if you look at it from a data perspective, I've seen this one, there's a collection of charts on the use of certain words at the New York Times over the last couple of decades. And since they have gone to a subscription service, all of a sudden the explosion of the word like woke, right? Has just gone off the chart. And the argument is, well, if you have a subscription-based business, you want to keep your subscribers happy. They're your customer. And therefore you naturally lean towards writing things that they will like rather than writing things that remain centrist or are counter to what they believe, right? Because they'll unsubscribe. And so the business model pulls you in a certain direction. Now, the ad-based model

did very similar things, right? It just was click-driven and kind of headline-driven. And so that pulled you in a different direction. I don't know if there's like a black and white simple answer here, but I also think it's dangerous to believe that the legacy media is kind of the standard and the alternatives are the defiance. It's probably somewhere in between is the standard and both of them are pulling it in opposite directions. And so you need a healthy dose of both. Like don't go consume 100% alternative media sources and don't consume 100% mainstream media sources either. If you get a little bit of both, you'll probably end up somewhere in the middle. We're realizing that that is, you know, kind of the most, you know,

rational view of the world. I agree with that. So where does Bitcoin fit in? Look, it's pretty simple. In 2014, I was at Facebook. We hired David Marcus from PayPal, comes over to run the messenger team. Uh, he was talking about Bitcoin a bunch and then other people kind of on the messenger team started to talk about it more. Uh, I heard about it, asked somebody on my team who's an engineer, you know, basically what, what is this? Uh, he said, it's stupid. Um, I never Googled it. I like, it was just kind of like a passing thing, whatever. Um, it ends up like I was stupid because I didn't go look it up. And then again, in 2016, end of 16, really, there's a kid that I'd met when he was in high

school who had now entered and was at NC State in college. And he had basically just been a really smart kid in high school. It was very obvious. He was like the smart kid who was kind of entrepreneurial and always scheming and trying to build businesses or whatever. And so, when I came back to North Carolina in the end of 2016, he basically was like, look, man, you should look at this stuff. And I was like, I don't know. It's like, you know, basically arcade money, you know, all the normal things that people normally go through. And he's like, well, you understand infrastructure stuff. My father was in the data center business for a long time. And so I understood the data centers. And he was like, mining is exactly like data centers. And so he sat me down, he showed me

a miner and, you know, went through everything. And so the best way to learn is to put some capital in. And so I took, I think it was about $50,000. I gave it to him and I said, let's set up a mine and like, let's see how this works works and so when we did that um it was right about it was right before uh ether it was actually ether mines that we started with first not bitcoin and um the the gpus um we started mining and if i remember correctly like ether was at like ten dollars at the start of 2017. And then it jumped to like 30 bucks in March. And then it was like at a hundred dollars by the end of May or something. Yeah. I mean, it was just like exploded over the first five or six months of the year. And so all of a sudden, like not only are we mining this, this cryptocurrency, but also we

are seeing the balance sheet expand, right? The things that we'd already mined are growing in value. And so naturally just like, there's a capitalist perspective of like, wait a minute, this is super profitable. Like I should spend more time on this. And so I really, really started to kind of unpack and understand it. The mines kept running. And then we started seeing other teams building, looking at the exchange business model. And like, it just became obvious that there was a lot of people building in the space. There wasn't a ton of professional investor interest. There'd been some Silicon Valley firms who had kind of dabbled, but no one had really kind of put the flag in the ground yet on the venture side. And so my partner, Jason and I decided that we should,

we should go do that. And we pretty much told all of the investors we had, look, we're not going to invest in anything outside of this space for the foreseeable future. We're going to go really, really deep here. We think there's a lot of opportunity. Give us a little, you know, give us a couple of weeks to figure out a plan as to how to do that. You know, what does that capital requirement look like, whatever, and we'll come back to you. And that ultimately led us to, to Mark Yusko, Morgan Creek. We decided to kind of combine forces there, started Morgan Creek Digital. And we've kind of been off to the races since really kind of early 2018 is when we kind of formalized all of that and really hit the ground running. It's a similar story. So many people that you talked to kind of found it and saw this

