Anthony Pompliano: Bitcoin
Guests: Anthony Pompliano
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
Contents16 chapters
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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.
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Click their links to support this podcast.
As a side note, let me say that I'll be having many conversations in the coming
months about cryptocurrency with people of all kinds of backgrounds and worldviews.
Those who are proponents of Bitcoin, like Anthony, Nick Carter, Robert
Breedlove, Alex Glastine, and many others.
And those who are proponents of other cryptocurrency technologies, like Vitalik
Buterin, Charles Hoskinson, Richard Hart, Sergey Nazarov, Silvia
Macaulay, and many others as well.
I'm not framing this as a debate.
I'm simply looking to explore exciting ideas in the space of technologies that
could very well change human civilization and AGI civilization as well.
I appreciate that some communities are a bit more intense in their style
of communication and others, but I personally am only interested in open
minded, respectful collaboration in exploring ideas.
I personally try to like to approach conversations by considering that I may
be wrong about everything and I'm looking to learn.
I won't engage in 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 S.
Thompson said, whether you pay for that ticket with Bitcoin, Ethereum, or
the dollar, gold, seashells, a beer, or just a good old smile.
This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
And here is my conversation with Anthony Pampliano.
You served in the US Army for six years and spent 13 months in Iraq in 2008 and
2009. Can you tell the story of why you joined the army and what were some of
the moving difficulties, maybe lasting experiences from the time you served?
Sure. I joined when I was 17 years old, needed my parents to basically sign in
order to join. And I graduated a semester early from high school and thought I was
going to go play football in college and kind of enroll in the spring semester.
And when that didn't happen, basically was working at Chick Fil A and Quiznos.
And I had in my mind, look, this is probably not the path in life that I want.
And so I knew I was going to go to college.
I knew I was going to go play football in the fall, but I had this window of time
and so I walked into a recruiting office and just basically was like, I'm assuming
you guys need some help.
And, uh, you know, they gave me the whole pitch and, uh, you know, give you a signing
bonus, you can go jump out of planes and go do all this crazy stuff.
I just said, okay, let's do it.
This was, this was close to the 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, uh, in eighth grade, um, if I remember correctly.
And, uh, I remember, uh, being in school when it happened and, uh, I walked into a
classroom and the entire class, uh, somebody else's class, they were all talking to the
teacher about something.
The second that me and a couple other kids walked in and we got real quiet and the
teacher was like, Hey, go back to your like, homeroom.
And so it was just kind of a weird, like what's going on.
Uh, and then next thing I know, they called all the students into the cafeteria.
And this is back before, you know, every classroom really had a television in it and,
you know, cable and all that kind of stuff.
And so when we were there, they basically just said, listen, there's been this, uh,
event that's occurred.
All of your parents are going to come pick you guys up and, uh, they'll explain it to
you.
And so to, you know, a kid in eighth grade, you're basically like, what happened?
And so I got home and, uh, and I remember talking to my dad about it and my dad
basically gave me, you know, the, uh, the core American kind of talking points.
Right. Look, somebody from another country came here and tried to kill Americans and
was successful in doing that.
Um, and to some extent he just said, and I'm willing to bet, you know, we're going
to go back after them.
Did that wake you up a little bit to the idea that there's evil out there that, you
know, even just the idea of terrorism for many people that was, um, when it hits you
on your own land, it's a, it really shakes up your mind in some sense, world war two.
That's why world war two was fundamentally different for Americans than it is for the
people like in Russia and England and France and, uh, in Europe in general is
there's something about when there's a 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, uh, of course
it's Pearl Harbor, but like, this is like in recent history, it's like, they hit us
here, that was like a profound idea.
I think America was very, very good at exporting the violence
elsewhere for a long time.
And, uh, there was this element of, uh, complacency, but also this element of,
uh, um, you know, really just American superiority that doesn't happen here.
Right.
And, uh, I think that that woke people up, not only to, uh, you know, to the
idea that other places around the world may not like the American ideals, may not
like democracy and capitalism and, and that, but also, uh, 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, you know, kind of change that apparatus.
