Lex Fridman Podcast - #171 – Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin

Episode Date: March 25, 2021

Anthony Pompliano is an entrepreneur, investor, writer, and podcaster on topics of decentralized finance. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Theragun: https://theragun.com/lex to get 30 day trial - Sun Basket: https://sunbasket.com/lex and use code LEX to get $35 off - ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/lexpod and use code LexPod to get 3 months free - Indeed: https://indeed.com/fridman to get $75 credit EPISODE LINKS: Anthony's Twitter: https://twitter.com/APompliano Anthony's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/AnthonyPompliano Anthony's Website: https://anthonypompliano.com/ Pomp Letter: https://pomp.substack.com/ Pomp Podcast: https://anthonypompliano.com/podcast/ PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (08:54) - Army (16:35) - Iraq (24:14) - Will there always be war? (31:27) - Bitcoin maximalism (39:56) - Money is a belief system (42:27) - Bitcoin (46:03) - Censorship (50:35) - Bitcoin as main currency (59:27) - Scarcity creates value (1:01:08) - Money is time (1:09:34) - Eric Weinstein vs Bitcoin Community (1:23:23) - Ray Dalio (1:40:31) - Bitclout (1:43:43) - How to get Bitcoin (1:54:28) - Investing (2:05:05) - Volatility (2:18:08) - Philosophy of the meme (2:28:03) - Dogecoin (2:37:33) - NFTs (2:43:21) - Virtual reality (2:48:17) - AI (2:54:18) - Bitcoin resources (2:58:44) - Book recommendations (3:01:22) - Can money buy happiness? (3:03:16) - Meaning of life

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 pump podcast and the pump letter. Quick thank you to our sponsors, TheraGun Muscle Recovery Device, SunBasket 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 Glassstein, and many others. And those who are proponents of other cryptocurrency technologies, like Vitalik Bitterin, Charles Hoskinson, Richard Hart, Sergei Nazarovvleyamakali, and many others as well. I'm not framing this as a debate. I'm simply looking to explore exciting ideas and 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 and exploring ideas.

I personally try to approach conversations by considering that I may be wrong about everything and I'm looking to learn. I won't engage in groupthink, 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 or 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. As usual, we have come to the part of the podcast where I do the ad reads. I try to go off the top of my head, try to make them interesting, but I also give you timestamps so you can skip if you must, but please still click the links in the description. It is the best way to support this podcast. This show is sponsored by TheraGun, a handheld percussive therapy device that I use for muscle recovery. It's surprisingly quiet, easy to use, comes with a great app that guides you through everything

you need to know. There's been long stretches of my life where I would exercise quite a bit, especially when it was Jiu-Jitsu or grappling or resting or Judo involved. There's many days where I would do two or days or three or days, you know, training twice or three times a day for basically every single day of the week. There was an art there to recovery, but also an art to the training process itself to avoid overtraining, but still pushing yourself to the limit. I'm very much from the school of like Russian wrestling where drilling and exhausting the mind, not

the body, is the goal of training. Anyway, try TheraGun for 30 days. TheraGun Gen 4 has an OLED screen personalized TheraGun app and is both quiet and powerful. Starting at $199, go to TheraGun.com slash Lex. That's TheraGun.com slash Lex. This show is also sponsored by Sunbasket. They deliver fresh, healthy, delicious meals straight to your door. They have prepared meals, meal kits, and raw ingredients like just a nice New York strip steak, trout, sea bass, salmon, and much more.

I should mention here that one of my favorite activities is going fishing. I love being one on one with nature for many hours at a time in that sort of peaceful zen state, whereas just you in the water. I'm mostly talking about fresh water fishing. I've actually never been deep sea fishing, and I'm not exactly sure if I'm interested in that. It seems like a whole another world, but I've sadly haven't done it regularly for a few years, but I'd like to get back into it.

Returning to nature regularly is a good mechanism for reminding me what's important in life. Anyway, right now Sun Basket has a limited time offer, get 90 bucks off, and four free gifts across your first four deliveries, including free shipping on a first box. When you go to SunBasket.com slash Lex and enter code Lex it check out that sunbasket.com slash Lex enter code Lex for amazing discounts and gifts that offer expires on April 13th all good things come to an end friends so hurry up This show is also sponsored by ExpressVPN

It's a good tool to shift the asymmetry of power in the battle for free speech to the individual. In the digital age, your data, your private data, is power. And freedom is maintaining control over that data. There's a lot of tools that help with this. I think a VPN is just a very basic tool that all of us should be using for many of our interactions

on the internet. Some technologies, of course, are just useful tools, useful hacks to get the job done, but they can also have profound philosophical ideas behind them. I think if VPN is very much that, the internet at its core is freedom. Of course, that could be chaotic, that can even be dangerous, but ultimately freedom wins, and the internet always wins in the end. Anyway, go to expressvpn.com slash Lex Pod to get an extra three months free. That's expressvpn.com slash Lex Pod for the simple, beautiful design of a big red button. What else

do you need in life friends? This episode is also sponsored by Indeed, a hiring website. I've used them as part of many hiring efforts I've done for the teams I've led. The main task is to quickly go from a huge number of initial applicants to a short list of great candidates. I recently had a discussion actually about the hiring

process for engineers and the three things I've mentioned that I was looking for first is competence, extreme competence. So demonstrating they were able to dig into the details of a particular project that you worked on and demonstrate that there's both a skill in an obsession to getting every little detail right and innovating in every single detail and questioning how that can be done better. The second thing I look for is extreme passion. So just I love, first of all, everything in this world, but really I love for projects that you've done in the past.

I love for projects that you've done in the past. I love for projects that you might do in the future. And the third thing is diversity broadly, which is, I love the weirdos. I love people that don't quite fit in. The square pegs, if you will, people that think differently in ways that are unlike my own. I mean, this is where indeed comes in, is you want to filter out the initial set of candidates to where you can really dedicate your energy, your attention to a few people at the very end, to see who is actually a really, really good fit.

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this is the Lex Friedman podcast and here spent 13 months in Iraq and 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 basically sign in order to join. I graduated semester early from high school and I was going to play football in college and kind of enrolled in the the spring semester and when that didn't happen basically was working at Chick-fil-A and Quiz nose and How did my mind look this is probably not the the path in life that I want 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 Yeah, they gave me the whole pitch and 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 close to 9-11. This was in 2006, about five years after. So what impact, I mean, do you remember 9-11? What impact did that have on your thinking about this? So I was in eighth grade, if I remember correctly, and I remember being in school when it happened, and I walked into a classroom, and the entire class, somebody else's class,

they were all talking to the teacher about something, the second that me and a couple of other kids walked in, I got real quiet, and the teacher was like, hey, go back to your home room. So it was just kind of a weird, like what's going on. And then next thing I know, they called all the students into the cafeteria. This is back before, you know, every classroom really had a television in it and cable and all that kind of stuff.

And so when we were there, they basically just said, listen, there's been this event that's occurred. All of your parents are going to come pick you guys up and 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 my dad about it and my dad basically gave me you know the the core American kind of talking points Right look somebody from another country came here and tried to kill Americans and was successful in doing that. And to some extent, he just said, and I'm willing to bet, we're gonna go back after them.

Did that wake you up a little bit too, the idea that there's an evil out there that even just the idea of terrorism for many people that was when it hits you on your own land, 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, in France, and Europe in general. 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 your, 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 there was this element of complacency, but also this element of really just American superiority. That doesn't happen here, right? And I think that that woke people up not only to the idea that other places around the world may not like the American ideals, may not like democracy and capitalism 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 the 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

kind of change that apparatus. But on top of that, I think that it really woke people up to extremism around the world. And I don't know if necessarily there was a change in the extremism as much as it just wasn't awareness thing. Right? How many people drew a line from, was it 92 or 93 with the World Trade Center bombing to deep levels of extremism and hatred of the American industrial complex,

probably not that many. 2001, a lot of people. And so I think that was, 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 we should go fight back, right? Was kind of the response

I think that I had. What role did that have psychologically feel when you then in 2006 joined the Army? I mean, this is a 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 there is a war on terror, and I know that people kind of criticize that whole formulation framework of thinking, but nevertheless, you are going to rock.

You are going to have to stand there. 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 that there's a couple of key pieces, right? So one, I'm like, what are the actual most impactful data points if you were kind of stories for me?

