Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin | Lex Fridman Podcast #171
the following is a conversation with anthony pompliano entrepreneur technology investor prolific writer podcaster and twitter user on topics of finance cryptocurrency technology and economics i highly recommend his popular podcast and daily letter called the pomp podcast and the pomp letter quick thank you to our sponsors there gun muscle recovery device sun basket meal delivery service expressvpn and indeed hiring website click their links to support this podcast as a side note let me say that i'll be having many conversations in the coming months about cryptocurrency with people of all kinds of backgrounds and worldviews those who are proponents of bitcoin like anthony nick carter robert breedlove alex glastine and many others and those who are proponents of other cryptocurrency technologies like vitalik buterin charles hoskinson richard hart sergey nazarov sylvia mccauley and many others as well i'm not framing this as a debate i'm simply looking to explore exciting ideas in the space of technologies that could very well change human civilization and agi civilization as well i appreciate that some communities are a bit more intense in their style of communication and others but i personally am only interested in open-minded respectful collaboration in exploring ideas i personally try to like to approach conversations by considering that i may be wrong about everything and i'm looking to learn i won't engage in group think social signaling outrage mobs mocking and derision if you do i understand it's just not my thing i send you my love either way and hope to meet you in person over some drinks some good laughs and a good conversation one day no matter the difference in style or substance we're all just human after all this is an amazing ride we're all on together buy the ticket take the ride as hunter as thompson said whether you pay for that ticket with bitcoin ethereum the dollar gold seashells a beer or just a good old smile this is the lex friedman podcast and here is my conversation with anthony pompliano you served in the u.s army for six years and spent 13 months in iraq in 2008 and 9. can you tell the story of why you joined the army and what were some of the moving difficult and maybe lasting experiences from the time you served sure i joined when i was 17 years old i needed my parents to uh basically sign in order to uh to join and uh i graduated semester early from high school and i thought i was going to play football in college and kind of enroll in the spring semester and when that didn't happen basically was working at a chick-fil-a and quiznos had in my mind look this is probably not the uh the path in life that i want um and so i knew i was gonna go to college i knew i was gonna go play football in the fall but i had this window of time and so i walked into a recruiting office and just basically was like i'm assuming you guys need some help and uh yeah they gave me the whole pitch and uh you know give you a signing bonus you can go jump out of planes and go do all this crazy stuff i just said okay let's do it this was this was close to 911. this was in 2006 about five years after so what uh impact i mean do you remember 911 what impact did that have when you're thinking about this so i was uh in eighth grade um if i remember correctly and i remember being in school when it happened and uh i walked into a classroom and the entire class uh somebody else's class they were all talking to the teacher about something the second that me and a couple other kids walked in and got real quiet and the teacher was like hey go back to your like home room and so it's just kind of a weird like what's going on uh and then next thing i know they called all the students into the cafeteria and this is back before you know every classroom really had a television in it and you know cable and all that kind of stuff and so when we were there they basically just said listen there's been this uh event that's occurred all of your parents are gonna come pick you guys up and uh they'll explain it to you and so to you know a kid in eighth grade you're basically like what happened and so i got home and i remember talking to my dad about it and my dad basically gave me you know the uh the core american kind of talking points right somebody from another country came here and tried to kill americans and was successful in doing that um and to some extent he just said and i'm willing to bet you know we're going to go back after him did that wake you up a little bit to the idea that there's evil out there that you know even just the idea of terrorism for many people that was um when it hits you on your own land it's a it really shakes up your mind in some sense world war ii that's why world war ii was fundamentally different for americans than it is for people like in russia in england and france and in europe in general is there's something about when there's families women children dying on your own land that's different and that was one of the first times in america where like on euro of course it's pearl harbor but like this is like in recent history it's like they hit us here that was like a profound idea i think america was very very good at exporting the violence elsewhere for a long time and uh there was this element of uh complacency but also this element of uh um you know really just american superiority that doesn't happen here right and i think that that woke people up not only to um kind of the idea that other places around the world may not like the american ideals may not like democracy and capitalism and and that but also maybe we aren't as big tough and secure as we thought we were right and so obviously i think you see the kind of over rotation with a lot of the kind of security theater that came after that of almost psychologically let's make our citizens feel like they're safe even if the things that we're doing don't necessarily you know kind of change that apparatus but on top of that i think that it really woke people up to uh extremism around the world and uh i don't know if necessarily there was a change in the extremism as much as it just was an awareness thing right how many people you know kind of drew a line from was it 92 or 93 with the world trade center bombing to you know deep levels of extremism and hatred of kind of the american industrial complex probably not that many 2001 a lot of people and so i think that was you know again as a young kid you don't understand a lot of this stuff you basically just hey somebody came here and tried to kill americans and so you know we should go fight back right was kind of the the response i think that i had what role did that have psychologically for you when you then in 2006 joined the army i mean this is very different joining the army than in the time when like it's more peaceful here you're essentially facing i mean i don't know if you see it that way but you know there is a war on terror and i know that people kind of uh criticize that whole formulation framework of thinking but nevertheless you are going to iraq you are going to afghanistan you're you're going to these places and are fighting these complicated like i mean it's not even clear what you're fighting yeah well i think there's a couple of key pieces right so one like one of the actual most impactful data points if you were or kind of stories for me uh was the pat tillman story so i played football uh in high school and i was gonna go play in college um and seeing you know this nfl player who basically just one day said hey i'm going to go and do this instead and walk away i don't know necessarily if it was a i want to pursue the same story right and obviously he ended up dying and so not exactly the the end result that you want but i think it was almost like uh he made it okay if you were on a certain trajectory in life to go take this detour and and to go do it um but the second thing is i was 17. you're pretty stupid when you're 17. you're pretty naive when you're 17 right and so uh i almost um kind of backed into the deployment because i signed up uh as a a reserve member and so basically the plan was to sign up for the reserves i was going to go to basic training get all the you know kind of education and qualification i was going to go to college and then after college you know maybe there's a chance that you will go and serve or do whatever for me i ended up getting deployed when i was a junior in uh college so i got pulled out of school and so at 20 years old it's not exactly what you thought you were signing up for right especially to kind of leave school to go do it and then on top of that uh i probably had an advantage over most people both on the entry to combat and the exit to kind of a combat situation which was football so i always explained that um in hindsight you're in a male-dominated testosterone driven kind of combative sport where it's us first them and and uh there's training and and uh you know injuries and just kind of all of the things that go into playing a combat sport like football to now they give you guns but you still have a uniform on still male dominated it's just a little bit you know more serious in terms of the injuries and and potential death and things like that but also on the exit from that deployment most guys i was there with they're going back to being you know prison guards police officers working at the lumber yard you know just kind of everyday americans and so i had the fortunate ability to go back into uh kind of that combative environment go back to play football and so it was almost this like de-escalation on the way out uh where they take your guns away we still got a uniform still male dominated uh still combative and then eventually you're just a normal citizen and so i think that in some weird way i was you know very fortunate to kind of on the entry and exit have that experience where other guys didn't so what you were deployed to iraq were there any memories experiences that changed you or in general like you're probably a different man on the other side of it how did that time change you i think there was two main takeaways that i took right so one was um not a specific moment but on multiple occasions i remember we were driving down the road and i would look and there would be a 10 12 14 year old kid and if you've never seen somebody who literally has hate and disdain in their eyes towards you just not necessarily to you personally just to the uniform to what you stand for it's all the stuff when you see it you see it right and i always think of um if you've ever uh watched the movie a 12 strong and in it they've got this afghan afghanistan warlord and he's talking to a bunch of soldiers and he says you know you don't have killer eyes you do you do and he's just like he can just tell right he's seen so many soldiers and so i think that that was a a memory on a number of occasions where i just saw a young kid and i just said they hate us right and and it's not you personally it's what you stand for but the the really big event was when you first get to these combat zones a lot of times what will happen is you basically your unit teams up with a unit that's leaving and there's a handoff and it happens over a couple of weeks and so you can imagine almost you know one percent of our team goes out with 99 of their team then 5 95 10 90 all the way till it's 50 50 and then eventually it rotates and then it's majority of our team and a small number of their team and so what a lot of people will explain is the two most dangerous times in war are actually the first two or three weeks in the last two or three weeks when you first get there you don't know who the people are you don't know the terrain you don't know you know kind of the local cultures and who to look out for what signs all that kind of stuff and the last two or three weeks is you basically think you've survived the deployment you're looking forward to going home so you become complacent things like that and so we made it through that transition period with no issues uh but the literally the very first mission uh that we went out as a team ourselves 100 um there was two separate incidents uh one was we were driving in milanite and uh what we think was a sniper shot at a truck that i was in i was standing up outside of it along with a another guy and that was kind of just a wake-up call again of never been shot up before right and so i'll never forget uh you kind of heard this whiz go by and the guy next to me was from rural pennsylvania and he just said you know look i've never been shot at before either but i've done a lot of hunting get the fuck down okay and so uh we kept driving that night um and uh later on in the night uh an ied went off a guy ran over an ied uh who was at the front of the convoy and when that ied went off uh again i had never been in a convoy that had been blown up before but the training kicks in and so immediately every single person starts screaming out ied ied and they start looking and trying to figure it out and you realize the united states military did a fantastic job training us before we went because in that moment nobody thought about anything you just did what you had been programmed to do and so ultimately kind of through the end of that event uh there was u.s soldier that ended up dying he was uh shot in the head and um when we got back to the base uh kind of after that entire event i think it just hit us we are at war and if we make mistakes here that is the cost of you know kind of those mistakes and this was somebody who i didn't know uh it was somebody who literally showed up kind of as secondary support for our unit and basically uh was there to help us right and so it was one of those weird situations where uh you have this emotional connection because it's somebody who uh shared an event with you but you didn't know them right and you learn their name later and you understand that they have a family and they have young kids and all this stuff and so again as a 20 year old kid you're kind of processing all this and you just realize like the gun i have in my arm my hands it's real for a reason right and we better take this seriously this is not you know us joking around in kind of the barracks and you know all the things that you would expect you know guys are doing the army so i think that was like the moment where i said hey i'm going to learn a lot here uh and i got to make sure i get home and you snapping into the training but nevertheless i mean you're somebody who thinks philosophically about this world now right you're uh very intelligent and thinks deeply about the world so looking back you mentioned hatred in the 14 year old kids eyes there's death so the way you kind of describe this whole story is like training kicks in this this shit is serious like this is uh you know there's a reason there's a gun in your hand so there's a strategic element there's like you have to get the job done there's a task at hand but at the same time if you zoom out there's a kid who has hate for you some of those kids would probably if they could would kill you for the thing you stand for in the uniform and then there's bullets flying at you and then there's people that some of them you might already care for deeply are dying what the hell do you make of that do you think about that does any of that haunt you how do you think about the world having witnessed that yeah a lot of times when we would talk about it we were there if i was that kid i would want to kill that person too right i would have hatred as well right imagine if in the united states tomorrow you and i woke up and there was tanks rolling down the street from another country yeah and they were basically imposing their rules on us whether they thought it was the right thing to do or not the soldiers were there they were doing this we would probably feel not so great about it right at kind of a minimum and at a maximum we'd be really really pissed off we would fight back and so what you don't understand when you're in the heat of the moment is why does this person feel this way and so what's very weird is well what happens if a year ago u.s soldiers came through they got shot at they returned fire and they killed that kid's uncle you'd be pissed off right and so you just start to understand like we look at war very black and white we look at it very much from a clinical perspective we're going to go we're going to go kind of invade somewhere we are the most dominant military in the world we're very good at invading uh and we will crush wherever we invade but when you're actually on the ground what you understand is the humanity of it all right and so what becomes very interesting is uh pretty much every veteran i know that comes back they're some of the largest pacifists in the world and i always revert back to uh marcus latrell uh who's a famous navy seal um and there's a movie made about him and his story uh he gave a speech one time that i saw and he basically said listen if you're a politician your job is to be the diplomat do everything you possibly can not to send me and my friends anywhere because when you send us we're gonna bring hell with us right and understand that is the business that we are in but every single other person up until we get sent has a job to do to prevent having to send us and i think that ultimately that's where you see a lot of kind of this generation that is fought in iraq and afghanistan that says listen maybe we shouldn't be running around the world being the police maybe we shouldn't be going and invading all these different countries because when you actually get to see firsthand what happens it's just something that we should avoid at all cost but if we have to go or we have to actually send soldiers somewhere understand what happens when that occurs and you know the united states is the best in the world of doing it do you think i'm thinking about that kid with a hatred do you think there will always be hatred in the world do you think from another perspective do you think there'll be war always is that a fundamental aspect of human nature or is that something we can escape yeah so war i think has like very negative connotations in terms of bullets and bombs and death and kind of just very morbid type um understanding conflict on the other hand i think people look at and say of course there'll always be conflict right you just can't have billions of people all on the same planet without some level of disagreement whether that's a disagreement of ideas disagreement over physical you know geography or something else and so i think conflict will always exist the question is what form does war take moving forward and so in my mind you know it's starting to look a lot more clinical right a lot more drones a lot less soldiers on the ground a lot more use of special forces and kind of these small highly specialized teams rather than kind of big mechanical armies um and then you get into like the information warfare and kind of cyber warfare and you start to understand that we're at war with a lot of people right now right doesn't mean we're necessarily dropping bombs uh on their countries it doesn't necessarily mean we're sending soldiers there but on a daily basis we are engaged in these kind of you know cyber battlefields and so if that's where war starts to play out um it one changes the tools and tactics and techniques that we need to arm our country and other countries will arm themselves with but it also changes the way that we think about war right it see it sounds a lot less uh worrisome if i say hey we're going to go to war with a country but by the way there's going to be no death right okay like that doesn't sound nearly as bad as hey we're going to go send 10 000 soldiers and you know some percentage of them are gonna die on the battlefield and then we're gonna you know basically pipe back videos and articles saying that american soldiers are dying yeah it does seem to be a fundamental difference between the the genghis khan style like if i would feel differently if somebody like hand to hand with a knife murder my family versus cyber security where i stole all their data stole all their money stole everything they owned falsified their identity all that kind of stuff that those are both traumatic events but they do seem to be fundamentally different but maybe that's actually very narrow style thinking because ultimately you have to think about what is life and what's happiness and it's like the samurai thinking i'm not sure what's more painful if i take it to myself like i'm not sure what i would rather live through being stabbed like to death or having my identity stolen all my money stolen or maybe reputation destroyed like with lies or something like that that that's very interesting to think about if you think about quality of life and all those kinds of things well one that's finite right yeah and the other is kind of a long prolonged almost torture physical pain versus psychological pain uh it's really interesting to it's really interesting to think about and i think another key piece to this um which i don't have answers to but but there is an element of emotion and rage in the physical violence versus again more of that clinical you know information warfare and so um it's really easy to show a battlefield where there's death on both sides and bombs being dropped and buildings destroyed it it fits very well into propaganda for everyone involved right regardless of what side they're on when you start talking about cyber warfare how many times have we seen a big company get data hacked or information hacked and we all you know read the headlines maybe throw a tweet out and then move on with our day and don't remember it anymore and so it's just very very different i think in the emotion and response that it invokes in people when they hear about it as well given the conflict do you think people are fundamentally good are we all sort of like blank slates that could be evil given the environment or good given the environment or can we kind of is there some base that we can rely on that people if left to their own devices will be good and trustworthy