Uh, but on top of that, I think it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's
I think that it really woke people up to, uh, extremism around the world.
And, uh, I don't know if necessarily there was a change in the extremism as
much as it just was an awareness thing, right.
How, how many people, you know, kind of drew a line from, was it 92 or 93 with
the world trade center bombing to, you know, deep levels of extremism and hatred
of, uh, kind of the American industrial complex, probably not that many, 2001,
a lot of people.
And so I think that was, you know, again, as a, as a young kid, you don't
understand a lot of this stuff.
You basically just, Hey, somebody came here and tried to kill Americans.
And so, you know, we should go fight back, right.
Was kind of the, uh, the, the response I think that I had.
What role did that have psychologically for you when you then in 2006 join 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 you know, there is a war on terror.
And I know that people kind of, uh, criticize that whole formulation
framework of thinking, but nevertheless, you are going to Iraq.
You are going to Afghanistan, you're 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, like what the actual most impactful data points, if you were, or
kind of stories for me, uh, was the Pat Tillman story.
So I played football, uh, in high school and it was going to go play in college.
Um, and seeing, you know, this NFL player who basically just one day said, Hey, I'm
going to go and do this instead, uh, and walk away.
I don't know necessarily if it was a, uh, I want to pursue the same story right now.
So he ended up dying.
And so not exactly the, uh, the end result that you want, but I think it
was almost like, uh, he made it okay.
If you were on a certain trajectory in life to go take this detour and,
and to go do it.
Um, but the second thing is I was 17.
You're pretty stupid when you're 17, you're pretty naive when you're 17.
Right.
And so, uh, I almost, um, kind of backed into the deployment because
I signed up, uh, as a, uh, a reserve member.
And so basically the plan was to sign up for the reserves.
I was going to go to basic training, get all the, you know, kind of education
and qualification, I was going to go to college and then after college,
you know, maybe there's a chance that you will go and serve or do whatever.
For me, I ended up getting deployed when I was a junior in college
and we got pulled out of school.
And so at 20 years old, uh, it's not exactly what you thought you were
signing up for, right.
Especially to kind of leave school to go do it.
And then on top of that, uh, I probably had an advantage over most people, both
on the entry to combat and the exit to, uh, kind of a combat situation, which
that was football.
So I always explain that, um, in hindsight, you're in a male dominated
testosterone driven kind of combative sport where it's us first them.
And, and, uh, there's training and, and, uh, you know, injuries and just kind of
all of the things that go into playing a combat sport like football to now they
give you guns, but you still have a uniform on still male dominated.
It's just a little bit, you know, more serious in terms of the injuries and,
and, uh, potential deaths and things like that, but also on the exit from that
deployment, most guys I was there with, they're going back to being, you know,
prison guards, police officers working at the lumber yard, you know, just kind
of every day Americans.
And so I had the fortunate ability to go back into, uh, kind of that combative
environment, go back to play football.
And so it was almost this like deescalation on the way out, uh, where
they take your guns away.
We still got a uniform, still male dominated, uh, still combative.
And then eventually you're just a normal citizen.
And so I think that in some weird way, I was, you know, very fortunate
to kind of on the entry and exit, have that experience where other guys did.
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, there was two main takeaways that I took, right?
So one was, um, not a specific moment, but on multiple occasions, uh, 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, just not necessarily to you personally, just to the uniform, to what
you stand for, it's all this stuff.
When you see it, you see it right.
And I always think of, um, if you've ever, uh, watched the movie, uh, 12 strong and
in it, uh, they've got this Afghan, uh, Afghanistan warlord, and he's talking
to a bunch of soldiers and he says, you know, you don't have killer eyes.
You do, you do.
And he's just like, he can just tell, right?
He's, he's seen so many soldiers.
And so I think that that was a, a memory on a number of occasions where I just saw
young kids and I just said, they hate us.
Right.
And, and it's not you personally, it's what you stand for.
But the really big event was, um, when you first get to these combat zones, a lot of
times what will happen is, uh, 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 five, 95, 10, 90, all the way till it's 50, 50.
And then eventually it rotates.
And then it's majority of our team and a small number of their team.