What's the Pat Tillman story? So I played football in high school and it was going to go play in college. 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'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 now. So he ended up dying and so not exactly the, the end result that you want. But I think it was almost like he made it okay if you were on a certain trajectory in life to go take this detour and, and to

go do it. But the second thing is I I was 17. Pretty stupid, we were 17. Pretty naive, we were 17, right? And so I almost kind of backed into the deployment because I signed up as a reserve member. And so basically the plan was to sign up for the reserves. I was gonna go to basic training, get all of the kind of education and qualification. I was gonna go to college and then after college,

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 college, that 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, I probably had an advantage over most people both on the But, and then on top of that, I probably had an advantage over most people both on the entry to combat and the exit to kind of a combat situation, which it was football. So I always explain that in hindsight, you're in a male dominated testosterone driven, kind of combative sport, where it's us first them and there's training and, 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 more serious in terms of the injuries 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 know prison guards police officers working at the lumber yard You know just kind of every day Americans and so I had the ability to go back into kind of that combative environment go back to play football and so it was almost this like deescalation on the way out Where they take your guns away. We still got a uniform, still male dominated, still combative,

and then eventually you're just a normal citizen. And so I think that in some weird way, I was 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 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,

what was you? Just not necessarily to you personally, just to the uniform, to what you stand for, to all this stuff. When you see it, you see it, right? And I always think of, if you've ever watched the movie, a 12 strong, and in it, they've got this 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 talking to a bunch of soldiers and he says, 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 memory on a number of occasions where I just saw young kids and I just said, they hate us, right? And it's not you personally, it's what you stand for.

But 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 happens over a couple of weeks and so you can imagine almost you know 1% 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 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 and 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 and who to look out for what signs All I can 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, but literally the very first mission that we went out as a team ourselves, 100%. There was two separate incidents. One was we were driving the Muldenite and what we think was a sniper shot at a truck that I was in. I was standing up outside of it, along with another guy. And that was kind of just a wake-up call again of an urban shot at before. Right. And so I'll never forget, you kind of heard this whiz go by and the guy next to me was from a rural Pennsylvania and he just said, you know, look, I never been shot at before either. I'd done a lot of hunting and get the fuck down. Right.

Okay. And so we kept driving that night. And later on in the night, an ID went off, a guy ran over an ID who was at the front of the convoy. And when that ID went off, again, I'd 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, there was you as soldier that of that event, there was you a soldier that ended up dying. He was shot in the head. And when we got back

to the base, 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. It was somebody who literally showed up kind of as secondary support for our unit. And basically was there to help us. Right. And so it was one of those weird situations where you have this emotional connection because it's somebody who 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 hands, it's real for a reason, right? And we better take this seriously. This is not, you know, less joking around in kind of the barracks, and, you know, all the things that you would expect, you know, guys, you're doing the army.

So I think that was like the moment where I said, hey, I'm gonna learn a lot here. And I gotta make sure I get home. And you snap it into the training, but nevertheless, I mean, you're somebody who thinks philosophically about this world now, right? You're very intelligent in things deeply about the world. So looking back, you mentioned hatred

in the 14-year year old kid's eyes. There's death. So the way you kind of describe this whole story is like training kicks in. This shit is serious. Like this is, 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 in hand.

But at the same time 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 and 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, US 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, 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 pretty much every veteran I know that comes back. There's some of the largest pacifists in the world. And I always revert back to Marcus Latrell who's a famous Navy SEAL and others moving made about him and his story. 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 has 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 to do it. Do you think, 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 will be war? 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 understanding. Conflict on the other hand, I think people look at and say, of course, there will 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. 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? That mean we're necessarily dropping bombs on their countries. 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, it one changes the tools and tactics and techniques that we need to arm our country and other countries we're armed themselves with. But it also changes the way that we think about war, right? It sounds a lot less 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 some percentage of them are going to die on the battlefield and then we're going to basically pipe back videos and articles

saying that American soldiers are dying. Yeah. It doesn't need to be a fundamental difference between the gangus con style. Like, if I would feel differently, if somebody like, hand to hand with a knife, murder my family versus cybersecurity, why I stole all their data, stole all their money, stole everything they owned, falsified their identity, all that

kind of stuff. 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 summer I 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's very interesting to think about if you think about quality of life and all those

kinds of things. Well what's finite? right? That's what it's called. One of the pain ends. Yeah. And the other is kind of a long, prolonged, almost torture. So physical pain versus psychological pain. It's really interesting to think about. And I think another key piece to this, which I don't have the answers to, 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 it's really easy to show a battlefield where there's death on both sides and bombs being dropped and buildings destroyed. It fits very well into propaganda for everyone involved, right? To be 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 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 motion and response that it invokes and 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, and kind of do bad things versus the actual actions themselves. So even as a society, 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 sociopath, 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. And you become that 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 in terms of the actual actions, the intentions, the way it's perceived is very, very different.

And so I think that as a world, we like a very black and white, clean cut, good, bad. 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 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? I do think it's better to look at the results of the behavior as opposed to the underlying ideology, the underlying intention of the behavior. I think that intention gets at the question of like, are people inherently good or bad? 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 kinder as a humanity to each other. If we spent more time looking at intention rather than action. But again, if somebody walks down the street and murders somebody, it's really hard to have a conversation. And it may be inappropriate for us to have a conversation about intention versus any level of action.

So you're one of the prominent, I was seeing even the faces of the world of cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, that whole entire world was die straight in and ask, do you consider yourself a Bitcoin maximalist? I think that the way I really look at it is 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. And what we ultimately do is we return sovereignty and individualism and

kind of personal responsibility and liberty to people over institutions. And what we end up doing is we end up kind of taking what has historically been a very analog or physical world economy and geographic rule. And we then kind of put it in the cloud. And this digital economy becomes the prevalent way that we all conduct commerce, communicate, et cetera. And so it's less about any one single technology to me, right? I think that it's pretty stupid for people

to almost in a way put an inanimate object up for some sort of obsession. To me, it's much more about the ideals, the ethos, and the most rational and likely path to that kind of end result or that world that I think is at this point just a foregone conclusion. So the distinction there, and maybe people don't know the terminology, maximalism is basically saying, I really think this is a good idea. Like, you know, if you prefer a certain kind of diet, you could be a keto maximalist saying like, this is probably, maybe he's not 100%, 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 the future. But you're drawing a distinction between sort of cult-like obsession about an object of any kind, whether it's keto or 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 this moving into the cloud, sort of 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 be a positive step for humanity. Yeah, I would even take maximums most 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, the Keto diet is not only the best diet, It's also an element of its anti-everything else. So take Keto, for example, the Keto diet is not only the best diet, all the other diets are bad. And so it's a very binary view of the world. I think that what's probably most misunderstood about,

let's take Bitcoin 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 there's this controversy and kind of clashing of 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. And so what ultimately ends up happening, which is very weird in the investing world, it's unlikely that you and I are going to sit down

and you're going to be like Apple stock is the best stock and there's no other stock that's worth anything. And then also it's very weird if you said to me, you know, this stock is worth zero and that's where everything that I own, I've put it on a short on one single company, right? There's diversification. There's a much more kind of probabilistic thinking and finance in general. When it comes to this specific world of cryptocurrency and kind of digital assets, if you will, 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 and 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 money. And 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. A theorem with kind of the world computer approach and you can kind of go down the line with all the other arguments. So what they're trying to after. I had a theorem with kind of the world computer approach and you can kind of go down line with all their other arguments.

