Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Anthony Pompliano, entrepreneur, technology
00:00:04 investor, prolific writer, podcaster, and Twitter user on topics of finance,
00:00:10 cryptocurrency, technology, and economics.
00:00:13 I highly recommend his popular podcast and daily letter called The Pump
00:00:19 Podcast and The Pump Letter.
00:00:22 Quick thank you to our sponsors, Theragun Muscle Recovery Device, Sun Basket Meal
00:00:27 Delivery Service, ExpressVPN, and Indeed Hiring website.
00:00:32 Click their links to support this podcast.
00:00:35 As a side note, let me say that I’ll be having many conversations in the coming
00:00:39 months about cryptocurrency with people of all kinds of backgrounds and worldviews.
00:00:44 Those who are proponents of Bitcoin, like Anthony, Nick Carter, Robert
00:00:50 Breedlove, Alex Glastine, and many others.
00:00:53 And those who are proponents of other cryptocurrency technologies, like Vitalik
00:00:57 Buterin, Charles Hoskinson, Richard Hart, Sergey Nazarov, Silvia
00:01:02 Macaulay, and many others as well.
00:01:04 I’m not framing this as a debate.
00:01:07 I’m simply looking to explore exciting ideas in the space of technologies that
00:01:12 could very well change human civilization and AGI civilization as well.
00:01:18 I appreciate that some communities are a bit more intense in their style
00:01:22 of communication and others, but I personally am only interested in open
00:01:26 minded, respectful collaboration in exploring ideas.
00:01:31 I personally try to like to approach conversations by considering that I may
00:01:36 be wrong about everything and I’m looking to learn.
00:01:41 I won’t engage in groupthink, social signaling, outrage mobs, mocking,
00:01:46 and derision. If you do, I understand, it’s just not my thing.
00:01:51 I send you my love either way and hope to meet you in person or some drinks, some
00:01:56 good laughs, and a good conversation one day.
00:02:00 No matter the difference in style or substance, we’re all just human after all.
00:02:05 This is an amazing ride we’re all on together.
00:02:08 Buy the ticket, take the ride, as Hunter S.
00:02:10 Thompson said, whether you pay for that ticket with Bitcoin, Ethereum, or
00:02:15 the dollar, gold, seashells, a beer, or just a good old smile.
00:02:21 This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
00:02:24 And here is my conversation with Anthony Pampliano.
00:02:29 You served in the US Army for six years and spent 13 months in Iraq in 2008 and
00:02:35 2009. Can you tell the story of why you joined the army and what were some of
00:02:40 the moving difficulties, maybe lasting experiences from the time you served?
00:02:43 Sure. I joined when I was 17 years old, needed my parents to basically sign in
00:02:50 order to join. And I graduated a semester early from high school and thought I was
00:02:55 going to go play football in college and kind of enroll in the spring semester.
00:02:58 And when that didn’t happen, basically was working at Chick Fil A and Quiznos.
00:03:02 And I had in my mind, look, this is probably not the path in life that I want.
00:03:07 And so I knew I was going to go to college.
00:03:09 I knew I was going to go play football in the fall, but I had this window of time
00:03:12 and so I walked into a recruiting office and just basically was like, I’m assuming
00:03:17 you guys need some help.
00:03:18 And, uh, you know, they gave me the whole pitch and, uh, you know, give you a signing
00:03:22 bonus, you can go jump out of planes and go do all this crazy stuff.
00:03:25 I just said, okay, let’s do it.
00:03:26 This was, this was close to the 9 11.
00:03:29 This was in 2006, about five years after.
00:03:33 So what impact, I mean, do you remember 9 11?
00:03:36 What impact did that have on your thinking about this?
00:03:38 So I was, uh, in eighth grade, um, if I remember correctly.
00:03:42 And, uh, I remember, uh, being in school when it happened and, uh, I walked into a
00:03:48 classroom and the entire class, uh, somebody else’s class, they were all talking to the
00:03:54 teacher about something.
00:03:54 The second that me and a couple other kids walked in and we got real quiet and the
00:03:57 teacher was like, Hey, go back to your like, homeroom.
00:04:00 And so it was just kind of a weird, like what’s going on.
00:04:02 Uh, and then next thing I know, they called all the students into the cafeteria.
00:04:06 And this is back before, you know, every classroom really had a television in it and,
00:04:10 you know, cable and all that kind of stuff.
00:04:12 And so when we were there, they basically just said, listen, there’s been this, uh,
00:04:14 event that’s occurred.
00:04:16 All of your parents are going to come pick you guys up and, uh, they’ll explain it to
00:04:19 you.
00:04:20 And so to, you know, a kid in eighth grade, you’re basically like, what happened?
00:04:25 And so I got home and, uh, and I remember talking to my dad about it and my dad
00:04:29 basically gave me, you know, the, uh, the core American kind of talking points.
00:04:33 Right. Look, somebody from another country came here and tried to kill Americans and
00:04:38 was successful in doing that.
00:04:40 Um, and to some extent he just said, and I’m willing to bet, you know, we’re going
00:04:44 to go back after them.
00:04:45 Did that wake you up a little bit to the idea that there’s evil out there that, you
00:04:48 know, even just the idea of terrorism for many people that was, um, when it hits you
00:04:53 on your own land, it’s a, it really shakes up your mind in some sense, world war two.
00:04:59 That’s why world war two was fundamentally different for Americans than it is for the
00:05:04 people like in Russia and England and France and, uh, in Europe in general is
00:05:11 there’s something about when there’s a families, women, children dying on your own
00:05:17 land, that’s different.
00:05:19 And that was one of the first times in America where like on your, uh, of course
00:05:24 it’s Pearl Harbor, but like, this is like in recent history, it’s like, they hit us
00:05:29 here, that was like a profound idea.
00:05:34 I think America was very, very good at exporting the violence
00:05:36 elsewhere for a long time.
00:05:38 And, uh, there was this element of, uh, complacency, but also this element of,
00:05:43 uh, um, you know, really just American superiority that doesn’t happen here.
00:05:47 Right.
00:05:48 And, uh, I think that that woke people up, not only to, uh, you know, to the
00:05:52 idea that other places around the world may not like the American ideals, may not
00:05:56 like democracy and capitalism and, and that, but also, uh, maybe we aren’t as
00:06:02 big, tough and secure as we thought we were.
00:06:04 Right.
00:06:05 And so obviously I think you see the kind of the over rotation with a lot of the
00:06:08 kind of security theater that came after that of almost psychologically, let’s
00:06:12 make our citizens feel like they’re safe, even if the things that we’re doing
00:06:15 don’t necessarily, you know, kind of change that apparatus.
00:06:18 Uh, but on top of that, I think it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s
00:06:22 I think that it really woke people up to, uh, extremism around the world.
00:06:27 And, uh, I don’t know if necessarily there was a change in the extremism as
00:06:32 much as it just was an awareness thing, right.
00:06:34 How, how many people, you know, kind of drew a line from, was it 92 or 93 with
00:06:39 the world trade center bombing to, you know, deep levels of extremism and hatred
00:06:44 of, uh, kind of the American industrial complex, probably not that many, 2001,
00:06:49 a lot of people.
00:06:50 And so I think that was, you know, again, as a, as a young kid, you don’t
00:06:53 understand a lot of this stuff.
00:06:54 You basically just, Hey, somebody came here and tried to kill Americans.
00:06:58 And so, you know, we should go fight back, right.
00:07:01 Was kind of the, uh, the, the response I think that I had.
00:07:03 What role did that have psychologically for you when you then in 2006 join the
00:07:09 army, I mean, this is a very different joining the army than in the time when
00:07:15 like it’s more peaceful here, you’re essentially facing, I mean, I don’t
00:07:20 know if you see it that way, but you know, there is a war on terror.
00:07:23 And I know that people kind of, uh, criticize that whole formulation
00:07:27 framework of thinking, but nevertheless, you are going to Iraq.
00:07:31 You are going to Afghanistan, you’re going to these places and are
00:07:35 fighting these complicated, like, I mean, it’s not even clear what you’re fighting.
00:07:40 Yeah.
00:07:41 Well, I think that there’s a couple of key pieces, right?
00:07:43 So one, like what the actual most impactful data points, if you were, or
00:07:47 kind of stories for me, uh, was the Pat Tillman story.
00:07:50 So I played football, uh, in high school and it was going to go play in college.
00:07:54 Um, and seeing, you know, this NFL player who basically just one day said, Hey, I’m
00:07:58 going to go and do this instead, uh, and walk away.
00:08:01 I don’t know necessarily if it was a, uh, I want to pursue the same story right now.
00:08:06 So he ended up dying.
00:08:07 And so not exactly the, uh, the end result that you want, but I think it
00:08:10 was almost like, uh, he made it okay.
00:08:13 If you were on a certain trajectory in life to go take this detour and,
00:08:17 and to go do it.
00:08:18 Um, but the second thing is I was 17.
00:08:20 You’re pretty stupid when you’re 17, you’re pretty naive when you’re 17.
00:08:23 Right.
00:08:23 And so, uh, I almost, um, kind of backed into the deployment because
00:08:28 I signed up, uh, as a, uh, a reserve member.
00:08:32 And so basically the plan was to sign up for the reserves.
00:08:34 I was going to go to basic training, get all the, you know, kind of education
00:08:37 and qualification, I was going to go to college and then after college,
00:08:41 you know, maybe there’s a chance that you will go and serve or do whatever.
00:08:45 For me, I ended up getting deployed when I was a junior in college
00:08:48 and we got pulled out of school.
00:08:50 And so at 20 years old, uh, it’s not exactly what you thought you were
00:08:54 signing up for, right.
00:08:54 Especially to kind of leave school to go do it.
00:08:57 And then on top of that, uh, I probably had an advantage over most people, both
00:09:01 on the entry to combat and the exit to, uh, kind of a combat situation, which
00:09:06 that was football.
00:09:08 So I always explain that, um, in hindsight, you’re in a male dominated
00:09:13 testosterone driven kind of combative sport where it’s us first them.
00:09:17 And, and, uh, there’s training and, and, uh, you know, injuries and just kind of
00:09:21 all of the things that go into playing a combat sport like football to now they
00:09:25 give you guns, but you still have a uniform on still male dominated.
00:09:28 It’s just a little bit, you know, more serious in terms of the injuries and,
00:09:32 and, uh, potential deaths and things like that, but also on the exit from that
00:09:36 deployment, most guys I was there with, they’re going back to being, you know,
00:09:40 prison guards, police officers working at the lumber yard, you know, just kind
00:09:45 of every day Americans.
00:09:48 And so I had the fortunate ability to go back into, uh, kind of that combative
00:09:53 environment, go back to play football.
00:09:55 And so it was almost this like deescalation on the way out, uh, where
00:09:58 they take your guns away.
00:09:59 We still got a uniform, still male dominated, uh, still combative.
00:10:02 And then eventually you’re just a normal citizen.
00:10:04 And so I think that in some weird way, I was, you know, very fortunate
00:10:07 to kind of on the entry and exit, have that experience where other guys did.
00:10:11 So what you were deployed to Iraq, were there any memories, experiences
00:10:17 that changed you or in general, like you’re probably a different
00:10:22 man on the other side of it?
00:10:23 How did that time change you?
00:10:25 I think there, there was two main takeaways that I took, right?
00:10:28 So one was, um, not a specific moment, but on multiple occasions, uh, I remember
00:10:32 we were driving down the road and I would look and there would be a 10, 12,
00:10:36 14 year old kid.
00:10:38 And if you’ve never seen somebody who literally has hate and disdain in their
00:10:42 eyes, just not necessarily to you personally, just to the uniform, to what
00:10:47 you stand for, it’s all this stuff.
00:10:49 When you see it, you see it right.
00:10:51 And I always think of, um, if you’ve ever, uh, watched the movie, uh, 12 strong and
00:10:56 in it, uh, they’ve got this Afghan, uh, Afghanistan warlord, and he’s talking
00:11:00 to a bunch of soldiers and he says, you know, you don’t have killer eyes.
00:11:03 You do, you do.
00:11:04 And he’s just like, he can just tell, right?
00:11:05 He’s, he’s seen so many soldiers.
00:11:07 And so I think that that was a, a memory on a number of occasions where I just saw
00:11:12 young kids and I just said, they hate us.
00:11:15 Right.
00:11:16 And, and it’s not you personally, it’s what you stand for.
00:11:19 But the really big event was, um, when you first get to these combat zones, a lot of
00:11:23 times what will happen is, uh, you basically, your unit teams up with a unit
00:11:27 that’s leaving and there’s a handoff and happens over a couple of weeks.
00:11:30 And so you can imagine almost, you know, 1% of our team goes out with 99% of their
00:11:34 team, then five, 95, 10, 90, all the way till it’s 50, 50.
00:11:38 And then eventually it rotates.
00:11:39 And then it’s majority of our team and a small number of their team.
00:11:42 And so what a lot of people will explain is the two most dangerous times in war
00:11:46 are actually the first two or three weeks and the last two or three weeks.
00:11:50 When you first get there, you don’t know who the people are.
00:11:52 You don’t know the terrain, you don’t know, you know, kind of the local cultures
00:11:55 and, and, uh, who to look out for, what signs, all that kind of stuff.
00:11:58 And the last two or three weeks is you basically think you survived the
00:12:01 deployment, you’re looking forward to going home.
00:12:03 So you become complacent, things like that.
00:12:05 And so we made it through that transition period with no issues.
00:12:08 Uh, but the literally the very first mission, uh, that we went out as a team,
00:12:12 ourselves, a hundred percent, um, there was two separate incidents.
00:12:17 Uh, one was we were driving in the middle of the night and, uh, what we think was a
00:12:20 sniper shot at a truck that I was in, I was standing up outside of it, uh, along
00:12:25 with a, uh, another guy.
00:12:27 And that was kind of just a wake up call again of never been shot at before.
00:12:31 Right.
00:12:32 And so I’ll never forget, uh, you kind of heard this whiz go by and the guy next to
00:12:36 me was from a rural Pennsylvania.
00:12:38 And he just said, you know, look, I’ve never been shot at before either, but
00:12:41 I’ve done a lot of hunting, get the fuck down.
00:12:44 Okay.
00:12:45 And so, uh, we kept driving that night.
00:12:48 Um, and, uh, later on in the night, uh, an IED went off, a guy ran over an IED,
00:12:53 uh, who was at the front of the convoy.
00:12:55 And when that IED went off, uh, again, I had never been in a convoy that had been
00:13:00 blown up before, but the training kicks in.
00:13:02 And so immediately every single person starts screaming out IED, IED, and they
00:13:05 started looking and trying to figure it out.
00:13:07 And you realize the United States military did a fantastic job training us before we
00:13:12 went, because in that moment, nobody thought about anything.
00:13:15 You just did what you had been programmed to do.
00:13:17 Um, and so ultimately kind of through the end of that event, uh, there was a US
00:13:21 soldier that ended up dying.
00:13:22 He was, uh, shot in the head.
00:13:24 And, um, when we got back to the base, uh, kind of after that entire event,
00:13:29 I think it just hit us.
00:13:31 We are at war.
00:13:32 And if we make mistakes here, that is the cost of, you know, kind of those mistakes.
00:13:37 And this was somebody who I didn’t know.
00:13:40 Uh, it was somebody who literally showed up, uh, kind of as secondary
00:13:43 support, uh, for our unit and basically, uh, was there to help us.
00:13:48 Right.
00:13:48 And so it was one of those weird situations where, uh, you have this emotional connection
00:13:53 because it’s somebody who, uh, shared an event with you, but you didn’t know them.
00:13:57 Right.
00:13:58 And you learn their name later and you understand that they have a family and
00:14:01 they have young kids and all this stuff.
00:14:03 And so again, as a 20 year old kid, you’re kind of processing all this and
00:14:06 you just realize like the gun I have in my arm, my hands, it’s real for a reason.
00:14:10 Right.
00:14:11 And we better take this seriously.
00:14:13 This is not, you know, let’s joking around in kind of the barracks and, you
00:14:17 know, all the things that you would expect, you know, guys you’re doing in the army.
00:14:20 So I think that was like the moment where I said, Hey, I’m going to learn a lot here.
00:14:24 Uh, and I got to make sure I get home.
00:14:26 And you snap it into the training, but nevertheless, I mean, you’re somebody
00:14:30 who thinks philosophically about this world now, right?
00:14:32 You’re, uh, very intelligent and things deeply about the world.
00:14:37 So looking back, you mentioned hatred in the 14 year old kids eyes, there’s death.
00:14:42 So the way you kind of described this whole story is like training kicks in.
00:14:47 This, this shit is serious.
00:14:50 Like this is, uh, you know, there’s a reason there’s a gun in, in your hand.
00:14:54 So there’s a strategic element.
00:14:56 There’s like, you have to get the job done.
00:14:58 There’s a task at hand, but at the same time, if you zoom out, there’s a kid who
00:15:03 has hate for you, uh, some of those kids would probably, if they could, would kill
00:15:09 you for the thing you stand for in the uniform.
00:15:12 And then there’s bullets flying at you.
00:15:15 And then there’s people that some of them you might already care for deeply are dying.
00:15:22 What the hell do you make of that?
00:15:26 Do you think about that?
00:15:27 Does any of that haunt you?
00:15:29 How do you think about the world having witnessed that?
00:15:32 Yeah.
00:15:33 A lot of times when we would talk about it, we were there.
00:15:36 If I was that kid, I would want to kill that person too.
00:15:40 Right.
00:15:40 I would have hatred as well.
00:15:42 Right.
00:15:42 Imagine if in the United States tomorrow, you and I woke up and there was tanks
00:15:46 rolling down the street from another country and they were basically imposing
00:15:51 their rules on us, whether they thought it was the right thing to do or not, the
00:15:55 soldiers were there and they were doing this, we would probably feel not so great
00:15:59 about it, right.
00:16:00 At kind of a minimum and at a maximum, we’d be really, really pissed off.
00:16:03 We would fight back.
00:16:04 And so what you don’t understand when you’re in the heat of the moment is why
00:16:08 does this person feel this way?
00:16:09 And so what’s very weird is, well, what happens if a year ago, US soldiers came
00:16:15 through, they got shot at, they returned fire and they killed that kid’s uncle.
00:16:20 You’d be pissed off.
00:16:21 Right.
00:16:22 And so you just start to understand, like we look at war very black and white.
00:16:26 We look at it very much from a clinical perspective.
00:16:29 We’re going to go, we’re going to go kind of invade somewhere.
00:16:32 We are the most dominant military in the world.
00:16:34 We’re very good at invading.
00:16:36 And we will crush wherever we invade, but when you’re actually on the ground, what
00:16:40 you understand is the humanity of it all.
00:16:42 Right.
00:16:42 And so what becomes very interesting is pretty much every veteran I know that
00:16:47 comes back, they’re some of the largest pacifists in the world.
00:16:50 And I always revert back to Marcus Luttrell, who was a famous Navy SEAL, and
00:16:55 there’s a movie made about him and his story.
00:16:57 He gave a speech one time that I saw and he basically said, listen, if you’re a
00:17:01 politician, your job is to be the diplomat, do everything you possibly can, not to
00:17:06 send me and my friends anywhere, because when you send us, we’re going to bring
00:17:10 hell with us, right.
00:17:12 And understand that is the business that we are in, but every single other person
00:17:16 up until we get sent has a job to do to prevent having to send us.
00:17:20 And I think that ultimately that’s where you see a lot of kind of this generation
00:17:23 that has fought in Iraq and Afghanistan that says, listen, maybe we shouldn’t be
00:17:28 running around the world being the police, maybe we shouldn’t be going and invading
00:17:32 all these different countries, because when you actually get to see firsthand
00:17:35 what happens, it’s just something that we should avoid at all costs.
00:17:39 But if we have to go, or we have to actually send soldiers somewhere, understand
00:17:44 what happens when that occurs.
00:17:46 And you know, the United States is the best in the world at doing it.
00:17:49 Do you think, I’m thinking about that kid with the hatred.
00:17:53 Do you think there will always be hatred in the world?
00:17:55 Do you think there will always be hatred?
00:17:57 In the world, do you think, uh, from another perspective, do you think there’ll
00:18:01 be war always, is that a fundamental aspect of human nature or is that
00:18:06 something we can escape?
00:18:08 Yeah.
00:18:08 So war, I think has like very negative connotations in terms of bullets and
00:18:12 bombs and death and kind of just very morbid type, um, um, understanding.
00:18:19 Conflict on the other hand, I think people look at and say, of course
00:18:22 there will always be conflict, right.
00:18:23 You just can’t have billions of people all on the same planet without some
00:18:27 level of disagreement, whether that’s a disagreement of ideas, disagreement
00:18:31 over physical, you know, geography, uh, or something else.
00:18:34 And so I think conflict will always exist.
00:18:37 The question is what form does war take moving forward?
00:18:40 And so in my mind, you know, it’s starting to look a lot more clinical,
00:18:44 right?
00:18:45 A lot more drones, a lot less soldiers on the ground, a lot more use of special
00:18:49 forces and kind of these small, highly specialized teams rather than kind of big
00:18:52 mechanical armies.
00:18:54 Um, and then you get into like the information warfare and kind of cyber
00:18:57 warfare and you start to understand that we’re at war with a lot of people right
00:19:01 now, right?
00:19:02 Doesn’t mean we’re necessarily dropping bombs, uh, on their countries.
00:19:05 Doesn’t necessarily mean we’re sending soldiers there, but on a daily basis, we
00:19:09 are engaged in these kind of, you know, cyber battlefields.
00:19:12 And so if that’s where war starts to play out, um, it, one changes the tools
00:19:17 and tactics and techniques that, uh, we need to arm our country and other
00:19:21 countries will arm themselves with.
00:19:22 But it also changes the way that we think about war, right?
00:19:25 It seems, it sounds a lot less worrisome if I say, Hey, we’re going to go to war
00:19:30 with a country, but by the way, there’s going to be no death.
00:19:33 Right?
00:19:33 Okay.
00:19:33 Like that doesn’t sound nearly as bad as, Hey, we’re going to go send 10,000
00:19:36 soldiers and you know, some percentage of them are going to die on the battlefield.
00:19:39 And then we’re going to, you know, basically pipe back videos and articles
00:19:43 saying that American soldiers are dying.
00:19:45 Yeah.
00:19:45 It does seem to be a fundamental difference between the, the Genghis Khan
00:19:49 style, like if I would feel differently if somebody like hand to hand with a knife
00:19:58 murdered my family versus cyber security, why I stole all their data, stole all
00:20:04 their money, stole everything they own, falsified their identity, all that kind
00:20:08 of stuff that those are both traumatic events, but they do seem to be
00:20:15 fundamentally different, but maybe that’s actually very narrow style thinking,
00:20:20 because ultimately you have to think about what is life and what’s happiness.
00:20:25 And, um, it’s like the samurai thinking, I’m not sure what’s more painful.