opportunity to make a shit ton of money. And so they focused on it. But then sort of, certainly my case, I came in as a trader, backed into the actual use case and importance of it, right? So at what point were you stricken with, I guess, either the importance of Bitcoin in that regard, or the failures that we were seeing, you know, with fiat currency and the actual legacy financial systems? You know, when did you really become, I guess, you know, a maximalist or a believer in the importance? Yeah, a lot of people don't know this. I actually have an economics degree. So I got an economics degree from Bucknell. And the two things that are so weird how the world works. But when I got the economics degree, I was in college

from 2006 to 2010. I ended up staying an extra year and a half because of the deployment to Iraq. And so I was literally in school studying economics while the global financial crisis was happening. Right. And you're just like, wait a minute, like that's pretty crazy timing. And I always say that like people my age, I'm 32 years old, basically were aware enough that it was going on and they could pay attention, they could learn, but they didn't have enough financial assets themselves to really be hurt by it. So it was kind of like a crash course without actually, you know, having to pay paid, uh, for the sins. And so, um, that was kind of step one, two was when I came back from Iraq,

um, I had, uh, I've been paid for a year, uh, tax free in a combat zone. Uh, and you got no expenses, like the military pays for everything, right? So they're getting you, they're giving you bombs, bullets, you know, the whole nine yards. And so when I came back, I had a little bit of money and I started actually trade. I wouldn't say day trading, but trading foreign currencies. And so I did really, really well for myself. I turned, I think I put like eight, 9,000 bucks and turned into like over 70 grand in literally like three months. Right. And this is when the, I think it was the dollar was just strengthening like crazy or whatever was going on. I was trading the USD Euro pair. And then I got into the summer and all of a sudden I started to like trade on my phone and,

you know, classic story of just like, oh, this is easy. I'm going to print money. And probably lost about half of it. So I still ended up making a decent amount of money, you know, for a young kid. But it was then when with the economics degree, and then with trading foreign currencies, I started to really understand kind of some of the structural issues, but frankly, didn't really care enough, right? There wasn't a solution. It was kind of like, this is the system we're in, like, whatever. When I saw Bitcoin and really started to understand it, I think it's Marty Bent who says, you know, come for the money, but stay for the money, right? Which is basically like,

come for the profits, and then you stay because of the sound money. It was then when I was like, oh, wait a second, like, those things from, you know, seven, eight, 10 years ago, now all of a sudden, here's a solution to that, that is real world application, that's already got some adoptions, got some mind share, like this thing could really go. And if it does, it could solve a lot of those problems. And so just naturally started paying more attention, talking about it more, learning about it more. And the deeper you go in the rabbit hole, I think the deeper your conviction gets. And you know, here we are now where like, I'm pretty convicted and pretty comfortable kind of talking about all aspects of it. And now, I mean, the world has even shit the bed even further, obviously, in the past four or five months.

Do you think that we're seeing finally, like, not only the people who get it and have been deep in it, like you said, who have gone down the rabbit hole, understanding the importance of it. But do you think that we're seeing average people now starting to see the cracks in the financial system, the stimulus packages, the, you know, quantitative easing and endless money printing? I don't think that the average person understands any of that. I think what, uh, what I do think is happening is there is this great financial education or great financial educational, like awakening occurring where people are realizing, wait a second, the deck is stacked against me if I don't know this stuff. Right. And it's not about quantitative easing.

It's not about like what I'll call all of the really exotic, you know, nooks and crannies of the finance system. It's the simple idea of like your cash is going to be worth less in the future. Rich people don't hold cash, they buy assets. And I think a lot of people have tried to explain that whether it's, you know, the rich dad, poor dad kind of book series, if it's other types of personal finance type series, but they don't ever come at it from a sense of here is another currency that is structured in the complete opposite way. And if you held that currency versus the currency you currently hold, here's the difference in kind of value over a long

period of time, right? And so this idea of like, if you hold a deflationary currency versus an inflationary currency, and you save, I always say that in the legacy finance system, investors are rewarded and savers are punished. Here, now all of a sudden, you can just be a saver and you can actually be rewarded, right? And so, I think that like that is where the most kind of light bulbs I see going off because it's the easiest, like most simple finance 101 thing. But we got to remember, you know, 50 plus percent of Americans don't know that. Like 45% of Americans don't own stocks. 50% can't come up with 400 bucks, you know, emergency payment. But we've heard all the stats. And so if you just give them that one piece of knowledge, you can literally change somebody's life with one single piece of information. And then Bitcoin