So what they're trying to build. I think the big difference just comes down to 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 starts to interrupt, do you mean financial security? Do you mean like literally the security of the particular cryptocurrency? The technical security of blockchain. So when you look at, let's say Bitcoin versus Ethereum,

Bitcoin has decided and that community has decided, securities, the number one thing that you have to optimize for. So decentralization 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 with a lot of technologies, right, Facebook's Libra or now what's known as DM is a great example, not having decentralization is susceptible to the nation state. And so a lot of these other platforms and blockchains,

they say security is important, but it's not the most important thing. We believe there's a trade-off between a little less security and transaction speed or composability or whatever it is. And so take a theory of this kind of the second largest community and blockchain by market cap. It was created because somebody wanted to or 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 as 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. But there's also a lot of really, really great ideas of 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 has attached to all of this, right? If you go back in history of technology, venture capitalists comes out of the idea that there's a ticker price that has 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? Just the market's going to desire, both going to work on it and try to make our successful. Here I think that the sensitivity and mainly 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, 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 dope them, and it's easier to run scams and kind of all this stuff. And so ultimately, I think that crypto is this like arena of ideas. It is literally the war of attrition. And what will end up happening is 10 years from now you and I will talk. And we're going to say, well, the market said X was valuable and Y wasn't. And so all of the tribalism from between here and there, it's fun, it's engaging

whatever, but ultimately 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 extreme personalities that do a lot of maybe part of the French shit talking. 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. There's nothing backing this other than a government ask you to pay your taxes in it, right? And they can have a monopoly on violence in terms of they can put you in jail if you don't pay your taxes, 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 of 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 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 money for 5,000 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 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. It's heavy to carry around. If you said to me, hey, you're in one city, mail it to me. You're really expensive. You know, there's always 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 then any point of you want the gold, you just show up and you say, give me three ounces of gold or two bars or whatever. And so that actually made the store of value. It 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, it kind of electronic Q-sips, all the way to credit and other systems on top of that gold. 1971 comes around and obviously we deepag from that gold, right? And it was a temporary measure at the time. We ended up not going back to it. And so what you moved or transition 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 they 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% year over year compound annual growth for over a decade, right? And 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.

And so what we're going to do is we're going to go build something new. And so you go get 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 2, 3, 4, or 5, we're going to do that here. And so they've already started to build this layer too, where it's easier to transact as cheaper,

it's faster, etc. And so I actually think that both of those worlds are going to coexist in the future. The big question is just which one has more importance, right? So again, get out of the binary. It's just probabilistically. And so my personal belief is that the security, that the store of value component as the bedrock for a monetary system is essential. 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. If money is an idea that we all, it's 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 the viral sense in our human brains. Well, and especially in light of the kind of the macroeconomy, right?

So like what's so fascinating about the last 12 months is in investing in general, the best return, I'm going to put that in here 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 and wrong just means you're an idiot, right? Being different and right means that that's where the outsize 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, and a decision is made in a very non-transparent process. And

what we've watched is the manipulation of all of those currencies are 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 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 can 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's pretty good. When you go to other countries, that might not be the case. And so I do think that there's 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 meme of exchange today. But if I go and I tell you

what about in these kind of extreme examples of Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Turkey, etc. 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, et cetera. The second thing, though, that I think is really, really important is around censorship. 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 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 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 that military might, we basically impose our will around the world. And so 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 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 arguing against that.

But I do think that if you really kind of zoom out and you say, I'm gonna take myself out of the Western world view and I'm simply gonna 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, must 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. 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. They have arguments, and some of their 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.

They have very kind of elaborate and well-articulated kind of viewpoint as to why they're doing it. But you and I hadn't ever say. And so when you start to look at, we have a very small group of people in this world, 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. And 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, a store of value and a monitoring 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 Americans and for many people in the world, but you kind of have a vision. 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, 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 in terms of the dollar, but also there is this component of just store of 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 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 then 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 a decade older than him or so and his peer group. And so I think as we're watching 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 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, 8, 10% growth every year. It's amazing. Just get invested in a stock market

and you'll make money over a long period of time regardless of the dips along the way. If you do not make 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 in a short period of time, but it's 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 the best in class as a fireman or as a teacher. And then oh, by the way, you have to 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're gonna go be an investor. So I think saving technology for Bitcoin standpoint is if you buy Satoshi or Bitcoin,

over time it will 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. The reason why somebody buys gold is because it's a store of value, right? Historically, that's a narrative-driven type asset, though. 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 is.

And that's what you mean by narrative-driven. We can't really prove it 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, I want to see you say whatever happened in the news. If you're with 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 way where our 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 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 one 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 $6 trillion in the United States, the one asset that historically has been the best store

of value and has, you know, in 2008 financial crisis hit an all-time high based on the government response has actually suffered 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 is about

$10 trillion market cap. And you say, okay, well, jewelry demand continues to fall, even if it's at a slight rate, but it continues to contract. Use central banks that now, at sometimes, are net sellers and sometimes net buyers. So 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 is a contracting demand from an investment perspective, that's 93% of all use of gold, only 7% of its use 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 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 kind of the wealthy in 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 quietly potentially switching out from sort of gold to Bitcoin, like naturally just doing,

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, Bill agree on all the problems that they see in the world, right? They'll actually agree on the solution, that they see in the world, right? They'll actually agree on the solution. That sound money is the solution. Where 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 define sound money, by the way? Sound money is just outside the system and no one can create more of it. So nobody controls it.

This is Scarcity's fundamental. Exactly. Why is Scarcity important in money? Well, I think Scarcity just has this very high correlation to value across all assets, not just money. Money happens to be the unit of account that we use in terms of daily commerce, but whether it is, as we're seeing now, sneakers or whatever it is, scarcity ultimately is that signal of value, I think, and that's just been the way that humans derive value

for literally thousands and thousands of years. Yeah, I got to say, that's my view on life and love in general, is scarcity is what makes it a valuable, people talk about immortality. I would like to be immortal, but it does seem that when you let go of the fight, netness 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 infinity, if you live forever, I worry that all the meaning will dissipate. And the same thing would love a quick criticism of sort of dating culture and all that kind of stuff. Like I haven't a shocking revelation that I've never been a tenant date or any of those things. I believe that scarcity and dating and interaction is like intensifies the value of when the interactions do happen. So when the 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 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 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, and it's funny because Justin Timberlake is in it, is this movie in the last time. 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 is embedded into their arm. And so 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 number of scenes where people are basically running to get to you. And I give you a little bit more time so that you can get to work on one day. 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 one. Section five, 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, essentially acquires a bunch of time and he's able to go to one of the higher levels. And now he's attending all of these gollas and poker nights and all of that 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 because wealth is time. And so that movie is, you know, it's got a ton of kind of 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, not be their initial reaction. I said, but you got to have to be, you know, 92 years old. Is the money worth the lack of time? I say sure, not be their initial reaction. I said, but you got to have to be 92 years old. Is the money worth the lack of time? Most people would say no. There's this guy, Graham Duncan, who really articulated this well.

And ultimately, what ends up happening is you realize time is more valuable than the money. But you acquire the money to gain more time. And the reason is valuable is because of the scarcity of time. We currently have the biology, the physics means that this is not just the narrative. We tell ourselves, maybe this, I don't know, but it feels like pretty sure we're mortal. 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 could actually convert time in a frictional way to money.

Well, and if you start to pull on this little bit and say, okay, a young person today, let's say somebody in their 20s has about two billion seconds left in their life, right? 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, a million dollars doesn't get you what it used to get, right? It's kind of 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 going to retire when I get a hundred thousand dollars. When I get the hundred thousand dollars, the hundred thousand dollars five years five years from now doesn't buy me what I thought it did. It's 9,500,000 or 200,000 or a million or whatever the number is. And so ultimately what ends up occurring is that the Bitcoin community and many people

and kind of this idea of sound money is you want to be able to acquire an asset that not only will hold the value, or, 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, 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, the free wills and illusions, this is really interesting to think about.

Maybe time is the kind of blockchain chain because you can't change anything. And then the physical space time of the universe is a ledger. So maybe it won't be Bitcoin that replaces gold. Maybe you'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, we'll 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 always 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% invest. And that's why we have a wealth inequality gap. And it continues to get wider and wider and wider is because the people who are holding the devaluing assets and saving are watching their wealth be devalued

away. 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, real estate may not be finite, but it's scarce, right? Or it may not be finite, but it's scarce. Gold may not be finite, but it scares, right? Art may not be finite, but it scares. Gold may not be finite, but it scares. 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 a fun and about the way you are trading time. Maybe it's a little bit indirect, but maybe not. So just because I brought up Eric and you're on Twitter, I'd love to hear your opinions. I talked to him a lot. He seems to have stepped into the beautiful dance of human communication and the social dynamics that is the big coin cryptocurrency community. Do you have thoughts on gauge theoretic conceptualization of the world or just Eric in general?