00:20:32 If I take it to myself, like, I’m not sure what I would rather live through
00:20:37 being stabbed, like to death, or having my identity stolen, all my money stolen,
00:20:47 or maybe reputation destroyed, like with lies or something like that.
00:20:54 That that’s very interesting to think about.
00:20:56 If you think about quality of life and all those kinds of things,
00:20:58 well, one’s finite, right?
00:21:01 One’s the pain ends and the other is kind of a long prolonged, almost torture.
00:21:05 So it’s physical pain versus psychological pain.
00:21:08 It’s really interesting to, it’s really interesting to think about.
00:21:12 And I think another key piece to this, which I don’t have answers to, but,
00:21:15 but there is an element of emotion and rage in the physical violence versus
00:21:20 again, more of that clinical, you know, information warfare.
00:21:22 And so, um, it’s really easy to show a battlefield where there’s death on both
00:21:29 sides and bombs being dropped and buildings destroyed, um, it fits very
00:21:34 well into propaganda for everyone involved, right, regardless of what side
00:21:38 they’re on, when you start talking about cyber warfare, how many times have
00:21:42 we seen a big company get data hacked or information hacked and we all, you
00:21:47 know, read the headlines, maybe throw a tweet out and then move on with our day
00:21:50 and don’t remember it anymore.
00:21:52 And so it’s just very, very different.
00:21:54 I think, uh, in, in the, uh, motion and response that it invokes and people
00:21:57 when they hear about it as well.
00:21:59 Given the conflict, do you think people are fundamentally good?
00:22:02 Are we all sort of like blank slates that could be evil given the environment
00:22:08 or good given the environment, or can we kind of, is there some base that we can
00:22:13 rely on that people, if left to their own devices will be good and trustworthy and
00:22:21 honest, I think you have to separate out intention from action.
00:22:25 So if you talk to some of the most heinous criminals in the world, they’ve
00:22:30 rationalized their actions, and so you’ve got to ask yourself, what is the level
00:22:36 of which they understood what they were doing, that they intended to be malicious,
00:22:41 nefarious, um, and kind of do bad things versus the actual actions themselves.
00:22:47 And so, um, even as a society, you know, if let’s say, for example, you were to
00:22:52 walk down the street and you were to murder somebody on the sidewalk, completely
00:22:55 unprovoked, we would look at you and say, you are a, you know, a sociopath, uh, you
00:23:01 have everything wrong with you and that is somebody that we do not want in our
00:23:04 society, and therefore we will levy, you know, the extent of rule of law against
00:23:09 you in order to protect society from you, right?
00:23:12 And you become that monster, that beast, if in the same situation, somebody walks
00:23:16 in your house with a knife and you murder them or you kill them, now we put you up
00:23:22 on a pedestal as a hero, and those are two very, very different responses.
00:23:26 They may be just as morbid, they may be just as violent, uh, in terms of the
00:23:31 actual actions, the intentions, the way it’s perceived is very, very different.
00:23:35 And so I think that, uh, as a world, we like a very black and white, clean cut,
00:23:40 you know, good, bad, uh, I think the world’s a lot more messy than that.
00:23:43 And I think that, uh, a lot of times when you look at intention, it’s hard for us
00:23:48 to tell what somebody’s intention is, but I’ve looked at a lot of, you know, people
00:23:53 who are both considered very good and also a lot of people are considered very
00:23:56 bad and they sound very similar in terms of the motivations for their actions.
00:24:01 And so I think that it’s just a really hard problem that probably doesn’t
00:24:04 have a perfect solution or an answer.
00:24:06 Do you give much value to the intention or do you think it’s better to look at
00:24:10 the results of the behavior, uh, as opposed to the, the underlying ideology?
00:24:17 Underlying ideology, the underlying intention of, of the behavior.
00:24:22 I think that intention gets at the question of like, are people inherently
00:24:25 good or bad, right?
00:24:26 Is I think that they’re generally inherently good and the intention is
00:24:30 driving towards the thing that they believe is the best outcome or the best
00:24:35 thing for them to pursue the action.
00:24:37 I think is where we spend most of our time focused on.
00:24:40 Um, and frankly, we actually may be a better society or, uh, kind of kinder
00:24:45 as a humanity to each other if we spent more time looking at
00:24:48 intention rather than action.
00:24:50 Um, but again, you know, if somebody walks down the street and murders
00:24:53 somebody, uh, it’s really hard to have a conversation and it may be inappropriate
00:24:57 for us to have a conversation about intention versus, uh, any level of,
00:25:02 of action, right?
00:25:04 So you’re one of the prominent, I would say even the faces of the, the world
00:25:10 of cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, that whole entire world was dive straight in and
00:25:16 ask, uh, do you think, do you consider yourself a Bitcoin maximalist?
00:25:23 I think that the way I really look at it is, uh, I work backwards off of what
00:25:28 is the maximalism that I believe in and the world that I believe in is, uh, kind
00:25:33 of an automated world that is run on these open decentralized protocols.
00:25:39 Uh, and what we ultimately do is we return sovereignty and individualism
00:25:45 and, and kind of, uh, personal responsibility and liberty, uh,
00:25:49 to people over institutions.
00:25:51 And what we end up doing is we end up, uh, kind of taking what has historically
00:25:56 been a very analog or physical world economy and, uh, geographic rule.
00:26:01 And we then kind of put it in the cloud and this digital economy becomes the
00:26:05 prevalent way that we all, uh, conduct commerce, communicate, uh, et cetera.
00:26:11 And so it’s less about any one single technology to me, right?
00:26:15 I think that it’s pretty stupid for people to, um, almost in a way, uh, put
00:26:20 an inanimate object up for, uh, you know, some sort of obsession, uh, to me,
00:26:26 it’s much more about the ideals, the ethos, uh, and the most rational, uh,
00:26:31 and likely path to that kind of end result or that world that I think, you
00:26:35 know, is at this point, just a foregone conclusion.
00:26:37 So the distinction there, and maybe people don’t know the terminology,
00:26:41 maximalism is basically saying, I really think this is a good idea.
00:26:49 Like, uh, you know, if you prefer a certain kind of diet, it could be a
00:26:52 keto maximalist saying like, this is probably, maybe it’s not a hundred
00:26:57 percent, but probably the diet that’s healthiest for humans kind of thing.
00:27:01 In the same sense, Bitcoin maximalism is saying, you know, of course we
00:27:06 don’t know, there’s a lot of uncertainty, but this particular technology seems
00:27:10 to be the best representations of some set of ideals that defines progress
00:27:14 in the future, but you’re drawing a distinction between sort of, um, cult
00:27:20 like obsession about an object of any kind, whether it’s keto, uh, or, uh,
00:27:26 Bitcoin, and just sort of believing that a technology is the best representation
00:27:32 of a particular set of ideals.
00:27:34 And you believe that sort of, uh, this moving into the cloud, uh, both
00:27:41 the distributed nature of it, but also just the digital nature of it is
00:27:45 something that’s going to, uh, be a positive step for humanity.
00:27:49 Yeah.
00:27:49 I would even take maximalism a step further, and it’s not just the kind
00:27:53 of singular viewpoint of this is the best, it’s also, uh, an element
00:27:58 of it’s anti everything else.
00:28:00 Right.
00:28:01 So, you know, take keto, for example, uh, the keto diet is not only the best diet.
00:28:05 All the other diets are bad.
00:28:06 Yeah.
00:28:07 Right.
00:28:07 And so it’s, it’s a very binary view of the world.
00:28:10 Um, I think that what’s probably most misunderstood about, uh, let’s take
00:28:14 Bitcoin, uh, as a specific example, is that most of the people who are labeled
00:28:18 Bitcoin maximalist, they would be open minded if they believe that something
00:28:23 else came along that was a superior technology or had a, a better, um, kind
00:28:28 of probability of achieving again, that ultimate vision, I think where, uh,
00:28:32 there’s this controversy and kind of clashing of, uh, ideas is that the
00:28:37 Bitcoin community believes Bitcoin is the best way to do that and has very
00:28:41 specific arguments as to why the other things are not right.
00:28:45 And so what ultimately ends up happening, which is very weird in the investing
00:28:49 world, right, it’s unlikely that you and I are going to sit down and you’re
00:28:52 going to like Apple stock is the best stock and there’s no other stock.
00:28:54 That’s worth anything.
00:28:55 Yeah.
00:28:55 Right.
00:28:56 And, uh, and then also it’s very weird if you said to me, um, you know, this
00:29:00 stock is worth zero and that’s where everything that I own, I’ve put on a
00:29:05 short on one single company, right?
00:29:06 There’s diversification.
00:29:07 There’s a much more kind of probabilistic thinking in finance in general.
00:29:10 Uh, when it comes to this specific world of cryptocurrency and kind of digital
00:29:15 assets, if you will, uh, is there’s two main groups of people who are trying to
00:29:20 build two very, very different things at the onset, but when you unpack it and you
00:29:25 start to spend more and more time on it, you rise, they’re actually trying to
00:29:28 accomplish the same thing in two different ways.
00:29:30 So Bitcoin is seen, I think, as a, uh, a digital currency, right?
00:29:33 Kind of the idea that this is going to ascend to become the next global
00:29:36 reserve currency, it’s a programmatic kind of digital currency, but it’s
00:29:40 also a programmatic kind of transparent, um, money.
00:29:43 And, uh, it’s essentially just 180 degrees difference than the inflationary,
00:29:48 you know, non transparent, uh, fiat currencies that exist in the world.
00:29:52 You then look at kind of everything else, right?
00:29:54 And you have a lot of smart contract platforms and various things that
00:29:57 they’re all going after at Ethereum with kind of the world computer
00:30:00 approach, and you can kind of go down the line with all their other
00:30:02 arguments as to what they’re trying to build.
00:30:04 I think the big difference just comes down to, uh, innovation versus security.
00:30:09 And when you simplistically look at it via that lens, you actually understand
00:30:15 where both people are coming from.
00:30:16 When you say security, sorry to interrupt, do you mean financial
00:30:19 security or do you mean like literally the, the, the security of the,
00:30:23 of the particular cryptocurrency?
00:30:25 The, the technical security of a blockchain.
00:30:28 So when you look at, let’s say, um, Bitcoin versus Ethereum, right?
00:30:31 Bitcoin has decided in that community has decided security is the number
00:30:34 one thing that you have to optimize for.
00:30:36 So decentralization, um, over everything else in terms of transaction
00:30:41 speeds, uh, cost, anything that you could come up with, that is, uh, something
00:30:45 that would be important for a currency.
00:30:47 The number one thing to optimize for is security.
00:30:50 And as we have seen, uh, with a lot of technologies, right?
00:30:53 Facebook’s, uh, Libra or now what’s known as DiEM is a great example.
00:30:56 Uh, not having decentralization is susceptible to the nation state.
00:31:01 And so a lot of these other platforms and blockchains, uh, they say security
00:31:07 is important, but it’s not the most important thing we believe there’s a
00:31:10 trade off between, you know, a little less security and transaction speed or
00:31:15 composability or whatever it is.
00:31:17 And so take a theorem as kind of the second, uh, largest, uh, community
00:31:22 and blockchain by market cap.
00:31:23 It was created because somebody wanted to, or a group of people
00:31:25 wanted to do something on Bitcoin.
00:31:26 They felt like they couldn’t do it.
00:31:27 And so they said, Hey, we’re going to go create something that has the smart
00:31:30 contracts that we can then go do here.
00:31:32 Again, this is technology, right?
00:31:33 And so the tribalism of like, you’re right, you’re wrong to me is a little
00:31:37 childish, just in the sense of like the market is going to decide what is most
00:31:40 valuable.
00:31:41 And then when you go inside of that community, like there’s a lot of dumb
00:31:44 ideas, people are trying to build around Bitcoin, but there’s also a lot of really,
00:31:47 really great ideas that people are trying to build around Bitcoin, same thing in
00:31:50 the Ethereum world. And so what you end up getting, I think, is the tribalism
00:31:54 really comes out of the idea that there’s a ticker price that is attached
00:31:57 to all of this, right?
00:31:59 If you go back in history of technology, venture capitalists didn’t sit around
00:32:04 the table and yell and scream at each other in this like religious zealot way,
00:32:08 right? Because you bet on one type of cloud computing platform.
00:32:11 And I bet on another one, right?
00:32:13 It’s just the market’s going to decide, we’re both going to work on and try to
00:32:15 make our successful, uh, here in the world.
00:32:18 I think that the sensitivity and mainly it comes out of the Bitcoin community is
00:32:21 that a lot of this is being funded, not only by venture capitalists and kind of
00:32:26 professional money managers and asset allocators.
00:32:29 There’s also this element of including the retail investor and the public.
00:32:33 And so it, whether it’s through ICOs or some other forms of capital raising,
00:32:38 um, there’s arguments for it saying, Hey, look, uh, this now gives kind of the
00:32:42 little guy, some sort of access and an ability to do it.
00:32:45 But there’s also arguments against it. Some people say, Hey, it’s easier to dupe
00:32:48 them and it’s easier to run scams and kind of all this stuff.
00:32:50 And so ultimately I think that, uh, crypto is this like arena of ideas.
00:32:55 It is literally the war of attrition and, uh, what will end up happening is 10
00:33:00 years from now, you and I will talk and we’re going to say, well, the market said
00:33:04 X was valuable and Y wasn’t.
00:33:06 And so all of the tribalism from between, you know, here and there, uh, it’s fun.
00:33:11 It’s, you know, engaging.
00:33:12 Whatever, but ultimately it doesn’t really matter because the public is involved.
00:33:15 There’s a lot of personalities.
00:33:16 And so a lot of times we focus on the extreme personalities that do a lot of
00:33:22 maybe, uh, pardon the French shit talking.
00:33:24 And, and so we kind of focus on that, but that’s not necessarily a representative
00:33:28 of the communities involved.
00:33:30 Let’s talk about Bitcoin first, and then it’ll help us use as a kind of comparison
00:33:33 to Ethereum or whatever else.
00:33:36 So when you think about what is money, right?
00:33:38 That’s kind of the first question.
00:33:39 People really kind of go down the rabbit hole on, and ultimately today,
00:33:43 it’s a belief system, right?
00:33:44 And you may believe that one currency has more value over another because
00:33:47 it’s backed by a certain military or a certain government has a monetary policy
00:33:52 that you believe in or don’t believe in.
00:33:54 Um, but ultimately it’s a belief system that there’s nothing backing this, uh,
00:33:58 other than, uh, a government asks you to pay your taxes in it, right?
00:34:01 And they can have a monopoly on violence, uh, in terms of they can put you in jail.
00:34:04 If you don’t pay your taxes, uh, they can, uh, they can, uh, they can
00:34:07 go to other countries and they can invade and do all this stuff.
00:34:11 It wasn’t always like that, right?
00:34:13 It was historically a layer one technology was gold.
00:34:17 And so gold was a fantastic store of value.
00:34:20 You knew that if you held gold, it wasn’t going to be inflated away.
00:34:23 It was sound money was outside the system and no one could create more of it.
00:34:27 And the reason why that’s important is because that optimization for store
00:34:30 of value served as the bedrock of the entire stack of, uh, money.
00:34:35 Uh, for 5,000 years. And so the problem with that though, again, trade off between
00:34:40 store of value is it was really hard to transact with, right?
00:34:43 If I came in here and I, and you said, Hey, I want a couple of ounces of gold and I
00:34:46 had a whole bar, I’d have to literally shave off the ounces of gold.
00:34:49 Uh, it’s heavy to carry around.
00:34:51 If you said to me, Hey, you’re in one city, mail it to me, really expensive.
00:34:55 You know, there’s all these issues with it.
00:34:57 And so ultimately what people said was, well, let’s create a second layer on top
00:35:01 of that gold in order to make it easier to transact with it.
00:35:03 That gold in order to make it easier to transact.
00:35:06 And so we created paper claims on the gold.
00:35:08 So, Hey, don’t carry around the gold in your pocket anymore.
00:35:10 Put it in a vault or a bank.
00:35:11 They’re going to issue a paper claim.
00:35:13 Now you and I can trade these paper claims around.
00:35:16 And at any point, if you want the gold, you just show up and you say, Hey, give
00:35:18 me three ounces of gold or two bars or whatever.
00:35:21 And so that actually made the store of value.
00:35:24 It was allowed that to be the anchor and kind of the most important part, the
00:35:27 security of your, of your purchasing power, but now it became easier to transact.
00:35:31 And then eventually we built layers even on top of that.
00:35:32 So everything from electronic money, uh, kind of electronic UCIPS, all the way
00:35:36 to credit and other systems on top of that gold 1971 comes around and obviously
00:35:40 we D peg from that gold, right?
00:35:42 And it was a temporary measure at the time.
00:35:44 We ended up not going back to it.
00:35:45 And so what you moved or transitioned from was sound money, which was outside
00:35:49 the system, no one could create more to now the government had full control.
00:35:52 They could create as much as they wanted to.
00:35:54 They tried to be responsible and disciplined, but obviously hard to do.
00:35:57 Sometimes we’ve been really good at it.
00:35:58 Sometimes we’ve been less good at it.
00:35:59 And then you go around the world and some countries have absolutely sucked
00:36:02 at it and some have been good at it.
00:36:04 And so when you look into the Bitcoin world, I think that when you look at
00:36:07 this optimization for security, similar to gold store value, people hold it.
00:36:12 Purchasing power has gone up a lot year over year.
00:36:15 It’s like a 200% year over year compound annual growth for over a decade.
00:36:19 Right?
00:36:19 And so you measure this in kind of the us dollar exchange price, et cetera.
00:36:23 But there’s still a lot of people who will yell and scream about it’s slow.
00:36:27 It’s costly, right?
00:36:28 All the things around those transactions that are obstacles or challenges.
00:36:32 And so there’s basically two schools of thought, and this is where we
00:36:35 kind of get into the bifurcation.
00:36:37 Some people just said, Hey, this technology is antiquated.
00:36:40 We can’t use it.
00:36:41 It doesn’t make sense.
00:36:42 Uh, and so what we’re going to do is we’re going to go build something new.
00:36:45 And so you go get, you know, kind of all of the various versions there.
00:36:48 The Bitcoin community says, no, just like gold had paper claims and other
00:36:52 things built on top and layer two, three, four, five, we’re going to do that here.
00:36:55 And so they’ve already started to build kind of this layer two where
00:36:58 it’s easier to transact.
00:36:59 It’s cheaper, it’s faster, et cetera.
00:37:02 And so I actually think that both of those worlds are going
00:37:05 to coexist in the future.
00:37:07 The big question is just which one has more importance, right?
00:37:11 So again, get out of binary.
00:37:13 It’s just probabilistically.
00:37:14 And so my personal belief is that the security that the store of value
00:37:19 component as the bedrock for a monetary system is essential, right?
00:37:23 Like that is the most important thing because you can always improve
00:37:28 the other components, but you can’t go back and fix that kind of core piece.
00:37:32 So money, money’s a, an idea that we all it’s like an emergent
00:37:37 idea that we believe in.
00:37:39 You’re saying that security is one of the most fundamental catalysts or fuels
00:37:44 for that idea to sort of take hold and be stable and sort of take over the world.
00:37:50 The other stuff is really nice to have, but if you don’t have the security,
00:37:54 you’re not going to, like, it’s not going to spread in the viral
00:37:57 sense in, in our human brains.
00:38:00 Well, and especially in light of the kind of the macro economy, right?
00:38:04 So like, what’s so fascinating about the last 12 months is, um, in
00:38:09 investing in general, the best returns, right?
00:38:12 I kind of put that in air quotes a little bit is something that is different
00:38:15 than everything else and right.
00:38:17 So being different and wrong just means you’re an idiot, right?
00:38:20 Being different and right means that that’s where kind of the outsize returns
00:38:23 are. And so if you look around the world at currencies today, they’re all the same.
00:38:27 They’re all inflationary, unlimited supply controlled by a government done and
00:38:32 decisions made in a very non transparent process.
00:38:35 And what we’ve watched is the manipulation of all of those currencies
00:38:38 over the last 12 months in direct contrast to that is this thing, Bitcoin,
00:38:43 which is outside of the system, has a finite supply, transparent and programmatic
00:38:47 monetary policy. And so when you see those two systems kind of, um, in comparison
00:38:53 to each other in the United States, there’s a lot of people who say the dollar
00:38:56 works great for me. I can go to the ATM, I can get out physical cash.
00:39:00 If I want to swipe a card, I could do that.
00:39:02 My money in my bank doesn’t lose 50% of its value in a day in terms of
00:39:06 purchasing power. Like the dollar’s pretty good.
00:39:09 When you go to other countries, that might not be the case.
00:39:11 And so I do think that there’s a kind of a relative analysis that goes on here.
00:39:16 If you compare Bitcoin to the dollar, there’s all kinds of arguments to make
00:39:19 that the dollar is better as a medium of exchange today.
00:39:22 But if I go and I tell you, well, what about in these kind of extreme examples
00:39:26 of Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Turkey, et cetera.
00:39:30 And so I think that that’s kind of one perspective to view this through is
00:39:34 security versus all of the innovative components of a medium of exchange, et
00:39:38 cetera. The second thing, though, that I think is really important is
00:39:41 around censorship.
00:39:43 And so when you look at, again, every currency in the world today, every
00:39:47 single financial service, they’re highly susceptible to censorship.
00:39:51 And actually, I would argue the United States is in the business of
00:39:54 censorship in terms of how many countries around the world do we sanction
00:39:59 and cut them off in either a minimal or a very material way from the global
00:40:04 financial system. So when you define it, when you talk about censorship,
00:40:08 do you mean just the censoring your ability to operate freely in the world?
00:40:13 Well, look at it a little bit differently, which is that the United
00:40:16 States has kind of the American superiority because we have the bombs,
00:40:20 the bullets, the soldiers and that military might.
00:40:23 We basically impose our will around the world.
00:40:27 And so there’s a very strong argument to be made that there are certain
00:40:32 countries around the world that are being sanctioned, that the people
00:40:35 of those countries did nothing wrong. Now, the governments are bad, right?
00:40:39 In terms of the way that you and I would look at democratic rule or
00:40:43 communism or whatever it is, but the people are being hurt as well.
00:40:48 So there’s a whole group of people who would just argue, listen, we
00:40:51 shouldn’t hurt anyone at the expense of punishing one person or a group
00:40:55 of people. There’s other people argue against that. But I do think that
00:40:58 if you really kind of zoom out and you say, I’m going to take myself out
00:41:02 of the Western worldview, and I’m simply going to look at this as we’re
00:41:05 all part of the human race, it’s censorship. And there might be an
00:41:10 argument for censorship, but there also might be an argument against
00:41:13 the censorship. And so what Bitcoin does, as that specific kind of
00:41:18 payment network is it says anyone in the world with an internet connection,
00:41:21 I don’t care where you were born, what language you speak, what
00:41:24 religion you are, your wealth status, your education status, none of it
00:41:27 matters. If you have an internet connection, you’re not going to
00:41:30 care. If you have an internet connection, you can plug into this
00:41:34 monetary system. And you can move value around the world to anyone
00:41:38 else without asking for permission. And in the United States, we
00:41:43 basically have that ability in the US dollar kind of traditional
00:41:45 banking system, I can pretty much send money to almost anyone I want
00:41:48 unless they’re a really bad person that’s on some list or something.