just happens to be one of the many applications that they can pursue in order to protect themselves. When I was a kid, my first bank account got like 15% interest or something in the eighties. Of course, that meant that like the mortgage on your house also was like 15, 15%. But yeah, I mean, you can't, I always feel bad for millennials. They get such a bad rap, but like, there's no way if you're young now to really put away your money in the legacy system and know that it's going to grow for your retirement. Right. You used to be able to just open a savings account, randomly buy stock slowly, dollar cost average, and in 50 years, you'd have wealth. But I don't think that exists now in the legacy system at all. Do you agree? One, it definitely doesn't exist. And two, it's only getting worse, right? Like actually the problem is compounding on itself. And so

the other thing that we have now is we've got the internet, right? So 20, 30 years ago, this stuff was happening all over. I mean, currencies have failed over and over and over again in countries all around the world. It's just that it was really hard to learn about it unless you were an economics or a finance, you know, kind of nerd and you wanted to go learn about it, right? Because you had to go read books about it and be very kind of intentional about it. Now, you can simply just turn on the television or turn on Twitter and you see things about Zimbabwe or Venezuela or Lebanon, right? And you're kind of like, wait, what do you mean the Lebanese currency is failing? What does that mean? Right? And you can read articles and like, and now the access

to information is much higher. And so I think that you've got people starting out with a higher base level of knowledge. Two, it's much easier to find out when this stuff happens. And three is you've got kind of an entire, you know, basically team of volunteers on the internet, who are kind of loosely coordinated, who are talking about one of the solutions, which is Bitcoin. And so I think that that, you know, those three trends kind of intersecting with each other has led to now, you know, 10s of millions of people, you know, kind of opting to protect some portion of their wealth with that asset. So we obviously both are, you know, somewhat maximalist, we believe in the case of Bitcoin, we believe in the future, we believe that it's a store of value. And we're

talking to a community that shares those beliefs generally. But to be honest, like, what do you see as the flaws with Bitcoin? Yeah, I think that there's two main buckets, right? In terms of one, the biggest risk to Bitcoin is a self-induced error, right? Kind of shooting ourselves in the foot. What I mean by that is you could see a software bug being introduced and all of those types of issues. One of the hard parts is that most people who are an average person don't understand computer science. They have no understanding of the development process. And so that can be very scary to them in the sense of like, wait a minute, there's software code that I can't read. I can't understand that somebody I don't know is contributing like, and my wealth could disappear.

I think that like the unknown is really scary in that sense. And so we've got to do a better job of educating people on like why that process is super methodical and intentional and how, you know, the kind of checks happen and making sure that isn't going to be a situation we face. But I think that's kind of one bucket. The second thing is, there's a lot of people who look at Bitcoin through the today lens. And what I mean by that is, they want to use Bitcoin today, the same way that they use the dollar that has had, you know, decades of time to kind of be developed. And so I always go back and I remind people like, gold was the start of the dollar, right?

And gold was really hard to move around. It wasn't divisible, or not portable, all these kinds of things. And so we had to build paper claims on the gold, which was originally the gold backed dollar. Then we built electronic money and credit and kind of all of these other layers on top of it. We are just starting out with Bitcoin.

And because it is the layer one, you want actually to have more security than you do want, than you want speed or kind of the innovation and the shiny stuff, right? And it's almost like the higher up you get in that stack of layers, the more you can trade off for the speed and the shiny stuff, because your layer one is built on a strong foundation of security. And so I think that again, that's like a Bitcoin 301 or 401 level conversation. The 101 is just like, wait a minute, if I go to use Bitcoin, somebody is telling me that this other thing over here like settles faster. So well, technically, yes, that can do 100,000 transactions a second or whatever, you or whatever the latest project is promoting.