and honest i think you have to separate out intention from action so if you talk to some of the most heinous criminals in the world they've rationalized their actions and so you've got to ask yourself what is the level of which they understood what they were doing that they intended to be malicious nefarious um and kind of do bad things versus the actual actions themselves and so um even as a society you know if let's say for example you were to walk down the street and you were to murder somebody on the sidewalk completely unprovoked we would look at you and say you are a you know a sociopath uh you have everything wrong with you and that is somebody that we do not want in our society and therefore we will levy you know the extent of rule of law against you in order to protect society from you right you become that a monster of that beast if in the same situation somebody walks in your house with a knife and you murder them or you kill them now we put you up on a pedestal as a hero and those are two very very different responses they may be just as morbid they may be just as violent uh in terms of the actual actions the intentions the way it's perceived is very very different and so i think that uh as a world we like a very black and white clean-cut you know good bad uh i think the world's a lot more messy than that and i think that a lot of times when you look at intention it's hard for us to tell what somebody's intention is but i've looked at a lot of you know people who are both considered very good and also a lot of people are considered very bad and they sound very similar in terms of the motivations for their actions and so i think that it's just a really hard problem that probably doesn't have a perfect solution or an answer do you give much value to the intention or do you think is is better to look at the results of the behavior uh as opposed to the in the un underlying ideology the underlying intention of the behavior i think that intention gets at the question of like are people inherently good or bad yeah right is i think that they're generally inherently good and the intention is driving towards the thing that they believe is the best outcome or the best thing for them to pursue the action i think is where we spend most of our time focused on and frankly we actually may be a better society or kind of kinder as a humanity to each other if we spent more time looking at intention rather than action um but again you know if somebody walks down the street and murders somebody uh it's really hard to have a conversation and it may be inappropriate for us to have a conversation about intention versus uh any level of of action right so you're one of the prominent i would say even the faces of the the world of cryptocurrency bitcoin that whole entire world let's dive straight in and ask uh do you think do you consider yourself a bitcoin maximalist i think that the way i really look at it is uh i work backwards off of what is the maximalism that i believe in and the world that i believe in is kind of an automated world that is run on these open decentralized protocols uh and what we ultimately do is we return sovereignty and individualism and and kind of uh personal responsibility and liberty uh to people over institutions and what we end up doing is we end up uh kind of taking what has historically been a very uh analog or physical world economy and uh geographic rule and we then kind of put it in the cloud and this digital economy becomes the prevalent way that we all uh conduct commerce communicate uh etc and so it's less about any one single technology to me right i think that it's pretty stupid for people to um almost in a way uh put an inanimate object up for uh you know some sort of obsession uh to me it's much more about the ideals the ethos uh and the most rational uh and likely path to that kind of end result or that world that i think you know is at this point just a foregone conclusion so the distinction there and maybe if people don't know the terminology maximalism is basically saying i really think this is a good idea like uh you know if you prefer a certain kind of diet you could be a keto maximalist saying like this is probably maybe it's not a hundred percent but probably the diet that's healthiest for humans kind of thing in the same sense bitcoin maximalism is saying you know of course we don't know there's a lot of uncertainty but this particular technology seems to be the best representations of some set of ideals that defines progress in in the future but you're drawing a distinction between sort of uh cult-like obsession about an object of any kind whether it's keto uh or uh bitcoin and just sort of believing that a technology is the best representation of a particular set of ideals and you believe that sort of uh this moving into the cloud both the distributed nature of it but also just the digital nature of it is something that's going to uh be a positive step for humanity yeah i would even take maximalism a step further and it's not just the kind of singular viewpoint of this is the best it's also an element of it's anti-everything else right so you know take keto for example uh the keto diet is not only the best diet all the other diets are bad yeah right and so it's it's a very binary view of the world um i think that what's probably most misunderstood about uh let's take bitcoin uh as a specific example is that most of the people who are labeled bitcoin maximalist they would be open-minded if they believed that something else came along that was a superior technology or had a better kind of probability of achieving again that ultimate vision i think where uh there's this controversy and kind of clashing of uh ideas is that the bitcoin community believes bitcoin is the best way to do that and has very specific arguments as to why the other things are not right and so what ultimately ends up happening which is very weird in uh the investing world right it's unlikely that you and i are going to sit down you're like apple stock is the best stock and there's no other stock that's worth anything yeah right and uh and then also it's very weird if you said to me um you know this stock is worth zero and that's where everything that i own i've put on a short on one single company right there's diversification there's much more kind of probabilistic thinking in finance in general uh when it comes to this specific world of cryptocurrency and kind of digital assets if you will uh is there's two main groups of people who are trying to build two very very different things at the onset but when you unpack it and you start to spend more time on it you guys they're actually trying to accomplish the same thing in two different ways so bitcoin is seen i think as a digital currency right kind of the idea that this is going to ascend to become the next global reserve currency it's a programmatic kind of transparent um money and uh it's essentially just 180 degrees difference than the inflationary you know non-transparent fiat currencies that exist in the world you then look at kind of everything else right and you have a lot of smart contract platforms and various things that they're all going after right ethereum with kind of the world computer approach and you can kind of go down the line with all their other arguments it's what they're trying to build i think the big difference just comes down to uh innovation for security and when you simplistically look at it via that lens you actually understand where both people are coming from when you say security start to interrupt do you mean financial security or do you mean like literally the the the security of the of the particular cryptocurrency the the technical security of a blockchain so when you look at let's say um bitcoin versus ethereum right bitcoin has decided and that community has decided security is the number one thing that you have to optimize for so decentralization um over everything else in terms of transaction speeds cost anything that you could come up with that is something that would be important for a currency the number one thing to optimize for is security and as we have seen uh with a lot of technologies right facebook's libra or now what's known as dm is a great example uh not having decentralization is susceptible to the nation state and so a lot of these other platforms and blockchains uh they say security is important but it's not the most important thing right we believe there's a trade-off between you know a little less security and transaction speed or composability or whatever it is and so take ethereum as kind of the second uh largest uh community in blockchain by market cap it was created because somebody wanted to or a group of people wanted to do something on bitcoin they felt like they couldn't do it and so they said hey we're going to go create something that has these smart contracts that we can then go do here again this is technology right so the tribalism of like you're right you're wrong to me is a little childish just in the sense of like the market is going to decide what is most valuable and then when you go inside of that community like there's a lot of dumb ideas people are trying to build around bitcoin there's also a lot of really really great ideas that people trying to build around bitcoin same thing in the ethereum world and so what you end up getting i think is the tribalism really comes out of the idea that there's a ticker price that is attached to all of this right if you go back in history of technology venture capitalists didn't sit around the table and yell and scream at each other in this like religious zealot way right because you bet on one type of cloud computing platform and i bet on another one right it's just the market's going to decide we're both going to work on and try to make ours successful uh here i think that the sensitivity and mainly comes out of the bitcoin community is that a lot of this is being funded not only by venture capitalists and kind of professional money managers and asset allocators there's also this element of including the retail investor and the public and so it whether it's through icos or some other forms of capital raising there's arguments for it saying hey look uh this now gives kind of the little guy some sort of access and ability to do it but there's also arguments against it some people say hey it's easier to dupe them and it's easier to run scams and kind of all this stuff and so ultimately i think that uh crypto is this like arena of ideas it is literally the war of attrition and uh what will end up happening is ten years from now you and i will talk and we're gonna say well the market said x was valuable and y wasn't and so all of the tribalism from between you know here and there uh it's fun it's you know engaging whatever but also it doesn't really matter yeah because the public is involved there's a lot of personalities and so a lot of times we focus on the ex extreme personalities that do a lot of maybe uh pardon the french shit talking and and so we kind of focus on that but that's not necessarily representative of the communities involved let's talk about bitcoin first and then it'll help us use as a kind of comparison to ethereum or whatever else so when you think about what is money right that's kind of the first question people really kind of go down the rabbit hole on and ultimately today it's a belief system right and you may believe that one currency has more value over another because it's backed by a certain military or a certain government has a monetary policy that you believe in or don't believe in but ultimately it's a belief system that there's nothing backing this other than a government asks you to pay your taxes in it right and they can have a monopoly on violence uh in terms they can put you in jail if you don't pay your taxes uh they can go to other countries and they can invade and do all this stuff it wasn't always like that right it was historically a layer one technology was gold and so gold was a fantastic store of value you knew that if you held gold it wasn't going to be inflated away it was sound money it was outside the system and no one could create more of it the reason why that's important is because that optimization for store of value served as the bedrock of the entire stack of uh money uh for 5000 years and so the problem with that though again trade-off between store of value is it was really hard to transact with right if i came in here and i and you said hey i want a couple of ounces of gold and i had a whole bar i'd have to literally shave off the ounces of gold uh it's heavy to carry around if you said to me hey you're in one city mail it to me it's really expensive you know there's all these issues with it and so ultimately what people said was well let's create a second layer on top of that gold in order to make it easier to transact and so we created paper claims on the gold so hey don't carry around the gold in your pocket anymore put it in a vault or a bank they're going to issue a paper claim now you and i can trade these paper claims around and at any point if you want the gold you just show up and you say hey give me you know three ounces of gold or two bars or whatever and so that actually made the store a value it was allowed that to be the anchor and kind of the most important part the security of your purchasing power but now it became easier to transact and then eventually we built layers even on top of that so everything from electronic money uh kind of electronic q-sips all the way to credit and other systems on top of that gold 1971 comes around and obviously we d-peg from that gold right it was a temporary measure at the time we ended up not going back to it and so what you moved uh or transitioned from was sound money which was outside the system no one could create more to now the government had full control they could create as much as they wanted to they tried to be responsible and disciplined but obviously hard to do sometimes we've been really good at it sometimes we've been less good at it and you go around the world and some countries have absolutely sucked at it and some have been good at it and so when you look into the bitcoin world i think that when you look at the optimization for security similar to gold store value people hold it purchasing power has gone up a lot year over year it's like a 200 percent year-over-year compounded annual growth uh for over a decade right so you measure this in kind of the us dollar exchange price et cetera but there's still a lot of people who will yell and scream about it's slow it's costly right all the things around those transactions that are obstacles or challenges and so there's basically two schools of thought and this is where we kind of get into the bifurcation some people just said hey this technology is antiquated we can't use it it doesn't make sense uh and so what we're gonna do is we're gonna go build something new and so you go get you know kind of all of the various versions there the bitcoin community says no just like gold had paper claims and other things built on top and layer two three four five we're gonna do that here and so they've already started to build kind of this layer two where it's easier to transact it's cheaper it's faster etc and so i actually think that both of those worlds are gonna coexist in the future the big question is just which one has more importance right so again get out of binary it's just probabilistically and so my personal belief is that the security the the store of value component as the bedrock for a monetary system is essential right like that is the most important thing because you can always improve the other components but you can't go back and fix that kind of core piece so if money money is a an idea that we all it's like an emergent idea that we believe in you're saying that security is one of the most fundamental catalysts or fuels for that idea to sort of take hold and be stable and sort of take over the world the other stuff is really nice to have but if you don't have the security you're not going to like it's not going to spread in a viral sense in in our human brains well and especially in light of the kind of the macro economy right so like what's so fascinating about the last 12 months is um in investing in general the best returns right i kind of put that in air quotes a little bit is something that is different than everything else and right so being different and wrong just means you're an idiot right being different and right means that that's where kind of the outsized returns are and so if you look around the world at currencies today they're all the same they're all inflationary unlimited supply controlled by a government done and decisions made in a very non-transparent process and what we've watched is the manipulation of all of those currencies over the last 12 months in direct contrast to that is this thing bitcoin which is outside of the system has a finite supply transparent and programmatic monetary policy and so when you see those two systems kind of um in comparison to each other in the united states there's a lot of people who say the dollar works great for me i can go to the atm i can get out physical cash if i want to swipe a card i could do that my money in my bank doesn't lose 50 of its value in a day in terms of purchasing power like the dollar is pretty good when you go to other countries that might not be the case and so i do think that there's uh kind of a relative analysis that goes on here if you compare bitcoin to the dollar there's all kinds of arguments to make that the dollar is better as a medium of exchange today but if i go and i tell you what about in you know these kind of extreme examples of uh venezuela zimbabwe turkey et cetera and so i think that that's kind of one perspective to view this through is security versus all of the innovative components of a medium of exchange etc the second thing though that i think is really really important is around censorship and so when you look at again every currency in the world today every single financial service they're highly susceptible to censorship and actually i would argue the united states is in the business of censorship in terms of you know how many countries around the world do we sanction and cut them off in either a minimal or a very material way from the global financial system so when you define when you talk about censorship do you mean just the censoring your ability to operate freely in the world well look at it a little bit differently which is that the united states has kind of the american superiority because we have the bombs the bullets the soldiers and and that military might we basically impose our will around the world and so uh there's a very strong argument to be made that there are certain countries around the world that are being sanctioned that the people of those countries did nothing wrong now the governments are bad right in terms of the way that you and i would look at democratic rule or communism or whatever it is but the people are being hurt as well so there's a whole group of people who would have just argued listen we shouldn't hurt anyone at the expense of punishing one person or a group of people there's other people who argue against that but i do think that if you really kind of zoom out and you say i'm going to take myself out of the western world view and i'm simply going to look at this as we're all part of the human race it's censorship and there might be an argument for censorship but there also might be an argument against the censorship and so what bitcoin does as that specific kind of payment network is it says anyone in the world with an internet connection i don't care where you are born what language you speak what religion you are your wealth status your education status none of it matters if you have an internet connection you can plug into this monetary system and you can move value around the world to anyone else without asking for permission and in the united states we basically have that ability in the us dollar kind of traditional banking system i can pretty much send money to almost anyone i want unless they're a really bad person that's on some list or something most people in the world don't have that capability and so what you're essentially doing is you're democratizing access to a true store value and a medium of exchange right and so what you see in many of these countries is that when their currency starts to fail the first thing that a government or a group of people in power and influence do is they lock the citizens into the currency with capital controls why because if you let them out it exasperates the problem and so now what we're seeing is we basically are giving a tool to billions of people around the world that is a peaceful protest right you and i had no say at all when not only the federal reserve and elected officials here in the united states but central banks around the world over the last 12 months decided to create trillions of dollars and inject it into the monetary system right they have arguments and some of them are very good arguments as to why they should do that they're trying to mitigate short-term pain long-term they'll figure out the other issues right they have very kind of um elaborate and well-articulated um kind of viewpoint as to why they're doing it but you and i had no say and so when you start to look at we have a very small group of people in this world uh both in our country and in countries around the world that make these decisions that have very very far-reaching kind of impact and on top of that in many cases there's actually not that much kind of accountability because usually these are not elected officials who are making some of these decisions these are appointed you can argue that hey we elected somebody who appointed them but at the same time that accountability isn't quite there and so i think ultimately when you just back out you say you know what is bitcoin and why is it important to the world it is giving access to anyone in the world with an internet connection to a store of value and a monetary network that allows them to peacefully protest and to opt out of