00:41:51 Most people in the world don’t have that capability. And so what
00:41:54 you’re essentially doing is you’re democratizing access to a true store
00:41:59 value, and a medium of exchange, right. And so what you see in many
00:42:05 of these countries is that when their currency starts to fail, the
00:42:09 first thing that a government or a group of people in power and
00:42:13 influence do is they lock the citizens into the currency with
00:42:16 capital controls. Why? Because if you let them out, it exasperates
00:42:22 the problem. And so now what we’re seeing is we basically are giving
00:42:27 a tool to billions of people around the world that is a peaceful
00:42:30 protest. Right? You and I had no say at all. When not only the
00:42:36 Federal Reserve and elected officials here in the United
00:42:38 States, but central banks around the world over the last 12 months
00:42:41 decided to create trillions of dollars and injected into the
00:42:44 monetary system. Right? They have arguments, and some of them are
00:42:47 very good arguments as to why they should do that. They’re
00:42:49 trying to mitigate short term pain. Long term, they’ll figure
00:42:51 out the other issues, right? They have very kind of elaborate and
00:42:55 well articulated kind of viewpoint as to why they’re
00:42:58 doing it. But you and I had no say. And so when you start to
00:43:02 look at, we have a very small group of people in this world,
00:43:06 both in our country and in countries around the world that
00:43:08 make these decisions that have very, very far reaching kind of
00:43:12 impact. And on top of that, in many cases, there’s actually not
00:43:16 that much kind of accountability. Because usually
00:43:19 these are not elected officials who are making some of these
00:43:21 decisions, these are appointed. And you can argue that, hey, we
00:43:24 elected somebody who appointed them. But at the same time, that
00:43:28 accountability isn’t quite there. And so I think ultimately,
00:43:31 when you just back out, you say, you know, what is Bitcoin? Why
00:43:33 is it important to the world? It is giving access to anyone in
00:43:37 the world with an internet connection to a store of value
00:43:40 and a monitoring network that allows them to peacefully
00:43:43 protest and to opt out of a system that pretty much is not
00:43:48 working for majority of people in the world.
00:43:51 So it’s moving the power from these centralized places,
00:43:54 sometimes unelected to the individuals and to the people.
00:43:59 So the dollar does seem to work for Americans and for many
00:44:04 people in the world. But you kind of have a vision, you paint
00:44:08 a picture of a future where potentially we move to
00:44:11 cryptocurrency. So what kind of trajectory do you see where
00:44:15 Bitcoin can become the main currency in the world, or at
00:44:19 least cryptocurrency become the main way of storing value in the
00:44:23 world and basically overtake the dollar?
00:44:25 Yeah, so I always go first to we don’t need to have competition
00:44:30 like in terms of like a direct competition between the dollar
00:44:33 and Bitcoin, right? If you look at most technologies in the
00:44:37 world, the really valuable ones are actually market expanding
00:44:40 technologies, rather than simply just market share stealing
00:44:44 technologies, right. So if you look at Uber, for example, Uber
00:44:47 didn’t just say, Hey, I’m gonna go take out all the taxis,
00:44:49 right? It actually drastically expanded the market for people
00:44:52 now there’s literally millions of people in the United States
00:44:55 who don’t have cars because they use Uber, right. And so I think
00:44:57 that Bitcoin is very similar in that, yes, there is a component
00:45:02 of medium of exchange, in terms of the dollar. But also there is
00:45:06 this component of just store value assets in general. And so
00:45:09 when you start to look at Bitcoin, specifically, I think
00:45:11 that what you’re seeing is you’re seeing a generational gap,
00:45:14 where young people say, I grew up with a phone in my hand, I’m
00:45:17 digitally native, the whole idea of going to the bank and
00:45:20 sending a wire, or going to an ATM and getting physical cash is
00:45:24 an antiquated idea in their mind, right? I one time asked my
00:45:27 brother, he’s 24 years old. And I said, Hey, how do you send
00:45:30 money to your friends? And he gave me one answer, which I
00:45:32 expected, which was Venmo. And the second answer, I didn’t
00:45:35 expect he said Uber. I said, How do you send money via Uber? He
00:45:38 said, Well, we get in a car together. And at the end, we
00:45:40 split the ride. And so again, you and I have probably both
00:45:44 done that. But I never thought of it as a way to send money to
00:45:47 each other. And so it is a psychological difference between
00:45:51 even me, who’s only, you know, a decade older than him or so,
00:45:54 and his peer group. And so I think as we’re watching kind of
00:45:57 Bitcoin continue this ascent, ultimately, what we’re seeing is
00:46:02 an entire generation of kids are saying, Listen, if I look at
00:46:05 financial assets across the board, I have stocks, I have
00:46:08 bonds, I have currencies, and I have commodities, I know that
00:46:12 bonds, from a real rate return perspective, is flat to
00:46:16 negative, right? I’m gonna make no money on this, because I have
00:46:19 a belief that my dollar is being devalued. And actually, what
00:46:23 we’re starting to see is, again, the internet has broken down
00:46:26 these walled gardens and kind of these centralized hubs of
00:46:30 information, in that if you were to look at, let’s say the stock
00:46:33 market, from 1971 to today, in dollar terms, it’s a 45 degree
00:46:37 angle right up into the right, right, you know, it’s kind of
00:46:39 seven, 810% growth, every year, it’s amazing, just get invested
00:46:44 in the stock market, and you’ll make money over a long period of
00:46:45 time, regardless of the dips along the way. If you do not
00:46:49 make that same stock market in gold, the stock market is down
00:46:52 since 1971. And so is it so much that the stock market is accruing
00:46:57 true value? Or is it that the underlying currency in which it
00:47:00 is denominated in is being devalued? Right? And I was being
00:47:03 devalued in a very disciplined way, right, in terms of it’s not
00:47:06 like it went 50% devaluation in a short period of time, but it’s
00:47:10 still being devalued. And so I think that people are waking up
00:47:13 to this idea that a traditional 6040 type global portfolio
00:47:16 doesn’t work anymore, right? 40% of it in bonds is just not going
00:47:21 to get it done. And so when you start to look at this, people
00:47:24 first look at Bitcoin via two main ways, in my opinion, they
00:47:28 look at it one as a store value, should I actually go and put
00:47:31 some of my wealth there use it as a savings technology, right?
00:47:34 We ask people in the traditional world, if you’re a teacher, a
00:47:37 fireman, an accounting, you know, mid level manager, we say,
00:47:41 hey, go do your job, be best in class as a fireman or as a
00:47:44 teacher. And then Oh, by the way, you have to be a
00:47:45 professional investor as well. Because if you just put your
00:47:48 dollars in your bank account, you’re literally going to have
00:47:50 your wealth devalued away over time. So you can’t just save you
00:47:54 have to invest. That is a really tall task for people, they have
00:47:58 a hard enough time just doing their job, right? Taking care of
00:48:00 their family, right? Now they got to go be an investor. So I
00:48:03 think savings technology for Bitcoin standpoint is, if you
00:48:06 buy satoshis or Bitcoin, over time, it will increase from a
00:48:11 purchasing power standpoint, because there’s a fixed supply
00:48:13 and demand continues to rise. But then you start to look at
00:48:16 well, what other assets do people put in their portfolios,
00:48:19 whether it’s art, it’s real estate, precious metals, or
00:48:23 something else. Most of those assets are not because people
00:48:27 actually think that they’re going to go up in value over
00:48:29 time, they’re using the store of value. Right? The reason why
00:48:33 somebody buys gold is because the store of value, right
00:48:35 historically, that’s a narrative driven type asset, though,
00:48:40 right? We tell people it’s scarce, we tell people that it
00:48:43 is a store of value. When you look at it, though, we don’t
00:48:46 know how much gold exists in the world, we have a good estimate,
00:48:48 right? But we don’t actually we can’t prove how much there is.
00:48:51 We don’t know how much is coming out of the ground every day.
00:48:53 Again, great, fantastic estimate. But we can’t prove it.
00:48:57 And we don’t know what the total supply and that’s what you mean
00:48:59 by narrative driven, we can’t really prove it, like
00:49:01 mathematically, we you I and everyone else in the world has
00:49:04 lived in a narrative driven world for the last couple of
00:49:06 decades, right? And what the internet and digital technologies
00:49:10 have done is it opened up the possibility and the desire from
00:49:14 people to have a world now where I can validate things. So when I
00:49:19 see that headline, I want to see you say whatever happened to the
00:49:24 news, if you’re the subject of the news, rather than have
00:49:26 somebody else tell me the story. If I see that you say something
00:49:29 is scarce, prove to me that it is scarce. And so I think that’s
00:49:33 kind of a psychological shift, the younger generation is
00:49:36 starting to understand because ultimately, you and I probably
00:49:39 grew up in a world where parents could tell us the story. And we
00:49:41 just believed it. You know, dad or mom says it must be true. If
00:49:45 my brother heard a story, what does he do? He goes to Google
00:49:47 and he looks it up. Randy comes back and usually tells my
00:49:50 parents, oh, you got the story wrong, right. And so I think
00:49:52 that that that provability or that that validation ends up
00:49:56 becoming really, really important. And so, you know,
00:49:57 look at something like gold, I think that people are
00:50:00 drastically underestimating the shift that’s underway right now.
00:50:03 Gold is one down in value since April, or I’m sorry, August of
00:50:08 2020. And so in a timeframe where central banks have had
00:50:13 historic quantitative using literally $6 trillion in the
00:50:16 United States, the one asset that historically has been the
00:50:19 best store of value and has, you know, in 2008 financial crisis
00:50:23 hit an all time high based on the government response has
00:50:26 actually suffered for a main part of this financial crisis.
00:50:32 You then look at central banks around the world who have been
00:50:34 very large holders of gold for a long time and net buyers on a
00:50:37 monthly basis. For multiple months, over the last six
00:50:41 months, they’ve been net sellers of gold. And then you
00:50:45 start to look at jewelry demand. So the actual non
00:50:47 monetary value of gold, and that demand for gold jewelry peaked
00:50:53 in 2013, and has continued to fall since. And so what you
00:50:57 start to say to yourself is take just the asset of gold, which
00:50:59 about $10 trillion market cap, and you say, Okay, well,
00:51:03 jewelry demand continues to fall, even if it’s at a slight
00:51:05 rate, but it’s continues to contract. You have central
00:51:08 banks that now at some times are net sellers and sometimes net
00:51:11 buyers, right? So okay, again, contraction there. And then from
00:51:14 the investment standpoint, the actual price, the daily price of
00:51:19 this continues to fall, which is a signal that there’s a
00:51:21 contracting demand from an investment perspective. That’s
00:51:25 93% of all use of gold, only 7% of it’s used for actual
00:51:29 technology and metal conduction and things like that. And so
00:51:32 you have a $10 trillion asset that it appears and again, maybe
00:51:36 data changes, and I’ll change my mind and other people change
00:51:38 their mind, but it appears is on the decline. And so if that
00:51:41 happens, you’re going to get the contraction of a $10 trillion
00:51:43 asset, where’s all that value go. And what you’re seeing is at
00:51:47 the same time that that asset is contracting, you’re also seeing
00:51:50 a massive influx from not only retail investors, not only kind
00:51:56 of the wealthy and the elite, but also from financial
00:51:58 institutions, corporations, pension funds, etc. into this
00:52:02 kind of digital sound money.
00:52:04 So you’re saying that there’s a kind of shift from gold to
00:52:07 Bitcoin, because they have a lot of the same properties, except
00:52:10 one is in the physical space, the other is in the digital
00:52:13 space. So do you see like central banks, quietly
00:52:18 potentially switching out from sort of gold to Bitcoin, like
00:52:24 naturally just doing is seeing a pattern that you’re referring
00:52:28 to now, but more drastically into the future, where there’s
00:52:31 a complete shift,
00:52:32 if you line up the gold community and the Bitcoin
00:52:35 community next to each other, they’ll agree on all the
00:52:37 problems that they that they see in the world, right? They’ll
00:52:41 actually agree on the solution that sound money is the solution
00:52:43 where they differentiate is the gold communities believes that
00:52:47 it’s the analog application of sound money, right? The physical
00:52:50 gold, that is the solution. The Bitcoin community believes the
00:52:53 digital application of sound money, Bitcoin, can you define
00:52:56 sound money, by the way, someone is just outside the system, and
00:52:59 no one can create more of it. So nobody controls it. This is
00:53:01 scarcity is fundamental. Exactly why scarcity important in money?
00:53:06 I think scarcity just has this very high correlation to value
00:53:09 across all assets, not just money, right? Money happens to
00:53:12 be the unit of account that we use in terms of daily commerce.
00:53:16 But whether it is, you know, as we’re seeing now, sneakers, or
00:53:21 you know, whatever it is, scarcity, ultimately, is that
00:53:24 signal of value, I think, and that’s just been the way that
00:53:27 humans derive value for literally, you know, thousands
00:53:31 and thousands of years. Yeah, I gotta say, that’s my view on
00:53:33 life and love in general, is scarcity is what makes it
00:53:38 valuable. People talk about immortality.
00:53:40 You know, I would like to be immortal, but it does, it does
00:53:43 seem that when you let go of the finiteness of life, I feel like
00:53:50 that meals and the experiences you have get devalued
00:53:56 significantly, like, the longer you live, the less value there
00:54:00 are in infinity, if you live forever, I worry that all the
00:54:05 meaning will dissipate. And the same thing with love, I think
00:54:08 criticism of sort of dating culture and all that kind of
00:54:11 stuff. Like I haven’t had shocking revelation that I’ve
00:54:15 never been on a tinder date or any of those things. I believe
00:54:19 that scarcity in dating and interaction is like, intensifies
00:54:24 the value of when the interactions do happen. So, when
00:54:28 they like when love does happen. And so in that sense, there’s
00:54:31 something magical about scarcity in the more subjective
00:54:34 psychological social world, as well. And perhaps money is just
00:54:38 another version of that, right? It’s just it’s all about the
00:54:41 stories and ideas we tell ourselves.
00:54:43 I think they’re actually more interconnected than you’re
00:54:46 giving it credit for, right? Which is, what is money? Money
00:54:49 is time, ultimately, right? The pursuit of the acquisition of
00:54:56 money, right, of whether it’s a currency or true money, is
00:55:00 because that should give you more time, right? And that’s
00:55:04 what would give you more time. And so one of my favorite
00:55:06 movies ever is, and it’s funny, because Justin Timberlake is in
00:55:10 it, is this movie in a lot of me, I lose most people at that
00:55:14 point, in time, in time. And basically, the premise of the
00:55:17 movie is that everyone has a clock that is embedded into
00:55:21 their arm. And so if you go to work, you basically put your
00:55:25 arm underneath when you leave, and there’s time that’s
00:55:28 deposited into your clock. And if your clock ever hits all
00:55:31 the arrows, you’re dead, you die on the spot. And so there’s
00:55:35 a number of scenes where people are basically running, you know,
00:55:38 to get to you, and I give you a little bit more time so that
00:55:40 you can get to work on Monday, and then you work to acquire
00:55:43 time. And so basically, time becomes this currency. But what
00:55:46 becomes very fascinating about it is there are sections in
00:55:49 society, where literally, there’s physical places, if you
00:55:53 only have, let’s say, 72 hours or less, you’re allowed to go to
00:55:57 Section One. Section Five, though, is because you have
00:56:00 years and years and years on your clock. And in this movie,
00:56:03 everyone at the age of 25 freezes from a biological aging
00:56:08 standpoint. So everyone stays the same, but you may have lived
00:56:12 for 1000 years. And so what becomes so fascinating about it
00:56:16 is that rich people have time, poor people do not have time.
00:56:21 And so in it, Justin Timberlake, the main character at one
00:56:23 point, essentially acquires a bunch of time, and he’s able to
00:56:27 go to one of the higher levels. And now he’s attending all these
00:56:32 galas and, you know, poker nights and all this stuff. And
00:56:35 one of the first things that he learns is that in the lower end
00:56:39 of society, everyone is running everywhere at all times in the
00:56:43 movie, because time is so finite, and it is so scarce.
00:56:46 And so therefore, why would I walk down the street, I must run
00:56:49 down the street. In the highest level of society, no one runs
00:56:54 anywhere. And in fact, if you run, you are seen as lower
00:56:58 class. Yeah, because wealth is time. And so that movie is, you
00:57:03 know, it’s got a ton of kind of things that you can pull out of
00:57:05 it, but to me is the perfect epitome of money is time. And so
00:57:10 when you start to think about the acquisition of money, right,
00:57:14 it goes to this whole idea of time billionaire. And I know
00:57:17 that there’s probably a lot of people who’ve heard about this
00:57:20 already. But if you think of a million seconds, it’s about 11
00:57:24 days, a billion seconds is 31 years. And so if I said to
00:57:30 somebody, you have to switch lives with Warren Buffett,
00:57:34 would you do it? Some people would say, Sure, that’d be
00:57:38 their initial reaction. But you got have to be you know, 92
00:57:41 years old, is the money worth the lack of time? Most people
00:57:46 would say no, right? And there’s this guy, Graham Duncan, who
00:57:48 really articulated this well. And ultimately, what ends up
00:57:52 happening is you rest time is more valuable than the money.
00:57:55 But the you acquire the money to gain more time. And the reason
00:58:00 is valuable is because of the scarcity of time. We currently
00:58:03 have the by the biology, the physics means that this is not
00:58:10 just the narrative we tell ourselves, maybe it is, I don’t
00:58:13 know, but it feels like pretty sure we’re mortal. And in that
00:58:18 sense, the scarcity there gives value to time, it’s fascinating
00:58:22 to think about all the thought experiments here of if that
00:58:26 could actually be on the economy, if you can actually
00:58:28 convert time in a frictionless way to money.
00:58:33 Well, and if you start to pull on this a little bit and say,
00:58:35 okay, a young person today, let’s say somebody in their
00:58:38 20s, has about 2 billion seconds left in their life, right, kind
00:58:41 of 60 years, give or take, based on life expectancy. They
00:58:47 usually, until they start to understand this concept, think
00:58:51 of wealth in dollar terms. But dollars are being devalued. And
00:58:57 so you know, a million dollars doesn’t get you what it used to
00:59:00 get, right is kind of an old adage. And so what you’re doing
00:59:03 is you’re pursuing something that ends up losing value. And
00:59:07 so it’s the constant rat race, it’s how do I constantly try to
00:59:11 get more? How do I get more dollars? How do I get more
00:59:13 dollars? Because even if I say to myself, you know, I’m going
00:59:15 to retire when I get $100,000. When I get the $100,000, the
00:59:21 $100,000 five years from now doesn’t buy me what I thought it
00:59:23 did. So now I need 500,000 or 200,000 or a million or whatever
00:59:27 the number is. And so ultimately, what ends up
00:59:29 occurring is that the Bitcoin community and many people in
00:59:33 kind of this idea of sound money is you want to be able to
00:59:36 acquire an asset that not only will hold the value, right, the
00:59:41 store of value over time, but it will actually appreciate over
00:59:45 time. And so when you look at something like Bitcoin against
00:59:48 the dollar against other types of assets, all of these assets
00:59:51 are down compared to Bitcoin, right? Now, some of that’s just
00:59:55 in the early days of kind of the pricing of an asset, you go from
00:59:58 very small to something much larger. But now what you start
01:00:01 to look at is well, if you have a finite supply of something,
01:00:05 what ends up happening is people begin to value it more. And so
01:00:10 in a world where dollars are infinite, and other fiat
01:00:13 currencies are infinite, Bitcoin becomes very, very interesting,
01:00:17 very special, and something that is very aspirational. And so I
01:00:21 think that’s where you’re starting to see people say,
01:00:23 wait a second, this is something where that finite, secure store
01:00:28 of value is essential to wealth generation and preservation over
01:00:32 a long period of time.
01:00:33 And if Sam Harris is right, that free will is an illusion. This
01:00:37 is really interesting to think about. Maybe time is a kind of
01:00:42 blockchain, because you can’t change anything. And then the
01:00:46 physical space time of the universe is a ledger. So maybe
01:00:55 it won’t be Bitcoin that replaces gold, maybe it’ll be
01:00:58 time, once we crack open that, in fact, the universe is fully
01:01:03 deterministic. So maybe that’s what like Eric Weinstein is
01:01:05 afraid of, once you figure out the theories of everything of
01:01:09 physics, we’ll be able to then start trading, create a market
01:01:15 out of like the very fabric of reality. And that way break it.
01:01:19 Well, if you look at infinite inflationary type currencies,
01:01:25 you can’t do that, right? Because it constantly is losing
01:01:27 value. When you look at a finite asset, again, that has the
01:01:31 provability of the actual finite element to it. Ultimately, the
01:01:36 wealth is that marketplace. Yeah. And so, you know, I always
01:01:42 kind of try to highlight for people, the top 55% of Americans
01:01:47 understand something that the bottom 45% don’t, they invest,
01:01:51 right, the bottom 45% consume the top 55% invest. And that’s
01:01:56 why we have a wealth inequality gap. And it continues to get
01:01:59 wider and wider and wider is because the people who are
01:02:02 holding the devaluing assets, and saving are watching their
01:02:06 wealth be devalued away. And there’s arguments and
01:02:09 controversy over how fast that’s happening, but it’s
01:02:11 happening. The people who are holding the assets that have any
01:02:15 level of scarcity, right, real estate may not be finite, but
01:02:18 it’s scarce, right? Art may not be finite, but it’s scarce. Gold
01:02:22 may not be finite, but it’s scarce. Those assets continue to
01:02:26 appreciate against the devaluing currency. And so when
01:02:30 you then say, No, I have complete finite supply, with
01:02:35 provability, and this transparency around it, where
01:02:38 everyone knows how much is there and what where it’s going. And
01:02:41 now all of a sudden, you and I can transact back and forth that
01:02:45 value. And it is a representation of time. Because
01:02:48 what I can essentially do is if I gather or acquire more of
01:02:51 that wealth, I then can apply leverage to my life. I can use
01:02:57 machines, humans, or some other resources. And basically now
01:03:03 free up my time.
01:03:05 Yeah, and it’s not fun about the way you are trading time.
01:03:07 Maybe it’s a little bit indirect, but maybe not. So just
01:03:12 because I brought up Eric and you’re on Twitter, I’d love to
01:03:15 hear your opinions. I talk to him a lot. He seems to have
01:03:19 stepped into the beautiful dance of human communication and the
01:03:23 social dynamics that is the Bitcoin cryptocurrency
01:03:26 community. Do you have thoughts on gauge, theoretic concepts,
01:03:33 conceptualization of the world, or just Eric in general? He’s
01:03:37 got a lot of love in his heart, and he’s got a grace in the way
01:03:40 he communicates. But he’s also loves to play with ideas and
01:03:46 seems to have touched a sensitive point with the Bitcoin
01:03:49 community. Is there anything you could say that’s hopeful,
01:03:52 inspiring about that whole dynamic that went down?