He's got a lot of love in his heart and he's got grace in the way he communicates. But he's also loves to play with ideas and seems to have touched a sensitive point with the Bitcoin community. Is there anything you could say that's hopeful and inspiring about that whole dynamic that went down? So I don't know all of the details, but what I will say is I've listened to a number of his podcasts and him and there's a whole bunch of people like him. I basically put them in the bucket of their 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 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, I put Eric and the whole host of other people, kind of, if you look at like the intellectual dark web is kind of a label that's 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 thought process. They're willing to talk about things that others may think are taboo. 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 vehemite 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 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 hedge fund managers and money managers in the world, all the way to what I'll consider

some of the most 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 the word of mouth 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 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, I'm just a guy Marty Bent who will 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, they've been thinking about it for five, seven, eight, ten years, right? They've gone through every simulation you possibly can. And they show up with data, examples, and responses. Now, they're not always right, but they've just done the work. And so what I actually 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, or they 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. Yeah. So let me sort of make a few comments. It's kind of interesting.

So you're exactly right. 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 you paint a really nice picture, which I kind of see it as an immune system that protects against 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 an overblown level of confidence about how much you understand, and that's actually the process about learning. And you realize you don't understand much. What I've noticed with the Bitcoin community is they're not as patient with the basics of the Dining Cougar effect. If I step in and make declarative statements about Bitcoin, I read a long time ago the white paper, like at the cursory level, I felt that I understand

the technology. This is basic intuitions. I didn't think about the social dynamics. I didn't think about any 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 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 all putting to me. I'm somebody that tries to communicate love and live that with everything I do. 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 and 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 that it could be in farming or it could be in whatever. Like I've lived life and I really thought deeply and I really care. I 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 can be wrong about a lot of things, and there's like an exchange of ideas that makes that mechanism that you talked about 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 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, to. They're like trigger 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 you have to sort of like guess develop patients 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 overcommonist toxicity. I think there's a couple of trends that are all kind of coalescing here, right? And in these types of experiences. So one is when you look at a community, there's always a spectrum, right?

In terms of there's some people who over index on kindness and stupidity, right? And there's some people who over index on kindness and stupidity, right? And there's some people who over index on intelligence and basically just being an asshole, right? And then you get everyone in between. And so like naturally as we know, the extremist ends of any community end up being allowed as usually, right? The second thing is there is from the outsider view

like in at the beginning of the exploration of ideas, it's very much a learning process, right? I don't know if I understand this or not, but here's 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, right? The truth is probably somewhere in between there, right?

And again, the world's not black and white. There's this kind of more gray area that I think actually is where most people exist. The other thing that's at play here is, I think the Bitcoin community understands the internet and the internet culture and narratives better than almost anyone. And so you see this with kind of the,

the just complete destruction of narratives with memes and just the visceral reaction and the use of things like Reddit and Twitter and YouTube, podcasts, just areas where I think a lot about if you are an upstart, right? And you are going to go challenge the most 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, right? Because they're going to try to out their lawyers, their regulators, their lobbyists, all this stuff. If you instead say, I'm going gonna meme you to death on the internet and I'm gonna control the public narrative, you've shifted the power, the asymmetry of power is more symmetrical now.

It's the ultimate insurgency, right? If you bring it back to the coddle, the coddle, I'd be like, yes. And so when you think about this, you have to lean into the advantage that you have. And so what ends up happening is you and I would absolutely lose it if we saw JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs with a Federal Reserve, start tweeting memes, right?

It would almost the validation that would give to the medium and the 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 toxicity at times, even though there's this visual reaction, sometimes there's even what I would call bullying 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 a part in institution is to recruit from inside of them one by one. Yes. And so what you're starting to see now is, 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 physical population, but with the ideas and with the philosophies. Banker in the streets, Bitcoiner in the sheets. I like it. That said, in terms of shit posting and memes, I got to say, bring it on because I believe,

in terms of asymmetry of power, I believe in that love will save the world not memes, or at least good vibe memes as opposed to shit posting. It's an interesting battleground though. It's an interesting battleground to think about. The other thing I would say too is one of the elements 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,

or for outsiders versus insiders. Yes. Laser eyes, right? Which seems absolutely ridiculous, elementary, and frankly 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 convince their colleagues in 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 Keep hearing Bitcoin is love love that trying to convert me. You have to laugh at, probably my favorite one out of all of it is I've seen on multiple occasions, Mark Cuban a couple of years ago, Kevin O'Leary, wealthy people, billionaires, et cetera, and you have people on anonymous accounts who knows who they are telling them how fun staying poor. Right. It's just, you know, it's just, again, part of a community and I think it's a feature or 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 major net positive. Maybe this is a bit of a personal question for me, just out of my own curiosity, but I've talked to Raid Alley a few times. So Raid Alley Alley, I think, was one of those people that took that journey, the Bitcoin journey. If thoughts about him specifically, about that whole world and about the journey, maybe of others, they're 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 insightful and deep thinkers about investment, about finance, about economics in general, actually about life. So it's interesting to see him go in that journey. Do you have something to comment about Ray or just those kinds of people in general, actually about life. So it's interesting to see him go in that journey. Do you have something to comment about, Ray or just those kinds of people in general? So if we look at what I'll just consider

the legends of Wall Street in general, right? There's no denying that they're incredibly intelligent. There's no denying that actually, especially in the hedge fund world, there's some of the most open-minded people in terms of their 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 one of the things that I really

respect about all those guys is almost all of them are willing to put ideas out via various writings that they do and accept the public criticism, right? Whether it's Howard Marks, Ray, or others, they will put this stuff out in public. And sure, there's a lot of people who 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? I think Ray's actually the most fascinating, though, out of all of these kind of legends of Wall Street in that he understands debt cycles.

He understands currencies. For a while now has been all over and famously said, you know, cashish trash, investable assets, right? He just kind of like just knew all of it. And for a long time, Bitcoiners said, right, 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 the establishment, people view you in a very static way as 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 Gates is a good example, right? Warren Buffett is a good example. Ray Dalio is a good example, et cetera. And so you have to give credit, I think, to Dalyo 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 know, if I wanted to say that he's a Bitcoin proponent, as much as he believes it is one of 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 Paul Tudor Jones,

a Stanley Druckenmiller, a Ray Dalio, Howard Marx not even writing about it, saying, hey, I was anti Bitcoin and put a ton of intellectual rigor into it, but thank God my son bought a bunch of our family right and kind of we've had exposure to it. I think what it does is more than anything, it's not gonna convince somebody to go and take it seriously or go ahead and make an allocation. It reduces career risk. And so if all of a sudden when Paul Tutor Jones

and Stanley Druckemiller 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 Tutor Jones, it's good enough for Stanley Druckenmiller. And so I think that it's very interesting because Ray 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. You started to have some of these kind of wall street legends come out, start out financial institutions, started to now, you're seeing corporations start to do it, right? Eventually, there's going to be a central bank that does it. And so you kind of walk through that line and what you understand is like, it's the same thing every time it's just somebody new, right? That path, right? That Bitcoiners 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 him a bunch of money And they didn't have to work hard for it. They don't really appreciate it And Ray actually has a book principles right and he talks about the hero's journey So he's like living it in some sense in terms of You know thinking about digital currency in general like digital finance 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 narrow definition of money, money is really everything. And so where you could argue that sort of cryptocurrency is like the base layer of this transformation to the digital space and everything else would just be built on top of it. I use a different word that I think is kind of closer to your world, which is it's ultimately automation. And what I mean by that is, you know, before 1970 or 1980, all the assets were analog. And so when you have analog assets, physical stock certificates, physical bonds, physical deduohome, you have to physically exchange them. When we wanted to increase transactions and increase kind of global finance and access,

we took those physical assets and we created electronic QCIP 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 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 electron accuses to these digital assets. And so if you look at again just let's say money or currency, every currency in the world is going to be digital.

You're going to have a digital dollar, a digital euro, yen, R&B, you're going to have decentralized kind of open source money like Bitcoin. You're also going to have private currencies like Facebook's attempt at DM 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 the first step that 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 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 it's gonna become interesting because all of the currencies are the same,

except for this one right now, and maybe there will be others in the future. But for sure Bitcoin today, and people may try to replicate in a private manner or something, but Bitcoin is kind of the only finite scarce digital sell money. And so when you then have that pretty big difference in that competition at the monetary policy layer,

it's actually not gonna 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 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 another 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 Those are my two options. It was high friction to change between currencies

When the competition of technology is kind of innovated away Now I can get paid in dollars these digital dollars and with a clickable 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 going to get paid in dollars, you have to pay your taxes and dollars. You're going to start to see people operate in a multi currency environment where they say, Okay, I got paid in my digital dollar, click a button, I save in Bitcoin, it stays there or text or grows my purchasing power. Oh, I need to pay my taxes. Let me switch back into dollars with a click a button I save in Bitcoin. It stays there or text or grows my purchasing power. Oh, I need to pay my taxes. Let me switch back into dollars with a 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, et cetera. 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.