a system that pretty much is not working for majority of people in the world so it's moving the power from these centralized places sometimes unelected to the individuals and to the people so the dollar does seem to work for for americans and for many people in the world but you kind of have a vision you you paint a picture of a future where potentially we move to cryptocurrency so what kind of trajectory do you see where bitcoin can become the main currency in the world or at least cryptocurrency become the main way of storing value in the world and basically overtake the dollar yeah so i always go first to we don't need to have competition like in terms of like a direct competition between the dollar and bitcoin right if you look at most technologies in the world uh the really valuable ones are actually market expanding technologies rather than simply just market share stealing technologies right so if you look at uber for example uber didn't just say hey i'm going to go take out all the taxis right it actually drastically expanded the market for people now there's literally millions of people in the united states who don't have cars because they use uber right and so i think that bitcoin is very similar in that yes there is a component of medium of exchange uh in terms of the dollar but also there is this component of just store value assets in general and so when you start to look at bitcoin specifically i think that what you're seeing is you're seeing a generational gap where young people say i grew up with a phone in my hand i'm digitally native the whole idea of going to the bank and sending a wire or going to an atm and getting physical cash is an antiquated idea in their mind right i one time asked my brother he's 24 years old and i said hey how do you send money to your friends and he gave me one answer which i expected which was venmo and the second answer i didn't expect he said uber i said how do you send money via uber he said well we get in a car together and at the end we split the ride and so again you and i have probably both done that but i never thought of it as a way to send money to each other and so it is a psychological difference between even me who's only you know a decade older than him or so uh and his peer group and so i think as we're watching kind of bitcoin continue this ascent ultimately what we're seeing is an entire generation of kids are saying listen if i look at financial assets across the board i have stocks i have bonds i have currencies and i have commodities i know that bonds from a real rate return perspective is flat to negative right i'm going to make no money on this because i have a belief that my dollar is being devalued and actually what we're starting to see is again the internet has broken down these walled gardens and kind of these centralized uh hubs of information in that if you were to look at let's say the stock market from 1971 to today in dollar terms it's a 45 degree angle right up into the right right you know it's kind of seven eight ten percent growth uh every year and it's amazing just get invested in the stock market and you'll make money over a long period of time regardless of the dips along the way if you denominate that same stock market in gold the stock market is down since 1971. and so is it so much that the stock market is accruing true value or is it that the underlying currency in which it is denominated in is being devalued right and i was being devalued in a very disciplined way right in terms of it's not like it went 50 devaluation uh in a short period of time but still being devalued and so i think that people are waking up to this idea that a traditional 60 40 type global portfolio doesn't work anymore right 40 of it in bonds is just not going to get it done and so when you start to look at this people first look at bitcoin via two main ways in my opinion they look at it one as a store value should i actually go and put some of my wealth there use it as a savings technology right we ask people in the traditional world if you're a teacher a fireman an accounting you know mid-level manager we say hey go do your job be best in class as a fireman or as a teacher and then oh by the way you'd be a professional investor as well because if you just put your dollars in your bank account you're literally going to have your wealth devalued away over time so you can't just save you have to invest that is a really tall task for people they have a hard enough time just doing their job right taking care of their family right now they got to go be an investor so i think savings technology for a bitcoin standpoint is if you buy satoshi's or bitcoin over time it will uh increase from a purchasing power standpoint because there's a fixed supply and demand continues to rise but then you start to look at well what other assets do people put in their portfolios whether it's art it's real estate it's precious metals or something else most of those assets are not because people actually think that they're going to go up in value over time they're using a store of value right the reason why somebody buys gold is because it's a store of value right historically that's a narrative driven uh type asset though right we tell people it's scarce we tell people that it is a store of value when you look at it though we don't know how much gold exists in the world we have a good estimate right but we don't actually we can't prove how much there is we don't know how much is coming out of the ground every day again great fantastic estimate but we can't prove it and we don't know what the total supply and that's what you mean by narrative driven we can't really prove it like mathematically we you i and everyone else in the world has lived in a narrative driven world for the last couple of decades right and what the internet and digital technologies have done is it opened up the possibility and the desire from people to have a world now where i can validate things so when i see that headline i want to see you say whatever happened to the news if you're the subject of the news rather than have somebody else tell me the story if i see that you say something is scarce prove to me that it is scarce and so i think that's kind of a psychological shift the younger generation is starting to understand because ultimately you and i probably grew up in a world where parents could tell us the story and we just believed it you know dad or mom says it it must be true if my brother heard a story what does he do he goes to google and he looks it up randy comes back and usually tells my parents how you got the story wrong right and so i think that that that provability or that that validation ends up becoming really really important and so you know look at something like gold i think that people are drastically underestimating the shift that's underway right now gold is won down in value since april or i'm sorry august of 2020. and so in a time frame where central banks have had historic quantitative easing literally six trillion dollars in the united states the one asset that historically has been the best store of value and has uh you know in 2008 financial crisis hit an all-time high based on the the government response has actually suffered uh for a main part of this financial crisis you then look at central banks around the world who have been very large holders of gold for a long time and net buyers on a monthly basis for multiple months over the last six months they've been net sellers of gold and then you start to look at jewelry demand so the actual non-monetary value of gold and that demand for gold jewelry peaked in 2013 and has continued to fall since and so what you start to say to yourself is take just the asset of gold which about 10 trillion dollars market cap and you say okay well if jewelry demand continues to fall even if it's at a slight rate but it continues to contract you have central banks that now at some times are net sellers and sometimes net buyers right so okay again contraction there and then from the investment standpoint the actual price that the daily price of this continues to fall which is a signal that there's a contracting demand from an investment perspective that's 93 percent of all use of gold only seven percent of it's used for actual technology and metal conduction and things like that and so you have a 10 trillion dollar asset that it appears and again maybe data changes and i'll change my mind and other people change their mind but it appears is on the decline and so if that happens you're going to get the contraction of a 10 trillion dollar asset where's all that value go and what you're seeing is at the same time that that asset is contracting you're also seeing a massive influx from not only retail investors not only uh kind of the wealthy and the elite but also from financial institutions corporations pension funds etc into this kind of digital sound money so you're saying that there's a kind of shift from gold to bitcoin because they have a lot of the same properties except one is in the physical space the other in the digital space so do you see like central banks uh quietly potentially switching out uh from sort of ghost gold to bitcoin like naturally it's just doing is seeing the pattern that you're referring to now but more drastically into the future where there's a complete shift if you line up the gold community and the bitcoin community next to each other they'll agree on all the problems that they that they see in the world right they'll actually agree on the solution that sound money is the solution were they differentiate is the gold communities believes that it's the analog application of sound money right the physical gold that is the solution the bitcoin community believes the digital application of sound money bitcoin can you find sound money by the way someone is just outside the system and no one can create more of it so nobody controls it this scarcity is fundamental exactly why scarcity important in money i think scarcity just has this very high correlation to value across all assets not just money right money happens to be the the unit of account that we use in terms of uh daily commerce um but whether it is um you know as we're seeing how uh sneakers are you know what whatever it is uh scarcity ultimately is that signal of value i think and that's just been the way that humans uh derive value for literally you know thousands and thousands of years yeah i gotta say that's my view on life and love in general is scarcity is what makes it more valuable people talk about immortality i you know i would like to be immortal but it does it does seem that uh when you let go of the fightiness of life i feel like that meals and the experiences you have get devalued significantly like the longer you live the less value there are in in infinity if you live forever i worry that all the meaning will will dissipate and the same thing with love a quick criticism of sort of dating culture and all that kind of stuff like i haven't uh had shocking revelation that i've never been an attended date or any of those things i i believe that scarcity and dating and interaction is like intensifies the value of when the interactions do happen so we'll need like when love does happen and so in that sense there's something magical about scarcity in the more subjective psychological social world as well and perhaps money is just another version of that right it's just it's all about the stories and ideas we tell ourselves i think they're actually more interconnected than you're giving it credit for right which is what is money money is time ultimately right the the pursuit of the acquisition of money right of whether it's a currency or true money is because that should give you more time and so one of my favorite movies ever is uh and it's funny because justin timberlake is in it uh is this movie i lose most people at that point in time in time and basically the premise of the movie is that everyone has a clock that's embedded into their arm and so uh if you go to work you basically put your arm underneath when you leave and there's time that's deposited into your clock and if your clock ever hits all zeros you're dead you die on the spot and so there's a number of scenes where people are basically running you know to get to you and i give you a little bit more time so that you can get to work on monday and then you work to acquire time and so basically time becomes this currency but what becomes very fascinating about it is there are sections in society where literally there's physical places if you only have let's say 72 hours or less you're allowed to go to section 1. section 5 though is because you have years and years and years on your clock and in this movie everyone at the age of 25 freezes from a biological aging standpoint so everyone stays the same but you may have lived for a thousand years and so what becomes so fascinating about it is that rich people have time poor people do not have time and so in it justin timberlake the main character at one point uh essentially acquires a bunch of time and he's able to go to one of the higher levels and now he's attending all these galas and you know poker nights and all stuff and one of the first things that he learns is that in the lower end of society everyone is running everywhere at all times in the movie because time is so finite and it is so scarce and so therefore why would i walk down the street i must run down the street in the highest level of society no one runs anywhere and in fact if you run you are seen as lower class yeah because wealth is time and so that movie is you know it's got a ton of kind of um things that you can pull out of it but to me is the perfect epitome of money is time and so when you start to think about the acquisition of money right it goes to this whole idea of time billionaire and i know that there's probably a lot of people have heard about this already but if you think of a million seconds it's about 11 days a billion seconds is 31 years and so if i said to somebody you have to switch lives with warren buffett would you do it some people would say sure that'd be their initial reaction i said but you gotta have to be you know 92 years old is the money worth the lack of time most people would say no right there's this guy graham duncan who really articulated this well um and ultimately what ends up happening is you realize time is more valuable than the money but you you acquire the money to gain more time and be the reason it's valuable is because of the scarcity of time we currently have the the biology the physics means that um this is not just the narrative we tell ourselves maybe this i don't know but it it feels like pretty sure we're mortal and in that sense the scarcity there gives value to time it's fascinating to think about all the thought experiments here of if that could actually be on the economy if you can actually convert time in a frictionless way to money well and if you start to pull on this a little bit and say okay a young person today let's say somebody in their 20s has about 2 billion seconds left in their life right kind of 60 years give or take based on life expectancy they usually until they start to understand this concept think of wealth in dollar terms but dollars are being devalued and so you know a million dollars doesn't get you what it used to get right it's kind of a an old adage and so what you're doing is you're pursuing something that ends up losing value and so it's the constant rat race it's how do i constantly try to get more how do i get more dollars how do i get more dollars because even if i say to myself you know i'm gonna retire when i get a hundred thousand dollars when i get the hundred thousand dollars the hundred thousand dollars five years from now doesn't buy me what i thought it did so now i need five hundred thousand or two hundred thousand or a million or whatever the number is and so ultimately what ends up occurring is that the bitcoin community and many people in kind of this idea of sound money is you want to be able to acquire an asset that not only will hold the value right the store of value over time but it will actually appreciate over time and so when you look at something like bitcoin against the dollar against other types of assets all of these assets are down compared to bitcoin right now some of that's just in the early days of kind of the pricing of an asset you go from very small to something much larger but now what you start to look at is well if you have a finite supply of something what ends up happening is people begin to value it more and so in a world where dollars are infinite and other fiat currencies are infinite bitcoin becomes very very interesting very special uh and something that is very aspirational and so i think that's where you're starting to see people say wait a second this is something where that finite secure store of value is essential to wealth generation and preservation over a long period of time and if sam harris is right that free will is an illusion this is really interesting to think about maybe time is the kind of block chain because you can't change anything and then the physical space time of the universe is a ledger so maybe uh it won't be bitcoin that replaces gold maybe it'll be time once we crack open that in fact the universe is fully deterministic so maybe that's what like eric weinstein is afraid of once you figure out the theories of everything of physics will be able to then start trading create a market out of like the very fabric of reality and that way break it well if you look at infinite inflationary type currencies you can't do that right because it constantly is losing value right when you look at a finite asset again that has the provability of the actual finite element to it ultimately the wealth is that marketplace yeah and so you know i i always uh kind of try to highlight for people the top 55 of americans understand something that the bottom 45 don't they invest right the bottom 45 consume the top 55 percent invest and that's why we have a wealth and equality gap and it continues to get wider and wider and wider is because the people who are holding the devaluing assets and saving or watching their wealth be devalued away and there's arguments and controversy over how fast that's happening but it's happening the people who are holding the assets that have any level of scarcity right real estate may not be finite but it's scarce right art may not be finite but it's scarce gold may not be finite but it's scarce those assets continue to appreciate against the devaluing currency and so when you then say no i have complete finite supply with provability and this transparency around it where everyone knows how much is there and what where it's going now all of a sudden you and i can transact back and forth that value and it is a representation of time because what i can essentially do is if i gather or acquire more of that wealth i then can apply leverage to my life i can use machines humans or some other resources and basically now free up my time yeah and it's not funny about the way you are trading time maybe it's a little bit indirect but maybe not uh so just because i brought up eric and uh you're on twitter i'd love to hear your opinions uh i talk to him a lot he seems to have stepped into the beautiful dance of human communication and the social dynamics that is the bitcoin cryptocurrency community do you have uh do you have thoughts on uh uh engaged theoretic concepts conceptualization of the world there's just eric in general he's got a lot of love in his heart and he's got a grace in the way he communicates but he's also uh loves to play with ideas and seems to have touched a sensitive point with the bitcoin community is there anything you could say uh that's hopeful inspiring about that whole dynamic that went down i so i don't know all of the details um but what i will say is i've listened to a number of his podcasts um and him and there's a whole bunch of people like him i basically put them in the bucket of they're an independent thinker who are courageous enough to speak their truth whatever that may be they are humble enough to revisit their ideas and say i got this right i got this wrong information changed i'll change my mind it's obviously a sign of intelligence to be able to do that type of stuff and i actually think that one of the most scarce things in our society are those independent thinkers who are able to do all this right speaking of scarcity yeah and so to me uh i put eric and a whole host of other people kind of if you look at like the intellectual dark web is kind of a label that's uh been used they're actually some of the most important people in our society because they're the people who are willing to stand up against the mass kind of um thought process they're willing to talk about things that others may think are taboo right they're willing to change their mind which all of a sudden has become a bad thing rather than a good thing and so when i see the exploration of ideas in public i actually think that those are the people who are most open to the kind of vehement blowback as well right because that's part of what they're doing is that they're eliciting hey i'm going to throw an idea into the arena if it doesn't get attacked they actually may be more nervous than if there is some level of you know kind of war of attrition if you will and so what i've seen with a number of the people who have done this everyone from some of the best you know hedge fund managers and kind of money managers in the world all the way to what i'll consider some of the most uh intellectual people in the world is they play with these ideas and they play with the ideas and they play with them and they play with them and they all arrive at the same conclusion and sometimes it takes a month sometimes it takes years but they arrive at this bitcoin thesis and what's so interesting about it is it highlights something that many people view as a bug but i think people in the bitcoin community view as a feature which is that community and so what ends up happening is when you have something that is as ambitious as creating a global