01:03:56 So I don’t know all the details. But what I will say is I’ve
01:04:00 listened to a number of his podcasts, and him and there’s a
01:04:03 whole bunch of people like him. I basically put them in the
01:04:07 bucket of they’re an independent thinker who are courageous
01:04:10 enough to speak their truth, whatever that may be. They are
01:04:15 humble enough to revisit their ideas and say, I got this right,
01:04:20 I got this wrong information change, I’ll change my mind.
01:04:23 Obviously, a sign of intelligence to be able to do
01:04:25 that type of stuff. And I actually think that one of the
01:04:28 most scarce things in our society are those independent
01:04:30 thinkers who are able to do all this. Right? Speaking of
01:04:33 scarcity. Yeah. And so to me, I put Eric and the whole host of
01:04:38 other people kind of, if you look at like the intellectual
01:04:40 dark web is kind of a label that’s been used. They’re
01:04:44 actually some of the most important people in our society,
01:04:47 because they’re the people who are willing to stand up against
01:04:50 the mass kind of thought process. They’re willing to talk
01:04:54 about things that others may think are taboo, right? They’re
01:04:57 willing to change their mind, which all of a sudden has become
01:05:00 a bad thing rather than a good thing. And so when I see the
01:05:04 exploration of ideas in public, I actually think that those are
01:05:08 the people who are most open to the kind of VM it blowback as
01:05:12 well. Right? Because that’s part of what they’re doing is that
01:05:15 they’re eliciting, hey, I’m going to throw an idea into the
01:05:18 arena. If it doesn’t get attacked, they actually may be
01:05:20 more nervous than if there is some level of, you know, kind of
01:05:23 war of attrition, if you will. And so what I’ve seen with a
01:05:26 number of the people who have done this, everyone from some of
01:05:29 the best, you know, hedge fund managers and kind of money
01:05:31 managers in the world, all the way to what I’ll consider some
01:05:33 of the most intellectual people in the world is they play with
01:05:37 these ideas. And they play with the ideas and they play with
01:05:40 them and they put them and they all arrive at the same
01:05:42 conclusion. And sometimes it takes a month, sometimes it
01:05:45 takes years, but they arrive at this Bitcoin thesis. And what’s
01:05:49 so interesting about it is it highlights something that many
01:05:52 people view as a bug. But I think people in the Bitcoin
01:05:56 community view as a feature, which is that community. And so
01:05:59 what ends up happening is when you have something that is as
01:06:02 ambitious as creating a global reserve currency doesn’t mean
01:06:07 needs to unseat any of the existing ones, but become the
01:06:10 global reserve currency of the internet, right, this digital
01:06:12 economy, you need shepherds of it. And so just like a
01:06:16 technology company wants to find those loyal fans that are
01:06:19 willing to go out and market and word of mouth and, and kind of
01:06:22 not only promote it, but also protect it. This technology
01:06:27 that is this decentralized thing, which uses a financial
01:06:31 incentive in order to elicit the buy in, not from a financial
01:06:35 perspective, but from a mental energy standpoint, has built one
01:06:39 of the most rabid, powerful and engaged communities on the
01:06:44 internet. And what ends up happening is those people have
01:06:48 thought more about these ideas, and actually challenged those
01:06:52 ideas more than anyone else in the world. And so I’ve got a lot
01:06:56 of folks who will just say, there’s this guy Marty Bent, who
01:06:59 will talk all the time about the Bitcoin critics haven’t done
01:07:02 their homework in a lot of cases. So they show up and
01:07:05 sometimes it’s super intellectual, lazy arguments,
01:07:07 sometimes actually very well thought out arguments, you know,
01:07:10 on the counter to the Bitcoin thesis. But ultimately, what
01:07:13 ends up happening is you’re talking to somebody who’s an
01:07:16 expert, they’ve been thinking about for five, seven, eight, 10
01:07:18 years, right? They’ve gone through every simulation you
01:07:20 possibly can. And they show up with data, examples, and
01:07:25 responses. Now, they’re not always right. But they’ve just
01:07:27 done the work. And so what I actually like about folks like
01:07:31 Eric and others is as they’re kind of going through this
01:07:33 journey, they’re incredibly smart, right? And they provide,
01:07:37 or they apply a lot of intellectual rigor to some of
01:07:41 these arguments. And so what it does is what does it do? It’s a
01:07:43 marketplace. It keeps people honest. Let me sort of make a
01:07:48 few comments. It’s kind of interesting. So you’re exactly
01:07:50 right. Maybe the blowback is part of the mechanism that
01:07:54 actually develops these ideas and so on. I do want to kind of
01:07:57 speak to a little bit of the toxicity that I’ve experienced
01:08:01 in the Bitcoin community. I kind of see it, the Bitcoin
01:08:04 community, I think you paint a really nice picture, which I
01:08:06 kind of see it as an immune system that protects against
01:08:10 sort of the viruses that are bad ideas. That said, the immune
01:08:17 system can destroy a body, right? And the thing you
01:08:21 mentioned about Eric and maybe about myself, and in general,
01:08:25 just people exploring ideas, is there is a Dunning Kruger
01:08:29 effect, which is when you first start exploring ideas deeply,
01:08:34 you have an overblown level of confidence about like how much
01:08:39 you understand. And that’s actually the process about
01:08:42 learning, then you realize you don’t understand much. What
01:08:44 I’ve noticed with the Bitcoin community is they’re not as
01:08:49 patient with the basics of the Dunning Kruger effect. Like if
01:08:52 I step in and make declarative statements about Bitcoin, like
01:08:58 I, you know, I read a long time ago, the white paper, like at
01:09:03 the cursory level, I felt that I understand the technology,
01:09:08 this is basic intuitions. You know, I didn’t think about the
01:09:11 social dynamics. I didn’t think about any like financial
01:09:14 implications and a lot of the deep, actually the ongoing
01:09:17 innovations and all that kind of stuff. But I thought I
01:09:20 understood that technology. And so I step in and make
01:09:22 declarative statements. I think those are the first time you
01:09:25 say, okay, what’s the role of Bitcoin in the world? You start
01:09:28 thinking about it deeply. And then you make statements. The
01:09:31 toxicity that you get in those first few statements is really
01:09:36 off putting to me. I’m somebody that tries to communicate love
01:09:38 and live that with everything I do. And there is a level of
01:09:44 disrespect that I’ve experienced, not directly just
01:09:48 observing others, people have been mostly kind to me. And I
01:09:51 appreciate that. But if you’re going to criticize me about my
01:09:55 exploration of ideas in Bitcoin, you have to also
01:09:59 acknowledge that I’m a human being that got like a PhD in
01:10:02 stuff. Like I did some hard shit that it could be in farming or
01:10:06 it could be in whatever. Like I’ve lived life and I’ve
01:10:09 really thought deeply and I really care. Like I know a lot
01:10:12 of shit. And it’s possible that I actually have a lot of ideas
01:10:17 that you can learn from. Now, if it’s agriculture, fine. Or if
01:10:22 it’s artificial intelligence, fine. Like I know what I’m
01:10:25 talking about, about certain things. And I could be wrong
01:10:27 about a lot of things. And there’s like an exchange of
01:10:29 ideas that makes that mechanism that you talked about more
01:10:35 efficient. Sometimes when the blowback is too strong too
01:10:38 early on, the development of ideas is just inefficient. And
01:10:42 I’m not sure if there’s a, you know, the way it was explained
01:10:46 to me is that for so long, that community was like bombarded
01:10:53 with just like bad ideas, like criticisms. They’re just overly
01:10:58 sensitive now to bullshit. They’re like triggered by
01:11:03 statements. They’ve heard it all before and they’re like,
01:11:07 oh, there they go again with the same old arguments. But
01:11:10 that doesn’t mean that you have to sort of, I guess, develop
01:11:14 patience and so on. Especially when you feel like in my case
01:11:18 that the person is coming from a good place, right? I don’t
01:11:20 know if there’s something you could say that’s positive about
01:11:23 the future of this kind of overcoming this toxicity.
01:11:26 I think there’s a couple of trends that are all kind of
01:11:29 coalescing here in these types of experiences. So one is when
01:11:32 you look at a community, there’s always a spectrum in
01:11:35 terms of there’s some people who over index on kindness and
01:11:39 stupidity. And there’s some people who over index on
01:11:41 intelligence and basically just being an asshole. And then you
01:11:45 get everyone in between. And so naturally, as we know, the
01:11:48 extremist ends of any community end up being the loudest
01:11:52 usually. The second thing is there is from the outsider
01:11:58 view, like at the beginning of the exploration of ideas, it’s
01:12:02 very much a learning process. I don’t know if I understand
01:12:06 this or not, but here’s ideas A, B, and C. From the internal
01:12:11 perspective, there’s a trillion dollars of value at stake and
01:12:14 we must protect it with our lives. The truth is probably
01:12:18 somewhere in between there. And again, the world’s not black
01:12:21 and white. There’s this kind of more gray area that I think
01:12:24 actually is where most people exist. The other thing that’s
01:12:28 at play here is I think the Bitcoin community understands
01:12:32 the internet and internet culture and narratives better
01:12:35 than almost anyone. And so you see this with kind of the just
01:12:39 complete destruction of narratives with memes and just
01:12:44 the visceral reaction and the use of things like Reddit and
01:12:48 Twitter and YouTube, podcasts, just areas where I think a lot
01:12:53 about if you are an upstart and you are going to go challenge
01:12:58 the most well respected elite kind of establishment
01:13:03 institutions in the world, if you walk in in a suit and tie
01:13:07 and you say, I’m here to debate you with ideas, you’re going to
01:13:12 get your clock cleaned because they’re going to trot out their
01:13:15 lawyers, their regulators, their lobbyists, right? Like all this
01:13:18 stuff. If you instead say, I’m going to meme you to death on
01:13:23 the internet and I’m going to control the public narrative.
01:13:26 You’ve shifted the power. The asymmetry of power is more
01:13:29 symmetrical now. It’s the ultimate insurgency, right? If
01:13:32 you bring it back to the the conflict. Yes. And so when you
01:13:36 think about this, you have to lean into the advantage that
01:13:39 you have. And so what ends up happening is you and I would
01:13:44 absolutely lose it if we saw JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs or the
01:13:48 Federal Reserve start tweeting memes. Yeah, right. It it would
01:13:52 almost the the validation that would give to the medium and
01:13:56 the even playing field that it would provide would pull these
01:14:01 establishments down to the level of what is this upstart?
01:14:06 But now what you’re starting to see is that the Bitcoin
01:14:08 community, even though there’s some level of toxicity at
01:14:13 times, even though there’s this visceral reaction, sometimes
01:14:16 there’s even what I would call bullying or or or kind of
01:14:21 outward projection of things, right? Even though it may be a
01:14:23 small percentage, it’ll happen every once in a while. What
01:14:26 they do understand, though, is that these establishments are
01:14:30 made up of humans. And what you can actually do, one of the
01:14:33 best ways to pick apart an institution is to recruit from
01:14:37 inside of them one by one. Yes. And so what you’re starting
01:14:41 to see now is I mean, I get the messages on Twitter and
01:14:44 LinkedIn all the time. Hey, I’m a banker by trade, but I’m a
01:14:47 bitcoiner at heart, right? And so what you’re doing is you’re
01:14:51 essentially infiltrating the organizations, not in in
01:14:55 physical, you know, population. Yeah. But with the ideas and
01:15:00 with the philosophies, banker in the streets, bitcoiner in the
01:15:04 sheets. Yeah. Okay. I like it. With that said, in terms of
01:15:10 shitposting and memes, I gotta say like bring it on because I
01:15:17 believe in terms of asymmetry of power, I believe in that
01:15:22 love will save the world, not memes. Or at least good vibe
01:15:28 memes as opposed to shitposting. It’s an interesting
01:15:31 battleground, though. It’s an interesting battleground to
01:15:34 think about. The other thing I would say, too, is one of the
01:15:37 elements that’s always kind of funny to me is how much of the
01:15:42 entertainment is love, right? So, when you start to think
01:15:45 about how many of the memes that are posted, for example,
01:15:48 are for outsiders versus insiders. Yes. Laser eyes,
01:15:52 right? Which seems absolutely ridiculous, elementary, and
01:15:56 frankly, beneath anyone in any level of power or influence in
01:16:00 the world somehow has congressmen and senators who
01:16:03 have done it. Yeah. They’re not trying to convince their
01:16:07 colleagues in elected positions to become bitcoiners. Yeah.
01:16:11 They’re speaking directly internally to the Bitcoin
01:16:13 community. Yeah, there’s some sense in which, yes, memes is
01:16:17 love. Even I keep hearing Bitcoin is love. They’re trying
01:16:21 to convert me. The one that you have to laugh at, right?
01:16:26 Probably my favorite one out of all of it is I’ve seen on
01:16:28 multiple occasions, you know, Mark Cuban a couple of years
01:16:31 ago, Kevin O Leary, whoever, you know, wealthy people,
01:16:35 billionaires, etcetera, and you have people on anonymous
01:16:38 accounts who who knows who they are telling them have fun
01:16:40 staying poor, right? It’s just, you know, it’s just, again,
01:16:45 part of a community and I think it’s a feature, not a bug.
01:16:48 There’s bad aspects to it at times but I do think it’s a net
01:16:52 positive. Yeah, just like the immune system. It does a lot of
01:16:56 crappy stuff but overall, it’s a major net positive. Maybe
01:17:01 this is a bit of a personal question for me. It just added
01:17:03 my own curiosity but I’ve talked to Ray Dalio a few
01:17:07 times. So, Ray Dalio, I think was one of those people that
01:17:10 took that journey, the Bitcoin journey. Do you have thoughts
01:17:16 about him specifically about that whole world and about the
01:17:20 journey maybe of others that are going through the same
01:17:22 process because Ray is, at least from my perspective, I’m a
01:17:26 bit of an outsider. He’s one of the most insightful and deep
01:17:33 thinkers about investment, about finance, about economics
01:17:37 in general. Actually, about life. So, it’s interesting to
01:17:41 see him go on that journey. Do you have something to comment
01:17:44 about Ray or just those kinds of people in general? So, if we
01:17:47 look at what I’ll just consider the legends of Wall Street in
01:17:50 general. Yeah. Right? There’s no denying that they’re
01:17:53 incredibly intelligent. There’s no denying that actually,
01:17:56 especially in the hedge fund world, they’re some of the most
01:17:58 open minded people in terms of they’re willing to change their
01:18:01 mind when they get new information. There’s no doubt
01:18:04 that they are historians in the sense of having studied
01:18:07 financial markets and cycles over time. And also, one of the
01:18:11 things that I really respect about all those guys is almost
01:18:14 all of them are willing to put ideas out via various writings
01:18:18 that they do and accept the public criticism, right?
01:18:21 Whether it’s Howard Marks, Ray or others, they will put this
01:18:23 stuff out in public. And sure, there’s a lot of people who are
01:18:28 supportive and kind of are part of a fan base, if you will. But
01:18:31 there’s a lot of people who also think that sometimes they
01:18:33 say stupid things. And so, putting that out takes kind of
01:18:36 courage, right? I think Ray’s actually the most fascinating
01:18:40 though out of all of these kind of legends of Wall Street in
01:18:42 that he understands debt cycles. He understands
01:18:46 currencies. He, for a while now, has been all over and
01:18:51 famously said, you know, cash is trash, investible assets,
01:18:55 right? He kind of like just knew all of it. And for a long
01:18:58 time, Bitcoiners have said, Ray, you understand the Bitcoin
01:19:00 argument, you’re just missing the last part, which is Bitcoin
01:19:02 is the solution, right? And so, he was gold and some other
01:19:05 ideas. But I think that he’s a perfect example of when you are
01:19:10 part of the establishment, people view you in a very
01:19:14 static way as the leader of a part of establishment. But
01:19:18 whether it’s Bill Gates, Ray Dalio, or somebody else, each
01:19:22 one of these people were innovators and challengers to a
01:19:24 system. They were upstarts at one point. And so, it’s kind of
01:19:27 this idea that like if you live long enough, you eventually
01:19:29 become the man, right? And so, you know, Gates is a good
01:19:33 example, right? Warren Buffett is a good example. Ray Dalio is
01:19:36 a good example, etc. And so, you have to give credit, I think,
01:19:39 to Dalio in the sense of he kept an open mind about all of
01:19:43 this and more so than many of his peers has continued to do
01:19:48 the work and come around to this idea. And now, I don’t
01:19:51 want to know if I wanted to say that he’s a Bitcoin
01:19:53 proponent as much as he believes it is one of a portion
01:19:58 of assets that can be a solution. And so, to me, when
01:20:01 you start to convince those types of people, when it’s
01:20:04 Paul Tudor Jones, a Stanley Druckenmiller, Ray Dalio,
01:20:08 Howard Marks now even writing about it saying, hey, I was
01:20:11 anti Bitcoin and put a ton of intellectual rigor into it.
01:20:14 But thank God my son bought a bunch for our family, right?
01:20:17 And kind of we’ve had exposure to it. I think what it does is
01:20:21 more than anything, it’s not going to convince somebody to
01:20:24 go and take it seriously or go ahead and make an allocation.
01:20:29 It reduces career risk. And so, if all of a sudden when Paul
01:20:33 Tudor Jones and Stanley Druckenmiller come out and
01:20:35 say, hey, I own Bitcoin and here’s why, every other
01:20:38 investor on Wall Street now can say to an investment
01:20:41 committee, well, it’s good enough for Paul Tudor Jones,
01:20:44 it’s good enough for Stanley Druckenmiller. And so, I think
01:20:46 that it’s very interesting because Ray doesn’t just
01:20:49 represent Wall Street. I think Ray in some weird way
01:20:53 represents this like macro economic investor. And so,
01:20:57 some of those are in hedge funds and some of those people
01:21:00 would be like CIOs at organizations. Some of them
01:21:02 would be at corporations and some of them are just kind of
01:21:05 retail investors. And so, you can see this kind of inflection
01:21:09 point throughout the adoption of Bitcoin, right? There was
01:21:12 infrastructure that got built. Okay, that kind of led to more
01:21:15 adoption. There was certain individuals, right? Usually
01:21:18 they were kind of technology oriented, entrepreneurial
01:21:22 billionaires. They would buy it and come out and say it. Okay,
01:21:25 that led to inflection points. You started to have some of
01:21:28 these kind of Wall Street legends come out, sort of
01:21:32 financial institutions started. And now, you’re seeing
01:21:35 corporations start to do it, right? Eventually, there’s
01:21:38 going to be a central bank that does it. And so, you kind of
01:21:40 walk through that line and what you understand is like, it’s
01:21:43 the same thing every time. It’s just somebody new, right? That
01:21:46 path, right? That Bitcoiners journey, if you will. And I
01:21:50 think that that is almost the beauty of it is if you
01:21:55 short circuit the journey, it’s almost like somebody doesn’t
01:21:58 appreciate it, right? If you take, let’s say, somebody who’s
01:22:01 a young kid and you just give them a bunch of money and they
01:22:03 didn’t have to work hard for it. They don’t really
01:22:05 appreciate it. Well, and Ray actually has a book
01:22:09 principles, right? And he talks about the hero’s journey. So,
01:22:12 he’s like living it in some sense in terms of, you know,
01:22:16 thinking about digital currency in general, like digital
01:22:20 finance. It’s one of the big transitions, transformations of
01:22:26 our world in some sense. It’s not just about money. Or you
01:22:31 could argue that money is everything. I mean, it’s like
01:22:33 money isn’t just the narrow definition of money. Money is
01:22:37 really everything. And so, where you could argue that sort
01:22:40 of cryptocurrency is like the base layer of this
01:22:44 transformation to the digital space and everything else would
01:22:47 just be built on top of it. I use a different word that I
01:22:52 think is kind of closer to your world, which is it’s ultimately
01:22:56 automation. And what I mean by that is, you know, before 1970
01:23:00 or 1980, all the assets were analog. And so, when you have
01:23:03 analog assets, physical stock certificates, physical bonds,
01:23:06 right, physical deed to a home, you have to physically exchange
01:23:11 them. When we wanted to increase transactions and
01:23:16 increase kind of global finance and access, we took those
01:23:19 physical assets and we created electronic QCIP assets. So, now
01:23:22 we have in centralized databases kind of a file, represents the
01:23:26 asset that’s sitting somewhere in custody. And you and I can
01:23:29 transact them a little bit easier, but still centralized.
01:23:32 There’s still some bureaucracy and, you know, maybe it takes
01:23:34 two days to transact rather than actually mailing it across
01:23:37 the world. Now, what we’re seeing is a transition from
01:23:42 those electronic QCIPs to these digital assets. And so, if you
01:23:45 look at, again, just let’s say money or currency, every
01:23:49 currency in the world is going to be digital. You’re going to
01:23:51 have a digital dollar, a digital euro, yen, RMB. You’re
01:23:55 going to have decentralized kind of open source money like
01:23:59 Bitcoin. You’re also going to have private currencies like
01:24:02 Facebook’s attempt at DiEM and there will be others that will
01:24:05 try to do this. And so, when you get everything digital, right,
01:24:09 and I think that’s the kind of the first step that everyone
01:24:11 focuses on, the competition at the technology layer
01:24:13 essentially goes away. You get some level of feature parity
01:24:16 and sure, there’s bells and whistles on each kind of
01:24:18 implementation of a digital currency, but at the end of the
01:24:21 day, the technology is relatively the same. And
01:24:23 ultimately, what it will do is it will facilitate the adoption
01:24:26 of digital wallets. So, you have to have a digital wallet
01:24:29 regardless of what digital currency you have. Same with me,
01:24:31 same with everybody else in the world. But what it does do is
01:24:34 when you kind of push away and reduce the friction of
01:24:37 competition at the technology layer, it moves the competition
01:24:41 to the monetary policy layer. And so, when you get to that
01:24:44 layer, now it becomes interesting because all of the
01:24:47 currencies are the same except for this one right now and maybe
01:24:50 there will be others in the future. But for sure, Bitcoin
01:24:53 today and people may try to replicate in a private manner
01:24:55 or something, but Bitcoin is kind of the only finite scarce
01:24:59 digital somebody. And so, when you then have that pretty big
01:25:04 difference in that competition at the monetary policy layer,
01:25:06 it’s actually not going to matter where you get paid.