Very similar. Like frictionless, go from asset to asset, yeah. So now what you end up doing is you start to open up the possibility for machine to machine transactions. Yeah. So today, if you and I write software code for two machines to transact with each other, they can't transact physical currency. And in many cases, they can't actually transact the

electronic Q-Sit currencies or assets either, because there's too long a settlement time. So you can't get true automation, right? So the whole idea of like, the car's gonna drive over a strip and the road is gonna 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 in the CD-ROM. It's just incompatible technology. Reference is nobody understands at this point. So by the way, you need to update your reference. I probably do. It's like taking a CD wrong, trying to put an MP3 player into streaming. 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 technologies create, 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 and 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 do all kinds of things that today we understand the internet really empowered. 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 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 of 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 vision of the future you're painting, it's kind of an exciting one. It almost makes me sad looking into the future and we'll look back at this time. It's kind of an exciting one and it almost makes me sad looking into the future and we'll look back at this time. It's like how incredibly inefficient of financial transactions were like the transaction of value of any kind. Like how, like what to pay each other, like there has to like processes, there's like payroll and all this kind of just the entirety of transactions is to like processes. There's like pay roll and all this kind of

Just the the entirety of 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 There's actually really interesting especially then you start to move that into the space of data 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 convert data into money 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 server 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 will just like fundamentally change our world. That's really, really exciting. One of the most interesting things to me is, I invested in a company called Bridget. What they told me was they said, $8 billion was paid to the top four banks last year on overdraft fees.

So literally, they took $8 billion 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. 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 $8 billion of value that flows to origin situations 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 the different mechanism of financial like the movement of money as opposed to you, which is what we want to do

as human beings, operating in a higher layers of like providing services for others of like following your passions and like working for others like doing cool shit, or 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 able to think in terms of money,

but not have to know how the counting works. Automation, simply free humans up to do more creative work. Yeah, right. Yeah. Like that's it. Yeah. Which is why you use the term automation, which I think is kind of brilliant

reframing of all of this. Yeah, because ultimately digital technologies are merely the conduit to usher us into that world. 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 some technologies where you can stream 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 going to be released until everyone on almost like a go-fund me type situation pays for it 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 2007, when the iPhone came out, Uber wasn't possible. Ram, he's good on the line. 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. Because it's just hard, right? Like, we like to think linearly, and that's not how the world works. Yeah. I do find it kind of interesting. It is NFT based, but I don't think it has to be this idea of, I think, big cloud. It's called, or whatever, 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 BitCloud 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 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? It's really hard to do it first and then slowly kind of becomes easier and easier as technology 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 line 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. Seed in professional sports, you see it in a lot of these things. And so I just think that a lot of the focus right now is on the technology. But ultimately, these are ideas that are very old and have had lots of success in traction. And we're just merely standing in the way of the evolution of these ideas with new technology. And so 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 progress of humanity, it's a foregone conclusion that stuff's gonna 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, that transform the world. And there's been, there's been a lot of different ideas popping up. Like, 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 drag this 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 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 in one way is to exchange Energy and computational power for Bitcoin. So you can mine it. You can literally take Computer power that you have you can rent it to the network and run that software and then it will pay you a portion of the kind of daily revenue off that system. You can acquire Bitcoin and exchange for your power and your computational kind of contribution. And that's the fundamental principle behind Bitcoin is the proof of work. So I got a hundred bucks like I used cash app

So, I got a hundred bucks, like I used cash app. You know, there's Coinbase, there's all these exchanges. Like, how do I convert my $100 to Bitcoin? Is there something disclaimer? This is not financial advice. And this is just us talking in just your opinions. Do not use this to invest or take us financial expertise. That said, is there something you recommend? That's an easy entry point for somebody that's like, I wonder if I can convert this $100 into whatever amount of Bitcoin. What do you recommend?

What are the options? So there's a lot of options. 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 BlockFi that 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. 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, it's kind of all these storage options.

So block files, you know, kind of the one that I'm biased towards because I- So block files are site to interrupt. So block file is a big coin only or is it an exchange with other crypto companies? It's got a bunch of different ones. Yeah, they basically are agnostic to what it is, but they provide 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. Cold storage, hot storage, what does that mean? So I go to a website and I convert dollars to Bitcoin, that's a kind of storage, that's like online banking. All 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 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 pick. But it is easier to move it around. If all of a sudden you call me up and say, hey, send me some money.

I can press a couple of 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 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 going to 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, you know, in a vault somewhere

that I don't have control over that's behind 10 passwords and biometric scanning and it's really difficult to even get to it. Right? So if you almost look at it, it's 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 can do it on BlockFibos, you also can do it on places like Coinbase, Gemini, Crackin, et cetera. Also, cash app. Cash app. You can do it on any exchange. If you can do it on block five, but she also can do it on places like Coinbase, Gemini, Crackin, etc. Also cash app. Cash app. You can do it on cash app. I think I think there's still sponsor in this podcast. I'm not biased at all. So once you get Bitcoin on any of these of venues, you can leave it there on that venue. Now, the trade off is you're taking account onparty risk. So somebody else is responsible

for the security and the protection of it. 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 counter-party risk. It is easier to quickly send to somebody, so the trade-off of ease of use, but counter-party risk is big. And in the Bitcoin community specifically, there's a huge thing of they really, really have a keep for not leaving the Bitcoin there, right, for the obvious counterparty. The second thing you can do is you can basically get it off of a new exchange, and you can put it in some level of what I'll call a second layer

of storage. That second layer of storage could be a hardware device that you can quickly just grab off your desk and plug into your computer and immediately use. That's what they call like a hardware wallet. Or you can have some sort of software wallet, right? Where it's not on an exchange, but there is some level of in between the hardware wallet and the exchange and the software wallet. But the software wallet is connected to the internet. Yeah. And so if you kind of think of it as the exchange, software wallet, hardware wallet, and then there's something called deep storage, or a cold storage. And this is literally there was a company called Zappo that would put things in deep cold

storage and it was literally buried in a mountain. Right. So the odds that somebody's physically gonna go there, there's armed guards, there's, you know, 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 is not your keys,

not your coins, or as my buddy, Isaiah Jackson came up with he said, not your keys, not your cheese, right, in terms of not your cheese, right? In terms of sovereignty is important, right? And ultimately, this goes back to kind of the beginning of our conversation around Bitcoin's ethos, sovereignty, right? Giving the power back to people. You don't have to rely on this infrastructure in order to be able to participate in this

monetary 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. And you alone are responsible for it. So the idea of personal responsibility. And then also you and you alone make the decisions as to whether you hold onto it or you use it without censorship. 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 depending on who you are, there's

varying degrees of kind of concern or decisions that get made there. And a lot of it comes down to personal preference. The Bitcoin community, though, absolutely will over optimize for sovereignty and kind of hardware or cold storage. I wonder if you can comment on that because you have both a sort of cash app and a block file 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 keep some of it there,

but you want to move 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 practically speaking for maybe a regular citizen? What should be the role of the hardware wallet in their lives? Yeah, so at the highest level, I just think that learning about it is important. Even if you only have $5 equivalent of Bitcoin, going and understanding here's how it works, here's

why it's important, here's how it would actually withdraw from an exchange under the hardware wall. Like that alone just as an intellectual exercise is a worthwhile pursuit and I think people should go do that. Actually go through the process of the step so you feel like you can do it. Yeah. It's kind of like if I said to you, you know, hey we're going to go buy an asset and you never went and you looked at it, you never went and made a decision like, sure maybe I did it or I didn't do it, but like you didn't actually experience it. So I think that's an important part. The second thing is, each person is different

from how they view this asset. So there are some people who are speculating, 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. 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 ensure 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? I'm gonna give it to one their 18th birthday Yeah, and so when you start to look at this what you end up saying is what do you I bought one Bitcoin and I'm gonna save it for my child, right? And I'm gonna give it to one of 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 this community, right? If you look at the on-chain metric, 60% of Bitcoin haven't moved 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 US dollar price.