reserve currency doesn't mean it needs to unseat any of the existing ones but become the global reserve currency of the internet right this digital economy you need shepherds of it and so just like a technology company wants to find those loyal fans that are willing to go out and market and word of mouth and and kind of not only promote it but also protect it this technology that is this decentralized thing which uses a financial incentive in order to elicit the buy-in uh not from a financial perspective but from a mental energy standpoint has built one of the most rabid powerful and engaged communities on the internet and what ends up happening is those people have thought more about these ideas and actually challenged those ideas more than anyone else in the world and so i've got a lot of folks who will just say there's this guy marty bent who we'll talk all the time about the bitcoin critics haven't done their homework in a lot of cases so they show up and sometimes it's super intellectual lazy arguments sometimes it's actually very well thought out arguments you know on the counter to the bitcoin thesis but ultimately what ends up happening is you're talking to somebody who's an expert i've been thinking about for five seven eight ten years right they've gone through every simulation you possibly can and they show up with data examples um and responses now they're not always right but they've just done the work and so what i actually uh like about folks like eric and others is as they're kind of going through this journey they're incredibly smart right and they provide uh or they um apply a lot of intellectual rigor to some of these arguments and so what it does is what does it do it's a marketplace it keeps people honest so i uh let me sort of make a few comments it's kind of interesting uh so you're exactly right uh maybe the blowback is part of the mechanism that actually develops these ideas and so on i do want to kind of speak to a little bit of the toxicity that i've experienced in the bitcoin community i kind of see it the bitcoin community i think he paints a really nice picture which i kind of see it as an immune system that protects against sort of uh the viruses that are bad ideas that said the immune system can destroy a body right and the thing you mentioned about eric and maybe about myself and in general just people exploring ideas is there is a dunning-kruger effect which is when you first start exploring ideas deeply you have um overblown level of confidence about like how much you understand and that's actually the process about learning then you realize you don't understand much what i've noticed with the bitcoin community is uh they're not as uh patient with the the basics of the dunning-kruger effect like if i step in and make declarative statements about bitcoin like i you know i read a long time ago uh the white paper like at the cursed degree level i felt uh that i understand the technology this is basic intuitions you know i didn't think about the social dynamics i didn't think about any like financial implications and a lot of the deep actually the ongoing innovations and all that kind of stuff but i thought i understood that technology and so i step in and make declarative statements i think those are the the first time you say okay what's the role of bitcoin in the world you start thinking about it deeply and then you make statements the toxicity that you get in those first few statements is really off-putting to me i'm somebody that tries to communicate love and live that with everything i do and there is a level of disrespect that i've experienced not directly just observing others people have been mostly kind to me and i appreciate that but if you're going to criticize me about my exploration of ideas in bitcoin you have to also acknowledge that i'm a human being they got like a phd and stuff like i did some hard shit of that it could be in farming or it could be whatever like i've lived life and i've really thought deeply i really care like i know a lot of shit and it's possible that i actually have a lot of ideas that you can learn from now if it's agriculture fine or if it's artificial intelligence fine like i know what i'm talking about about certain things and i could be wrong about a lot of things and there's like an exchange of ideas that's that makes the that mechanism that you talked about um more efficient sometimes when the blowback is too strong too early on the development of ideas is just inefficient and i'm not sure if if there's a you know the way it was explained to me is that for so long that community was like bombarded with just like bad ideas like criticisms there's just overly sensitive now to like to bullshit just they're like triggered by statements like they've heard it all before and they're like oh there they go again with the same old arguments but that doesn't mean that um you know you have to sort of i guess develop patience and so on especially when you feel like in my case that the person is coming from a good place right i don't know if there's something you could say yeah that's positive about the future of this kind of overcoming this toxicity i think there's a couple of trends that are all kind of coalescing here right in these types of experiences so one is uh when you look at a community there's always um a spectrum right in terms of there's some people who over index on kindness uh and stupidity right and there's some people who over index on intelligence and uh basically just being an asshole right and then you get everyone in between and so like uh naturally as we know the extremist ends of uh any community end up being the loudest usually right the second thing is um there is from the outsider view like in at the beginning of the exploration of ideas uh it's very much a learning process right it's it's i don't know if i understand this or not but piers ideas a b and c from the internal perspective there's a trillion dollars of value at stake and we must protect it with our lives yeah right the truth's probably somewhere in between there right again the world's not black and white there's this kind of more gray area that i think actually um is where most people exist the other thing that's at play here is uh i think the bitcoin community understands the internet and internet culture and uh narratives better than almost anyone yes and so you see this with kind of the uh the just complete destruction uh of narratives with memes and and um just the the visceral reaction and the use of things like reddit and twitter and uh youtube podcasts just areas where um i think a lot about uh if you are an upstart right and you are going to go challenge the most uh well-respected elite kind of establishment institutions in the world if you walk in in a suit and tie and you say i'm here to debate you with ideas you're going to get your clock cleaned yeah right because they're going to trot out their lawyers their regulators they're lobbyists right like all this stuff if you instead say i'm going to meme you to death on the internet yeah and i'm going to control the public narrative you've shifted the the power the asymmetry of power is more symmetrical now it's the ultimate insurgency right if you bring it back to the the field yes and so when you think about this you have to lean into the advantage that you have yeah and so what ends up happening is you and i would absolutely lose it if we saw jp morgan or goldman sachs or the federal reserve start tweeting memes yeah right it would almost the the validation it would give to the medium and the uh even playing field that it would provide would pull these establishments down to the level of what is this upstart but now what you're starting to see is that the bitcoin community even though there's some level of toxic toxicity at times even though there's this visceral reaction sometimes there's even what i would call bullying or or kind of outward projection of things right even though it may be a small percentage it'll happen every once in a while what they do understand though is that these establishments are made up of humans and what you can actually do one of the best ways to pick apart an institution is to recruit from inside of them one by one yes and so what you're starting to see now is i mean i get the messages on twitter and linkedin all the time hey i'm a banker by trade i'm a bitcoiner at heart right and so what you're doing is you're essentially infiltrating the organizations not in in physical uh you know uh population yeah but with the ideas and with the philosophies banker in the streets bitcoin are in the sheets i like it uh with that said uh in terms of shit posting and memes i gotta say um uh like bring it on because i i believe um in terms of asymmetry of power i believe in that love will save the world not memes uh or at least the good good vibe memes as opposed to shit posting it's a it's an interesting battleground though it's an interesting battleground to think about the other thing i would say too is um one of the elements uh that's always kind of funny to me is how much of the entertainment is love right so when you start to think about how many of the memes that are posted for example are for outsiders versus insiders yes laser eyes right which seems absolutely ridiculous elementary and and uh frankly uh beneath anyone in any level of power or influence in the world somehow has congressmen and senators who have done it yeah they're not trying to uh convince their colleagues in uh elected positions to become bitcoiners yeah they're speaking directly internally to the bitcoin community yeah there's some sense in which yes memes is love even if hearing bitcoin is love they're trying to convert me uh the one that you the you uh you have to laugh at right probably my favorite one out of all that is i've seen on multiple occasions uh you know mark cuban a couple of years ago kevin o'leary whoever you know wealthy people billionaires et cetera and you have people on anonymous accounts who knows who they are telling them have fun staying poor and it's just you know it's just again part of a community and i think it it's uh it's a feature not a bug there's bad aspects to it at times but i do think it's a net positive it's just like the immune system it does a lot of crappy stuff but overall it's a it's a major net positive maybe this is a bit of a personal question for me just out of my own curiosity but i've uh talked to ray daly a few times so ray dalio i think was one of those people that took the that that journey uh the the the bitcoin journey gift give thoughts about him specifically about that whole world and about the journey maybe of others that are going through the same process because ray is at least from my perspective i'm a bit of an outsider he's one of the most uh insightful and deep thinkers about investment about finance about economics in general uh actually about life so it's interesting to see him go on that journey do you have something in common about rey or just those kinds of people in general so if we look at um what i'll just consider the legends of wall street in general yeah right um there's no denying that they're incredibly intelligent uh there's no denying that actually especially in the hedge fund world they're some of the most open-minded people uh in terms of they're willing to change their mind when they get new information there's no doubt that they are historians in the sense of having studied financial markets and cycles over time and also uh one of the things that i really respect about all those guys is almost all of them are willing to put ideas out uh via various writings that they do uh and accept the public criticism right whether it's howard marx ray or others uh they will put this stuff out in public and uh sure there's a lot of people who um are supportive and kind of are part of a fan base if you will but there's a lot of people who also think that sometimes they say stupid things and so putting that out takes kind of courage right um i think ray's actually the most fascinating though out of all of these kind of legends of wall street in that um he understands debt cycles he understands currencies he for a while now has been all over and famously said you know cash's trash uh investable assets right he just he kind of like just knew all of it and for a long time bitcoiners have said ray you understand the bitcoin argument you're just missing the last part which is bitcoin's the solution right and so he was gold and some other ideas but i think that he's a perfect example of when you are part of uh the establishment people view you in a very static way as uh the leader of a part of establishment but whether it's bill gates ray dalio or somebody else each one of these people were innovators and challengers to a system they were upstarts at one point and so it's kind of this idea that like if you live long enough you eventually become the man right and so you know gates is a good example right warren buffett is a good example ray dalio's a good example etc and so uh you have to give credit i think to dalio in the sense of he kept an open mind about all of this and more so than many of his peers has continued to do the work and come around to this idea and now i don't want to know if i want to say that he's a bitcoin proponent as much as he believes it is one of you know a portion of assets that can be a solution and so to me when you start to convince those types of people when it's you know paul tudor jones or stanley druckenmiller ray dalio howard mark's now even writing about it saying hey you know i was anti-bitcoin i didn't put a ton of intellectual rigor into it but thank god my son bought a bunch of our family right and uh and kind of we've had exposure to it i think what it does is more than anything it's not going to convince somebody to go and um you know take it seriously or go ahead and make an allocation it reduces career risk and so if all of a sudden when paul tudor jones and stanley dracula come out and say hey i own bitcoin and here's why every other investor on wall street now can say to an investment committee well it's good enough for paul tudor jones it's good enough for stanley druckenmiller and so i think that it's very interesting because rey doesn't just represent wall street i think ray in some weird way represents this like macro economic investor and so some of those are in hedge funds and some of those people would be like cios at organizations some of them would be at corporations and some of them are just kind of retail investors and so you can see this kind of inflection point throughout the adoption of bitcoin right there was infrastructure that got built okay that kind of led to more adoption there was certain individuals right usually they were kind of technology oriented entrepreneurial billionaires they would buy it and come out and say it okay that led to inflection points uh you started to have some of these kind of wall street legends come out started financial institutions started now you're seeing corporations start to do it right eventually there's gonna be a central bank that does it and so you kind of walk through that line and what you understand it's like it's the same thing every time it's just somebody new right that that path right that bitcoiner's journey if you will and i think that that is almost the beauty of it is uh if you short circuit the journey it's almost like somebody doesn't appreciate it right if you take let's say somebody who's a young kid and you just give them a bunch of money and they didn't have to work hard for it they don't really appreciate it and uh ray ray actually has the book principles right and he talks about the hero's journey so he's like living in some sense in terms of you know thinking about digital currency in general like digital finance it's one of the big transitions transformations of our world in some sense it's not just about money or you could argue that money is everything i mean it's like money isn't just the the narrow definition of money money is really everything and so we're you could argue that sort of uh cryptocurrency is like the base layer of this transformation to the digital space and everything else will just be built on top of it i use a different word um that i think is kind of closer to your world which is it's ultimately automation and what i mean by that is uh you know before 1970 or 1980 all the assets were analog and so when you have analog assets physical stock certificates physical bonds right physical deed to a home you have to physically exchange them yeah when we wanted to increase transactions and increase kind of global finance and access we took those physical assets and we created electronic qsip assets so now we have in centralized databases kind of a file represents the asset that's sitting somewhere in custody and you and i can transact them a little bit easier but still centralized there's still some bureaucracy and you know maybe it takes two days to transact rather than actually mailing it across the other world now what we're seeing is a transition from those electronic q-sips to these digital assets and so if you look at again just let's say money uh or currency every currency in the world is going to be digital you're gonna have a digital dollar a digital euro yen rmb you're gonna have decentralized uh kind of open source uh money like bitcoin you're also gonna have private currencies like facebook's attempt at dm uh and there will be others that will try to do this and so when you get everything digital right and i think that's the kind of first step everyone focuses on the competition at the technology layer essentially goes away you get some level of feature parity and sure there's bells and whistles on each kind of implementation of a digital currency but at the end of the day the technology is relatively the same and ultimately what it will do is it will facilitate the adoption of digital wallets so you have to have a digital wallet regardless of what digital currency you have same with me same with everybody else in the world but what it does do is when you kind of uh push away and reduce the friction of competition at the technology layer it moves the competition to the monetary policy layer and so when you get to that layer now often it becomes interesting because all of the currencies are the same except for this one right now and maybe there will be others in the future uh but but for sure bitcoin today and people may try to replicate in a private manner or something but bitcoin is kind of the the only finite scarce digital cell money and so when you then have that pretty big difference in that competition at the monetary policy layer it's actually not going to matter where you get paid right and what i mean by that is like you and i both live in a single currency environment i get paid in dollars i historically have saved in dollars all of the assets in my life are denominated in dollars and i owe my debts in dollars whether it's taxes or in the private market and i don't have to worry about foreign currencies i don't exchange anything the only time i would ever think about in other currencies if i'm going to another country in their single currency environment and in order to change or exchange my currency i go to the bank or i go get ripped off at the airport right like those are my two options so it's high friction to change between currencies when the competition of technology is kind of um innovated away now i can get paid in dollars these digital dollars and with a click of a button switching to any other currency in the world and so what ultimately happens is value and liquidity is going to coalesce around the best monetary policy and so you get in this very weird world where even if the united states says hey you're gonna get paid in dollars you have to pay your taxes in dollars you're gonna start to see people operate in a multi-currency environment where they say okay i got paid my digital dollar click a button i save in bitcoin it stays there protects or grows my purchasing power oh i need to pay my taxes let me switch back into dollars with click of a button and pay when you go to a multi-currency world it's not just about currency it's now multi-asset world because not only is the currency digitized but that same technology is used to digitize stocks bonds and commodities as well and so today we live in a very fragmented financial world where basically i have a brokerage account i have a bank account i may have an alternative asset account etc when i can put all those assets in a single digital wallet and i can then go from asset to asset without having to go back to a single unit of account like frictionless uh going from acid to asset yeah so now what you end up doing is you start to open up the possibility for machine-to-machine transactions so today if you and i write software code for two machines to transact with each other yeah they can't transact physical currency and in many cases they can't actually transact the electronic q-sip currencies or assets either because there's too long of a settlement time so you can't get true automation right so the whole idea of like the car's going to drive over a strip in the road it's going to pay the toll right well that can't happen right now because literally the transaction won't go through right and so i always joke that like in an automated world it's like a cd-rom but we're trying to take cassette tape player assets and put it in the cd-rom it's just incompatible technology references nobody understands at this point oh by the way you need to update your references i probably do it's like taking a cd-rom trying to put an mp3 player into uh streaming but but i think that the reason why that becomes really interesting is when you start to create these digital assets now you open up the world of possibilities so when new technology is created you can do two things you can either create new things the world's never seen before or you can use it to improve the old world most people because it's the easiest thing to think about want to improve the old world so an equivalent of this would be when the internet came along a media company