It's like that's actually not what you want to optimize for because what we're looking at is a multi-decade play and security should come before speed today. That makes a lot of sense. But I guess that begs the question then, is the future Bitcoin itself? Is it additional layers on Bitcoin itself? Or is it one of these shiny other? Yeah, I think we can all agree that most of the altcoin projects are not focusing on security first. And that's arguably the most important thing. But if they do, do you think that the future could be one of those and not necessarily Bitcoin? I think we get one shot at this. And ultimately, to have a decentralized digital

currency, you get one shot. It's only because money is just a belief system, right? And so, I use the example of Venezuela. The Boliviar failed. If the Venezuelan government comes out with a new currency, nobody in Venezuela is taking it. You broke trust with us, no way. Fool me once on me, fool me twice, then that's not going to happen. And so I think that as part of what occurs in the digital decentralized currency space is we've got one shot. Bitcoin has gotten enough adoption now and enough mindshare, enough coverage in the mainstream media, all these things that if it fails, I literally think you, I, and our entire generation is going to have to die or at least get really, really old before

there's enough people to believe in the next one. Right. Right. Because this is the shot and it's a pretty damn good shot. It's $200 billion asset already in 11 years, right? It's already being accepted by major institutions. There's governments talking about it and using it and kind of all these things. But if it fails for whatever reason, whether that is a state-backed attack, it's a self-induced error, whatever the reason, I do not think that people will buy into the idea of a digital decentralized currency in our lifetime in any material way, because they'll have been burnt by that idea before. So what about digital centralized currencies? I mean, we're seeing it across the world now. I know the Bank of Japan is adopting and all across Europe.

Obviously, China is moving to a digital yuan. I mean, what do you think of central bank digital currencies? I mean, I think we can all agree that paper money is going to die, right? I mean, it's going digital one way or another, whether it's Bitcoin or otherwise. I mean, I think we can all agree that paper money is going to die, right? I mean, it's going digital one way or another, whether it's Bitcoin or otherwise. I mean, do you see those as an open door to adoption for Bitcoin, or do you see them as a threat, assuming they're inevitable? So I definitely think they're inevitable. I think there's three types of currencies that we're going to see. You're going to have decentralized digital currencies.

You're going to have digital private currencies. You're going to have digital private currencies, and you're going to have digital kind of central bank currencies. The key to that is all three of them are digital, right? So kind of the technology layer is the exact same or very, very similar. And so there's no competition at the technology layer. Where I think that the competition is going to play out is at the monetary policy layer. And part of the beauty of digitizing all of the currencies is now every person on earth has access to every single currency. So it looks much more like a free market because of the digitization of these currencies. And so now an individual in Venezuela, when the Boliviar fails, they're not going to have to say, man, I really want dollars, but I can't get dollars because it's super dangerous, the black market, you know, I'm

scared the bank's going to seize my assets, whatever. So let me go to gold. Instead, they're going to say, I have access to every single currency in the world because I have an internet connection. And so what that pushes up to now is if you have 100% accessibility, it's a competition in the monetary policy layer. The key to Bitcoin is that every other currency does the exact same thing. It's all inflationary fiat currencies. And so Bitcoin is choosing a different path, an opposite path. As we know from investing, if you do to drive returns, you've got to do something different than everybody, and you've got to be right. It's very clear that it's doing something different. The question where all of the kind of price speculation and trading and investing is happening is, is it right or not? And so again, I think it's right. I really, really think it's

right. I think a lot of other people think it's right, but there's actually a majority of the world today doesn't think it's right. And so I think that's what makes this so exciting is, you know that you're early compared to majority of the population of the world, right? You also have a belief that this is something that is a divergence in strategy of a monetary policy. And if you believe it is superior, then you would have a strong argument to put some portion of your wealth, don't go put 100%, but some portion to get exposure to something that's doing something different. And if it's right, we'll end up being ungodly more valuable than it is today. Right. I mean, I think that there's no question that it's bullish for Bitcoin or digital currencies in theory that everyone gets even just familiar with a digital wallet and, you know,

is used to sending transactions in that manner and just basically has a natural familiarity and that they are being told from a source that they trust, whether they trust their government or not, that this is the way that we're going to transact in the future. And I think that then the news of things like PayPal and Venmo, you know, opening the doors on the back of what we've seen on the Cash App is another kind of another version of the same thing. It's a trusted source where people are used to transacting now telling them that Bitcoin is credible and even more important, I guess, safe to purchase. I mean, to me, the PayPal and Venmo news was like the biggest aha moment for what could be with Bitcoin? I mean, do you agree that those are the biggest steps or those are huge steps towards the potential mass adoption? So I definitely think