01:25:10 Right? And what I mean by that is like you and I both live in
01:25:12 a single currency environment. I get paid in dollars. I
01:25:18 historically have saved in dollars. All of the assets in
01:25:21 my life are denominated in dollars and I owe my debts in
01:25:25 dollars, whether it’s taxes or in the private market. And I
01:25:29 don’t have to worry about foreign currencies. I don’t
01:25:31 exchange anything. The only time I would ever think about
01:25:33 another currency is if I’m going to another country in
01:25:35 their single currency environment. And in order to
01:25:39 change or exchange my currency, I go to the bank or I go get
01:25:43 ripped off at the airport. Right? Those are my two options.
01:25:46 So, it’s high friction to change between currencies. When
01:25:49 the competition of technology is kind of innovated away, now
01:25:54 I can get paid in dollars, these digital dollars, and with
01:25:57 a click of a button, switch into any other currency in the
01:25:59 world. And so, what ultimately happens is value and liquidity
01:26:03 is going to coalesce around the best monetary policy. And so,
01:26:07 you get in this very weird world where even if the United
01:26:09 States says, hey, you’re going to get paid in dollars, you have
01:26:11 to pay your taxes in dollars. You’re going to start to see
01:26:13 people operate in a multi currency environment where they
01:26:15 say, okay, I got paid in my digital dollar, click a button,
01:26:17 I save in Bitcoin. It stays there or grows my purchasing
01:26:21 power. Oh, I need to pay my taxes. Let me switch back into
01:26:23 dollars with click of a button and pay. When you go to a
01:26:26 multi currency world, it’s not just about currency. It’s now
01:26:30 multi asset world. Because not only is the currency
01:26:34 digitized, but that same technology is used to digitize
01:26:38 stocks, bonds, and commodities as well. And so, today we live
01:26:42 in a very fragmented financial world where basically I have a
01:26:44 brokerage account, I have a bank account, I may have an
01:26:46 alternative asset account, etc. When I can put all those assets
01:26:50 in a single digital wallet, and I can then go from asset to
01:26:55 asset without having to go back to a single unit of account.
01:26:58 Like frictionless going from asset to asset. Yeah. So now
01:27:01 what you end up doing is you start to open up the
01:27:03 possibility for machine to machine transactions. Yeah. So
01:27:07 today, if you and I write software code for two machines
01:27:10 to transact with each other, they can’t transact physical
01:27:13 currency. And in many cases, they can’t actually transact
01:27:16 the electronic QCIP currencies or assets either because
01:27:19 there’s too long of a settlement time. So you can’t
01:27:21 get true automation, right? So the whole idea of the car’s
01:27:24 going to drive over a strip in the road and it’s going to
01:27:26 pay the toll, right? Well, that can’t happen right now
01:27:29 because literally the transaction won’t go through,
01:27:31 right? And so I always joke that in an automated world,
01:27:35 it’s like a CD ROM, but we’re trying to take cassette tape
01:27:38 player assets and put it in the CD ROM. It’s just incompatible
01:27:40 technology. Reference is nobody understands at this point.
01:27:44 By the way, you need to update your reference. I probably
01:27:46 do. It’s like taking a CD ROM and trying to put an MP3
01:27:48 player into a streaming. But I think that the reason why
01:27:52 that becomes really interesting is when you start to create
01:27:54 these digital assets, now you open up the world of
01:27:57 possibilities. So when new technology is created, you can
01:27:59 do two things. You can either create new things the world’s
01:28:02 never seen before, or you can use it to improve the old
01:28:04 world. Most people, because it’s the easiest thing to
01:28:08 think about, want to improve the old world. So an equivalent
01:28:11 of this would be when the internet came along, a media
01:28:14 company that had newspapers would say, hey, we should take
01:28:17 a PDF of the newspaper and we should put it on a website. And
01:28:20 now anyone in the world can go to this website and they can
01:28:21 read the newspaper today. That was valuable, but it missed out
01:28:26 on the ability to change headlines, to test, to put
01:28:29 multimedia, to distribute it differently, to do all kinds of
01:28:32 things that today we understand the internet really empowered.
01:28:35 And so what I think we’re about to watch happen is we’re going
01:28:38 to digitize the assets. We’re going to put them all into
01:28:40 these digital wallets. You’re going to get automated
01:28:43 technologies where machines can now transact with each other.
01:28:46 And we’re going to do simple things like why do we pay
01:28:50 people once every two weeks? Why don’t we just pay them at
01:28:53 the end of every day? Or why don’t I literally stream
01:28:56 payments to you on an hour by hour basis based on the work
01:28:59 you do? It would solve incredible economic issues in
01:29:03 our country and in countries around the world. But
01:29:05 historically businesses can’t do this because of the
01:29:08 technology problem. They can’t keep track of it all. How do
01:29:10 they pay everyone every day? How do they pay everyone every
01:29:12 hour? You just can’t do it.
01:29:13 Yeah, it’s funny. The vision of the future you’re painting,
01:29:18 it’s kind of an exciting one. And it almost makes me sad
01:29:22 looking into the future when we’ll look back at this time.
01:29:24 It’s like how incredibly inefficient financial
01:29:30 transactions were. Like the transaction of value of any
01:29:33 kind. Like how to pay each other. Like there has to be
01:29:38 processes. There’s like payroll and all this kind of just the
01:29:43 entirety of the transactions is just like painful. Almost
01:29:47 all transactions are painful. And the companies that
01:29:51 innovate to make the transactions a little bit more
01:29:55 frictionless like Amazon with the one click purchase button
01:29:58 like went out huge. But even that’s really painful. It’s
01:30:02 actually really interesting especially when you start to
01:30:04 move that into the space of data. There’s a lot of people
01:30:07 thinking about privacy and data and like can we put, can
01:30:11 we like convert data into like money so that you can pay for
01:30:17 how much you reveal to the companies about your own
01:30:19 private data that can then be used to assign value to you so
01:30:24 you can use the service for free if you hand over the data
01:30:27 but there’s like explicit transaction going on. So you
01:30:30 can empower all those kinds of things that will just like
01:30:34 fundamentally change our world. That’s really, really,
01:30:37 really exciting.
01:30:37 One of the most interesting things to me is I invested in
01:30:41 a company called Bridget and what they told me was they said
01:30:43 $8 billion was paid to the top four banks last year on
01:30:49 overdraft fees. So literally they took $8 billion from
01:30:52 people who didn’t have money in their bank account, right?
01:30:55 And so when you dig into why is that a lot of times it’s not
01:30:58 that the people don’t have the money. It’s actually a
01:31:01 mismatch of the payments. So what ends up happening is you
01:31:04 get paid on the 1st and the 15th but on the 12th your
01:31:06 Netflix bill hits, on the 13th you went grocery shopping, and
01:31:10 on the 14th your car payments hit, you overdraft, and then
01:31:13 on the 15th you actually get the check and then you’re able
01:31:15 to pay not only the overdraft but for the expenses that you
01:31:18 have. And so something as simple as just getting paid at
01:31:21 the end of every day immediately would eliminate
01:31:24 some big percentage of those $8 billion of value that flows
01:31:27 to large institutions on overdraft fees.
01:31:30 Yeah and also I mean this whole process with overdraft fees
01:31:34 and just many of the financial transactions we have to live
01:31:37 through today forces many of us to be like accountants, like
01:31:42 to understand the different mechanism of financial like
01:31:46 the movement of money as opposed to you which is what we
01:31:50 want to do as human beings operating in high layers of
01:31:53 like providing services for others, of like following your
01:31:58 passions and like working for others, like doing cool shit
01:32:01 or you know basically providing value, exchanging value
01:32:07 in the world and not thinking about the money. The money
01:32:09 takes care of itself and then you see the results of it.
01:32:12 So you’re able to think in terms of money but not have to
01:32:19 know how like the accounting works.
01:32:22 Automation simply frees humans up to do more creative
01:32:26 work.
01:32:26 Yeah.
01:32:27 Right?
01:32:27 Yeah.
01:32:28 Like that’s it.
01:32:29 Yeah.
01:32:29 And what we
01:32:30 Which is why you use the term automation which I think is
01:32:34 kind of brilliant reframing of all of this.
01:32:36 Yeah because ultimately digital technologies are merely
01:32:40 the conduit to ushers into that world and I think the most
01:32:44 fascinating part of this entire industry is people who are
01:32:50 trying to figure out now that we’re going to have these
01:32:52 digital technologies how do we usher in that automated world
01:32:56 faster and so there’s people who are building all kinds of
01:33:00 incredible things right there’s literally some technologies
01:33:04 where you can stream for paying for consumption of content.
01:33:09 Yeah.
01:33:09 Right there’s I saw somebody recently who they basically
01:33:13 said hey I have created something but it’s not going to
01:33:16 be released until everyone and almost like a GoFundMe type
01:33:20 situation pays for it in combination then it gets
01:33:23 unlocked and so when you start to think about this it’s not
01:33:26 only innovation on the technology front it’s innovation
01:33:28 around the way that we form capital it’s the way that we
01:33:34 organize resources it’s the way that we build companies it’s
01:33:36 the business models right it’s the application of those
01:33:39 technologies all that stuff starts to change and go back to
01:33:43 a 2007 that’s when the iPhone came out Uber wasn’t possible
01:33:49 right I’m just going to lie like all these companies that
01:33:51 weren’t possible before when the digital technologies are
01:33:54 kind of adopted on a global scale I think that we all myself
01:33:58 included drastically underestimate how fast and how
01:34:02 big innovation can be because it’s just hard right like like
01:34:06 we like to think linearly and that’s not how the world works.
01:34:08 Yeah I do find it kind of interesting it is NFT based but
01:34:14 I don’t think it has to be this this idea of I think big clout
01:34:20 it’s called or whatever the idea of sort of investing in
01:34:23 individuals it makes me immediately think about
01:34:26 investing in ideas so even just the words you speak having
01:34:32 value and sort of if you have a frictionless like automated
01:34:39 financial system then you could do a bunch of interesting
01:34:42 things about what it means to add value to the world I mean
01:34:47 I don’t know if big cloud is currently an efficient
01:34:50 representation of that but I am truly happy that however that
01:34:58 thing works I’m just one notch above Vladimir Putin which is
01:35:03 one of the that’s like one of the bucket list items for me to
01:35:06 to have a list where I’m one notch above Putin well what I
01:35:09 think you’re talking about here is important because there’s
01:35:12 historical examples you could invest in a patent in some
01:35:16 situations you could invest in an organization that has an
01:35:20 idea right so these are super inefficient given kind of the
01:35:23 vision that you’re painting in terms of like investing directly
01:35:26 in an idea in a super efficient automated fashion yeah but
01:35:29 that’s how the technology evolution works right is it’s
01:35:32 really hard to do at first and then slowly kind of becomes
01:35:35 easier and easier as technology is more prevalent the other
01:35:39 thing that I think is interesting is this whole idea
01:35:40 of investing in people if you really think about the
01:35:43 origination of that is I would hire somebody right I pay you
01:35:48 money and then you’re going to create production but I take
01:35:50 the lion’s share and you don’t now there’s things like these
01:35:54 ISAs these income sharing agreements where basically I
01:35:57 will educate you on something train you on something I’ll put
01:36:01 up capital right and then over time you’ll pay me back plus
01:36:05 profits as some version eventually I don’t know what it
01:36:09 looks like but being able to get upside in somebody’s success
01:36:14 for having risk capital early on doesn’t seem that far off
01:36:18 see it in professional sports you see it in you know a lot of
01:36:20 these things and so I just think that a lot of the focus
01:36:24 right now is on the technology but ultimately these are ideas
01:36:30 that are very old and have had lots of success and traction
01:36:33 and we’re just merely standing in the way of the evolution of
01:36:36 these ideas with new technology and so it’s easy to get caught
01:36:40 up in the technology but when you really zoom out and look at
01:36:43 it from the ideological standpoint and kind of the
01:36:46 progress of humanity it’s a foregone conclusion this stuff’s
01:36:49 going to happen it’s just how I think the world is waiting and
01:36:52 some of us are trying to create that future world which is like
01:36:56 what are the applications of this technology that will
01:36:59 transform the world and then you know I hate the term but
01:37:03 killer apps like cool ideas that are implemented effectively at
01:37:08 scale that transform the world and there’s been a there’s been
01:37:11 a lot of different ideas popping up like the there’s a
01:37:15 lot of ideas about social networks that are built on top
01:37:17 of the technology and all that kind of stuff so but let me
01:37:21 actually drag this back down to something basic if a person
01:37:25 wanted to buy Bitcoin store Bitcoin how do they actually do
01:37:32 it yeah so there’s a couple of different ways to kind of
01:37:36 acquire Bitcoin and in every way you’ve got to exchange
01:37:40 some form of value for Bitcoin right which is part of why it
01:37:44 has values because you’re giving up value so in one way is
01:37:49 to exchange energy and computational power for Bitcoin
01:37:54 so you can mine it you can literally take computer power
01:37:57 that you have you can rent it to the network and run that
01:38:01 software and then it will pay you a portion of the kind of
01:38:05 daily revenue off that system and you can acquire Bitcoin in
01:38:09 exchange for your power and your computational kind of
01:38:13 contribution and that’s the fundamental principle behind
01:38:15 Bitcoin is the proof of work so I got a hundred bucks like I
01:38:20 use cash app the you know they there’s Coinbase there’s all
01:38:25 these exchanges like how do I convert my $100 to Bitcoin is
01:38:32 there something disclaimer this is not financial advice and
01:38:36 this is just us talking and just your opinions this do not
01:38:40 use this to invest or take as financial expertise that said
01:38:46 like is there something you recommend that’s an easy entry
01:38:50 point for somebody that’s like hmm I wonder if I can convert
01:38:54 this hundred dollars into whatever amount of Bitcoin what
01:38:57 do you recommend what are the options so there’s a lot of
01:39:00 options I’m heavily biased I went out and I scoured the
01:39:03 market looked at all of them I’ve invested a lot of money in
01:39:05 a company called BlockFi that basically basically has
01:39:08 financial products for crypto investors so you can go you can
01:39:11 take dollars or other currency you have you can convert it
01:39:14 through an exchange you can leave it on these interest
01:39:18 bearing accounts you can earn interest just like you would
01:39:20 earn in a traditional account but higher levels of interest
01:39:22 because it’s this new thing or you can withdraw it and you can
01:39:26 put it into cold storage on a hardware device you can leave
01:39:29 it in a software wallet there’s kind of all these storage
01:39:31 options so BlockFi is you know kind of the one that I’m biased
01:39:34 towards because I’m sorry to interrupt so BlockFi is Bitcoin
01:39:40 only or is it an exchange with other crypto it’s got a bunch
01:39:43 of different ones yeah they basically are agnostic to what
01:39:46 it is but they provide kind of financial you know products to
01:39:50 crypto investors okay so you mentioned a few interesting
01:39:53 ideas that’d be nice for people who would not be familiar with
01:39:57 it cold storage hot storage what does that mean so like I go to
01:40:02 a website and I convert dollars to Bitcoin that’s a kind of
01:40:06 storage that’s like online banking right what else is
01:40:12 there so there’s a couple of different things that you can
01:40:14 do right and let’s use the legacy system as kind of an
01:40:17 example so if I want to get currency and I put in my bank
01:40:23 account it sits there I have to trust that the bank doesn’t go
01:40:27 under nobody steals it all this kind of stuff there’s insurance
01:40:30 for it right there’s all these kind of benefits in the legacy
01:40:33 system to make sure that as long as I don’t have you know
01:40:35 millions and millions of dollars there I’m going to be
01:40:37 protected pretty much if anything happens through FDIC
01:40:40 insurance if I want to do that I’m taking that counterparty
01:40:44 risk though so it’s mitigated but there’s still counterparty
01:40:47 risk I’m counting on that bank but it is easier to move it
01:40:50 around right if all of a sudden you call me up and say hey send
01:40:52 me some money I can press a couple buttons on my computer
01:40:54 and it’ll send it to you if I want deeper level of security I
01:40:58 can go and I can get the physical dollars and I can go
01:41:02 and I can you know put under my mattress right and I can say
01:41:05 you know what it’s not gonna be as easy to send it to you
01:41:07 immediately but if I really want to I can go underneath my
01:41:10 mattress pretty quickly I can grab it I can get it back to
01:41:13 the bank and then I can send you the money the third thing I
01:41:16 could do is I could basically take those physical dollars out
01:41:18 of the bank and I could go and I could go put it literally you
01:41:21 know in a vault somewhere that I don’t have control over that’s
01:41:24 behind 10 passwords and biometric scanning and like it’s
01:41:27 really difficult to even get to it right so if you can almost
01:41:30 look at it it’s like there’s three stages of security that
01:41:33 you could have in the traditional world the same thing
01:41:35 is true in Bitcoin so you could buy Bitcoin on any exchange you
01:41:38 can do it on BlockFi but you also can do it on places like
01:41:40 Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken, etc. Also Cash App. Cash App. You can
01:41:46 do it on Cash App. I think I think they’re still sponsoring
01:41:48 this podcast. I’m not biased at all. So once you get Bitcoin
01:41:54 on any of these venues you can leave it there on that venue.