Still doesn't move. And so these are the kind of long-term holders, right? These are the iron fists or as recently as become popular, the diamond hands, right? They 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. 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 kind of convicted around Bitcoin, sound money, macro environment,

all stuff. And then they make a mistake because they trusted, you know, ABCD company. And that counterparty risk is that ends up actually being fatal or detrimental. So again, this is not financial advice disclaimer, but let me ask, so in terms of investment advice on Bitcoin, so you see Bitcoin's potentially not just the thing that you speculate over, like buy and sell, buy and sell, buy and sell,

but it's something that you 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 the own quite a large percentage of your wealth in Bitcoin and you're basically buying only and storing long-term. So that's something that's a legitimate way to approach Bitcoin in your recommendation. Good other culture. So if we remove ourselves from the Western world culture of investing in gamification of financial markets and the financialization of everything, let's say we go to the culture

of India. For hundreds of 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, you're a great grandfather gave 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 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 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 I think that for me personally, I've got over 95% of my net worth that's in this. 90, over 95% of your net worth. There's two important caveats to this. One is I didn't buy some Bitcoin in 2011 or 12 right and then all

So I appreciated a bunch and it grew into that but from a cost basis perspective, you know, put a hundred dollars and now it's a ton of money. Instead what I did was I basically in 2018 saw Bitcoin from a US dollar price standpoint, it 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 denominator 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 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. And so we 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, you know, what's the dollar worth? You'd say, well, a $1 bills worth $1, right? Bitcoin, to me, I'd denominate my wealth in Bitcoin. So I think of one Bitcoin is worth one Bitcoin, not one Bitcoin is worth 60,000 or 55,000 or 70,000, right? I'd 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 devalue in currency

as the denominator, doesn't matter, right? Like you're financially incentivized to spend or invest or into consume. When you have an appreciating currency, all of a sudden, you become much less consumptive in your behavior. Yeah.

Because you're actually trading off future purchasing power for the consumption today. It's fascinating to think that if, when you move about this world, you think in Bitcoin, you behave differently as if you think in dollars. That's really fascinating. People, 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. 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-Cola's are at McDonald's. Right. You go to other places, they don't serve on that big. And so the other example, though, or the negative argument is we have to consume. Because if not, you end up being the bottom 45% of Americans that help known vegetable 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, 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, much more than that. You just become much more of a 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, better for the growth of the civilization, because capitalism is fascinating. 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, societies built an idea that we have to keep growing. 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 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, 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. 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 order to get them to give it to you. There's less room for corruption, less room for manipulation. That's not actually productive. Yeah, definitely.

So you said you moved a lot of your investment into Bitcoin. When you look to your special human being in many ways, 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 plug like me, in terms of just investing and moving into 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 kind of timeless advice when it comes to investing

or requiring an asset in general. Dollar cost averaging is usually the best way to think about it. And what I mean by that is most people don't just have a pile of currency sitting there, right? It's not like they have a million dollar sitting in their bank. It's like, what do I do with it? 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, the best way to acquire Bitcoin without having to worry about timing markets and being a professional trader is to simply take whatever the percentages 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 3% of your paycheck.

Take 3% go buy Bitcoin. Don't worry about what the price is. You should do that over time. And the reason why that's important is, if in December of 2017, when Bitcoin is 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 when it 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 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 say, hey, set your, what's called asset allocation plan. I want 30% in stocks, I want 10% in 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 a 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 some in 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 2% higher or lower than where you bought it?

It doesn't really matter. And buying offing makes you, I guess, resistant robust to the volatility of the market or volatility, the Bitcoin price and so on. That said, Bitcoin price is volatile. And 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 is now, I mean, but let's look at companies that have now stabilized, right? 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. Right now it's volatile. And this is why you have to have these kinds of strategies to write out of volatility. Of course, everything that goes to zero is also volatile. Like the early days are volatile.

Do you see like this volatility is like a feature or a bug or is it just like a way of life? So Amazon is the one that I know the numbers on in terms of the early volatility. Every year since it has gone public, it's had a double digit drawdown in that year. The average is over 30%. And one time it drew down over 95%. Sounds a lot like Bitcoin, right? Like, oh, wow, it's 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, 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 denominator

stocks, it's down like 80%, 85%. If you're down to eight gold, if you'reominate stocks down like 80% 85% if you don't dominate gold if you don't dominate bonds If you just go down the line real estate, etc It's all down massively against Bitcoin now you could argue that that's because Bitcoin is appreciating in US all terms Or you could actually argue that the world is repricing this asset is doing price discovery on this asset And it's essentially comparing it's saying hey Bitcoin verse the stock or Bitcoin verse this argue that the world is repricing this asset, is doing price discovery on this asset, and it's essentially comparing. It's saying, hey, Bitcoin versus the stock, or Bitcoin versus this ounce of gold,

or Bitcoin versus 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 of that is based on Lindi effect, just the longer it persists, the more likely it is to survive. Some of that is based on 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 majority of people that's dollars. And 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 basically said is I've acquired X amount of Bitcoin and I'm just going to hold it for years. And every time somebody has 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 U.S. 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 at one of 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 decision making because we're so emotional, especially when something has a price tight to it.

Yeah. So it's in terms of our strategies and decision making which would be long term and have like a regular almost think like an algorithm in that kind of way. So I think you've tweeted that you believe that Bitcoin has a chance of reaching one million. I don't know what it is currently. I think it's five, 60, 60, 60, which is incredible.

I think I remember when it was at least in the double digits. I think I remember what was in the signal digits of a dollar. So the fact that it's cross 50 is crazy. But 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 you have to see first, when might it reach a million? Like what are the signs transformative effects you 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.

Gold is a $10 trillion asset, and when you compare the technology of gold to the technology of Bitcoin, Bitcoin is superior in every single way. It's more portable, it's more divisible, 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 a hundred X improvement from a technology standpoint. And so we don't need Bitcoin to actually kind of capture the full 10X or 100X improvement from a market cap standpoint. If Bitcoin simply captures 2X, the value, be a $20 trillion 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 dollar price point.

You can ask a good question, which is what's the current market cap for Bitcoin? The current market cap is right around a trillion, just over a trillion dollars. And you're saying gold is 10 trillion. I'm sorry, where did you get the 20 trillion? 20 trillion would just be 2x gold's market cap. 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 market cap, kind of the equivalent, puts you around $500,000. Right. So you can kind of see there's a big coin. So if you capture the entirety of the gold market, then it would be a value of a single Bitcoin. 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 cost from. Correct. Got it. So, if you then save yourself, okay, how does the pricing kind of cycles work, right, or the boom and bust cycles. Gold is a very linear type supply schedule, meaning that there is a certain amount of gold that comes out of the ground each year. The interyear 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. Maybe one goes at a business. But for the most part, the kind of inflationary increase to the supply of gold is pretty stagnant

year over year. Bitcoin has a very unique feature, which every four years, there is a programmatic supply shock, meaning that 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 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 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 we 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's unique in that there's 100% verifiable proof of the existing supply, the total supply and the incoming daily supply. So we know 100% that can show you on the actual blockchain or in the code that there's 21 million Bitcoin And that's all there will ever be. I can show you that there's 18.6 million give or take

Bitcoin that actually are in circulation today, right? And I can go all the way back to every single transaction that's ever cursed in January through Chosen9 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 of 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 the supply shocks

lead to significant price appreciation as the asset gets reprised because there's a supply shock to them. 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 gonna have both a 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 end.

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 jahrirations in the repo markets, a lot of CEOs leaving their jobs, all this kind of stuff.

And all I said was at some point, when the market turns over, the government's going to have to step in. We were addicted to stimulus. They're going to have to, many played interest rates down and they're going to have to print money. I had no clue that there was going to be a global pandemic that they were going to 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're going to 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 gonna run the gold, they're gonna run the Bitcoin, et cetera. And right as they do that, it appears at the same time, there's gonna be this supply shock. So you're gonna get a supply shock and a demand shock that are both positive for the price.

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 100,000 Bitcoin, $100,000 Bitcoin this year. Right, at some point, I don look for and I say, okay, we are likely going to see $100,000 Bitcoin, $100,000 Bitcoin this year, right at some point, I don't know what it happens, but we're moving in that.