that had newspapers would say hey we should take a pdf of the newspaper and we should put it on a website and now anyone in the world can go to this website they can read the newspaper today that was valuable but it missed out on the ability to change headlines to test to put multimedia to distribute it differently to you know do all kinds of things that today we understand the internet really empowered and so what i think we're about to watch happen is we're going to digitize the assets we're going to put them all into these digital wallets you're going to get automated technologies where machines cannot transact with each other and we're going to do simple things like why do we pay people once every two weeks why don't we just pay them at the end of every day or why don't i literally stream payments to you yeah on an hour-by-hour basis based on the work you do it would solve incredible economic issues in our country and in countries around the world but historically businesses can't do this because the technology problem they can't keep track of it all how do they pay everyone every day how do they pay everyone every hour like you just can't do it yeah it's funny the the the vision of the future you're painting it's kind of an exciting one and it almost makes me sad looking into the future when we'll look back at this time it's like is how incredibly inefficient our financial transactions were like the transaction of value of any kind like how like what to pay each other like there has like processes there's like payroll and all this kind of just the the entirety of the transactions is just like painful almost all transactions are painful and even and the companies that innovate to make the transactions a little bit more frictionless like amazon with the one-click purchase button like went out huge but even that's really painful so it's actually really interesting especially then you start to move that into the space of data there's a lot of people thinking about privacy and data and like can we put can we uh like convert data into like money it's just so that you can pay for how much you reveal to the companies about your own private data that can then be used to assign value to you so you can use a service for free if you hand over the data but there's like explicit transaction going on so you can empower all those kinds of things that uh will just like fundamentally change our world that's that's really really really exciting one of one of the most interesting things to me um is i invested in a company called bridget what they told me was they said eight billion dollars was paid to the top four banks last year on overdraft fees okay so literally they took eight billion dollars from people who didn't have money in their bank account right and so when you dig into why is that a lot of times it's not that the people don't have the money it's actually a mismatch of the payments yeah so what ends up happening is you get paid on the first and the 15th but on the 12th your netflix bill hits on the 13th you went grocery shopping and on the 14th your car payments hit you overdraft and then on the 15th you actually get the check and then you're able to pay not only the overdraft but for the expenses that you have and so something as simple as just getting paid at the end of every day immediately would eliminate you know some big percentage of those eight billion dollars of value that flows to large institutions on overdraft fees yeah and also i mean this whole process with overdraft fees and just many of the financial transactions we have to live through today forces many of us to be like accountants like to understand uh the different mechanism of financial like movement of money as opposed to you which is what we want to do as human beings operating in higher layers of like providing services for others of like following your passions and like working for others like doing cool shit or or you know basically providing value exchanging value in the world and not thinking about the money the money takes care of itself and then you see the results of it so you're you're able to think in terms of money but not have to know how the like the accounting works automation simply frees humans up to do more creative work yeah right yeah like that like that's it yeah and which is why they use the term which is why you use the term automation which i think is kind of brilliant uh reframing of all this yeah because ultimately digital technologies are merely the conduit to usher us into that world yeah and i think the most fascinating part of this entire industry is people who are trying to figure out now that we're going to have these digital technologies how do we usher in that automated world faster and so there's people who are building all kinds of incredible things right there's literally um some technologies where you can stream uh for paying for consumption of content yeah right there's i saw somebody recently who they basically said hey i have created something but it's not gonna be released until everyone and almost like a gofundme type situation pays for in combination then it gets unlocked and so when you start to think about this it's not only innovation on the technology front it's innovation around the way that we form capital it's the way that we organize resources it's the way that we build companies it's the business models right it's the application of those technologies all that stuff starts to change and go back to 20 uh 2007 is when the iphone came out uber wasn't possible right he's going online like all these companies that weren't possible before when the digital technologies are kind of adopted on a global scale i think that we all myself included drastically underestimate how fast and how big innovation can be uh because it's just hard right like like we like to think linearly and that's not how the world works yeah i i do find it kind of interesting uh it is nft based but uh i i don't think it has to be this uh this idea of i think big clout it's called or whatever uh the idea of sort of investing in individuals it makes me immediately think about investing in ideas so even just the words you speak having value and sort of if you have a frictionless like automated financial system then you could do a bunch of interesting things about what it means to add value to the world i mean i don't know if bit cloud is currently an efficient representation of that but i am truly happy that however that thing works i'm just one notch above vladimir putin which is one of the that's like one of the bucket list items for me to have a list where i'm one notch above putin well what i think you're talking about here is important because there's uh historical examples you could invest in a patent in some situations you could invest in an organization that has an idea right so these are super inefficient given kind of the vision that you're painting in terms of like investing directly in an idea in a super efficient automated fashion but that's how the technology evolution works right is it's really hard to do it first and then slowly kind of becomes easier and easier as technology uh is more prevalent the other thing that i think is interesting is this whole idea of investing in people if you really think about the origination of that is i would hire somebody right i pay you money and then you're going to create production but i take the lion's share and you don't now there's things like these isas these income sharing agreements where basically i will educate you on something train you on something i'll put up capital right and then over time you'll pay me back plus profits as some version eventually i don't know what it looks like but being able to get upside in somebody's success for having risk capital early on doesn't seem that far off seen in professional sports you see it in you know a lot of these things and so i just think that a lot of um the focus right now is on the technology but ultimately these are ideas that are very old and have had lots of success and traction and we're just merely standing in the way of the evolution of these ideas with new technology and so uh it's easy to get caught up in the technology but when you really zoom out and look at it from the ideological standpoint and kind of the the progress of humanity it's a foregone conclusion this stuff's going to happen it's just how i think the world is waiting and some of us are trying to create that future world which is like what are the applications of this technology that will transform the world and then you know i hate the term but killer apps like cool ideas that are implemented effectively at scale to transform the world there's been there's been a lot of different ideas popping up like the there's a lot of ideas about social networks that are built on top of the technology and all that kind of stuff so but let me actually uh drag us back down to something basic if a person wanted to buy bitcoin store bitcoin how do they actually do it yeah so there's a couple of different ways to kind of uh acquire bitcoin and in every way you've got to exchange some form of value for bitcoin right which is part of why it has values because you're giving up value so um in one way is to exchange uh energy and computational power for bitcoin so you can mine it you can literally take uh computer power that you have you can rent it to the network uh and run that software and then it will pay you a portion of the kind of daily revenue uh off that system you can acquire bitcoin in exchange for your power uh and your computational um kind of contribution and that's the fundamental principle behind bitcoin is the proof of work so i got a hundred bucks uh like i use cash app uh you know they uh there's coinbase there's all these exchanges like how do i convert my hundred dollars to uh to bitcoin is there something disclaimer this is not financial advice and this is just us uh talking is just your opinions just do not use this to invest um or take us financial expertise that said uh like uh is there something you recommend that's an easy entry point for somebody that's like hmm i wonder if i can convert this hundred dollars into whatever amount of bitcoin what do you recommend what are the options so there's a lot of options uh i'm heavily biased i went out and i scoured the market looked at all of them i've invested a lot of money in a company called block fi that basically um basically has financial products for crypto investors so you can go you can take dollars or other currency you have you can convert it through an exchange uh you can leave it on these interest bearing accounts you can earn interest just like you would earn in a traditional account but higher levels of interest because it's this new thing or you can withdraw it and you can put it into cold storage on a hardware device you can leave it in a software wall there's kind of all these storage options uh so block file is you know kind of the one that i'm biased towards because so block files or sorry to interrupt uh so the block fi is is uh bitcoin only or is it an exchange with the other crypto it's got a bunch of different ones yeah they basically are agnostic to what it is um but they provide uh kind of financial you know products to crypto investors okay so you mentioned a few interesting ideas that'd be nice for people who would not be familiar with it uh cold storage hot storage uh what does that mean so like i go to a website and i convert dollars to bitcoin that's the kind of storage that's like online banking right what else is there so there's a couple of different things that you can do right and let's use the legacy system as kind of an example so if i want to um get currency and i put in my bank account it sits there i have to trust that the bank doesn't go under nobody steals it all this kind of stuff there's insurance for it right there's all these kind of benefits in the legacy system to make sure that as long as i don't have millions and millions of dollars there i'm going to be protected pretty much if anything happens through fdic insurance if i want to do that i'm taking that counterparty risk though so it's mitigated but there's still counterparty risk i'm counting on that bank but it is easier to move it around right if all of a sudden you call me up and say hey send me some money i can press a couple buttons on my computer and it'll send it to you if i want deeper level of security i can go and i can get the physical dollars and i can go and i can you know put under my mattress right and i can say you know what it's not gonna be as easy to send it to you immediately but if i really want to i can go underneath my mattress pretty quickly i can grab it i can get it back to the bank and then i can send you the money the third thing i could do is i could basically take those physical dollars out of the bank and i could go and i could go put it literally uh you know in a vault somewhere that i don't have control over that's behind 10 passwords uh and biometric scanning and like it's really difficult to even get to it yeah right so if you almost look at it as like there's three stages of security that you could have in the traditional world the same thing is true in bitcoin so you could buy bitcoin on any exchange you could do it on wi-fi but you also can do it on places like coinbase gemini kraken etc also cash app cash app you can do that i think i i think there's still sponsoring this podcast i'm not biased at all so once you get bitcoin on any of these uh venues uh you can leave it there on that venue now the trade-off is you're taking counterparty risk so somebody else is responsible for the security and the protection of it uh in many cases big well-known companies who have billions and billions of dollars of assets they have higher levels of security that's why they're well known that's why people trust them whatever but you are taking counterparty risk it is easier to quickly send to somebody so this so the trade-off of like ease of use uh but counterparty risk is big and in the bitcoin community specifically this is a huge thing of uh they really really have a cape for not leaving the bitcoin there right for the obvious counter priority the second thing you can do is you can basically get it off of an exchange and you can put it in some level of kind of what i'll call a second layer of storage that second layer storage could be a hardware device that you can quickly just you know grab off your desk and plug into your computer and immediately use that's what they call like a hardware hardware wallet yep or you can have some sort of software wallet right where it's not on an exchange but there is some level of uh in between between the hardware wallet and the exchange in this software wallet but the software wallet is connected to the internet yeah and so um if you kind of think of it as like the exchange software wallet hardware wallet and then there's something called deep storage right or cold storage um and this is you know literally there was a a company uh called zappo that uh would put things in deep cold storage and it was literally buried in a mountain right so like the odds that somebody's physically gonna go there there's armed guards there's you know kind of all this type of stuff but again you're taking some level of counterparty risk because they have your bitcoin and so the saying or the phrase uh is not your keys not your coins uh whereas my buddy isaiah jackson came up with these said uh uh not your keys not your cheese right in terms of uh uh sovereignty is important right and ultimately this goes back to kind of the beginning of a conversation around bitcoin's ethos sovereignty right giving the power back to people you don't have to rely on uh this infrastructure in order to be able to participate in this monetary uh kind of economy which you are now able to do is you're able to use digital sound money you're able to keep control of it you and you alone are responsible for it so the idea of personal responsibility um and then also you and you alone make the decisions as to whether you hold on to it or you use it without censorship right no one can tell you what you can do with it or can't do with it and so the purchase and the storage what i find is uh depending on who you are there's varying uh degrees of kind of concern or decisions that get made there a lot of it comes down to personal preference the bitcoin community though absolutely will over optimize for uh sovereignty and uh kind of hardware or cold storage i wonder if you can sort of comment on that because you you have uh uh sort of uh cash app and block fi and coinbase like you can store it that you can purchase and trade it there and store it there and so on but ultimately they're saying you want to you know keep some of it there but you want to move it to the hardware wallet and the cold storage of the hardware wallet is like you can disconnect it from the computer because ultimately stuff that's connected to the internet can be compromised can be controlled by governments and other parties and so on what are your thoughts about sort of practically speaking for maybe like a regular citizen what's what should be the role of the hardware wallet in their lives yeah so at the highest level i just think that like learning about it is important right so even if you only have five dollars equivalent of bitcoin going and understanding here's how it works here's why it's important here's how i would actually withdraw from an exchange under the hardware wall like that alone just as an intellectual exercise is a worthwhile pursuit i think people should go do that and actually go through the process of the steps so you feel like you can you can do it yeah yeah it's kind of like if i said to you you know hey we're gonna go buy an asset and you never went and you looked at it you never went and uh you know made a decision like sure maybe i did it or i didn't do it but like you didn't actually experience it right and so i think that that's the important part the second thing is uh each person is different from a how they view this asset so there are some people who are speculating right there's three use cases for bitcoin there's store value medium of exchange and speculation and the people who are speculating they can't put it in deep cold storage because they need to be able to trade it right so what ends up happening is they fall in the bucket of like high risk high reward they're trying to trade they're trying to do all these things and sure maybe there are profits that they can generate if they're good at it but also they're introducing a lot of risk and so that person is very different than the person who says hey you know i bought one bitcoin and i'm gonna save it for my child right and i'm gonna give it to them on their 18th birthday yeah and so when you start to look at this what you end up saying is what are you actually purchasing this for kind of like why are you doing it and then what's your time horizon and what ends up happening is more and more people in the bitcoin community have longer time horizons one of the advantages to uh this community right if you look at the on-chain metrics 60 of bitcoin haven't moved uh from the digital wallet in which they sit in the last 12 months so even though it's appreciated hundreds of percent on the upside there's been lots of volatility a 50 drop in a single day in terms of the us dollar price still doesn't move and so these are kind of the long-term holders right these are the the iron fists or as recently as it's become popular the diamond hands right hands they're just they're not going anywhere and so i think that those people are much more likely to not have their bitcoin on exchanges or in software walls they've got it in some sort of like highly secure environment uh and what and one in which they have deep sovereignty or kind of prevalent sovereignty and the reason for that is because they have that long time horizon they don't want to be um kind of convicted around bitcoin sound money macro environment all stuff and then they make a mistake because they trusted you know abcd company uh and that counterparty risk because it ends up actually being you know fatal or or detrimental so again this is not financial advice disclaimer but uh let me ask so you in terms of investment advice on bitcoin so you see bitcoins potentially not just the thing that you sp speculate over like buy and sell buy and sell buy and sell but it's something that you can just buy only and i believe i've heard that you own uh quite a large percentage of you of your wealth in in bitcoin and you're basically buying only yeah and storing long term so that's something that's a legitimate way to approach bitcoin in your recommendation go to other cultures so if we remove ourselves from the western world culture of uh investing in gamification of financial markets and the financialization of everything let's say we go to uh the culture of india for hundreds if not thousands of years families basically saved their wealth in gold and in jewelry and in these hard assets with the expectation to pass it on to the next generation and so it would be blasphemous to sell the family's gold in that culture right you know your great grandfather gave it to your grandfather your grandfather gave it to your father your father gave it to you right and so in that culture the long-term kind of uh holding is the default i think that what bitcoin has presented again is a digital application of the exact same thing which is that while everything else in the world is being devalued that is denominated in a uh a currency that is being inflated away whether it's quickly or not this finite supply this scarce asset ends up accruing more and more value over time right and so um i think that for me personally um i've got you know over 95 of my net worth that's in this 90 over 95 percent of your net worth there's two important caveats to this one is i didn't you know buy some bitcoin in 2011 or 12 right and then also it appreciated a bunch and it grew into that but from a cost basis perspective you know i put 100 and now it's a ton of money instead what i did was i basically in 2018 um saw bitcoin