And so what a lot of people will explain is the two most dangerous times in war
are actually the first two or three weeks 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
§02Transcript · 11:55–23:16
and, and, uh, who to look out for, what signs, all that kind of stuff.
And the last two or three weeks is you basically think you survived the
deployment, you're looking forward to going home.
So you become complacent, things like that.
And so we made it through that transition period with no issues.
Uh, but the literally the very first mission, uh, that we went out as a team,
ourselves, a hundred percent, um, there was two separate incidents.
Uh, one was we were driving in the middle of the night and, uh, what we think was a
sniper shot at a truck that I was in, I was standing up outside of it, uh, along
with a, uh, another guy.
And that was kind of just a wake up call again of never been shot at before.
Right.
And so I'll never forget, uh, you kind of heard this whiz go by and the guy next to
me was from a rural Pennsylvania.
And he just said, you know, look, I've never been shot at before either, but
I've done a lot of hunting, get the fuck down.
Okay.
And so, uh, we kept driving that night.
Um, and, uh, later on in the night, uh, an IED went off, a guy ran over an IED,
uh, who was at the front of the convoy.
And when that IED went off, uh, again, I had never been in a convoy that had been
blown up before, but the training kicks in.
And so immediately every single person starts screaming out IED, IED, and they
started 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.
Um, and so ultimately kind of through the end of that event, uh, there was a US
soldier that ended up dying.
He was, uh, shot in the head.
And, um, when we got back to the base, uh, kind of after that entire event,
I think it just hit us.
We are at war.
And if we make mistakes here, that is the cost of, you know, kind of those mistakes.
And this was somebody who I didn't know.
Uh, it was somebody who literally showed up, uh, kind of as secondary
support, uh, for our unit and basically, uh, was there to help us.
Right.
And so it was one of those weird situations where, uh, you have this emotional connection
because it's somebody who, uh, shared an event with you, but you didn't know them.
Right.
And you learn their name later and you understand that they have a family and
they have young kids and all this stuff.
And so again, as a 20 year old kid, you're kind of processing all this and
you just realize like the gun I have in my arm, my hands, it's real for a reason.
Right.
And we better take this seriously.
This is not, you know, let's joking around in kind of the barracks and, you
know, all the things that you would expect, you know, guys you're doing in the army.
So I think that was like the moment where I said, Hey, I'm going to learn a lot here.
Uh, and I got to make sure I get home.
And you snap it into the training, but nevertheless, I mean, you're somebody
who thinks philosophically about this world now, right?
You're, uh, very intelligent and things deeply about the world.
So looking back, you mentioned hatred in the 14 year old kids eyes, there's death.
So the way you kind of described this whole story is like training kicks in.
This, this shit is serious.
Like this is, uh, you know, there's a reason there's a gun in, in your hand.
So there's a strategic element.
There's like, you have to get the job done.
There's a task at hand, but at the same time, if you zoom out, there's a kid who
has hate for you, uh, 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 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, they're some of the largest pacifists in the world.
And I always revert back to Marcus Luttrell, who was a famous Navy SEAL, and
there's a movie 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 going to 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 costs.
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 at doing it.
Do you think, I'm thinking about that kid with the hatred.
Do you think there will always be hatred in the world?
Do you think there will always be hatred?
In the world, do you think, uh, from another perspective, do you think there'll
be war always, is that a fundamental aspect of human nature or is that
something we can escape?
Yeah.
So war, I think has like very negative connotations in terms of bullets and
bombs and death and kind of just very morbid type, um, um, 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, uh, or something else.
And so I think conflict will always exist.
The question is what form does war take moving forward?
And so in my mind, you know, it's starting to look a lot more clinical,
right?
A lot more drones, a lot less soldiers on the ground, a lot more use of special
forces and kind of these small, highly specialized teams rather than kind of big
mechanical armies.
Um, and then you get into like the information warfare and kind of cyber
warfare and you start to understand that we're at war with a lot of people right
now, right?
Doesn't mean we're necessarily dropping bombs, uh, on their countries.
Doesn't necessarily mean we're sending soldiers there, but on a daily basis, we
are engaged in these kind of, you know, cyber battlefields.