they're very, very big steps. I don't think that there's necessarily just one though, right? So like, I would throw in that same bucket, things like public pensions getting exposure. I would throw in OCC's decision to clarify saying that banks are able to custody Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. You know, there's kind of like, I think of it as there's these inflection points and they compound on each other. So each one of those on their own, we're like, oh, wow, that's a big moment. But then when you kind of zoom out, it's just one big moment of, you know, at this point, maybe 50 to 100 that have happened in the lifetime of Bitcoin. And in the beginning, the quote unquote, big moment was like, Time Magazine wrote about Bitcoin in 2012, or whatever, 13, right? But like, that was a massive moment in

relationship to whatever else had happened. Now, there's an article every day about Bitcoin, right? So like an article is no longer the bar for a big moment. Now the bar is the OCC or a central bank in the future saying that they're going to put Bitcoin in their central bank reserves. Like that will be a big moment in the future, right? Once banks hold it. And so I think it's just all relative to the time that you're in. And then in hindsight, the things that people thought were a big moment then, you know, you look pretty stupid, right? You know, like the Time article, everyone's just like, duh, like, okay, sure. I guess all that was important.

At the time, I mean, then people were literally running around being like, oh my God, did you see they wrote about Bitcoin? And the price exploded, right? And so I think same thing here. But right now, I do agree Venmo, PayPal, OCC decision, those are all big moments that definitely are driving interest. And what do you make of the, I guess, current rise and interest in Bitcoin? Where do you think that the interest is coming from? I mean, you look back at 2017, I think it was clearly a bubble to

some degree, hard to argue. And you see like the Google searches of Bitcoin were spiking to thousands and thousands. And your Uber driver was telling you about Bitcoin and your hairdresser. I'll never forget the day that my friend called me and said that his nanny had just bought shares of Ripples, plural Ripples, had bought shares of Ripples, you know, and shares. And so that was, I guess, one kind of retail driven situation. But I think you could argue that retail isn't really here or interested right now. But we're still seeing the same thing on the strength of institutional buying and real, genuine, powerful interest. Yeah, I mean, look, it's no secret that Wall Street has jumped into Bitcoin in a very material

way. Some of that is through things like the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, where they're basically just trying to arb this premium that that fund has. You also see people like Paul Tudor Jones, with his kind of 2% and writing publicly. It's just that Bitcoin has gone from something that you used to have to whisper in the corner and say, Oh, you're, you're in Bitcoin too. Okay. Like, you know, cool, man. Like, let's talk about it afterwards. Right. You know, like, like, like we'll literally go out for a beer and talk about it. Cause we don't want to talk about it. Like being an atheist. To now it's like on the agenda of the meeting at the all hands meeting right and so

it's literally graduated to that level and look there's plenty of businesses that will get into something related to bitcoin um ultimately i think every business does because ultimately i think every one of them is going to accept bitcoin right like there's going to take time to get there and so to me it's just one of these things where like, you've got to have short-term urgency, but long-term patience. And so I just call that like urgent patience, which is literally every day we should work our asses off and try to build as much as we can and kind of do all the work that needs to be done. But also understand like, again, this is a multi-decade play, right? And I think part of why I get excited, it's like, I'm going to live hopefully,

right. You know, God willing to end up seeing multiple decades of that. But, you know, 30 years from now, is Bitcoin going to be more valuable than it is today? Most likely, right. Betting against innovation and technology is usually a pretty bad strategy. And so it's just a question of like, what everyone wants to talk about, what's it going to do tomorrow? Like, who cares? I literally could go to $1,000, you know, in US dollar exchange value. And now would it suck? I want to drop to 4,000 earlier this year. Literally, my heart was in my stomach, right? I was like, Oh, my God, whatever. And I painfully am pressing the buy button to buy more because I'm telling my mind is having to override my human emotion. But now look,

right? And so it's kind of like, yes, it will continue to be volatile. Yes, it will continue to kind of do this stuff. But if you just keep this really low time preference or long-term outlook, like this is probably one of the most obvious things I've seen in technology or business investing. And I think that's why I get so excited and kind of like really put the flag down and say like, hey, we're going in this direction because it's not a question to my mind. It is an inevitable event and it's already happened. It's already a $200 billion asset. Yeah, it's real. Yeah, it's funny though because the people who adopt Bitcoin are young generally, right? And so we need the older people, but, because the people who adopt Bitcoin are young, generally, right?