So you think in 2021, we'll see $100,000? That would be my most conservative view. I've said $100,000 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 $100,000 and people are saying, you know, multiples of that number. So we'll see what happens. But I think that there's still a lot of room kind of to run from a US 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 the 625 to whatever. 50% reduction. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's what I think will carry us to the million dollar Bitcoin. From the six to five to whatever. 50% reduction. Yeah. And so that's what I think will basically when we get that next supply shock that'll carry us up over a hundred that are over a one million dollar Bitcoin price, which if historical examples persistent again, sometimes it's hard to use historical examples to look at future events. 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 18 to 24 months, you would see the kind of top of the next market.

Hopefully without a coupling to another pandemic. Yes, we would like to do all of this without public health crisis So that would take it to 20 trillion You don't have to compare to the dollar ascension in some sense that the dollar could also lose value I mean, there's a lot of kind of dynamics that play here now, but like fundamentally there's going to be a huge

Move in your prediction of value into into Bitcoin I'm actually playing here. Now, but like fundamentally, there's going to be a huge move in your prediction of value into Bitcoin. I mean, that's a fascinating world to think about. 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 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 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. So first let me ask you about what the hell is shit coin? Is this connected to our previous discussion of the meme? This shit coin cover

basically all coins that are not Bitcoin? Is it mean, is it beautiful, is it some mixture of both? As with most things in life, depends who you ask. The most kind of enthusiastic and parts of the Bitcoin community, Shitcoin is anything else, right? Kind of, if you ascribed to kind of a maximumistic view of the world, Shitcoin would be anything. If you look at people who I would say are Bitcoin proponents, yet, see value in other things, Shitcoin 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 tears might be different depending who you ask. Ultimately, what it is, is it's a meme. Yeah. And it's used to articulate the idea that whatever you want to put in that bucket has no value. So, shit coin, right? Our coins that have no value.

What is fascinating about it, and I think that, again, speaks to the power of the Bitcoin community, is there was congressional hearings a couple of years ago. And at one point, a congressman from Ohio Warren Davidson, who was definitely open-minded and excited about Bitcoin, asked an individual on the Congress floor during testimony to talk about these other coins, and at one point basically read into the record the terminology of shitcoin. He said the word shitcoin. I can't remember if he said it first, or if the other person did, and then he repeated it. But he definitely, he was trying to get that red into the record, for sure.

And so, you can imagine one, again, the meme speaking insultally to the Bitcoin community was, made him very well liked. But also, too, was it does go back to this idea almost of, 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 gonna 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 somebody who is financially ascribed to be that leader and kind of 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 team 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 naturally 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 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 next guy Yeah, I mean the meaning to be honest. It's it's what it's all 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 and they're just not good at using them so they become mean. But when you do it with grace, it can tear down an argument at the same time,

have love and respect underneath it. I mean, it's a beautiful dance, they have to be good at. People just can suck a communication, and even a powerful weapon like a meme in the wrong hands just 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 a symmetry of power.

So you have to have gorilla warfare in this internet game, especially when there's no leader, like you said, in the distributed culture. I have to say here that is, is really important, I think, is from a society standpoint. We've become very soft and very kind of coddling, and not in a way that's like, I think people take this argument too far sometimes, but what I mean by that is, 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 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, 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, not about narrative, not about feelings or emotion. It's math. 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 on life. Right? They say, hey, you made X claim, prove it. And as you can imagine, great example is the financial media meets Bitcoiners. And it's a bloodbath, right? And kind of the arena of ideas, because what do they do? The financial media is used to the soft opinion pieces, et cetera, and Bitcoiners show up.

And they're like, 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're like, 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, I'm wrong, I'm wrong, I'm wrong. Like you can't say I'm wrong. And they're like, no, just prove what I just say. And so you get in this like very, very weird world. It's fascinating, it's a fascinating benefit.

But I do wanna say, I've been watching this. It's kind of interesting. I think that the pursuit of truth, 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 disagreement, they think that disagreement is easy. Like they see the lies or the inaccuracies in the statement and they just think they can say wrong. Yes, you can say that, but if you want to be effective, it requires great skill. You look at a beautiful 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. What I am 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 wanna, if you want to be a part of this culture, you want to get good at it, like any skill,

it's the 10,000 hours, like get improved, 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 shitposting. But I think it's really, really important, right? Because you're right in that it's all about intention versus action. If your intention is to tell somebody that they are wrong in an effort to get them to see the truth, that's very different than if your intention is to tell

someone they're wrong and hurt their feelings. And so when you can unpack intention and 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 memes when I use that term, I'm not just talking about like a static photo, right? When I'm talking about these elaborate, kind of edited videos and kind of all this stuff, When done right, it is 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. I see them, I share the ones that I like, right? But it does take practice and you can tell look. There's people who are fantastic meme lords 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 whether it's emojis, it's gifts, it's memes, whatever communicating and I've heard the idea a bunch of times so I don't know who to kind of credit for it, but Whether it's emojis, it's gifts, it's memes, whatever This is the extension and evolution of just hieroglyphics 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 But speaking our memes what the heck do you think is up with Elon Musk talking about

Dogecoin a lot? Sort of from the cryptocurrency community, I've been talking to a lot 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 it's security issues. There's a bunch of issues it has. Nevertheless, you did say that money is the kind of social construct, right? And Elon Musk's combination of humor and 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 Doishcoin. It's like, what is it? He says

that the most amusing outcome 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 dorsh coin philosophically or technically? Is it possible that dorsh coin will overtake Bitcoin and run the entire world? I can't even, because it could happen. It could happen. But what if there's any serious way to answer that question? Well, we have to start with TechnoKing of Tesla and Master of Coin as they are sort of decently called in the latest SEC filing. He officially changes title TechnoKing. TechnoKing of Tesla. And now the CFO's new title is a master of coin. And so when you have a sense of humor,

and frankly, a level of self confidence and an element of 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 and all this stuff. And so I think that Elon 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, 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. 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 as beautifully humorous and whatever the hell in that culture is as Doshcoin. 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 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 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 it as like a Venn diagram. What's the thing that a bunch of people know about, care about, think or it's 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 people just freaking out. I mean, I love it, but I don't know if I would have the guts

to do it myself, but 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? 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 when you're somebody on a mission to create interplanetary life, when you're trying 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 describe that much importance to compared to those things, they're almost 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 acts on 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 a really kind of game of like 3D chess that frankly I'm not privy to, right? And I'm kind of watching from the sidelines and figuring out alongside everybody else. But I also don't think that it's just Elon,

bought a bunch of dogecoin and tweets about it because he thinks he's going to do a dollar and he's gonna make money. I don't think it's going to do a dollar and he's gonna you know make money Right, like I don't think yeah, I don't think it's an economic Argument as to why he's so interested and I think it's much more It's almost like meta-message for a lot of other stuff Yeah, he's kind of trying to break apart internet communication from first principles like it does so many other problems

It's kind of fascinating to watch. I know he's been He's taught me quite a bit about communication and 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 that 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 kind of, but it was also an FU. So in that sense, I think

Elon has a perspective on the world, similar to Bitcoin, folks, which I really like, which is like thinking long-term. That'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 Bayzos' view, which 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 to and then look backwards. Yes. And say this decision that I'm going to 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 a minimum regret.