from a us dollar price standpoint was falling and falling and falling and in december of 2018 it said take about 50 of my net worth and convert it from dollar denominated assets into bitcoin so it was a very kind of intentional decision with a very specific view on the world as to like why i was doing it i then essentially just let it sit there grow whatever until uh the spring of 2020. and when i saw the government step in and start to say hey we're going to really be aggressive in terms of interest rate manipulation and quantitative easing i then decided to go ahead and take basically the remainder and start to convert it as well so i became very aggressive in doing that and so the way that i look at it is that's actually my savings right and so in some weird way if i said to you know what's the dollar worth you'd say well a one dollar bill's worth one dollar right bitcoin to me i denominate my wealth in bitcoin so i think of one bitcoin is worth one bitcoin not one bitcoin is worth sixty thousand or fifty five thousand or seventy thousand right i denominate everything in bitcoin when i make a purchase in my head i'm calculating how much bitcoin am i spending right now right well guess what happens when you have a devaluing currency as the denominator doesn't matter right like you're financially incentivized to spend or invest right to consume uh when you have an appreciating currency all of a sudden you become much less consumptive yeah because you're actually trading off future purchasing power yeah for the consumption today it's fascinating to think that if if uh when you move about this world you think in bitcoin you behave differently is if you think in dollars that's really fascinating people but but here's the thing is the last 50 years or so is actually the outlier in history most people used to think this way yeah it's only when a fiat currency got introduced that one argument the positive argument or perspective is there was an explosion in growth but really it's because there was a financial incentive to consume yeah right and there's nobody better in the world than the united states at consuming and we consume anything and everything and if you want to see a great example look at how big the coca-colas are at mcdonald's right you know you go to other places they don't serve them that big and so the other example or the negative argument is we have to consume because if not you end up being the bottom 45 percent of americans that held no investable assets and actually are just having their wealth devalued away so holding the dollars end up being a very bad economic decision and so when you then switch to this sound money you say wait a second why would i if today i can trade one bitcoin you know back in october of last year one bitcoin for 10 000 us dollars why would i spend that if at some point in the future whether it's a month from now or 10 years from now i could trade it for something much more than that you just become much more of a um uh anti-consumer and much more of a long-term thinker yeah from the individual perspective that's pretty powerful i wonder i mean i think that's an interesting debate what's better for the long-term economy no uh better for the growth of the civilization because capitalism is fascinating uh it seems to it seems to work pretty well there's this kind of like eric weinstein says that one of the problems is for the past several decades this whole economy society is built on the idea that we have to keep growing like it depends on that idea and it's a good question whether that's going to result in huge problems or if like a college student on a deadline the the dependence on growth will mean that we'll have to grow like the fear of death will force us to grow but i think there's a false equivalency between um we're dependent on growth and then if the world was denominated and sound money we don't grow what i think ends up happening is we remove a lot of the society's bullshit yeah because right now when the money is free or the currency is free you can come up with all kinds of crazy stuff and people will give it to you right when all of a sudden it's really really valued by the population the decisions are better yeah you have to provide real value in the goods and services you provide to get them to give it to you there's less room for corruption less room for manipulation that's and like that's not actually productive yeah uh definitely so you said you moved a lot of your investment into bitcoin and is there uh when you look so you're a special human being in many ways uh so you're like a strategic thinker but you're also like a deep thinker about this whole thing but when you look at a regular club like me uh in terms of just investing and moving into uh thinking about cryptocurrency is there a strategy that you recommend what are the different options about investing into bitcoin yeah so i think that there's just uh kind of timeless advice when it comes to uh investing or acquiring an asset in general uh dollar cost averaging is usually the the best way to think about it and what i mean by that is um most people don't just have a pile of uh currency sitting there right it's not like they have a million dollars sitting in their banks like what do i do with it uh that situation aside what happens is they trade their hours and their effort for currency and so as they get paid every two weeks let's say um the best way to acquire bitcoin without having to worry about timing markets and being a professional trader is to simply take whatever the percentage is that you want and to buy bitcoin when you get your paycheck so if you get paid on the first and 15th of every month on that day you should go take you know let's say it's three percent of your paycheck take three percent go buy bitcoin don't worry about what the price is just do that over time and the reason why that's important is um if in december of 2017 when bitcoin was at 20 000 it was the height of kind of this last big upwards movement you had taken all of your money and you had put it into bitcoin you would have had to wait almost three years just to get back to quote-unquote break even in us dollar terms if at the same time you had simply bought then and over the next three years bought every two weeks you would have been up hundreds of percent three years later because what ended up happening was you bought a bunch of bitcoin when it was at 15 12 10 9 8 3 4 5 5 5 you know all the way back up on the other side and so dollar cost averaging is one of these weird things that uh it almost sounds too easy but what we find is in america we have a lack of financial education and so rather than try to be smarter than markets what most people are better off doing is just saying hey set your what's called an asset allocation plan i want 30 in stocks i want 10 real estate i want this this whatever and every time you get your paycheck just think of it as a savings account right just put it in based on those percentages and don't think about it and over a long enough period of time what we find is almost anyone in the united states right there's exceptions but almost anyone in the united states can become a millionaire in their lifetime if they follow these plans and have that long-term view and they allow compounding to work for them and so don't look at the price of bitcoin and all that kind of stuff just pick a specific time specific day that you just buy and you just keep buying that's probably good investment advice across any kind of assets it's like if you don't believe in bitcoin and you just want to let's say you just want to do the s p 500 yeah you shouldn't try to time the market of the s p 500 either right you should just every two weeks you should just buy something over a 20-year period you're gonna end up buying it at all kinds of different prices but you're gonna get kind of a blended average and the more important thing is the compounding and the time in the market then did you buy it at you know two percent higher or lower than where you bought it doesn't really matter and buying often makes you i guess uh resistant robust to the uh to the volatility of the market or the volatility the bitcoin price and so on that said uh you know bitcoin price is volatile and you know again the argument i've heard is like everything that's going to be a lot more valuable in the future like if you look at the history like companies like apple like tesla's now i mean but you know let's look at companies that have now stabilized right uh apple is a good example it's like volatile in the beginning and so the argument for bitcoin is like yeah this is the early stages because it's going to be a lot more valuable and right now it's volatile and this is why you have to have these kinds of strategies to write out the volatility of course everything that goes to zero is also volatile like the early days are volatile uh do you see like this volatility is like a feature or a bug or is this just like a way of life so amazon is the one that i know the numbers on in terms of early volatility uh every year since they've gone it has gone public it's had a double-digit drawdown in that year uh the average is over 30 percent and one time it drew down over 95 percent sounds a lot like bitcoin right like oh wow this is crazy but it's one of the best performing stocks in the last 20 years if not the best performing stock and so volatility is not positive or negative it's positive or negative compared to the position you're in so if you're long and it's volatile to the upside it's positive if you're long holding something and it's volatile to the downside you see it as a negative it's all about perspective with that said um another way that i look at this is every asset priced in bitcoin is down significantly so over the last one three five years the dollar priced in bitcoin has crashed 99 if you denominate stocks it's down like 80 85 if you dominate gold if you denominate bonds if you just go down the line real estate et cetera it's all down massively against bitcoin now you could argue that that's because bitcoin is appreciating in u.s dollar terms or you could actually argue that the world is repricing this asset it's doing price discovery on this asset and it's essentially comparing it's saying hey bitcoin versus this stock or bitcoin versus this ounce of gold or bitcoin verse you know this dollar which is more valuable and it continues to move up in the rankings in terms of the value that the world ascribes to this some that's based on lindy effect just the longer it persists the more likely it is to survive some of that's based on like the underlying fundamentals of how much computing power the usage transaction volume things like that but some of it also is that as more and more people wake up to the fact that it's a finite supply asset that has a place in the world and demand increases people just naturally compete and ascribe more value to it and so the volatility i think all comes back to like what do you price your life in for the majority of people that's dollars so you look at the us dollar price you get all this volatility the beauty of this is that 60 that doesn't move regardless of price upward or downward in movement those people aren't looking at the day-to-day price what they've basically said is i've acquired x amount of bitcoin and i'm just going to hold it for years and every time somebody's done that right if you bought bitcoin at any point in the last 12 years and you held it till today you are up in us dollar terms now if we had this conversation 18 months ago couldn't say that so it's all about not only the acquisition price if you will it's also when are you looking at it right because there was a point in 2017 you could have said the same thing but in 18 you couldn't and so i tend to think a lot about humans are really really bad at short-term uh decision-making because we're so emotional especially when something has a price tied to it yeah so it's in terms of our the strategies and decision-making we should be long-term and have like a regular almost think like an algorithm that in that in that kind of way so i think you've tweeted that uh you believe that bitcoin has a chance of reaching one million i don't know what it is currently i think it's five which is incredible i think i remember when it was at least in the double digits i think i remember was in the signal digits of a dollar so the fact that it's across 50 is crazy uh but uh you're even crazier apparently thinking that it can reach a million so do you think it's possible for it to reach a million is there some kind of transformative effects we'll have to see first when might it reach a million like what are the signs that we would look for what's required for it to reach a million so let's just look at it from a macro perspective uh gold is a 10 trillion dollar asset and when you compare the technology of gold to the technology of bitcoin bitcoin is superior in every single way right it's more portable it's more divisible uh it's more verifiable it's more scarce on everything and so some people would argue it's a 10x improvement some people argue it's 100x improvement from a technology standpoint and so we don't need bitcoin to actually kind of um capture the full 10x or 100x improvement from a market cap standpoint if bitcoin simply captures 2x the value would be a 20 trillion dollar market cap which would put bitcoin at about a million dollars right so kind of just from a macro perspective if you have a 10x or 100x improvement from a technology standpoint and you directionally get some value capture in that direction you're hitting around a million or more uh dollar price point you can ask a quick question which is uh what's the current market cap for bitcoin uh the current market cap's right around a trillion just over a trillion dollars and you're saying gold is 10 trillion and uh i'm sorry where did you get the 20 trillion 20 trillion would just be 2x cold's market cap got it right so if it's a 10x technology improvement let's just say it only captures 2x the market cap got it right and so again if it was to capture just gold's market cap kind of the equivalent puts you around 500 000 right so you can kind of see there's bitcoin so if you capture the entirety of the gold market uh then it would be value of single bitcoin uh the price of a single bitcoin would be 500 000 okay to reach a million it would be double that that's what the 20 trillion comes from correct got it so if you then say to yourself okay how does the uh the pricing um kind of cycles work right or the boom and bust cycles gold is a very kind of linear type supply schedule meaning that there is a certain amount of gold that comes out of the ground each year the inter-year variation in that incoming supply is not much right maybe there's an extra mining company that gets set up or a couple of them or maybe one goes out of business but for the most part the kind of inflationary increase to the supply of gold is pretty stagnant uh year over year bitcoin has a very unique feature which every four years there is a programmatic supply shock meaning that uh in the beginning 50 bitcoin every 10 minutes was introduced into the supply after four years of that happening every 10 minutes it was cut in half so on a in a single moment it went from 50 to now it was 25. four years every 10 minutes 25 got cut in half again to 12 and a half and then recently in may 2020 got cut to 6.25 when you have an asset that is determined the price based on supply and demand you normally have two inputs to the equation what is the supply and what is the demand in an asset like gold or a stock or anything else we have to do our best guess at the supply both the existing supply and the incoming supply and do our best guess at the demand and we're actually pretty good at this a lot of times in terms of directionally saying it's going to go up or down and here's kind of some price point milestones bitcoin is unique in that there's 100 verifiable proof of the existing supply the total supply and the incoming daily supply so we know 100 i can show you on the actual blockchain uh or in the code that there's 21 million bitcoin uh and that's all there will ever be i can show you that there's 18.6 million give or take uh bitcoin that actually are in circulation today right now i can go all the way back show you every single transaction that's ever occurred since january through 2009 and then i can show you on a daily basis that 900 bitcoin a day are coming into the circulating supply and so when you have 100 confidence because you can prove the supply side of this equation you can hold it constant i know with 100 accuracy the supply side so now i've reduced the mathematical equation that i need to do to determine price movements to a 50 reduction i only have to worry about demand i don't have to worry about supply and so when i look at demand i can do all kinds of things i can take the demand over the last 10 years and the growth and just extrapolate it out i can increase it i can decrease it whatever but what you find is that these supply shocks lead to significant price appreciation as the asset gets repriced because there there's a supply shock to it and so probably the best thing that i've done over the last couple of years was in 2019 i started to talk about the idea that we were going to have both the supply shock and the demand shock in 2021 or i'm sorry in 2020. i didn't know when this bull market that we were in was gonna nobody knows right it's impossible to time these things but you could tell that we were kind of at late stages of a cycle there was inverted yield curves there was re uh gyrations in the repo markets a lot of ceos leaving their jobs you know all this kind of stuff and all i said was at some point when the market turns over the government's gonna have to step in we are addicted to stimulus they're gonna have to manipulate interest rates down and they're gonna have to print money i had no clue that there was gonna be a global pandemic that they were gonna have to step in in such an aggressive way and move rates not down but down to zero and that they not only were going to print hundreds of billions but they could print trillions of dollars but the framework that i used to think about this was when they do that everyone is going to run to store value assets they're going to run to gold they're going to run the bitcoin et cetera and right as they do that it appears at the same time there's going to be this supply shock so you're going to get a supply shock and a demand shock that are both positive for the price and i call it rocket fuel for bitcoin well it happened and here we are i now look for and i say okay we are likely going to see a hundred thousand bitcoin a hundred thousand dollar bitcoin this year right at some point i don't know when it happens but we're moving in that city i think in 2021 we'll see a hundred thousand that would be uh my most conservative view uh i i've said a hundred thousand dollars since 2019 and people thought that was insane and crazy and all stuff now i'm the conservative guy in the room because i stick with the hundred thousand dollars and people are saying you know multiples of that number here uh so we'll see what happens but but i think that there's still a lot of room kind of to run from a u.s dollar price standpoint what is on the horizon is in 2024 we will have another supply shock and so that's what i think will carry us to the million dollar bitcoin from six to five to whatever 50 reduction yeah yeah and so that's what i think uh we'll basically when we get that's that next supply shock that'll carry us up over 100 or over a 1 million dollar bitcoin price which if historical examples persist and again sometimes it's hard to use historical examples to uh look at future events um but if that happens we would see a million dollars of bitcoin by the end of 2026. after that wave so 2024 basically is the supply shock and within you know 18 to 24 months you would see the uh the kind of top of the next market hopefully without a coupling to the net to another pandemic yes we would like to do all of this without a public health crisis so that would take it to would uh 20 trillion you don't have to compare it to the dollar essentially in some sense that the dollar could also lose value i mean there's a lot of kind of dynamics at play here now but like fundamentally there's going to be a huge move in your prediction of value into into bitcoin i mean that's a fascinating world to think about uh i mean but i do have to kind of ask you about the whole space of technology there because we're talking about the value of security we're talking about the the future which bitcoin will be at the center of but from my perspective of thinking how like i and others can build technologies on top of this kind of decentralized world i'm thinking about different tech different technologies out there different cryptocurrencies out there ethereum being one but there's a lot of others so i'd love to get your sort of ideas about some of these but so first let me ask you about what the hell is shit coin is this connected to uh to our previous discussion of the meme uh does shit coin cover basically all coins that are not bitcoin is it uh uh mean is it a beautiful is this a mixture of both as with most things in life uh depends who you ask um the uh most um uh kind of enthusiastic and uh uh parts of the bitcoin community shitcoin is anything else right kind of if you ascribe to kind of a maximalistic view of the world should run be anything if you look at people who i would say are bitcoin proponents uh yet see value in other things shit coin may be the bottom half of the other things right so i think again it's really important kind of who you ask is how you'll get that answer so there's tiers and the way you divide those tiers might be different depending who you ask ultimately what it is is it's a meme yeah and it's used to uh articulate the idea that whatever you want to put in that bucket has no value so shit coin are coins that have no value yeah uh what is fascinating about it and i think that again speaks to the power of the bitcoin community is uh there was