01:41:58 Now the trade off is you’re taking counterparty risk so
01:42:02 somebody else is responsible for the security and the
01:42:04 protection of it in many cases big well known companies who
01:42:09 have billions of billions of dollars of assets they have
01:42:11 higher levels of security that’s why they’re well known
01:42:13 that’s why people trust them whatever but you are taking
01:42:15 counterparty risk it is easier to quickly send to somebody so
01:42:19 that so the trade off of like ease of use but counterparty
01:42:22 risk is big and in the Bitcoin community specifically there’s
01:42:25 a huge thing of they really really have a keep for not
01:42:29 leaving the Bitcoin there right for the obvious counterparty
01:42:32 the second thing you can do is you can basically get it off of
01:42:35 an exchange and you can put it in some level of kind of what
01:42:38 I’ll call a second layer of storage that second layer
01:42:41 storage could be a hardware device that you can quickly
01:42:43 just you know grab off your desk and plug into your
01:42:45 computer and immediately use that’s what they call like a
01:42:47 hardware wallet or you can have some sort of software wallet
01:42:51 right where it’s not on an exchange but there is some
01:42:53 level of in between between the hardware wallet and the
01:42:57 exchange and the software wallet but the software wallet
01:42:59 is connected to the internet yeah and so if you kind of
01:43:02 think of it as like the exchange software wallet
01:43:05 hardware wallet and then there’s something called deep
01:43:07 storage right or cold storage and this is you know
01:43:11 literally there was a company called Zappo that would put
01:43:15 things in deep cold storage and it was literally buried in
01:43:19 a mountain right so like the odds that somebody’s
01:43:22 physically going to go there there’s armed guards there’s
01:43:24 you know kind of all this type of stuff but again you’re
01:43:27 taking some level of counterparty risk because they
01:43:29 have your Bitcoin and so the saying or the phrase is not
01:43:33 your keys not your coins whereas my buddy Isaiah Jackson
01:43:38 came up with he said not your keys not your cheese right in
01:43:42 terms of sovereignty is important right and ultimately
01:43:46 this goes back to kind of the beginning of our conversation
01:43:48 around Bitcoin’s ethos sovereignty right giving the
01:43:52 power back to people you don’t have to rely on this
01:43:55 infrastructure in order to be able to participate in this
01:43:58 monetary kind of economy what you are now able to do is
01:44:01 you’re able to use digital sound money you’re able to
01:44:04 keep control of it you and you alone are responsible for it
01:44:07 so the idea of personal responsibility and then also
01:44:10 you and you alone make the decisions as to whether you
01:44:13 hold on to it or you use it without censorship right no
01:44:16 one can tell you what you can do with it or can’t do with it
01:44:19 and so the purchase and the storage what I find is
01:44:24 depending on who you are there’s varying degrees of kind
01:44:29 of concern or decisions that get made there and a lot of it
01:44:32 comes down to personal preference the Bitcoin
01:44:35 community though absolutely will over optimize for
01:44:38 sovereignty and kind of hardware or cold storage I
01:44:42 wonder if you can sort of comment on that because you
01:44:45 have both sort of cash app and the BlockFi and Coinbase like
01:44:52 you can store it that you can purchase and trade it there
01:44:56 and store it there and so on but ultimately they’re saying
01:44:59 you wanna you know keep some of it there but you wanna move
01:45:02 it to the hardware wallet and the cold storage of the
01:45:06 hardware wallet is like you can disconnect this from the
01:45:08 computer because ultimately stuff that’s connected to the
01:45:11 internet can be compromised can be controlled by governments
01:45:16 and other parties and so on what are your thoughts about
01:45:19 sort of practically speaking for maybe like a regular
01:45:24 citizen what’s what should be the role of the hardware wallet
01:45:28 in their lives yeah so at the highest level I just think
01:45:31 that like learning about it is important right so even if you
01:45:33 only have five dollars equivalent of Bitcoin going and
01:45:37 understanding here’s how it works here’s why it’s important
01:45:39 here’s how I would actually withdraw from an exchange under
01:45:42 the hardware wall like that alone just as an intellectual
01:45:45 exercise is a worthwhile pursuit I think people should
01:45:47 go do that actually go through the process of the steps so
01:45:50 you feel like you can you can do it yeah yeah it’s kind of
01:45:53 like if I said to you you know hey we’re gonna go buy an
01:45:55 asset and you never went and you looked at it you never went
01:45:57 and you know made a decision like sure maybe I did it or I
01:46:01 didn’t do it but like you didn’t actually experience it
01:46:03 right and so I think that that’s important part the
01:46:05 second thing is each person is different from a how they view
01:46:09 this asset so there are some people who are speculating
01:46:12 right there’s three use cases for Bitcoin their store value
01:46:14 medium of exchange and speculation and the people who
01:46:16 are speculating they can’t put it in deep cold storage because
01:46:19 they need to be able to trade it right so what ends up
01:46:22 happening is they fall in the bucket of like high risk high
01:46:25 reward they’re trying to trade they’re trying to do all these
01:46:28 things and sure maybe there are profits that they can generate
01:46:30 if they’re good at it but also they’re introducing a lot of
01:46:33 risk and so that person is very different than the person who
01:46:36 says hey you know I bought one Bitcoin and I’m gonna save it
01:46:38 for my child right and I’m gonna give it to them on their
01:46:40 18th birthday yeah and so when you start to look at this what
01:46:44 you end up saying is what are you actually purchasing this
01:46:48 for kind of like why are you doing it and then what’s your
01:46:50 time horizon and what ends up happening is more and more
01:46:55 people in the Bitcoin community have longer time horizons one
01:46:57 of the advantages to this community right if you look at
01:47:01 the on chain metrics 60% of Bitcoin haven’t moved from the
01:47:04 digital wallet in which they sit in the last 12 months so
01:47:08 even though it’s appreciated hundreds of percent on the
01:47:10 upside there’s been lots of volatility a 50% drop in a
01:47:13 single day in terms of US dollar price still doesn’t move
01:47:17 and so these are the kind of long term holders right these
01:47:19 are the the iron fist or or as recently has become popular the
01:47:22 diamond hands right they just they’re not going anywhere and
01:47:27 so I think that those people are much more likely to not have
01:47:32 their Bitcoin on exchanges or in software walls they’ve got it
01:47:35 in some sort of like highly secure environment and what and
01:47:39 one in which they have deep sovereignty or kind of prevalent
01:47:43 sovereignty and the reason for that is because they have that
01:47:46 long time horizon they don’t want to be kind of convicted
01:47:50 around Bitcoin sound money macro environment all stuff and
01:47:55 then they make a mistake because they trusted you know
01:47:58 ABCD company and that counterparty risk ends up
01:48:01 actually being you know fatal or or detrimental so again this
01:48:06 is not financial advice disclaimer but let me ask so
01:48:12 in terms of investment advice on Bitcoin so you see Bitcoin
01:48:16 potentially not just the thing that you speculate over like
01:48:19 buy and sell buy and sell buy and sell but it’s something
01:48:22 that you can just buy only and I believe I’ve heard that you
01:48:26 own quite a large percentage of of your wealth in in Bitcoin
01:48:31 and you’re basically buying only and storing long term so
01:48:34 that’s something that’s a legitimate way to approach
01:48:38 Bitcoin in your recommendation go to other cultures so if we
01:48:41 remove ourselves from the Western world culture of
01:48:45 investing in gamification of financial markets and the
01:48:48 financialization of everything let’s say we go to the culture
01:48:51 of India for hundreds if not thousands of years families
01:48:55 basically saved their wealth in gold and in jewelry and in
01:49:00 these hard assets with the expectation to pass it on to
01:49:04 the next generation and so it would be blasphemous to sell
01:49:09 the family’s gold in that culture right you know your
01:49:12 great grandfather gave to your grandfather your grandfather
01:49:14 gave to your father your father gave it to you right and
01:49:17 so in that culture the long term kind of holding is the
01:49:24 default I think that what Bitcoin has presented again is
01:49:28 a digital application of the exact same thing which is that
01:49:32 while everything else in the world is being devalued that is
01:49:35 denominated in a currency that is being inflated away whether
01:49:40 it’s quickly or not this finite supply this scarce asset ends
01:49:45 up accruing more and more value over time right and so I think
01:49:49 that for me personally I’ve got you know over 95% of my net
01:49:53 worth that’s in this 90 over 95% of your net worth there’s
01:49:59 two important caveats to this one is I didn’t you know buy
01:50:04 some Bitcoin in 2011 or 12 right and then all of a sudden it
01:50:08 appreciated a bunch and it grew into that but from a cost
01:50:11 basis perspective you know put $100 and now it’s a ton of
01:50:14 money instead what I did was I basically in 2018 saw Bitcoin
01:50:21 from a US dollar price standpoint was falling and
01:50:23 falling and falling and in December 2018 as I take about
01:50:26 50% of my net worth and convert it from dollar denominated
01:50:30 assets into Bitcoin so it’s a very kind of intentional
01:50:32 decision with a very specific view on the world as to like
01:50:34 why I was doing it I then essentially just let it sit
01:50:38 there grow whatever until the spring of 2020 and when I saw
01:50:44 the government step in and start to say hey we’re going to
01:50:47 really be aggressive in terms of interest rate manipulation
01:50:50 and quantitative easing I then decided to go ahead and take
01:50:52 basically the remainder and start to convert it as well so
01:50:55 became very aggressive in doing that and so the way that I look
01:50:59 at it is that’s actually my savings right and so in some
01:51:03 weird way if I said to you know what’s the dollar worth you’d
01:51:06 say well a one dollar bill is worth one dollar right Bitcoin
01:51:09 to me I denominate my wealth in Bitcoin so I think of one
01:51:13 Bitcoin is worth one Bitcoin not one Bitcoin is worth 60,000
01:51:16 or 55,000 or 70,000 right I denominated everything in
01:51:19 Bitcoin when I make a purchase in my head I’m calculating how
01:51:22 much Bitcoin am I spending right now right well guess what
01:51:25 happens when you have a devaluing currency as the
01:51:28 denominator doesn’t matter right like your financial
01:51:32 incentivize to spend or invest right to consume when you have
01:51:36 an appreciating currency all of a sudden you become much less
01:51:41 consumptive in your behavior yeah because you’re actually
01:51:44 trading off future purchasing power for the consumption today
01:51:50 it’s fascinating to think that if if when you move about this
01:51:55 world you think in Bitcoin you behave differently is if you
01:51:59 think in dollars that’s really fascinating people but here’s
01:52:05 the thing is the last 50 years or so is actually the outlier
01:52:09 in history most people used to think this way yeah it’s only
01:52:14 when a fiat currency got introduced that one argument the
01:52:18 positive argument or perspective is there was an
01:52:21 explosion in growth but really it’s because there was a
01:52:24 financial incentive to consume yeah right and there’s nobody
01:52:28 better in the world than the United States at consuming and
01:52:31 we consume anything and everything and if you want to
01:52:34 see a great example look at how big the coca colas are at
01:52:37 McDonald’s right you know you go to other places they don’t
01:52:40 serve them that big and so the other example though or the
01:52:44 negative argument is we have to consume because if not you end
01:52:50 up being the bottom 45% of Americans that help no
01:52:53 investable assets and actually are just having their wealth
01:52:56 devalued away so holding the dollars end up being a very bad
01:53:01 economic decision and so when you then switch to this sound
01:53:05 money you say wait a second why would I if today I can trade
01:53:09 one Bitcoin you know back in October of last year one Bitcoin
01:53:13 for 10 thousand US dollars why would I spend that if at some
01:53:17 point in the future whether it’s a month from now or 10
01:53:20 years from now I could trade it for something much much more
01:53:23 than that you just become much more of a anti consumer and
01:53:30 much more of a long term thinker yeah from the individual
01:53:32 perspective that’s pretty powerful I wonder I mean I
01:53:35 think that’s a interesting debate what’s better for the
01:53:38 long term economy no better for the growth of the civilization
01:53:44 because capitalism is fascinating it seems to it seems
01:53:49 to work pretty well there’s this kind of like Eric Weinstein
01:53:54 says that one of the problems is for the past several decades
01:53:59 this whole economy society is built on the idea that we have
01:54:03 to keep growing like it depends on that idea and it’s a
01:54:08 good question whether that’s going to result in huge
01:54:11 problems or if like a college student on a deadline the
01:54:17 the dependence on growth will mean that we’ll have to grow
01:54:21 like the fear of death will force us to grow but I think
01:54:25 there’s a false equivalency between we’re dependent on
01:54:29 growth and then if the world was denominated in sound money
01:54:32 we don’t grow what I think ends up happening is we remove a
01:54:36 lot of the society’s bullshit yeah because right now when the
01:54:41 money is free or the currency is free you come with all kinds
01:54:45 of crazy stuff and people will give it to you right when all
01:54:48 of a sudden it’s really really valued by the population the
01:54:53 decisions are better yeah you you have to provide real value
01:54:56 in the goods and services you provide in order to get them to
01:54:59 give it to you there’s less room for corruption less room
01:55:01 for manipulation that’s and like that’s not actually
01:55:04 productive yeah definitely so you said you moved a lot of
01:55:10 your investment into bitcoin is there when you look so you’re
01:55:16 a special human being in many ways so you’re like a strategic
01:55:21 thinker but you’re also like a deep thinker about this whole
01:55:23 thing but when you look at a regular club like me in terms
01:55:27 of just investing and moving into thinking about
01:55:31 cryptocurrency is there a strategy that you recommend
01:55:34 what are the different options about investing into bitcoin
01:55:38 yeah so i think that there’s just uh kind of timeless advice
01:55:41 when it comes to uh investing or or acquiring an asset in
01:55:45 general uh dollar cost averaging is usually the the
01:55:48 best way to think about it and what i mean by that is um most
01:55:51 people don’t just have a pile of uh currency sitting there
01:55:55 right it’s not like they have a million dollars sitting in
01:55:57 their bank like what do i do with it uh that situation aside
01:56:00 what happens is they trade their hours and their effort for
01:56:05 currency and so as they get paid every two weeks let’s say
01:56:08 um the best way to acquire bitcoin without having to worry about timing
01:56:12 markets and being a professional trader is to simply take whatever the
01:56:15 percentages that you want and to buy bitcoin when you get your
01:56:19 paycheck so if you get paid on the first and 15th of every month
01:56:22 on that day you should go take you know let’s say it’s three percent of your
01:56:25 paycheck take three percent go buy bitcoin don’t
01:56:28 worry about what the price is you should do that over time and the
01:56:30 reason why that’s important is um if in december of 2017 when bitcoin
01:56:35 is at twenty thousand dollars it was the height of kind of this last
01:56:38 uh big upwards movement you had taken all of your money
01:56:41 and you had put it into bitcoin you would have had to wait almost three
01:56:45 years just to get back to quote unquote break even
01:56:48 in us dollar terms if at the same time you had simply bought then and over the
01:56:54 next three years bought every two weeks you would have been up hundreds of
01:56:58 percent three years later because what ended up
01:57:01 happening was you bought a bunch of bitcoin when it was at
01:57:03 15 12 10 9 8 3 4 5 5 5 you know all the way back up on the
01:57:09 other side and so dollar cost averaging is one of
01:57:12 these weird things that uh it almost sounds too easy but what we
01:57:17 find is in america we have a lack of financial education
01:57:21 and so rather than try to be smarter than markets what most people are better
01:57:24 off doing is just saying hey set your what’s called an asset
01:57:27 allocation plan i want 30 in stocks i want 10 in real
01:57:32 estate i want this this whatever and every time you get your paycheck
01:57:35 just think of it as a savings account right just put it in
01:57:38 based on those percentages and don’t think about it
01:57:41 and over a long enough period of time what we find is
01:57:44 almost anyone in the united states right there’s exceptions but almost anyone in
01:57:48 the united states can become a millionaire in their
01:57:50 lifetime if they follow these plans and have that long term view and they allow
01:57:54 compounding to work for them and so don’t look at the price of
01:57:57 bitcoin and all that kind of stuff just pick a
01:58:00 specific time specific day that you just buy
01:58:04 and you just keep buying that’s probably good investment advice across any kind
01:58:07 of assets it’s like if you don’t believe in
01:58:10 bitcoin and you just want to let’s say you just want to do the s&p 500
01:58:13 yeah you shouldn’t try to time the market of the s&p 500 either right you
01:58:16 should just every two weeks you should just buy some
01:58:18 and over a 20 year period you’re gonna end up buying it at all kinds
01:58:21 of different prices but you’re gonna get kind of a blended average
01:58:24 and the more important thing is the compounding and the time in the market
01:58:28 then did you buy it at you know two percent higher or lower than where you
01:58:32 bought it doesn’t really matter and buying often makes you i guess
01:58:35 uh resistant robust to the uh to the volatility of the market or the
01:58:40 volatility of bitcoin price and so on that said uh you know bitcoin price
01:58:46 is volatile and you know again the argument i’ve heard
01:58:53 is like everything that’s going to be a lot more valuable in the future
01:59:00 like if you look at the history like companies like apple like teslas
01:59:04 now i mean but let’s look at companies that
01:59:08 have now stabilized right uh apple is a good example
01:59:12 it’s like volatile in the beginning and so the argument for bitcoin is like
01:59:17 yeah this is the early stages because it’s going to be a lot more valuable
01:59:21 right now it’s volatile and this is why you have to have these kinds of
01:59:24 strategies to ride out the volatility of course everything that goes to zero is
01:59:28 also volatile like the early days are volatile uh
01:59:33 do you see like this volatility as like a feature or a bug
01:59:36 or is this just like a way of life so amazon is the one that i know the
01:59:40 numbers on in terms of early volatility uh every year since it has gone public
01:59:45 it’s had a double digit drawdown in that year uh the average
01:59:50 is over 30 percent and one time it drew down over 95 percent
01:59:55 sounds a lot like bitcoin right like oh wow this is crazy
01:59:58 but it’s one of the best performing stocks in the last 20 years if not the
02:00:01 best performing stock and so volatility is not positive or
02:00:05 negative it’s positive or negative compared to the
02:00:08 position you’re in so if you’re long and it’s volatile to the
02:00:12 upside it’s positive if you’re long holding something and
02:00:16 it’s volatile to the downside you see it as a negative it’s all about
02:00:19 perspective with that said um another way that i
02:00:23 look at this is every asset priced in bitcoin
02:00:28 is down significantly so over the last one
02:00:32 three five years the dollar priced in bitcoin
02:00:36 has crashed 99 percent if you denominate stocks it’s down like
02:00:41 80 85 if you denominate gold if you
02:00:44 denominate bonds if you just go down the line real estate etc
02:00:47 it’s all down massively against bitcoin now you could argue that that’s because
02:00:53 bitcoin is appreciating in us dollar terms
02:00:55 or you could actually argue that the world is
02:00:58 repricing this asset it’s doing price discovery on this asset
02:01:02 and it’s essentially comparing it’s saying hey bitcoin verse
02:01:05 this stock or bitcoin verse this ounce of gold or bitcoin verse
02:01:08 you know this dollar which is more valuable and it continues to move up in
02:01:11 the rankings in terms of the value that the world
02:01:13 ascribes to this some of that’s based on lindy effect just
02:01:16 the longer it persists the more likely it is to survive some of that’s based on
02:01:20 like the underlying fundamentals of how much computing power the usage
02:01:23 transaction volume things like that but some of it also is that as more
02:01:28 and more people wake up to the fact that it’s a finite supply asset that has a
02:01:31 place in the world and demand increases people just naturally
02:01:35 compete and ascribe more value to it and so the
02:01:38 volatility i think all comes back to like what do you
02:01:42 price your life in for majority people that’s dollars
02:01:45 and so you look at the us dollar price you get all this volatility
02:01:49 the beauty of this is that 60 that doesn’t move regardless of
02:01:52 price upward or downward and movement those people aren’t looking at the day
02:01:57 to day price what they’ve basically said is i’ve
02:01:59 acquired x amount of bitcoin and i’m just going to hold it for years
02:02:04 and every time somebody’s done that right if if uh you bought bitcoin at any point
02:02:07 in the last 12 years and you held it till today you are up in us dollar terms
02:02:13 now if we had this conversation 18 months ago couldn’t say that
02:02:18 so it’s all about not only the acquisition
02:02:21 price if you will it’s also when are you looking at it
02:02:24 right because there was a point in 2017 you could have said the same thing but
02:02:27 in 18 you couldn’t and so i tend to think a lot about um
02:02:30 humans are really really bad at short term
02:02:33 uh decision making because we’re so emotional
02:02:36 especially when something has a price tied to it and so it’s in terms of our
02:02:40 strategies and decision making we should be long term and have like a
02:02:43 regular almost think like an algorithm that
02:02:46 in that in that kind of way so i think you’ve tweeted that
02:02:50 you believe that bitcoin has a chance of reaching 1 million i don’t know what it
02:02:53 is currently i think it’s five the 60s which is incredible
02:02:59 i think i remember when it was at least in the double digits i think i remember
02:03:03 it was in the signal digits of a dollar so the fact that it’s cross 50 is crazy
02:03:09 uh but uh you’re even crazier apparently thinking that it can reach a million
02:03:15 so do you think it’s possible for it to reach a million is there some kind of
02:03:18 transformative effects we have to see first
02:03:21 when might it reach a million like what are the signs that we would look for
02:03:25 what’s required for it to reach a million so let’s just look at it from a macro
02:03:29 perspective uh gold is a 10 trillion dollar asset
02:03:33 and when you compare the technology of gold to the technology of bitcoin
02:03:38 bitcoin is superior in every single way right it’s more portable it’s more
02:03:41 divisible uh it’s more verifiable it’s more
02:03:44 scarce on everything and so some people would argue it’s a
02:03:48 10x improvement some people argue it’s 100x improvement from a technology
02:03:51 standpoint and so we don’t need bitcoin to
02:03:55 actually kind of um capture the full 10x or 100x
02:04:00 improvement from a market cap standpoint if bitcoin simply captures
02:04:04 2x the value be a 20 trillion dollar market cap
02:04:08 which would put bitcoin at about a million dollars
02:04:10 right so kind of just from a macro perspective if you have a 10x or 100x
02:04:13 improvement from a technology standpoint and you directionally get some value
02:04:17 capture in that direction you’re hitting around a million or more
02:04:21 uh dollar price point can ask a quick question which is uh
02:04:25 what’s the current market cap for bitcoin uh the current market cap is
02:04:28 right around a trillion just over a trillion dollars and you’re saying gold
02:04:31 is 10 trillion and uh sorry where did you get the 20
02:04:35 trillion 20 trillion would just be 2x gold market cap
02:04:39 got it right so if it’s a 10x technology improvement let’s just say it only
02:04:42 captures 2x the market cap got it right and so again if it was to
02:04:46 capture just gold market cap kind of the equivalent
02:04:49 puts you around 500 000 right so you can kind of see there’s bitcoin
02:04:52 so if you capture the entirety of the gold market
02:04:55 uh then it would be value of a single bitcoin uh the price of a single bitcoin
02:05:00 would be five hundred thousand dollars okay
02:05:04 to reach a million it would be double that that’s what the 20 trillion comes
02:05:08 from correct got it so if you then say to yourself
02:05:11 okay how does the uh the pricing um kind of cycles work right or the
02:05:18 boom and bust cycles gold is a very um
02:05:23 kind of linear type supply schedule meaning that
02:05:27 uh there is a certain amount of gold that comes out of the ground each year
02:05:30 the interyear variation in that incoming supply is not much
02:05:35 right maybe there’s an extra mining company that gets set up or a couple of
02:05:38 them maybe one goes out of business but for the
02:05:40 most part the kind of inflationary uh increase to the supply of gold
02:05:46 is pretty stagnant uh year over year bitcoin has a very unique feature which
02:05:52 every four years there is a programmatic supply shock
02:05:56 meaning that uh in the beginning 50 bitcoin every 10 minutes was introduced
02:06:00 into the supply after four years of that happening every
02:06:03 10 minutes it was cut in half so on a in a single
02:06:06 moment it went from 50 to now it was 25 four years every 10 minutes 25 got cut
02:06:11 in half again to 12 and a half and then recently in may 2020 got cut to 6.25
02:06:16 when you have an asset that is determined the price
02:06:20 based on supply and demand you normally have
02:06:23 two inputs to the equation what is the supply and what is the demand
02:06:27 in an asset like gold or a stock or anything else
02:06:31 we have to do our best guess at the supply
02:06:34 both the existing supply and the incoming supply and do our best guess at
02:06:37 the demand and we’re actually pretty good at this a lot of times in terms of
02:06:40 directionally saying it’s going to go up or down and here’s kind of some price
02:06:44 point milestones bitcoin’s unique in that there’s 100
02:06:48 verifiable proof of the existing supply
02:06:52 the total supply and the incoming daily supply
02:06:56 so we know 100 i can show you on the actual blockchain
02:06:59 or in the code that there’s 21 million bitcoin and that’s all there will ever
02:07:03 be i can show you that there’s 18.6 million
02:07:06 give or take bitcoin that actually are in circulation
02:07:09 today right and i can go all the way back to every single transaction that’s ever
02:07:12 occurred since january 2009 and then i can show you on a daily
02:07:15 basis that 900 bitcoin a day are coming into the circulating supply