But also three is, even if you only look for minimum 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 Bitcoin has kind of this like you know proxy for time as we talked about Interplant 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 overest maybe what we can do in one year under estimate, what we can do in 10. Well, to me, it's a kind of degree of 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 5,000%. 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, or there's a common thing in like the startup world, end up actually following kind of the bread crumbs 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 refusal to kind of move or budge off of that. So it makes them special. One of the things that garnered a lot of excitement in the crypto community is NFTs. I have no idea really the depths, the fundamental technological, philosophical depths really the depths, the fundamental technological thresholds, go depths of the technology,

whether this is just like a little bit of a fad, or 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 if we just start with like what is an NFT? It's a non-fungible token, meaning that there's

no fungibility. 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 the hundred dollar bills and we mixed them up and I just grabbed a $100 bill and left. I'm no worse as long as they're all, you know, official $100 bills because as long as I have $100, I don't need that exact same bill back. So that means that those $100 bills are fungible. Non-fungible would be like art. If I took up 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 and it wasn't the Picasso. I lose because the Picasso is really important there. 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, 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 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 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 art 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 those kinds 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 base world scarcity kind of in 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 up painting and

hang in 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 people have 20% in terms of number of billionaires, 20% of their wealth is in art. You can bring to this digital realm, which is much more kind of natural to a digital native. And so the best way I 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, who made it, where they sent it, they have no value. Eiffel Tower 001 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 1% ultimately what we're starting to see here. And what we're looking at is probably 1% of what it's going to grow into. So you're bullish. You're saying it could grow into something for 1%, it could grow into something

significant, like all the kinds of different applications. Strip away all the applications right now, and just think about is digital scarcity going to be important in the internet? Right. Moving all the things that are scarce in the physical world and the digital space, us trying to figure out which things can be moving and not. And also there is 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 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

By 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 some sense, this whole idea of scarcity can overtake the entirety of the digital world. It can consume all of the markets we see as financial markets and just turn everything into a market. Well, so if I take you on like a 10 year fast forward, 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 them will. There's a world where you and I are participating in a digital economy, in a virtual world, where 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? It was just if I said to you 20 years ago, I'm going to give you a global education. I mean, I'm going to take you and I'm going to physically move you to geography after geography after geography. So I'm 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 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 the value. You don't get 100% of the same value. We get 90% of the value. But you can do it at a much faster pace. And so in the six month period, you've actually made three times the progress than you would have if you had to do the physical world. So that's where I think we're heading. So there's digital art being displayed in the digital museum and people 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, we live most of our productive and social lives in this digital world, and increasingly essentially create a simulation where the biological basis is just there to sustain the brain that's used to operate in the virtual world. Taking us back to the original, when we started talking about war, I wonder what conflict looks like in that world, that the people who are born

today maybe will be fighting wars 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 to be able to do that. I'm going to be able to do that. I'm going to be able to do that. I'm going to be able to do that. I'm going to be able to do that. I'm going to be able to do that. I'm going to be able to do that.

I'm going to be able to do that. I'm going to be able to do that. I'm going to be able to do that. I'm going to be able to do that. I'm going to be able to do that. I'm going to be able to do that. in virtual life and 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 analogue, 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. One of the features of the digital world is that artificial intelligence systems can operate with much more power in a frictionless way in that world. Curl names we understand. It's hard to build robots that operate at scale and do like arbitrary, large amount of impact damage your positive in the physical world. It's much easier to do in the digital world.

Do you ever think about AI systems just swimming about doing extraordinarily powerful, destructive things in the digital world? Is there something of a concern to you? Or is this something into a very distant future? I think a lot of artificial intelligence is in the name. It's simply the replication of human intelligence at scale, automated and programmatic, meaning that in the analog world, you could go higher a thousand employees or in Amazon case, higher 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 when we talk about artificial intelligence, right? And so when you look at that, when technology is 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 malicious. And to me, that's what 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 gonna treat them the same way we've always treated people who use technology poorly, right? We're gonna understand it, we're gonna identify it, we're gonna control it, and then we're gonna 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. The thing that's scary to me is that it can scale arbitrarily. So it can odd number of 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 Let's talk about something kind of like humans but dumb in the 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 you when you only had maybe a million the day before, like, how does that world look different? That were the fucked all these chimps come from. And they like, and then we can pretend to be like, well, let's hope the chimps, like, don't get violent because 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 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's terrifying. I always think about the inadvertent, but as you're talking what it maybe think of is also the irreversible.

Reversible. Right. So it's one thing if there's an inadvertent negative impact, but we have a 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 have the trillion chimps, you can't. They're not going to like it when you try to

start killing them off. All right. But back to Bitcoin. Those chimps in the Bitcoin community. Any time you bring up chimps, as some of you will say, Joe Rogan entered the chat, can I ask you about sort of learning about Bitcoin books and resources? 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 digital world.

But obviously you also have a newsletter that's incredible on Substack. And, but do you have recommendations? Maybe it would be great if you could talk about, first of all, your podcasts and the newsletter, but also other resources that you recommend people should check out in order to learn about Bitcoin. Yeah, so the podcast and email are 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 was it called by the way? Just the podcast. And so in doing that,

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 is like a practice that I probably would do even if no one read it. And then by being able to publish it, what it does do it elicits both the good and bad responses. And so people will let me know if they can make it and they'll usually not respond if they think that it's something smart. And so those two things are really educational for me

and I think kind of forced me 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 got to start with Bitcoin standard. That one to me feels like it really lays out the picture nicely. There is Bitcoin money you can't fuck with.

I was written by our friend Jason Williams. As you can imagine, it's basically what it talks about. There's another book, Layered Money. There's written by Nick, who's done 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. And there's a whole bunch more. I'm gonna forget them all. There's the, I think it's called the Cost of Tomorrow,

a guy Jeff Booth, Jeff Booth wrote it. And just, if you get on Twitter, basically, you're gonna see all these books flying around. But I do have to say that from a psychological concept, or philosophical concept. The number one book that I've ever read that aligns with Bitcoin ethos, but doesn't say word about Bitcoin,

is a book called The Dow of Capital by Mark Spitz-Nagel. 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 tail risk hedging. And so in March or February of 2020, they're up like 4,000%.

By the way, they pretty much lose money for eight, nine years than that happens. And so, but they're still one of the best performing funds if you look at it over years and years. So it's just this mindset of everyone is so short term focused. So I think it's just a great reminder to long term thinking. And also, I mean, I've gotten quite a bit of value just reading the papers. And 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, like a few years ago, still really interesting to think about, to look at what people were thinking about because the principles are carried through with other cryptocurrencies as well. It's all there, even in the early documents. That's fascinating to see that whole history from, if you're more tech savvy. Like you said, Twitter is an interesting place. If you can look past all the shit coin talk, it's a fascinating place for news and resources. Is there books outside of all this cryptocurrency, sort of technical fiction philosophical that

impact on your life? Because you have interest that are all over the place. Is there something that you would recommend to others? So, Dow of Capital is definitely probably my favorite book. Books that have been impactful. I read when I was 20 actually sitting in the desert of Iraq, Rich Dad, Porta, Thinking Grow Rich, and the Rich's Man of Babylon.

And I don't think I took a single thing and implemented it from an execution standpoint, but it was a complete shift in mentality and understanding and 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 and I read them in succession were really impactful And then I think one of the best books probably ever written is I think it's called when breath becomes air Or air becomes breath. I can't remember

But it's basically a doctor or medical professional who's dying and he essentially writes about the experience and thoughts and kind of all of 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 all gonna die, right? And you and I can wanna be as immortal as we want, but at some point we're gonna 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 think you like literally meditate on your mortality? I necessarily think I meditate on it as much as... Are you afraid of death? Are 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 think that it was just one of these things where like, if you fixate on something and you worry about it, then, at least to me, 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 going back into the college environment and like things people 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 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, 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 Happen as 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 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. 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 explain it to myself. Listen, in my opinion, against 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 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 resonate, 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 is 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 this shit out of every day? I answered in a way that isn't meant to be accurate. It's meant to be the right answer for me, which is ultimately, you know, I talked to a lot of people who always ask like, what's the, what are you doing? Why

are you doing this? I say, 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, you know, enough being enough. And recently he talked about it in the context of Bitcoin. And so, Bitcoiners 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, go once they feel like they've got enough. But two, as 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 you say 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? Some people who start thinking about it when they're 60. Well, naturally you're not going to accomplish it before you're 60 if you just start thinking about it 60. People who start 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 this is really an ass formulation.

I almost like to sort of oscillate back and forth. So majority of the time is spent in the mode of enough is enough of gratitude, of basically being content with where you're at, like deeply appreciative at every moment and all the Bitcoin, whatever Bitcoin you have, being deeply appreciative of every moment and all the Bitcoin, whatever Bitcoin you have, being deeply appreciative of it 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 to being, like deeply self-critical and nothing is enough. Nothing you've ever done is worth anything. It's the Marvin Minsky said, like the secret to success is hating Nothing you've ever done is worth anything. It's the Marvin 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 the better. Nothing is 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, the madman comes out kind of thing. I also think it's kind of purpose driven in the sense of there's a lot of people who have the 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 you could do. They'll 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 courses 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 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. You know, I thank you for just educating the world for teaching me, inspire 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 Pumpliano.

And thank you to our sponsors, TheraGun Muscle of a Curry device, Sun Basket Meals delivery service, ExpressVPN, and indeed hiring website. Click their links to support this podcast. And now let me leave you 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. Thank you.