congressional hearings a couple of years ago oh no and at one point uh a congressman from ohio warren davidson who was definitely open-minded and excited about bitcoin asked a an individual on the congress floor uh during testimony to uh talk about these other coins and at one point basically read into the record the terminology of shit coin he said the word shit coin uh i i can't remember if he said it first somebody else did it or if uh the other person did and then he um you know repeated it uh but he definitely he was trying to get that read into the record yes uh for sure and so uh yeah you can imagine one again the meme speaking insolently to the bitcoin community was you know made him very uh very well liked uh but also too was um it does go back to this idea almost of uh if you and i sat down with 10 ceos and we interviewed each one of them and then we went in a room and we deliberated and we said we have to pick the person who's going to be the most successful one of the inputs not all the inputs but one of the inputs would be who's the person who we believe has the best ability to raise capital recruit people and tell a story to the world that will get them to follow and so somebody like elon would probably be the best example of this when you have decentralized products you have no kind of leader right in the sense of uh somebody who is financially uh ascribed to be that leader and kind of the the executive decision maker so what you have to do is you have to look at these technologies in these communities and say well which volunteer teams or which technologies have been able to coalesce these groups around it and in some way build the same level of engagement and protection and things like that and so you actually get tribalism but you also get things like shit coin because what it does is it's not only a kind of verbal attack towards uh others it's a rallying cry for internal what's so funny is that it was started with the bitcoin community talking about everybody but now you've seen adoption in other communities who use it you know basically say well we're not a shit coin it's the it's the next guy yeah i mean the meaning to be honest it's it's one it's off it's sometimes misused i think like with anything it's like people adopt memes that we used to be brilliant or still brilliant and they're just not good at using them so they become mean but when you do with with grace it can tear down an argument and at the same time have like love and respect underneath it i mean it's a beautiful dance they have to be good at like you know people just can suck at communication and even uh like even a powerful weapon like a meme in the wrong hands just uh fires in a way that doesn't get anything done but this is like a war of humor and memes it's kind of fascinating exactly like you formulated that there's asymmetry of power so you have to have guerilla warfare in this internet game especially when there's no leader like you said in a distributed culture here that is um is really important i think is from a society standpoint we've become very soft and very kind of coddling and not in um not in a way that's like i think people take this argument like too far sometimes but what i mean by that is um it's almost like if you're the person who holds somebody accountable you become the bad person right if you're the person who um says hey you know that's wrong you're the bad person right and so in a world where i think in this kind of influencery you know all positive if you have any negative you know feedback or constructive criticism like you're the bad person uh it's the ultimate echo chamber right and so i think that what the bitcoin world does and some crazy crazy way to look at it is bitcoin is ultimately about truth yeah not about narrative not about feelings or emotion it's math yeah you look at a blockchain and you can prove something or you can't and so naturally people who are attracted to that have a very similar approach in life yeah right they say hey you made x claim prove it and as you can imagine you know a great example is like the financial media meets bitcoiners and it's a bloodbath right in kind of the the arena of ideas because what do they do the financial media is used to the soft you know opinion pieces et cetera and bitcoiners show up and they're like uh here's data point a b and c here's example one two and three and you're wrong and then all they yell and scream about is like uh i'm wrong i'm wrong i'm wrong like you can't say i'm wrong and like no like disprove what i just said and so you get in this like very very weird it's fascinating it's a fascinating benefit but i i do want to say it's it i've been watching this it's kind of interesting i think that the pursuit of truth through like tearing down bad ideas can be done with grace and to do it with grace requires a lot of skill like what people don't realize about this agreement they think that disagreement is easy like they they see the the the lies or the inaccuracies in the statement and and they just think they can say wrong yes you can say that but if you want to be effective it requires great skill like you look at i don't know um a beautiful uh verbal shit poster which is christopher hitchens right it requires a lot of skill through your words to tear down an argument to criticize and to take a step towards truth uh what i'm disheartened by internet culture like the negative side is people don't put a lot of effort in their tear downs like into your shit posting into your memes you should put effort and see it as a skill that you want to if you want to be a part of this culture you want to uh get good at it like any skill to 10 000 hours like get improve deliberate practice self-criticism all of those things just because you're anonymous doesn't mean you won't get deep joy and actually have an impact on the world if you get good at shit posting but but but i think this is really really important right because you're right in that uh it's all about intention versus action if your intention is to uh tell somebody that they are wrong in an effort to get them to see the truth yes that's very different than if your intention is to tell someone they're wrong and hurt their feelings yes right and so when you can unpack and tension in action you really quickly can tell what somebody ultimately is trying to accomplish i also think that one of the craziest things that i've seen play out is uh memes when i use that term i'm not just talking about like a static photo right when i'm talking about these elaborate uh kind of edited videos and kind of all this stuff um when done right it is uh the most articulate way to deliver a blunt message and it's done in such a way that is humorous and entertaining yet really hammers the point home and so it's a skill set that many people don't have i don't make those i'm assuming you don't make them either right i see them i share the ones that i like right uh but it does take practice and you can tell look there's people who are fantastic meme lords right and there are people who absolutely suck at it and it's like anything it's just how good are you at communicating and i've heard the idea a bunch of times so i don't know who to kind of credit for it but uh whether it's emojis it's gifs it's memes whatever this is the extension and evolution of just hieroglyphics right yeah like like we have been doing this for literally centuries it's just that now we're doing it on the internet and you can press a button and go to millions and millions of people immediately uh but speaking of memes what the heck do you think is up with elon musk talking about dogecoin a lot sort of uh from the cryptocurrency community i uh from i've been talking to a lot of sort of technologists i guess and reading papers on cryptocurrency it's like nobody really sees dogecoin as a revolutionary crypto technology a lot of people talk about security issues there's a bunch of issues it has nevertheless you did say that money is the kind of social construct right and uh elon musk's combination of humor and brilliant engineering in the various companies he runs combines to create a kind of value and excitement behind dogecoin it's like what is it he says that the most amusing outcome is is the most likely kind of idea which sounds silly but there could be like profound truth to it it's like what do you make of deutsche coin philosophically or technically is is it possible that deutsche coin will overtake bitcoin and run the entire run the entire world i can't even because it could happen it could happen but what uh if there's any serious way to answer that question well we have to start with uh techno king of tesla yeah and master of coin as they are so articulately called in the latest sec filing because he officially changed his title techno king yes techno king of tesla and now the cfo's new uh title is a master of coin and so uh when you have a sense of humor yeah and frankly uh a level of uh self-confidence and uh an element of uh an appreciation for irony in the world dogecoin is actually one of the least crazy things that you could talk about when you're willing to go to techno king of tesla master of coin uh and all this stuff and so i think that elon uh doesn't get enough credit frankly for his understanding of internet culture understanding of memes and understanding of frankly human psychology and marketing and so in some crazy way every time he talks about dogecoin it's a rallying cry for an entire generation of kids it's a rallying cry for an entire industry in terms of cryptocurrencies and digital technologies but this is the flag yeah and this is the thing that he can yell and scream about and tweet about without worry of punishment so he could be talking about bitcoin he could be talking about cryptocurrency but that's not going to be uh as beautifully humorous and whatever the hell internet culture is as dogecoin he's finding the right language he's speaking the language of the people of the in the digital age if you want to reach weird people yeah you can't be serious and most people are weird the the masses are weird so he's speaking to the masses yeah and the techno king and even further than that i think is he essentially is um he's using dogecoin as a way to say i'm doing this because i can yeah he couldn't do it with securities he couldn't do it with certain types of other assets right like i almost look at this like a venn diagram what's the thing that a bunch of people know about care about thinkers funny whatever and also overlay that with the things that like he could actually talk about they won't get in trouble for that's a big fu to the sec i could see the the people just freaking out i i mean i love it but um i i don't know if i would have the guts to do it myself but i i think he's an inspiration to a lot of us to be like well maybe you should grow the guts when you're the techno king you can do whatever you want right [Laughter] and i mean that's something to aspire to is to be the techno king in your own little world if you also think about it in the sense of uh when you're somebody on a mission to create interplanetary life yeah when you're trying to solve a or put a dent in the climate crisis or create electric vehicles and be the first american company and you know however long frankly the sec or other things in your life that just don't you don't ascribe that much importance to compared to those things they're almost uh nuisances and that's scary i think for shareholders of a company when the person that you're trusting to lead you to the promised land and create shareholder value doesn't put value on certain things but at the same time i always look at it as a tug of war how much of the actions of what he's doing and calling attention to actually changed the way that regulators lawmakers politicians countries whatever act he may not be able to say do x i'm the techno king and they go do it but with every step he makes he changes some of their behavior and so i think that it's um a really kind of game of like 3d chess that frankly i'm not privy to right i'm kind of watching from the sidelines and uh figuring out alongside everybody else but i also don't think that it's just elon uh bought a bunch of dogecoin and tweets about it because he thinks he's going to a dollar and he's gonna you know make money right like i don't think i don't think it's an economic argument as to why he's so interested in it i think it's much more uh it's almost like meta message for a lot of other stuff yeah he's kind of uh trying to break apart internet communication from first principles like he does so many other problems it's kind of fascinating to watch i know he's been uh he's he's taught me quite a bit about communication and uh at least for me it's been liberating to not give a fuck about the old school way of things i've been always bothered by a place i deeply admire which is mit but there's problems the bureaucracies and hierarchies that hold back innovation brilliant minds and in that sense doge is a kind of fu to the system that's kind of positive but also uh kind of uh but it was also an fu so in that sense i think elon has a perspective on the world that's similar to bitcoin folks which i really like which is like thinking long term it's how visionaries think it's like how will if i take these ideas what and the ideas hold true what will the world look like in 20 30 50 years and think about everything in that way yeah i like bezos view which is uh is essentially how do you minimize regret how do you accelerate your life mentally and go to 80 90 100 150 years whatever we end up being you know fortunate enough to live to and then look backwards yes and say this decision that i'm gonna make i have two options which one is going to be the one that i least regret and if you continue to make decisions that way one you have that long-term view kind of built in because you're working backwards two you are ultimately going to optimize for minimal regret but also three is even if you only look for 10 years that's much much further than most people do and so it gives you a significant advantage and i think that um bitcoin has kind of this like um you know proxy for time as we talked about inter-plant planetary travel where there's multiple steps from creating a reusable rocket to landing it to you know all the stuff all the way to simple things just like if you're simply trying to figure out where the world's going to be 30 years from now you know bill gates says that we overestimate what we can do in one year underestimate what we can do in 10. well to me it's a kind of degree of uh mistake if you will 10 years maybe you're off by 10 well if that line of progress continues 20 years you may be off by 100 and 30 years you may be off by a thousand percent right like almost the further you go out the more inaccurate you become and so i think that people who want to iterate their way to success right that's a common thing in like the startup world end up actually following kind of the breadcrumbs to where the world is taking them but people like an elon musk a jeff bezos a jack dorsey all the way down the line all these innovators they actually say to themselves there is a point in time in the future where there's a world i want to construct and then they go and they construct it regardless of the short-term iterations and incentives it is just they're driving towards that point and i think that it's this whole idea of having this like you know kind of set vision and this uh refusal to kind of move or budge off of that it's what makes them special one of the things that garnered a lot of excitement in the crypto community is nfts i i have no idea really the depths the fundamental technological philosophical depths of the second of this technology whether this is just like a little bit of a fad or if there's some deep lessons to learn whether it's bitcoin or cryptocurrency in general about it do you have thoughts about like the long lasting fundamental aspects of nfts i think there's probably both things happening fad and things to learn right and um if we just start with like what is an nft it's a non-fungible token meaning that um there's no fungibility and fungibility is a fancy word i always describe it as if i took a hundred dollar bill and i put it on the table with a bunch of other hundred dollar bills and we mixed them up and i just grabbed a hundred dollar bill and left i'm no worse as long as they're all you know uh official hundred dollar bills because as long as i have 100 500 i don't need that exact same bill back so that means that those hundred dollar bills are fungible non-fungible would be like art if i took a picasso and i put it down on the table and you brought three artists that no one's ever heard of before and we mixed them up and i just took any random piece of art it wasn't the picasso i lose because the picasso is really important there right so the non-fungibility is important in art what these non-fungible tokens essentially are doing is they are creating scarcity and originality in a digital environment and what i mean by that is um take a music file if i had a music file and you wanted it you said send it to me i press send it essentially creates a copy and you get one music file i get another we don't care you can listen to the music i can listen to music we're super happy if i instead though have a digital file that entire premise is based on scarcity and i hit send and you get a copy and i keep the original or you get the original i get a copy there's a problem and so ultimately what i think is playing out with nfts is it's a technology regardless of where it plays out from blockchains or what in communities or environments that just brings true digital scarcity to the internet and so naturally what do people do they look at the legacy world and they say well what's scarce there that has value how do we bring that to the digital world so art is a perfect example right and you know frankly last year i started to look at this because it felt like this was going to be really really big and the conclusion i came to was just as bitcoin is going to be bigger than gold right the digital application of something is going to be bigger than the analog application the same thing is going to be true in art the digital art world is going to be bigger than the traditional art world people think that sounds crazy at first until you start to realize it's very very similar the yard is more portable it can be divisible right it's got a larger demand market in terms of the internet rather than an auction right all this kind of stuff when you display it it can have motion and music and all of these aspects to it that are better than the traditional art what the traditional art market has that the digital art market has not had is the narrative narrative-based world scarcity kind of in a digital sense and so what i think the entire world is going through right now is an exploration of how do we use this technology to create new things frankly we're not going to be good at it for a while and so the only place i've really focused on is digital art itself and i've always been interested in art but i wasn't going to go buy a painting and hang it on the wall right in the sense of that's how i was going to store value what i find fascinating though is that i now can take that concept which most of the wealthiest people in the world have a significant portion some you know some people have 20 percent in terms of you know number of billionaires 20 of their wealth is in art and you can bring to this digital realm which is much more um kind of natural to a digital native and so the best way to know how to describe the importance is imagine a serial number being placed on something take the eiffel tower the only eiffel tower that has value is the first one every replica of it regardless of size location you know who made it where they sent it they have no value eiffeltower001 is the most important and so i think that's ultimately what we're starting to see here and what we're looking at is probably one percent of what it's going to grow into you're bullish on us you're saying it could grow into something for one percent it could grow into something significant like all kinds of different applications strip away all the applications right now and just think about is digital scarcity going to be important on the internet right moving all the things that are scarce in the physical world into digital space us trying to figure out which things can be moved and not and also there's things in the digital space just like you're saying that don't exist in the physical world that might also benefit from gaining scarcity like you know people are i guess creating nfts out of like tweets or whatever so like you're you have you have a fun twitter account you know you could say like you could put value to a single tweet and then be able to invest in it and trade it and buy parts of it and all those kinds of things you know you can invest in people you can invest in you know art can be defined broadly as any kind of creation right in in some sense this whole idea of scarcity can overtake the entirety of the digital world it can like consume the all of the markets we see as financial markets and just turn everything into a market well so if i if i take you on like a i don't know 10 year fast forward yeah and i paint a picture of something today that seems absolutely insane but there's early signs that people are building this and let's just give them the benefit of the doubt that some of the early iterations will work and some of or most of them won't there's a world where you and i are participating in a digital economy in a virtual world where uh whether it is a piece of art it is a digital sculpture it is a digital skin from a video game it is a digital good that we purchased somewhere online and we bring it and we display it in a digital museum or a virtual museum and so now all of a sudden you can charge people for entry you can consign digital goods it's the replication of what happens in the analog world now just in digital and when you do that what you do is you take the addressable markets of these assets or these