And so we need the older people. But those are the people who are inherently impatient, right? So like, you know, we see it on Robin Hood, you know, Davy Day Trader, all this stuff. Everyone's getting, you know, hilariously rich and you're not sort of those memes. So I think that that is a kind of a challenge is getting young people who want to be rich now, who think they should be millionaires when they're 25 to understand that this is a multi-decade play. Yeah. And look, I think a big part of what everyone needs to do to help facilitate that is explaining like, this is not a speculation tool. Could you speculate on it? Of course. But what ends up

happening in investing is the people who pick the right assets, they're early and they hold it for a long period of time. They do much, much better than everybody. Right. And so it's like, that is a tried and true strategy. Again, I told the story when I was 21 years old and I was trading foreign currencies, there was no long-term holding, right? I was waking up, you know, in the middle of the night and trading and doing all kinds of crazy stuff. And yes, I made some money, but the stress and then losing 50% of what I had gained, you know, all this kind of stuff. It's just, you realize if I'd kept playing that game, I would have ended up losing like the house every time. And so like,

thank God I could walk away. Right. But like, it was more of like walk away, like licking my chops, being like, damn, like, you know, the market really kicked my ass. Uh, what I think will end up happening is like, that has to happen to people. They have to kind of get humbled. Right. And realize, wait a second, this is a game where I don't have an advantage. What game can I have an advantage? Oh, I can just be early in a trend where the macro wins or the tailwind, and I'm going to benefit from it by just being patient. And I think that people will eventually get there. It's just going to take time. Those are lessons that every single trader learned. It's so funny. And every time I have a trader on here, I'm like, what's the secret to success? They're like losing

everything three times, you know, just getting so sick of losing. But it is true. I mean, if you truly believe in it over the long term, taking the risk of losing it in the short term and the ass kicking you're going to have to give yourself down the road as a result is really not worth it. That's why even as a trader, like I always sort of preach, like trade with like 10% of your money, 15% of your money, put the rest away and don't be a jackass. You know, it's just a really important lesson. So pretty impressive that you got out of it unscathed because most people don't

leave their very brief trading career profitable. They usually leave because they can't do it anymore. They don't have a choice. Well, listen, at the time, I didn't think I left unscathed because I saw 70,000 drop to like 30,000, 35,000, whatever it was. And, you know, as humans like to do, all I could think about it was the money I had lost, right? Not the money that I had gained. And so it was, it was not fun at the time, but it was a fantastic lesson. And, you know, again, thank God it happened at 21 and not, you know, kind of later in life. Yeah. You don't want that lesson when you're 65 and it's a, and you also don't want it to be 2008 when you're 65, which is something

you can't control whether a trader or not. I guess that's a topic for a different day. I want to ask you, I mean, you've spoken to basically everybody. I mean, like you said, you're interviewing five, six, seven, eight people a week. Who are the most brilliant people that you've interviewed, the most impressive interviewees that you've had, or even just the ones that sort of gave you those aha moments and really had an impact on your thinking yeah um there's way too many to to name all of them for sure uh i am constantly overwhelmed with just how cool it is to be able to do this and and how much i've learned um i would say that the people uh that just stick out. So let me go two guys, two women.

Murad Mahab did the first time I had him on. It was by far the most popular episode we'd ever done at the time. And he laid out just the bull argument for Bitcoin. And then articulation that I hadn't heard before about it being a market expanding technology and kind of just how big it could get. Right. And his belief that like we're all underestimating it rather than overestimating it. So that was really powerful. I would say Kathy Wood is by far my favorite investor on Wall Street.

So I've had her on twice. And just, you know, look, she's been around for a long time, seen everything or most things, and has this deep-seated belief in investing in innovation. And I think that she just, the way that she talks about her thesis in the world is fantastic. And she's, you know, one of the best. Chamath, obviously, him and I, you know, we really, we really had a nice conversation. And I think we kind of have a mutual respect for each other, just in that, like, we're both straight shooters. Like, if I, you know, if I don't like something, you're going to know it. If he thinks something, he's just going to tell you. And I just appreciate people who can do that and do that well and respectfully do it.