And so if that's where war starts to play out, um, it, one changes the tools
and tactics and techniques that, uh, we need to arm our country and other
countries will arm themselves with.
But it also changes the way that we think about war, right?
It seems, 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 you know, some percentage of them are going to die on the battlefield.
And then we're going to, you know, basically pipe back videos and articles
saying that American soldiers are dying.
Yeah.
It does seem to be a fundamental difference between the, the Genghis Khan
style, like if I would feel differently if somebody like hand to hand with a knife
murdered my family versus cyber security, why I stole all their data, stole all
their money, stole everything they own, falsified their identity, all that kind
of stuff that those are both traumatic events, but they do seem to be
fundamentally different, but maybe that's actually very narrow style thinking,
because ultimately you have to think about what is life and what's happiness.
And, um, it's like the samurai thinking, I'm not sure what's more painful.
If I take it to myself, like, I'm not sure what I would rather live through
being stabbed, like to death, or having my identity stolen, all my money stolen,
or maybe reputation destroyed, like with lies or something like that.
That that's very interesting to think about.
If you think about quality of life and all those kinds of things,
well, one's finite, right?
One's the pain ends and the other is kind of a long prolonged, almost torture.
So it's physical pain versus psychological pain.
It's really interesting to, it's really interesting to think about.
And I think another key piece to this, which I don't have answers to, but,
but there is an element of emotion and rage in the physical violence versus
again, more of that clinical, you know, information warfare.
And so, um, it's really easy to show a battlefield where there's death on both
sides and bombs being dropped and buildings destroyed, um, it fits very
well into propaganda for everyone involved, right, regardless of what side
they're on, when you start talking about cyber warfare, how many times have
we seen a big company get data hacked or information hacked and we all, you
know, read the headlines, maybe throw a tweet out and then move on with our day
and don't remember it anymore.
And so it's just very, very different.
I think, uh, in, in the, uh, 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, um, and kind of do bad things versus the actual actions themselves.
And so, um, even as a society, you know, if let's say, for example, you were to
walk down the street and you were to murder somebody on the sidewalk, completely
unprovoked, we would look at you and say, you are a, you know, a sociopath, uh, you
have everything wrong with you and that is somebody that we do not want in our
society, and therefore we will levy, you know, the extent of rule of law against
you in order to protect society from you, right?
And you become that monster, that beast, if in the same situation, somebody walks
§03Transcript · 23:16–34:56
in your house with a knife and you murder them or you kill them, now we put you up
on a pedestal as a hero, and those are two very, very different responses.
They may be just as morbid, they may be just as violent, uh, in terms of the
actual actions, the intentions, the way it's perceived is very, very different.
And so I think that, uh, as a world, we like a very black and white, clean cut,
you know, good, bad, uh, I think the world's a lot more messy than that.
And I think that, uh, a lot of times when you look at intention, it's hard for us
to tell what somebody's intention is, but I've looked at a lot of, you know, people
who are both considered very good and also a lot of people are considered very
bad and they sound very similar in terms of the motivations for their actions.
And so I think that it's just a really hard problem that probably doesn't
have a perfect solution or an answer.
Do you give much value to the intention or do you think it's better to look at
the results of the behavior, uh, as opposed to the, the underlying ideology?
Underlying ideology, the underlying intention of, 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.
Um, and frankly, we actually may be a better society or, uh, kind of kinder
as a humanity to each other if we spent more time looking at
intention rather than action.
Um, but again, you know, if somebody walks down the street and murders
somebody, uh, it's really hard to have a conversation and it may be inappropriate
for us to have a conversation about intention versus, uh, any level of,
of action, right?
So you're one of the prominent, I would say even the faces of the, the world
of cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, that whole entire world was dive straight in and
ask, uh, do you think, do you consider yourself a Bitcoin maximalist?
I think that the way I really look at it is, uh, I work backwards off of what
is the maximalism that I believe in and the world that I believe in is, uh, kind
of an automated world that is run on these open decentralized protocols.