02:07:18 and so when you have 100 confidence because you can prove
02:07:22 the supply side of this equation you can hold it constant
02:07:26 i know with 100 accuracy the supply side so now i’ve reduced the mathematical
02:07:31 equation that i need to do to determine price movements
02:07:34 to a 50 reduction i only have to worry about demand i don’t have to worry about
02:07:38 supply and so when i look at demand i can do
02:07:41 all kinds of things i can take the demand over the last 10 years and
02:07:44 the growth and just extrapolate it out i can increase it i can decrease it
02:07:47 whatever but what you find is that these supply
02:07:51 shocks lead to significant price appreciation
02:07:55 as the asset gets repriced because there there’s a supply shock to
02:07:59 and so probably the best thing that i’ve done over the last couple of years
02:08:03 was in 2019 i started to talk about the idea that we were going to have both a
02:08:07 supply shock and the demand shock in 2021
02:08:13 or i’m sorry in 2020 i didn’t know when this bull market that we were in was
02:08:17 going to end nobody knows right it’s impossible to time
02:08:20 these things but you could tell that we were kind of at late stages of a cycle
02:08:23 there was inverted yield curves there was rep uh gyrations in the repo markets
02:08:27 a lot of ceos leaving their jobs you know all this kind of stuff
02:08:31 and all i said was at some point when the market turns over
02:08:34 the government’s gonna have to step in we were addicted to stimulus they’re
02:08:37 gonna have to manipulate interest rates down and they’re gonna have to print
02:08:40 money i had no clue that there was going to be a global
02:08:43 pandemic that they were going to have to step in
02:08:45 in such an aggressive way and move rates not down but down to zero
02:08:49 and that they not only were going to print hundreds of billions but they could
02:08:52 print trillions of dollars but the framework that i used to think
02:08:56 about this was when they do that everyone is going to
02:09:00 run to store value assets they’re going to run the gold they’re going to run the
02:09:03 bitcoin etc and right as they do that it appears at
02:09:07 the same time there’s going to be this supply shock
02:09:09 so you’re gonna get a supply shock and a demand shock that are both positive for
02:09:12 the the price i called it rocket fuel for bitcoin
02:09:15 well it happened and here we are i now look forward and i say okay we are
02:09:20 likely going to see a hundred thousand bitcoin
02:09:22 a hundred thousand dollar bitcoin this year or at some point i don’t know when
02:09:25 it happens but we’re moving in that so you think in 2021 we’ll see a hundred
02:09:28 thousand that would be uh my most conservative
02:09:32 view uh i i’ve said a hundred thousand dollars
02:09:35 since 2019 and people thought that was insane and
02:09:38 crazy and all stuff now i’m the conservative guy in the room
02:09:41 because i stick with a hundred thousand dollars and people are saying
02:09:44 you know multiples of that number here uh so we’ll see what happens but
02:09:48 but i think that there’s still a lot of room kind of to run from a us dollar
02:09:52 price standpoint what is on the horizon is in 2024 we
02:09:56 will have another supply shock and so that’s what i think will carry
02:09:59 us to the million dollar bitcoin from 6 to 5 to whatever 50 reduction yeah
02:10:04 yeah and so that’s what i think uh well
02:10:06 basically when we get that that next supply shock that’ll carry us up over a
02:10:10 hundred or over a one million dollar bitcoin price which if historical
02:10:15 examples persist and again sometimes it’s hard to use historical examples to
02:10:20 look at future events um but if that happens we would see
02:10:23 a million dollars of bitcoin by the end of 2026
02:10:27 after that wave so 2024 basically is the supply shock and within
02:10:32 you know 18 to 24 months you would see the uh
02:10:35 the kind of top of the next market hopefully without a coupling to the net
02:10:39 to another pandemic yes we we would like to do all of this without a
02:10:44 public health crisis so that would take it to
02:10:47 20 trillion you don’t have to compare it to the dollar
02:10:51 essentially in some sense that the dollar could also lose value i mean
02:10:55 there’s a lot of kind of dynamics at play here
02:10:58 now but like fundamentally there’s going to be a huge
02:11:02 move uh in your prediction of uh value into into bitcoin
02:11:06 i mean that’s a fascinating world uh to think about
02:11:10 uh i mean but i do have to kind of ask you about the whole space of
02:11:16 technology there because we’re talking about the value of security we’re
02:11:19 talking about the the future which bitcoin will be at the
02:11:22 center of but from my perspective of
02:11:26 thinking how like i and others can build technologies on top of
02:11:31 this kind of decentralized world i’m thinking about different
02:11:35 different technologies out there different cryptocurrencies out there
02:11:38 ethereum being one but there’s a lot of others
02:11:42 so i’d love to get your sort of ideas about some of these but
02:11:45 so first let me ask you about what the hell is shit coin
02:11:50 is this connected to uh to our previous discussion of the meme
02:11:54 uh this shit coin cover basically all coins that are not
02:11:59 bitcoin is it uh uh mean is it a beautiful is it’s a mixture of
02:12:05 both as with most things in life uh depends
02:12:08 who you ask um the uh most um
02:12:14 kind of enthusiastic and uh uh parts of the bitcoin community shit
02:12:19 coin is anything else right kind of if you ascribe to kind
02:12:23 of a maximalistic view of the world shit crime be anything if you look at
02:12:27 people who i would say are bitcoin proponents uh yet
02:12:31 see value in other things shit coin may be the bottom half
02:12:35 of the other things right so i think again it’s really important kind of who
02:12:39 you ask is how you’ll get that answer so
02:12:42 there’s tiers and the way you divide those tiers might be different depending
02:12:45 who you ask ultimately what it is is it’s a meme yeah
02:12:48 and it’s used to uh articulate the idea that whatever you want to put in
02:12:54 that bucket has no value so shit coin right are coins that have
02:12:57 no value yeah uh what is fascinating about it and i
02:13:02 think that again speaks to the power of the bitcoin community
02:13:05 is uh there was congressional hearings a couple years ago
02:13:08 oh no and at one point uh a congressman from ohio warren davidson who uh
02:13:13 who’s definitely uh open minded and excited about bitcoin
02:13:17 asked a an individual on the congress floor
02:13:20 uh during testimony to uh talk about these other coins and at one point
02:13:26 basically read into the record the terminology of shit coin
02:13:31 he said the word shit coin uh i can’t remember if he said it first
02:13:34 somebody else did or if uh the other person did and then he uh um
02:13:38 you know repeated it that’s awesome but he definitely he was trying to get that
02:13:42 read into the record yes uh for sure and so uh you know you
02:13:46 can imagine one again the meme speaking insolently to
02:13:50 the bitcoin community was you know made him very uh very well
02:13:54 liked uh but also too was um it does go back to this idea almost of
02:14:00 uh if you and i sat down with 10 ceos and we interviewed each one of them and
02:14:05 then we went in a room and we deliberated and we said we have to pick
02:14:07 the person who’s going to be the most successful
02:14:10 one of the inputs not all the inputs but one of the inputs would be
02:14:13 who’s the person who we believe has the best ability to
02:14:16 raise capital recruit people and tell a story
02:14:20 to the world that will get them to follow and so somebody like elon would
02:14:26 probably be the best example of this when you have decentralized products you
02:14:30 have no kind of leader right in the sense of somebody who is
02:14:34 financially ascribed to be that leader and kind of the
02:14:37 executive decision maker so what you have to do is you have to
02:14:40 look at these technologies in these communities and say
02:14:43 well which volunteer teams or which technologies have been able to coalesce
02:14:48 these groups around it and in some way build the same level of
02:14:53 engagement and protection and things like that and so
02:14:57 you actually get tribalism but you also get things like
02:15:00 shitcoin because what it does is it’s not only a um
02:15:05 kind of verbal attack towards uh others it’s a rallying cry for
02:15:12 internal what’s so funny is that it was started with the bitcoin community
02:15:16 talking about everybody but now you’ve seen adoption in other communities who
02:15:19 use it you know basically say well we’re not a
02:15:21 shitcoin it’s the it’s the next guy yeah i mean the meaning to be honest
02:15:26 it’s it’s one it’s off it’s sometimes
02:15:29 misused i think like with anything it’s like
02:15:32 people adopt memes that used to be brilliant or still brilliant
02:15:37 and they’re just not good at using them so they become
02:15:40 mean uh but when you do with with grace it can tear down an
02:15:47 argument and at the same time have like love and
02:15:51 respect underneath it i mean it’s a beautiful dance they have to be good at
02:15:54 like you know people just can suck at communication and even
02:15:59 uh like even a powerful weapon like a meme in the wrong hands
02:16:02 just uh fires in a way that doesn’t get anything done but this is like a war
02:16:09 of humor and memes it’s kind of fascinating exactly like you formulated
02:16:13 that there’s a symmetry of power so you have to
02:16:16 have guerrilla warfare in this internet game especially when there’s no leader
02:16:22 like you said in a distributed culture i would say here that is um
02:16:26 is really important i think is from a society standpoint
02:16:31 we’ve become very soft and very kind of coddling and not in um
02:16:37 not in a way that’s like i think people take this argument like too far
02:16:40 sometimes but what i mean by that is um it’s almost like if you’re the person
02:16:45 who holds somebody accountable you become the bad person right if you’re
02:16:49 the person who um says hey you know that’s wrong you’re
02:16:53 the bad person right and so in a world where i think in um
02:16:57 this kind of influencery you know all positive if you have any negative
02:17:02 you know feedback or constructive criticism like you’re the bad person
02:17:06 uh it’s the ultimate echo chamber right and so i think that what the bitcoin
02:17:11 world does in in some crazy crazy way to look
02:17:15 at it is bitcoin is ultimately about truth
02:17:20 not about narrative not about feelings or emotion it’s math yeah
02:17:26 you look at a blockchain and you can prove something
02:17:30 or you can’t and so naturally people who are attracted to that
02:17:34 have a very similar approach in life yeah right they say hey
02:17:37 you made x claim prove it and as you can imagine
02:17:41 you know a great example is like the financial media meets bitcoiners
02:17:45 and it’s a bloodbath right in kind of the the arena of ideas because
02:17:50 what do they do the financial media is used to the soft
02:17:54 you know opinion pieces etc and bitcoiners show up and they’re like
02:17:57 uh here’s data point a b and c here’s example one two and three
02:18:01 and you’re wrong and then all they yell and scream about is like
02:18:05 uh i’m wrong i’m wrong i’m wrong like you can’t say i’m wrong and they’re like
02:18:08 nerd like disprove what i just said and so you get in this like very very weird
02:18:12 it’s fascinating it’s a fascinating battlefield but
02:18:14 i i do want to say it’s i’ve been watching this
02:18:17 it’s kind of interesting i think that the pursuit of truth
02:18:23 like tearing down bad ideas can be done with grace and to do it with
02:18:29 grace requires a lot of skill like what people
02:18:32 don’t realize about disagreement they think that disagreement is easy
02:18:38 like they they see the the the lies or the inaccuracies in the
02:18:44 statement and and they just think they can say
02:18:47 wrong uh yes you can say that but if you want
02:18:51 to be effective it requires great skill like you look at
02:18:57 i don’t know um a beautiful uh verbal shit poster which is Christopher
02:19:03 Hitchens right it requires a lot of skill
02:19:08 through your words to tear down an argument
02:19:11 to criticize and to take a step towards truth
02:19:16 what i’m disheartened by internet culture like the negative side
02:19:20 is people don’t put a lot of effort in their tear downs
02:19:25 like into your shit posting into your memes
02:19:29 you should put effort and see it as a skill that you want to if you want to be
02:19:34 a part of this culture you want to uh get good at it
02:19:39 like any skill it’s the 10 000 hours like get improve deliberate practice
02:19:45 self criticism all of those things uh just because you’re anonymous
02:19:50 doesn’t mean you won’t get deep joy and actually have an impact on the world if
02:19:55 you get good at shitposting but but i think this is really really
02:19:59 important right because you’re right in that
02:20:01 uh it’s all about intention versus action if your intention is to
02:20:05 uh tell somebody that they are wrong in an effort to get them to
02:20:09 see the truth yes that’s very different than if your intention is to tell
02:20:12 someone they’re wrong and hurt their feelings yes
02:20:14 right and so when you can unpack intention and action
02:20:18 you really quickly can tell what somebody ultimately is trying to
02:20:22 accomplish i also think that one of the craziest
02:20:25 things that i’ve seen play out is uh memes when i use that term i’m not
02:20:30 just talking about like a static photo right when i’m talking about these
02:20:32 elaborate uh kind of edited videos and kind of
02:20:35 all this stuff um when done right it is
02:20:41 uh the most articulate way to deliver a blunt message and it’s
02:20:47 done in such a way that is humorous and entertaining
02:20:51 yet really hammers the point home and so it’s a skill set that many people don’t
02:20:57 have i don’t make those i’m assuming you don’t make them either
02:21:00 right i see them i share the ones that i like right
02:21:03 uh but it does take practice and you can tell
02:21:06 look there’s people who are fantastic meme lords right and there are
02:21:10 people who absolutely suck at it and it’s like anything it’s just
02:21:15 how good are you at communicating and uh i’ve heard the idea a bunch of times so
02:21:20 i don’t know who to kind of credit for it but uh whether it’s emojis
02:21:24 it’s gifs it’s memes whatever this is the extension and evolution of
02:21:29 just hieroglyphics right yeah like like we have been doing
02:21:33 this for literally centuries it’s just that now we’re doing it on
02:21:36 the internet you can press a button and go to
02:21:38 millions and millions of people immediately uh but speaking of memes
02:21:43 what the heck do you think is up with elon musk talking about dogecoin a lot
02:21:48 sort of uh from the cryptocurrency community i
02:21:51 from i’ve been talking to a lot of sort of technologists i guess
02:21:56 and reading papers on cryptocurrency it’s like
02:21:59 nobody really sees dogecoin as a revolutionary
02:22:04 crypto technology a lot of people talk about it’s security issues there’s a
02:22:07 bunch of issues it has nevertheless you did say that money is the
02:22:13 kind of social construct right and uh elon musk’s
02:22:19 combination of humor and brilliant engineering in the various
02:22:24 companies he runs combines to create a kind of value
02:22:29 and excitement behind dogecoin it’s like
02:22:32 um what is it he says uh that the most amusing outcome is the most likely
02:22:38 kind of idea which sounds silly but there could be like profound truth to it
02:22:44 it’s like what do you make of dogecoin philosophically or technically is is it
02:22:50 possible that dogecoin will overtake bitcoin and run the
02:22:55 run the entire world i can’t even because it could happen
02:22:59 it could happen but what uh if there’s any serious way to answer that question
02:23:04 well we have to start with uh techno king of tesla yeah and master of coin
02:23:12 as they are so articulately called in the latest scc filing
02:23:15 he officially changed his title techno king yes no king of tesla
02:23:19 and the cfo’s new uh title is a master of coin
02:23:24 and so uh when you have a sense of humor yeah and frankly uh a level of uh
02:23:32 self confidence and uh an element of uh an appreciation for irony in the world
02:23:39 dogecoin is actually one of the least crazy things that you could talk about
02:23:44 when you’re willing to go to techno king of tesla master of coin
02:23:48 uh and all this stuff and so i think that
02:23:51 elon uh doesn’t get enough credit frankly for his understanding of internet
02:23:55 culture understanding of memes and understanding
02:23:58 of frankly human psychology and marketing and so
02:24:02 in some crazy way every time he talks about dogecoin
02:24:06 it’s a rallying cry for an entire generation of kids
02:24:09 it’s a rallying cry for an entire industry uh in terms of cryptocurrencies
02:24:13 and digital technologies but this is the flag yeah
02:24:19 and this is the thing that he can yell and scream about
02:24:22 and tweet about without worry of punishment
02:24:26 so he could be talking about bitcoin he could be talking about cryptocurrency
02:24:29 but that’s not going to be uh as beautifully
02:24:33 humorous and whatever the hell internet culture is as dogecoin
02:24:37 he’s finding the right language he’s speaking the language of the people
02:24:40 of the of the in the digital age if you want to reach weird people
02:24:45 yeah you can’t be serious and most people are weird
02:24:49 the masses are weird so he’s speaking to the masses
02:24:52 yeah and the techno king and even further than that i think is
02:24:56 he essentially is um he’s using dogecoin as a way to say
02:25:04 i’m doing this because i can yeah he couldn’t do it
02:25:08 with securities he couldn’t do it with certain types of other assets right
02:25:13 like i almost look at it as like a venn diagram what’s the thing that a bunch of
02:25:16 people know about care about thinkers funny whatever and
02:25:19 also overlay that with the things that like he
02:25:21 could actually talk about they won’t get in trouble for
02:25:24 that’s a big f you to the sec i could see the
02:25:27 the people just freaking out i i mean i love it
02:25:30 but um i i don’t know if i would have the guts to do it myself
02:25:34 but i i think he’s an inspiration to a lot of us
02:25:37 to be like well maybe you should grow the guts
02:25:40 when you’re the techno king you can do whatever you want right
02:25:45 and i mean that’s something to aspire to is to be the techno king in your own
02:25:49 little world if you also think about it in the sense
02:25:52 of uh when you’re somebody on a mission to create interplanetary
02:25:58 life yeah when you’re trying to solve a or put a dent in the climate crisis
02:26:05 or create electric vehicles and be the first american company and you know
02:26:08 however long frankly the sec
02:26:13 or other things in your life that just don’t
02:26:16 you don’t ascribe that much importance to compared to those things
02:26:20 they’re almost uh nuisances and that’s scary i think for shareholders
02:26:25 of a company when the person that you’re trusting to lead
02:26:28 you to the promised land and create shareholder value
02:26:31 doesn’t put value on certain things but at the same time
02:26:36 i always look at it as a tug of war how much of the actions of what he’s doing
02:26:40 and calling attention to actually change the way
02:26:44 that regulators lawmakers politicians countries whatever act he may not be
02:26:50 able to say do acts i’m the techno king and they go do it
02:26:55 but with every step he makes he changes some of their behavior and so i
02:27:01 think that it’s um a really kind of game of like 3d chess
02:27:07 that frankly i’m not privy to right i’m kind of watching from the sidelines and
02:27:11 uh figuring out alongside everybody else but i also don’t think that it’s just
02:27:17 elon uh bought a bunch of dogecoin and tweets about it because he thinks he’s
02:27:20 going to a dollar and he’s gonna you know make money right like i don’t think
02:27:23 i don’t think it’s an economic argument as to why he’s so
02:27:26 interested in i think it’s much more uh it’s almost like meta message
02:27:31 for a lot of other stuff yeah he’s kind of
02:27:35 trying to break apart internet communication from first principles like
02:27:38 it does so many other problems it’s kind of fascinating to watch i know he’s been
02:27:42 uh he’s he’s taught me quite a bit about communication
02:27:45 and uh at least for me it’s been liberating to not give a fuck
02:27:52 about the old school way of things i’ve been always bothered by
02:27:57 a place i deeply admire which is mit but there’s
02:28:01 problems the bureaucracies and hierarchies that hold back innovation
02:28:05 brilliant minds and in that sense doge is a kind of fu to
02:28:10 the system that’s kind of positive but also
02:28:15 uh kind of uh but it was also an fu so in that sense i think
02:28:22 elon has a perspective on the world that’s similar to bitcoin folks
02:28:26 which i really like which is like thinking long term
02:28:30 it’s how visionaries think is like how will if i take these ideas
02:28:35 what and the ideas hold true what will the world look like in 20 30
02:28:42 50 years and think about everything in that way
02:28:45 yeah i like uh bezos’s view which is uh is essentially how do you minimize
02:28:51 regret how do you accelerate your life mentally
02:28:55 and go to 80 90 100 150 years whatever we end up
02:28:59 being you know fortunate enough to live to and then look backwards
02:29:02 yes and say this decision that i’m going to make i have two
02:29:06 options which one is going to be the one that i least regret
02:29:10 and if you continue to make decisions that way
02:29:13 one you have that long term view kind of built in because you’re working
02:29:15 backwards uh two you are ultimately going to optimize
02:29:19 for uh minimal regret but also three is
02:29:23 even if you only look forward 10 years that’s much much further than most
02:29:27 people do and so it gives you a significant
02:29:29 advantage and i think that um bitcoin has kind of this like um
02:29:33 you know proxy for time as we talked about uh
02:29:36 interplant uh planetary travel where there’s multiple steps from creating a
02:29:41 reusable rocket to landing it to you know all this stuff all the way
02:29:46 to simple things just like if you’re simply trying to figure out
02:29:49 where the world’s going to be 30 years from now
02:29:52 you know bill gates says that we overestimate what we can do in one year
02:29:56 underestimate what we can do in 10 well to me it’s a um kind of degree of
02:30:02 uh mistake if you will 10 years maybe you’re off by 10 percent
02:30:07 well if that line of progress continues 20 years you may be off by
02:30:11 100 and 30 years you may be off by a thousand percent
02:30:15 right like almost the further you go out the more inaccurate you become
02:30:20 and so i think that people who want to iterate their way to success right
02:30:26 that’s a common thing in like the startup world
02:30:29 end up actually following kind of the breadcrumbs to where the
02:30:33 world is taking them but people like an elon musk a jeff
02:30:38 bezos a jack dorsey all the way down the line all these
02:30:41 innovators they actually say to themselves there is
02:30:45 a point in time in the future where there’s a world i want to
02:30:48 construct and then they go and they construct it
02:30:52 regardless of the short term iterations and incentives
02:30:56 it is just they’re driving towards that point and i think that it’s this whole
02:30:59 idea of having this like you know kind of set vision and this
02:31:03 uh refusal to kind of move or budge off of that
02:31:07 that’s what makes them special one of the
02:31:11 things that garnered a lot of excitement in the crypto
02:31:14 community is nfts i i have no idea really the depths the
02:31:21 fundamental technological philosophical depths of the second of this technology
02:31:26 whether this is just like a little bit of a fad or there’s some deep lessons to
02:31:30 learn whether it’s bitcoin or cryptocurrency in general about it
02:31:33 do you have thoughts about like the long lasting fundamental aspects of nfts
02:31:38 i think there’s probably both things happening fad
02:31:41 and things to learn right and um if we just start with like what is an
02:31:47 nft it’s a non fungible token meaning that um there’s no fungibility
02:31:52 and fungibility is a fancy word um i always describe it as
02:31:56 if i took a hundred dollar bill and i put it on the table with a bunch of the
02:31:58 hundred dollar bills and we mixed them up and i just grabbed a hundred dollar
02:32:01 bill and left i’m no worse as long as they’re all you
02:32:04 know uh official hundred dollar bills because as long as i have a hundred
02:32:07 dollars i have hundred dollars i don’t need that exact same bill back
02:32:10 so that means that those hundred dollar bills are fungible
02:32:13 non fungible would be like art if i took a picasso and i put it down on the table
02:32:17 and you brought three artists that no one’s ever heard of before and we mixed
02:32:20 them up and i just took any random piece of art
02:32:22 it wasn’t the picasso i lose because the picasso is really
02:32:25 important there right so non fungibility is important in art
02:32:28 what these non fungible tokens essentially are doing is they are uh
02:32:32 creating scarcity and originality in a digital environment and what i mean by
02:32:38 that is um take a music file if i had a music
02:32:42 file and you wanted it you said send it to me
02:32:45 i press send it essentially creates a copy and you get one music file i get
02:32:49 another we don’t care you can listen to music i
02:32:51 can listen to music we’re super happy if i instead though have a digital file
02:32:57 that entire premise is based on scarcity and i hit send and you get a copy and i
02:33:03 keep the original or you get the original i get a copy
02:33:05 there’s a problem and so ultimately what i think is playing out with nfts is
02:33:11 it’s a technology regardless of where it plays out from
02:33:15 blockchains or uh what in communities or environments
02:33:19 that just brings true digital scarcity to the internet and so naturally what
02:33:25 people do they look at the legacy world and they
02:33:28 say well what’s scarce there that has value
02:33:30 how do we bring that to the digital world so art is a perfect example right
02:33:33 and you know frankly last year i started to
02:33:36 look at this because it felt like this was going to be really really big
02:33:40 and the conclusion i came to was just as bitcoin is going to be bigger
02:33:45 than gold right the digital application of
02:33:48 something is going to be bigger than the analog application
02:33:50 the same thing’s going to be true in art the digital art world is going to be
02:33:54 bigger than the traditional art world people think that sounds crazy at first
02:33:57 until you start to realize it’s very very similar the art is more
02:34:01 portable it can be divisible right it’s got a
02:34:04 larger demand market in terms of the internet rather than an auction right
02:34:08 all this kind of stuff when you display it it can have motion
02:34:12 and music and all of these aspects to it that are better than the traditional
02:34:16 art what the traditional art market has that
02:34:18 the digital art market has not had is the narrative narrative based world
02:34:23 scarcity kind of in digital sense and so what i think the entire world is
02:34:30 going through right now is an exploration of how do we use this
02:34:33 technology to create new things frankly
02:34:38 we’re not going to be good at it for a while
02:34:40 and so the only place i’ve really focused on is
02:34:43 digital art itself and i’ve always been interested in art but i wasn’t going to
02:34:50 go buy a painting and hang it on the wall
02:34:52 right in the sense of uh that’s how i was going to store value