mechanisms and they explode in the digital realm and so now all of a sudden how fast does the human race accelerate when it comes to human production intelligence learning all in the digital output let's just if i said to you 20 years ago i'm going to give you a global education it means i'm going to take you and i'm going to physically move you to geography after geography after geography it's going to take time it's going to take resources and ultimately it's going to take lots of effort if i now said to you hey i'm going to transport you in this virtual world to multiple geographies but you're going to experience it in this virtual uh world and you're going to have digital goods that you can take from economy to economy or from location to location all of a sudden you may get maybe you get 90 of that you don't get a hundred percent of the same value we get ninety percent of the value but you can do it at a much faster pace and so in a six month period you've actually made three times the progress than you would have if you had to do in the physical world so that's where i think we're heading so [Music] so there's digital art being displayed in the digital museum and people are being charged for access and perhaps we plug in our senses which means we start to operate more and more in a virtual reality augmented reality virtual reality way with this digital world and increasingly go into this world basically lived most of our productive and uh social lives in this digital world and increasingly essentially create a simulation uh where the biological basis is just there to sustain the brain that's used to operate in the in the virtual world uh taking us back to the original when we started talking about war i wonder what conflict looks like in that world that uh the people who are born today maybe will be fighting wars in the space in in that museum world in that digital world remember what i said we're moving from a world of conflict surrounded and determined by bombs bullets and soldiers to a battlefield that is determined by war of information and cyber capabilities and so in that virtual world is it about death and destruction of human life in the physical analog world or will it become more important to attack or defend virtual property and virtual life and you know some level of virtual sovereignty in my opinion the latter is more likely and so what you start to understand is well what do you truly value in your life is it the physical analog materialistic consumptive goods or is it virtual and in many cases something as simple as the ability to connect with somebody is really important and so one of the most disruptive combative violent things that a country may do to another country in the future simply take down the internet and put people in isolation yeah i don't need to physically harm you if i can psychologically harm you i don't need to terrifying yeah i don't need to actually convince you through a monopoly on violence on physical violence what if i can psychologically change the way you see the world through misinformation through all sorts of nefarious activities and i think that you know the united states has been struggling with this idea over the last couple of years in the political arena but what happens when it starts to come to other aspects of our life and i think it's very likely it's almost obviously likely that we're moving into the digital world the one of the features of the digital world is that artificial intelligence systems can operate with much more power and a frictionless way in that world currently as we understand it it's hard to build robots that operate at scale and do like arbitrary large amount of impact damage or positive in the physical world it's much easier to do in the digital world do you have do you ever think about ai systems just swimming about uh doing extraordinarily powerful destructive things in the digital world is that something of a concern to you or is this something into a very distant future i think a lot of artificial intelligence is uh in the name it's simply the replication of human intelligence at scale automated and pr and program programmatic meaning that in the analog world you could go hire a thousand employees or in you know an amazon case hire millions of employees and set a mission or a goal and push them to go do that that requires recruiting retention training resources all that stuff in the virtual world or in this digital economy what if you can just program the resources and gain the same leverage and do it at scale and do it in a very programmatic way and then have them actually make decisions in a way that doesn't require you to have thought of every single potential scenario or edge case that's ultimately what we're talking about we talk about artificial intelligence right and so when you look at that when technology's created everyone uses it for good or bad but both get used right and so whether we're talking about cell phones beepers the internet guns whatever it's always used for good and bad the big question is and i think that you know yourself and many other people have rightfully said this is the question really becomes is the negative and nefarious uses of this inadvertent potentially or does it actually come from a malicious person it's the intention militias and to me that's what i i don't know enough you know much more about this and there's plenty of other people who do as well but i do think that there will be nefarious actors and malicious people but we're going to treat them the same way we've always treated people who use technology poorly right we're going to understand it we're going to identify it we're going to control it and then we're going to end up reversing it or preventing that from doing that it's the inadvertent things that i think are actually the most dangerous because when you have something that can think for itself and there is no way to leverage a monopoly on violence for control it's a very scary thing and it can i mean the the thing that's scary to me is that it can scale arbitrarily so it can outnumber humans very quickly even if it's dumber than humans and so i don't know if we're able to reason about a world like let's look at the physical analog where all of a sudden uh let's talk about something kind of like humans but dumber than humans like chimps okay imagine that all of a sudden chimps could multiply arbitrarily quickly and you could have like a trillion chimps the next day when when you only had maybe a million the day before like how does that world look different where the fuck did all these chimps come from and they like and then we can we can pretend to be like well let's hope the chimps like don't get violent because they they don't seem to get violent when the resources aren't constrained but like we don't know and the problem is it all starts by building that first chip multiplier device and everyone's like okay yeah there's a lot of good applications you want you know you can make all kinds of arguments for why you have more chimps maybe they can help you out around the house or something like that in the physical space but ultimately it's the unintended consequences that you're referring to is you don't know what's gonna happen i'm really worried about dumb ai agents uh like having impact when they're multiplied to a million to a billion and are allowed to operate in the digital space especially as we clearly are moving more and more of our lives into the digital space so it's kind of terrifying because we you know a lot of people are terrified or like concerned about super intelligent systems i think i'm definitely much more concerned about super dumb systems at scale that that's terrifying i always think about um the inadvertent but as you were talking what it made me think of is also the irreversible irreversible right so it's one thing if there's uh inadvertent negative impact but we have reversibility built into a system and we can fix our mistakes yeah i think the really scary part is when you overlay inadvertent mistakes with the irreversible aspect of it and therefore humans have no control yeah if you if you have the trillion chimps you can't they're not gonna like it when you try to start killing them off uh all right but back to bitcoin those chimps in the bitcoin community anytime you bring up chimps somebody will say joe rogan entered the chat can i ask you about sort of learning about bitcoin books and resources do you have an amazing podcast that's not just about bitcoin or cryptocurrency it's about everything including life but you do have a lot of really amazing conversations about this whole world digital world but you oh obviously you also have a newsletter that's incredible on sub stack and and um but do you have recommendations maybe it would be great if you could talk about first of all your podcast and the news newsletter but also other resources that you recommend people should check out in order to learn about bitcoin yeah so the podcasts and uh email are like the two most selfish things i do because the podcast is a way for me to learn from other people so i get them to come on and tell me all the things they're thinking about and i get asked some questions what's it called by the way uh just a pomp podcast and so in doing that um it really is informative for me and i think that my whole goal is just like if i'm learning other people will be learning and then the email i read it every morning because it forces me to collect my thoughts and actually articulate them in somewhat of a coherent way and so it's just something that um is like a practice that i probably would do even if no one read it and then by being able to publish it uh what does it do it elicits you know both the good and bad responses and so people will let me know if they think i'm an idiot and they'll usually not respond if they think that it's something smart and so um those two things are uh really um educational for me and and i think kind of forced me to uh to be able to articulate a lot of ideas but a lot of what i share or learn on those things come from these other resources so i'm definitely subscribing people should subscribe but what are bitcoin resources books that you recommend i think you gotta start with bitcoin standard uh that one to me feels like uh it really lays out the picture nicely um there is uh bitcoin uh money you can't fuck with uh it's written by our friend jason williams uh as you can imagine it's basically what it talks about uh there's another book layered money um that's written by nick who uh who's done a grant a great job kind of laying it out there's a book called bitcoin in black america written by a guy isaiah jackson and he basically lays out the argument for why the black community can benefit in a asymmetric way from something like bitcoin um and there's a whole bunch more i'm gonna forget them all there's the uh i think it's called the cost of tomorrow a guy uh jeff booth uh jeff booth wrote it um and just if you get on twitter basically you're gonna see all these books flying around um but i do have to say that uh from a psychological concept uh or philosophical uh concept the number one book that i've ever read uh that aligns with bitcoin ethos but doesn't say a word about bitcoin is a book called the dao of capital by mark spitznagel and so what he essentially does is he just reiterates over and over and over again long-term thinking outliers disruption all the stuff and so he's a guy who he runs a fund that essentially they just do uh tail risk hedging and so in you know march or february of 2020 they're up like four thousand percent right by the way they pretty much lose money you know for eight nine years then that happens and so uh but they're still one of the best performing funds if you look at it over you know years and years and so it's just this mindset of uh everyone is so short-term focused and so i think it's just a great reminder to long-term thinking uh and also i mean i've gotten quite a bit of value just reading the papers that's perhaps more like for technical folks there's quite an active research community and also going back to the original white paper and just original documents old school old school still uh what uh like what a few years ago still really interesting to think about to look at what people were thinking about because the the principles are carried through uh with uh other cryptocurrencies as well like it's it's all it's all there even in the early documents so it's kind of fascinating to see that whole history from if you're more like tech savvy and like you said twitter is actually an interesting place if you can look up past all the shit coin talk uh it's a it's a fascinating place for news and resources is there books outside of all of this cryptocurrency sort of technical fiction philosophical that an impact on your life because you've you have interests that are all over the place is there something that um you would recommend to others so doubt capital is definitely probably my favorite book um books that have been impactful i read when i was 20 actually sitting in the desert of iraq um rich dad poor dad think and grow rich and the richest man in babylon and i don't think i took a single thing and like implemented it from like an execution standpoint uh but it was a complete shift in mentality and understanding a relationship with money and just kind of what i wanted to do with my life and stuff like that so i think those three books i read them in succession were really impactful um and then i think one of the best books probably ever written is uh i think it's called when breath becomes air um or air becomes breath i can't remember uh but it's basically a doctor or a medical professional who's dying and he essentially writes about the experience and thoughts and kind of all the stuff and i think that it's just one of these things where if you said to me you know what's the number one thing i took out of my experience in iraq that's a book like that also gives you is we're all going to die right and you and i can want to be as immortal as we want but at some point we're going to die and so it really does kind of focus you on time being that scarce asset and use it for enjoyment and happiness more so than anything else and i think that's part of your message and it's a great one do you do you think do you like literally meditate on your own mortality i necessarily think i uh meditate on it as much as um are you afraid of death were you afraid of death when you're in iraq i mean if you're coming face to face with it are you afraid of death today no i i think that it was just one of these things where like if you fixate on something and you worry about it then to at least to me like you become uneasy about it and so after an experience like going to war i think that everything is just so not important compared to that right like when i came back i remember uh going back into the college environment and like things people were worried about i was like listen let me explain to you you know what the real world's like right but i think even today right if you talk to people who know me really well i don't get worked up about a lot of stuff i don't get you know in either direction good or bad uh anything because ultimately it just comes down to if that's the final result let's enjoy it it's fascinating to ask you because this reformulation of money essentially buying time and uh you know there's the old question of does money buy happiness do you think money can buy happiness in the context of money being able to buy time or is happiness something else that is beyond all of this when people talk about this question i think that they really focus on money as a means to getting materialistic things so they want a big house they want a boat they want a fast car they want you know whatever they think that's the stuff that will make them happy what i think about it is if you have resources you can have time and if you have time and you spend it the way that you want to spend it then that's ultimately happiness so i always say to people if you think that money doesn't buy you happiness what if i told you that if you had more money you could spend more time with your family it reframes it yeah and now is all about i want to do certain things in life but there's a lot of people who spend their life not doing those things because they feel the need to pursue economic means as a way to provide a living or whatever and so i explained that i said listen in my opinion again it's my opinion it's what makes me happy if i can leverage financial resources to create more time to do the things i like i'm happier might not work for everybody but like that's what works for me and so there's this element of like i don't care what other people think if they like that or not because they're not me right like like there's almost this element of like you got to figure out what works for you and if it works for me then like no i think that resonates that will resonate with a lot of people i think that's a brilliant reframing of it that said you kind of imply there's a there's a reason behind this whole existence of ours there's a meaning to it so let me ask what is the meaning of life anthony do you think about these ridiculous big questions that have no answer every once in a while or do you just enjoy the shit out of every day i answer it in a way that um isn't meant to be accurate it's meant to um be the right answer for me which is ultimately you know i talk to a lot of people who always ask like what's the what are you doing why are you doing this it's to be happy and the reason why i think of it that way is i've got a friend jonathan geller who talks about uh you know enough being enough and recently he talked about it in the um context of bitcoin and so bitcoiners are have two things any bitcoiner if you talk to them they believe the same two things one they don't want the us dollar price to go up because they actually want to acquire more bitcoin right and then like once they feel like they've got enough but two is no matter how much they only think that they don't own enough and they want to acquire more and so at some point you say to yourself what is enough and i think that the whole meaning of life is to understand kind of what your level of satisfaction is and for some people that's a monetary thing some people that's a freedom of time thing for some people it's an impact thing whatever but just understanding that's important and then going and accomplishing it and what i've found is that the people who i know who have done this and been intentional about it they accomplish it on a much shorter timeline than people who don't right there's some people who start thinking about when they're 60 well naturally you're not going to accomplish it before you're 60 if you start thinking about it at 60. people who are thinking about it earlier can do it and so i think that's really it for me it's just like the meaning of life is to enjoy it the way i think about it that's because it's a really nice formulation i i almost like to sort of oscillate back and forth so majority of the time it's spent at the moment enough is enough of gratitude basically being content with where you're at like deeply appreciative of every moment and all the bitcoin whatever bitcoin you have being deeply appreciative and that being enough and then some fraction of time perhaps it shrinks as you get older that's maybe there's an optimal trajectory there but some fraction of time is spent being like deeply self-critical and nothing is enough nothing you've ever done is worth anything it's the marvel minsky said like the secret to success is hating everything you've ever done so like that mode of just hating everything you've ever done and just like trying to improve trying to make stuff better nothing's enough it's never enough that kind of stuff and then oscillating back and forth like you don't have to have the same algorithm operating throughout the day you could just like oscillate back and forth and maybe reserve that gratitude part the chill part to when you're hanging out with family and friends and loved ones and then when you're like alone or maybe a work is that the madman comes out kind of thing i also think it's um kind of purpose driven in the sense of there's a lot of people who have the uh i need to do more but in a somewhat altruistic way so they're you know take elon as an example the idea of colonizing mars sure if he is successful he will be very rich i don't think you or i or many people believe he's doing it for the money right there's a lot of other things he could do that'd be much easier that would make him tons of money and so in some weird way he has enough because he's able to free himself from the constraints of i need to acquire more resources and he can focus on what is the thing that i want to work on regardless of money and so in that pursuit that is non-economic you can be as selfish as you want because ultimately you're not tied back to this like measurement tool and so it's this uh again like altruistic non-monetary purpose and i think that there's a lot of people who spend their whole life looking for that and they don't know what it is and so again some people may not think of it that way but if you can find something to do that you win i don't think there's a better way to end it anthony i'm a huge fan it's a huge honor that you waste all this time with me today uh i you know i thank you for just educating the world for for teaching me uh inspiring me to learn more about this new set of technologies that look like they have a potential to change transform all of human civilization so thank you for coming today and thank you for being who you are absolutely thank you so much for having me thanks for listening to this conversation with anthony pompliano and thank you to our sponsors there gun muscle recovery device sun basket meal delivery service expressvpn and indeed hiring website click their links to support this podcast and now let me leave you with some words from mahatma gandhi freedom is not worth having if it doesn't include the freedom to make mistakes thank you for listening and hope to see you next time