And then the most recent one is Kat Cole. Kat is, she lives in Atlanta. She's the president and COO of Focus Brands. Focus owns, you know, Moe's Southwest Grill, Cinnabon, Jamba Juice, Auntie Anne's, you know, a bunch of these kind of retail brands. And her story is really crazy in that she started out at, I think, 17 years old as a Hooters waitress girl. Wow. And worked her way up to VP by 26 at Hooters. Ended up opening up a bunch of restaurants all

around the world, you know, kind of doing all this stuff, took over at Cinnabon, and then eventually took over at Focus. And she's just one of those operators who she's literally done it all. And so it's not like, oh, I think in this situation, this is how you should act. She's like, here is a lesson learned on the management or operator side. And here's five stories that I can tell you of exactly how it got implemented and just over and over and over again. And you're like, I am literally talking to an expert at their craft and a practitioner of what they're saying.

And you could do this for hours and she wouldn't be done with the lessons. And so I think like those people are very few and far between. But she's definitely one that I think sticks out is just having, I learned a lot from talking to her. I always say that having a podcast is the greatest thing in the world, because you can call anyone who wouldn't have spoken to you otherwise. And like, they'll commit an hour to basically schooling you on what they're good at. And you don't understand. It's really like, I don't think people understand how like, lucky we are to be able to do this. So you're interviewing all the time. You're

proselytizing for Bitcoin, obviously. You've gotten a lot of famous people to buy Bitcoin. You've convinced a lot of people. Do you have that one dude in your family or among your friends who just refuses to touch it and is like, no way, no matter how hard you sell? I can't think of anyone who's really, really really close to me. Who's just like, no, I just don't get it. Um, most of them, even I got four younger brothers, like, I mean, some of them took a while, but like, you know, and they may have only bought a couple hundred dollars, a couple thousand dollars, whatever it was kind of, you know, just tip their toe in. But, um, pretty much, uh, everyone at least understands it, you know, is on board generally with it, has some exposure.

There's one person who is not close to me, but is a very, very big name. So obviously everyone knows like the Bill Burr situation and kind of a couple of these examples. There's one person that I am working on that. Is it Peter Schiff? Cultural icons to the point when people would hear who it is they would be like wait what uh we're close um but what i think when this happens and i think we will get there like shortly the next week or two uh when that happens i think that it's one of those moments where people are just going to be like, oh, this is not just a finance. This is

going to be a culture thing. And when that happens, like game on. And so what's that like? Is that like, hey, dear, dear LeBron, I wrote yesterday, just writing again to see if you had a chance to read my email about the importance of Bitcoin. So here's the crazy part. I don't go outbound to anyone with this stuff. It's all inbound stuff. I don't go outbound to anyone with this stuff. It's all inbound stuff. But like, you know, you get like the NBA players or stuff like that. Like they're just generally interested. They've got cash, like they want to understand investing, whatever, like, and a lot of them are actually much more intelligent than the finance people anyways. But this person came inbound and it was like him and a friend and they were been talking about it.

And they were just like, we don't understand it. Like, let's go learn. And so like one kudos to them for just like not being blind to just like either go spend money or not spend money. Instead, they want to learn. And so it's been pretty interesting to kind of see them, you know, you start out with like, you guys are crazy to like, oh, okay, wait, like there's problems in the existing system to, oh, this is pretty interesting. So like, hey, I'm starting to get the hang of it and understand it. So like, I think we're almost at the point of like, hey, I'm going to like, go actually put a portion of my net worth in this and then I'm going to be willing to talk about it. And to me, it's like, yeah, putting your net worth in is one thing. Being willing to talk about it is a whole nother game right and I think

we're gonna get this person there I can't wait to see what it is so what's next for you man what can we expect I have no clue good more more of the same is that's all the batters where everybody uh follow up with you after this make sure i'm sure that literally everybody who listens to this already is following you but we might as well might as well throw it out there yeah easy is uh twitter just search at a pompliano uh or you can subscribe to the email at a pompletter.com but those are the two places awesome man well thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it.

I know you're busy. And also thank you for your service. I think maybe a lot of people don't know that you spent all that time in the military and it is much appreciated. So thank you. Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Scott. Appreciate it.

All right, man. Speak soon. Bye.