02:34:55 what i find fascinating though is that i now can take
02:34:59 that concept which most of the wealthiest people in the world
02:35:02 have a significant portion some you know some people have 20 percent in terms of
02:35:06 you know number of billionaires 20 percent of their wealth is in art
02:35:10 and you can bring to this digital realm which is much more um
02:35:13 kind of natural to a digital native and so the best way to describe the
02:35:19 importance is imagine a serial number being placed on
02:35:22 something take the eiffel tower the only eiffel
02:35:26 tower that has value is the first one every replica of it regardless of size
02:35:30 location you know who made it where they sent it
02:35:33 they have no value eiffel tower 001 is the most important
02:35:38 and so i think that’s ultimately what we’re starting to see here
02:35:41 and what we’re looking at is probably one percent of what it’s going to grow
02:35:45 into so you’re you’re bullish you’re saying
02:35:49 it could grow into something for one percent it could grow into something
02:35:52 significant like all the kinds of different applications
02:35:55 strip away all the applications right now and just think about
02:35:58 is digital scarcity going to be important on the internet moving all the things
02:36:01 that are scarce in the physical world into digital space
02:36:04 us trying to figure out which things can be moved and not
02:36:07 and also there’s things in the digital space just like you’re saying that
02:36:10 don’t exist in the physical world that might also
02:36:13 benefit from gaining scarcity like you know people are i guess creating
02:36:18 nfts out of like tweets or whatever so like you’re you have you
02:36:21 have a fun twitter account you know you could say like you
02:36:24 could put value to a single tweet and then be
02:36:27 able to invest in it and trade it and buy parts of it and all those kinds of
02:36:31 things you know you can invest in people you
02:36:33 can invest in you know art can be defined broadly as
02:36:38 any kind of creation right and in some sense
02:36:42 this whole idea of scarcity can overtake the entirety
02:36:47 of the digital world it can like consume the
02:36:52 all of the markets we see as financial markets and just turn
02:36:56 everything into a market well so if i take you on like a i don’t know
02:37:01 10 year fast forward yeah and i paint a picture of uh something today that seems
02:37:06 absolutely insane but there’s early signs that people are
02:37:09 building this and let’s just give them the benefit of the doubt that
02:37:12 some of the early iterations will work and some of or most of them won’t
02:37:16 there’s a world where you and i are participating in a digital economy
02:37:21 in a virtual world where uh whether it is a piece of art
02:37:26 it is a digital sculpture it is a digital
02:37:29 skin from a video game it is a digital good that we purchased somewhere online
02:37:36 and we bring it and we display it in a digital museum or a virtual museum
02:37:42 and so now all of a sudden you can charge people for entry
02:37:46 you can consign digital goods it’s the replication of what happens in the
02:37:50 analog world now just in digital and when you do that
02:37:53 what you do is you take the addressable markets
02:37:58 of these assets or these mechanisms and they explode
02:38:01 in the digital realm and so now all of a sudden
02:38:05 how fast does the human race accelerate when it comes to human
02:38:10 production intelligence learning all in the digital
02:38:14 output it’s just if i said to you 20 years ago i’m going to give you a
02:38:19 global education that means i’m going to take you and i’m
02:38:22 going to physically move you to geography after geography after
02:38:26 geography it’s going to take time it’s going to
02:38:29 take resources and ultimately it’s going to take lots of effort
02:38:32 if i now said to you hey i’m going to transport you
02:38:36 in this virtual world to multiple geographies
02:38:40 but you’re going to experience it in this virtual
02:38:44 world and you’re going to have digital goods that you can take
02:38:47 from economy to economy or from location to location
02:38:52 all of a sudden you may get maybe you get 90 of the value you don’t get 100
02:38:55 of the same value we get 90 of the value but you can
02:38:58 do it at a much faster pace and so in the six month period
02:39:02 you’ve actually made three times the progress
02:39:05 than you would have if you had to do in the physical world so that’s where i
02:39:09 think we’re heading so there’s digital art being displayed
02:39:13 in the digital museum and people are being charged for access
02:39:17 and perhaps we plug in our senses which means we start to operate more and more
02:39:22 in a virtual reality augmented reality virtual reality way
02:39:25 with this digital world and increasingly going to this world
02:39:29 basically lived most of our productive and uh
02:39:33 social lives in this digital world uh and increasingly essentially create a
02:39:39 simulation where the biological basis is just there
02:39:44 to say sustain the brain that’s used to operate in the in the virtual world
02:39:49 uh taking us back to the original when we started talking about war
02:39:53 i wonder what conflict looks like in that world
02:39:57 that uh the people who are born today maybe will be fighting wars
02:40:02 in the space in in that museum world in that digital world remember what i said
02:40:07 we’re moving from a world of conflict surrounded
02:40:11 and determined by bombs bullets and soldiers
02:40:14 to a battlefield that is determined by war of information
02:40:19 and cyber capabilities and so in that virtual world
02:40:24 is it about death and destruction of human life in the physical analog world
02:40:31 or will it become more important to attack or defend
02:40:35 virtual property and virtual life and you know some level of virtual
02:40:40 sovereignty in my opinion the latter is more likely
02:40:45 and so what you start to understand is well
02:40:48 what do you truly value in your life is it the physical analog materialistic
02:40:55 consumptive goods or is it virtual
02:41:00 and in many cases something as simple as the ability to connect
02:41:05 with somebody it’s really important and so one of the most disruptive
02:41:10 combative violent things that a country may do to another country in the future
02:41:15 simply take down the internet
02:41:18 and put people in isolation yeah i don’t need to physically harm you if i can
02:41:23 psychologically harm you i don’t need to it’s terrifying yeah i
02:41:27 don’t need to uh actually convince you
02:41:32 through a monopoly on violence on physical violence
02:41:36 what if i can psychologically change the way you see the world
02:41:39 through misinformation through all sorts of
02:41:42 nefarious activities and i think that you know the united states has been
02:41:46 struggling with this idea over the last couple of years in the political arena
02:41:49 but what happens when it starts to come to other aspects of our life
02:41:54 and i think it’s very likely it’s almost obviously likely that we’re moving into
02:41:58 the digital world
02:42:01 the one of the features of the digital world
02:42:05 is that artificial intelligence systems can operate with much more power in a
02:42:11 in a frictionless way in that world currently as we understand it it’s hard
02:42:16 it’s hard to build robots that operate at scale and do like
02:42:20 arbitrary large amount of impact damage or positive
02:42:24 in the physical world it’s much easier to do in the digital world
02:42:28 do you have do you ever think about ai systems
02:42:31 just swimming about uh doing extraordinarily powerful destructive
02:42:38 things in the digital world is that something of a concern to you
02:42:42 or is this something into a very distant future
02:42:46 i think a lot of artificial intelligence is
02:42:49 uh in the name it’s simply the replication of human intelligence
02:42:54 at scale automated and program uh programmatic meaning
02:43:00 that in the analog world you could go hire a
02:43:04 thousand employees or in you know an amazon case hire
02:43:07 millions of employees and set a mission or a goal and push
02:43:12 them to go do that that requires recruiting retention
02:43:16 training resources all that stuff in the virtual world or in this digital
02:43:22 economy what if you can just program the resources
02:43:26 and gain the same leverage and do it at scale and do it in a very
02:43:30 programmatic way and then have them actually make decisions
02:43:35 in a way that doesn’t require you to have thought of every single
02:43:39 potential scenario or edge case that’s ultimately what we’re talking about when
02:43:43 we talk about artificial intelligence right
02:43:45 and so when you look at that when technology is created
02:43:49 everyone uses it for good or bad but both get used
02:43:53 right and so whether we’re talking about cell phones beepers the internet
02:43:57 uh guns whatever it’s always used for good and bad
02:44:01 the big question is and i think that you know yourself and many other people have
02:44:05 rightfully said this is the question really becomes
02:44:10 is the negative and nefarious uses of this inadvertent potentially
02:44:16 or does it actually come from a malicious person it’s the intention
02:44:20 malicious and to me that’s what i i don’t know
02:44:22 enough you know much more about this and there’s plenty of other people who do as
02:44:25 well but i do think that there will be
02:44:29 nefarious actors and malicious people but we’re going to treat them the same
02:44:34 way we’ve always treated people who use technology poorly right we’re going to
02:44:38 understand it we’re going to identify it we’re going to control it and then we’re
02:44:40 going to end up reversing it or preventing that from doing them it’s the
02:44:44 inadvertent things that i think are actually the most dangerous
02:44:47 because when you have something that can think for itself
02:44:51 and there is no way to leverage a monopoly on violence
02:44:56 for control it’s a very scary thing and it can i mean the the thing that’s
02:45:02 scary to me is this it can scale arbitrarily so it can outnumber humans
02:45:06 very quickly even if it’s dumber than humans and so
02:45:12 i don’t know if we’re able to reason about a world
02:45:16 like let’s look at the physical analog where all of a sudden
02:45:21 uh let’s talk about something kind of like humans but dumber than humans like
02:45:26 chimps okay imagine that all of a sudden chimps
02:45:30 could multiply arbitrarily quickly and you could have
02:45:35 like a trillion chimps the next day when you
02:45:39 when you only had maybe a million the day before
02:45:42 like how does that world look different where the fuck all these chimps come
02:45:46 from and they like and then we can we can
02:45:50 pretend to be like well let’s hope the chimps like don’t get violent because
02:45:54 they don’t seem to get violent when the resources aren’t constrained
02:45:59 but like we don’t know and the problem is
02:46:02 it all starts by building that first chip multiplier
02:46:07 device and everyone’s like okay yeah there’s a lot of good applications you
02:46:10 want you know uh you can make all kinds of
02:46:14 arguments for why you have more chimps maybe they can help you out around the
02:46:19 house or something like that in the physical space uh but
02:46:23 ultimately it’s the unintended consequences that you’re referring to is
02:46:27 you don’t know what’s going to happen i’m really worried about
02:46:31 dumb ai agents uh like having impact when they’re multiplied
02:46:38 to a million to a billion and are allowed to operate in the digital space
02:46:44 especially as we clearly are moving more and more
02:46:48 of our lives into the digital space so it’s kind of terrifying because we you
02:46:54 know a lot of people are terrified or like concerned about super
02:46:57 intelligence systems i think i’m definitely much more
02:47:02 concerned about super dumb systems at scale that
02:47:06 that’s terrifying i always think about um the inadvertent
02:47:09 but as you were talking what it made me think of is
02:47:12 also the irreversible irreversible that’s right so it’s one thing if there’s
02:47:16 your inadvertent negative impact but we have
02:47:20 reversibility built into a system and we can fix our mistakes yeah i think
02:47:24 the really scary part is when you overlay inadvertent mistakes with the
02:47:28 irreversible aspect of it and therefore humans have no control
02:47:34 yeah if you if you have the trillion chimps you can’t
02:47:38 they’re not gonna like it when you try to start killing them off
02:47:44 uh all right but back to bitcoin those chimps in the bitcoin community
02:47:51 anytime you bring up chimps some people say joe rogan entered the chat
02:47:55 can i ask you about sort of learning about bitcoin books and resources you
02:48:00 have an amazing podcast that’s not just about
02:48:04 bitcoin or cryptocurrency it’s about everything including life but you do
02:48:08 have a lot of really amazing conversations about this whole
02:48:12 digital world but you obviously you also have a newsletter
02:48:17 that’s incredible on substack and and um
02:48:23 but do you have recommendations maybe it would be great if you could talk about
02:48:27 first of all your podcast and the newsletter but also other
02:48:31 resources that you recommend people should check out in order to learn
02:48:35 about bitcoin yeah so the podcast and uh email are like the two most selfish
02:48:40 things i do because the podcast is a way for me to
02:48:43 learn from other people so i get them to come on and tell me all
02:48:46 the things they’re thinking about and i could ask some questions what’s it
02:48:49 called by the way uh just the pomp podcast
02:48:52 and so in doing that um it really is informative for me and i think that my
02:48:57 whole goal is just like if i’m learning other people will be learning
02:49:00 and then the email uh i read it every morning because it forces me to
02:49:05 collect my thoughts and actually articulate them in somewhat of a
02:49:08 coherent way and so it’s just something that um is
02:49:12 like a practice that i probably would do even if no one read it
02:49:14 and then by being able to publish it uh what does it do it elicits you know
02:49:19 both the good and bad responses and so people will let me know if they think
02:49:22 i’m an idiot and they’ll usually not respond if they think that
02:49:24 it’s something smart and so um those two things are really um
02:49:29 educational for me and i think kind of forced me to uh to be able to
02:49:32 articulate a lot of ideas but a lot of what i share or learn on
02:49:36 those things come from these other resources
02:49:38 so i’m definitely subscribing people should subscribe but
02:49:41 what are bitcoin resources books that you recommend
02:49:45 i think you got to start with bitcoin standard uh that one to me feels like
02:49:49 uh it really lays out the picture nicely um
02:49:52 there is uh bitcoin uh money you can’t fuck with
02:49:56 i was written by our friend jason williams uh as you can imagine it’s
02:49:59 basically what it talks about uh there’s another book layered money
02:50:03 um it’s written by nick who uh who’s done a great uh great job
02:50:06 kind of laying it out um there’s a book uh called bitcoin in black america
02:50:10 written by a guy isaiah jackson and he basically lays out the argument for
02:50:14 why the black community um can benefit in a
02:50:18 asymmetric way from something like bitcoin um and there’s a whole bunch
02:50:22 more i’m gonna forget them all um there’s the uh i think it’s called the
02:50:25 cost of tomorrow a guy jeff booth uh jeff booth wrote it
02:50:30 um and just if you get on twitter basically you’re gonna see all these
02:50:33 books flying around um but i do have to say that uh from a
02:50:38 psychological concept uh or philosophical
02:50:41 concept the number one book that i’ve ever read uh that aligns with bitcoin
02:50:45 ethos but doesn’t say a word about bitcoin
02:50:47 is a book called the dow of capital by mark spitznagel
02:50:51 and so what he essentially does is he just reiterates over and over and over
02:50:55 again long term thinking outliers disruption
02:50:59 all the stuff and so he’s a guy who he runs a fund
02:51:02 uh that essentially they just do uh tail risk hedging
02:51:05 and so in you know march or february of 2020
02:51:09 they’re up like four thousand percent right
02:51:13 by the way they pretty much lose money you know
02:51:16 for eight nine years then that happens and so
02:51:18 uh but they’re still one of the best performing funds if you look at it over
02:51:22 you know years and years and so it’s just this mindset of
02:51:25 uh everyone is so short term focused and so i think it’s just a great reminder
02:51:29 to long term thinking uh and also i mean i’ve gotten quite a
02:51:34 bit of value just reading the papers and that’s perhaps more
02:51:37 like for technical folks there’s quite an active research community
02:51:40 and also going back to the original white paper and just
02:51:44 original documents old school old school is still
02:51:48 what uh like what a few years ago still really interesting
02:51:52 to think about to look at what people were thinking about
02:51:56 because the the principles are carried through
02:52:00 with uh other cryptocurrencies as well like it’s it’s all
02:52:04 it’s all there even in the early documents so
02:52:07 that’s kind of fascinating to see that whole history from if you’re more
02:52:10 like tech savvy and like you said twitter is actually an interesting place
02:52:14 if you can look past all the shit coin talk
02:52:17 it’s a it’s a fascinating place for news and resources
02:52:21 is there books outside of all this cryptocurrency sort of
02:52:24 technical fiction philosophical that impact on your life
02:52:29 because you’ve you have interests that are all over the place is there
02:52:32 something that um you would recommend to others so
02:52:36 doubt capital is definitely probably my favorite book
02:52:39 um books that have been impactful i read uh when i was 20 actually sitting in the
02:52:43 desert of iraq um rich dad poor dad thinking grow rich
02:52:47 and the richest man in babble on and i don’t think i took a single thing
02:52:51 and like implemented it from like an execution
02:52:54 standpoint uh but it was a complete shift in mentality
02:52:59 and understanding a relationship with money and um
02:53:02 just kind of what i wanted to do with my life and stuff like that so i think
02:53:05 those three books i read them in succession
02:53:07 were really impactful um and then i think one of the best books probably
02:53:11 ever written is uh i think it’s called uh when breath becomes air
02:53:14 um or air becomes breath i can’t remember uh but it’s basically a
02:53:18 doctor or a medical professional who’s dying
02:53:21 and he essentially writes about the experience and thoughts and kind of all
02:53:26 the stuff and i think that it’s just uh one of these
02:53:29 things where if you said to me you know what’s the number one thing i took out
02:53:32 of my experience in iraq that’s a book like that also gives you is
02:53:37 we’re all gonna die right and you and i can want to be as
02:53:40 immortal as we want but at some point we’re gonna die
02:53:42 and so it really does kind of focus you on
02:53:45 time being that scarce asset and use it for
02:53:49 enjoyment and happiness uh more so than anything else and i think that’s part of
02:53:53 your message and it’s a great one do you think do you like literally
02:53:58 meditate on your own mortality i necessarily think i uh meditate on it
02:54:02 as much as um are you afraid of death were you afraid of
02:54:06 death when you’re in iraq i mean if you’re coming face to face with it
02:54:09 are you afraid of death today no i i think that it was just one of these
02:54:12 things where like if you fixate on something and you
02:54:16 worry about it then at least to me like you become
02:54:21 uneasy about it and so after an experience like going to war
02:54:28 i think that everything is just so not important compared to that
02:54:32 right like when i came back i remember uh going back into
02:54:35 the college environment and like things people worried about i was like
02:54:39 listen let me explain to you you know what the real world is like right
02:54:43 but i think even today right if you talk to people who know me really well
02:54:47 i don’t get worked up about a lot of stuff i don’t get you know in either
02:54:50 direction good or bad uh anything because ultimately it just
02:54:53 comes down to if that’s the final result
02:54:58 let’s enjoy it it’s fascinating to ask you
02:55:01 because this reformulation of money essentially buying time
02:55:08 and uh you know there’s the old question of does money buy happiness
02:55:16 do you think money can buy happiness in the context of money being able to buy
02:55:22 time or is happiness something else that is
02:55:26 beyond all of this when people talk about this question i
02:55:30 think that they really focus on money as a means to getting materialistic
02:55:36 things so they want a big house they want a boat they want a fast car they
02:55:40 want you know whatever they think that’s the stuff that will
02:55:44 make them happy what i think about it is if you have
02:55:48 resources you can have time and if you have time and
02:55:51 you spend it the way that you want to spend it then that’s ultimately
02:55:54 happiness so i always say to people if you think that money doesn’t
02:55:57 buy you happiness what if i told you that if you had more money you could
02:56:01 spend more time with your family it reframes it yeah and now is all
02:56:06 about i want to do certain things in life but
02:56:09 there’s a lot of people who spend their life
02:56:11 not doing those things because they feel the need to pursue economic
02:56:16 means as a way to provide a living or
02:56:20 whatever and so i explain this listen in my opinion again it’s my opinion it’s
02:56:24 what makes me happy if i can leverage financial resources to
02:56:29 create more time to do the things i like i’m happier
02:56:34 might not work for everybody but like that’s what works for me and so there’s
02:56:37 this element of like i don’t care what other people think if
02:56:39 they like that or not because they’re not me right like there’s
02:56:43 almost this element of like you gotta figure out what works for you and if it
02:56:46 works for me then like no i think that resonate that that will
02:56:50 resonate with a lot of people i think that’s a brilliant reframing of it
02:56:53 uh that said uh you kind of imply there’s a
02:56:57 there’s a reason behind this whole existence of ours there’s a meaning to it
02:57:01 so let me ask what is the meaning of life
02:57:04 anthony do you think about these ridiculous big questions
02:57:09 that have no answer every once in a while or do you just enjoy the shit out
02:57:12 of every day i answer it in a way that um isn’t meant
02:57:17 to be accurate it’s meant to um
02:57:22 be the right answer for me which is ultimately you know and i talk to a lot
02:57:26 of people who always ask like what’s the what are you doing why are you doing this
02:57:29 i say it’s to be happy and the reason why i think of it that
02:57:34 way is i’ve got a friend jonathan galler who talks about uh
02:57:37 you know enough being enough and recently he talked about it in the
02:57:41 um context of bitcoin and so bitcoiners are have two things any
02:57:45 bitcoiner if you talk to them they believe the same two things one
02:57:47 they don’t want the us dollar price to go up because they actually want to
02:57:50 acquire more bitcoin right and then let it go once they feel like they’ve got
02:57:53 enough but two is no matter how much they own they think that they don’t own
02:57:56 enough and they want to acquire more and so at some point you say to yourself
02:58:02 what is enough and and i think that the whole meaning of life
02:58:06 is to understand kind of what your level of satisfaction is and for
02:58:12 some people that’s a monetary thing some people that’s a freedom of time thing
02:58:15 for some people it’s an impact thing whatever but just
02:58:18 understanding that’s important and then going and accomplishing it
02:58:22 and what i’ve found is that the people who i know who have done this and been
02:58:26 intentional about it they accomplish it on a much shorter
02:58:29 timeline than people who don’t right there’s some people who start thinking
02:58:31 about this when they’re 60 naturally you’re not going to accomplish
02:58:34 before you’re 60 if you just start thinking about it 60
02:58:37 people who are thinking about it earlier can do it and so i think that’s really
02:58:40 it for me it’s just like the meaning of life is to enjoy it
02:58:43 the way i think about it that’s because it’s a really nice formulation i i
02:58:46 almost like to sort of oscillate back and forth so
02:58:49 majority of the time is spent at the moment of enough is enough
02:58:54 of gratitude of basically being content with where you’re at like deeply
02:58:59 appreciative of every moment and all the bitcoin whatever bitcoin you
02:59:03 have being deeply appreciative of it and that being enough and then some
02:59:07 fraction of time perhaps it shrinks as you get older that’s
02:59:10 maybe there’s an optimal trajectory there but
02:59:13 some fraction of time is spent being yeah like deeply self critical
02:59:18 and nothing is enough nothing you’ve ever done is worth anything it’s the
02:59:22 marvin minsky said like the secret to success
02:59:25 is hating everything you’ve ever done so like that mode of just hating
02:59:29 everything you’ve ever done and just like trying to improve trying to make
02:59:33 stuff better nothing is enough it’s never enough that
02:59:37 kind of stuff and then oscillating back and forth like
02:59:39 you don’t have to have the same algorithm operating throughout the day
02:59:42 you could just like oscillate back and forth
02:59:44 and maybe reserve that gratitude part the chill part to when you’re hanging
02:59:50 out with family and friends and loved ones
02:59:52 and then when you’re like alone or maybe at work
02:59:55 that’s the madman comes out kind of thing i also think it’s um
02:59:59 kind of purpose driven in the sense of there’s a lot of people who have the
03:00:03 uh i need to do more but in a somewhat altruistic way
03:00:08 so they’re you know take elon as an example
03:00:11 the idea of colonizing mars sure if he is successful he will be very
03:00:18 rich i don’t think you or i or many people
03:00:20 believe he’s doing it for the money right there’s a lot of other things he
03:00:23 could do that would be much easier that would make him tons of money
03:00:26 and so in some weird way he has enough because he’s able to free himself from
03:00:33 the constraints of i need to acquire more resources
03:00:37 and he can focus on what is the thing that i want to work on regardless of
03:00:40 money and so in that pursuit that is
03:00:44 non economic you can be as selfish as you want
03:00:47 because ultimately you’re not tied back to
03:00:50 this like measurement tool and so it’s this
03:00:54 uh again like altruistic non monetary purpose and i think that there’s a lot
03:00:59 of people who spend their whole life looking for that and they don’t know
03:01:01 what it is and so again some people may not think
03:01:05 of it that way but if you can find something to do that
03:01:09 you win i don’t think there’s a better way to end it anthony i’m a huge fan
03:01:13 it’s a huge honor that you waste all this time with me today
03:01:16 uh you know i thank you for just educating the world for
03:01:21 for teaching me uh inspire me to learn more about this new
03:01:24 set of technologies that look like they have a potential to change
03:01:29 transform all of human civilization so thank you for coming today and thank you
03:01:33 for being who you are absolutely thank you so much for having me
03:01:36 thanks for listening to this conversation with anthony pampliano
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03:01:55 from mahatma gandhi freedom is not worth having
03:01:59 if it doesn’t include the freedom to make mistakes
03:02:04 thank you for listening and hope to see you next time