Uh, and what we ultimately do is we return sovereignty and individualism
and, and kind of, uh, personal responsibility and liberty, uh,
to people over institutions.
And what we end up doing is we end up, uh, kind of taking what has historically
been a very analog or physical world economy and, uh, geographic rule.
And we then kind of put it in the cloud and this digital economy becomes the
prevalent way that we all, uh, conduct commerce, communicate, uh, 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, um, almost in a way, uh, put
an inanimate object up for, uh, you know, some sort of obsession, uh, to me,
it's much more about the ideals, the ethos, uh, and the most rational, uh,
and likely path to that kind of end result or that world that I think, you
know, is at this point, just a foregone conclusion.
So the distinction there, and maybe people don't know the terminology,
maximalism is basically saying, I really think this is a good idea.
Like, uh, you know, if you prefer a certain kind of diet, it could be a
keto maximalist saying like, this is probably, maybe it's not a hundred
percent, but probably the diet that's healthiest for humans kind of thing.
In the same sense, Bitcoin maximalism is saying, you know, of course we
don't know, there's a lot of uncertainty, but this particular technology seems
to be the best representations of some set of ideals that defines progress
in the future, but you're drawing a distinction between sort of, um, cult
like obsession about an object of any kind, whether it's keto, uh, or, uh,
Bitcoin, and just sort of believing that a technology is the best representation
of a particular set of ideals.
And you believe that sort of, uh, this moving into the cloud, uh, both
the distributed nature of it, but also just the digital nature of it is
something that's going to, uh, be a positive step for humanity.
Yeah.
I would even take maximalism a step further, and it's not just the kind
of singular viewpoint of this is the best, it's also, uh, an element
of it's anti everything else.
Right.
So, you know, take keto, for example, uh, the keto diet is not only the best diet.
All the other diets are bad.
Yeah.
Right.
And so it's, it's a very binary view of the world.
Um, I think that what's probably most misunderstood about, uh, let's take
Bitcoin, uh, as a specific example, is that most of the people who are labeled
Bitcoin maximalist, they would be open minded if they believe that something
else came along that was a superior technology or had a, a better, um, kind
of probability of achieving again, that ultimate vision, I think where, uh,
there's this controversy and kind of clashing of, uh, ideas is that the
Bitcoin community believes Bitcoin is the best way to do that and has very
specific arguments as to why the other things are not right.
And so what ultimately ends up happening, which is very weird in the investing
world, right, it's unlikely that you and I are going to sit down and you're
going to like Apple stock is the best stock and there's no other stock.
That's worth anything.
Yeah.
Right.
And, uh, and then also it's very weird if you said to me, um, you know, this
stock is worth zero and that's where everything that I own, I've put on a
short on one single company, right?
There's diversification.
There's a much more kind of probabilistic thinking in finance in general.
Uh, when it comes to this specific world of cryptocurrency and kind of digital
assets, if you will, uh, is there's two main groups of people who are trying to
build two very, very different things at the onset, but when you unpack it and you
start to spend more and more time on it, you rise, they're actually trying to
accomplish the same thing in two different ways.
So Bitcoin is seen, I think, as a, uh, 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 digital currency, but it's
also a programmatic kind of transparent, um, money.
And, uh, it's essentially just 180 degrees difference than the inflationary,
you know, non transparent, uh, 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 at Ethereum with kind of the world computer
approach, and you can kind of go down the line with all their other
arguments as to what they're trying to build.
I think the big difference just comes down to, uh, innovation versus security.
And when you simplistically look at it via that lens, you actually understand
where both people are coming from.
When you say security, sorry to interrupt, do you mean financial
security or do you mean like literally the, the, the security of the,
of the particular cryptocurrency?
The, the technical security of a blockchain.
So when you look at, let's say, um, Bitcoin versus Ethereum, right?
Bitcoin has decided in that community has decided security is the number
one thing that you have to optimize for.
So decentralization, um, over everything else in terms of transaction
speeds, uh, cost, anything that you could come up with, that is, uh, something
that would be important for a currency.
The number one thing to optimize for is security.
And as we have seen, uh, with a lot of technologies, right?
Facebook's, uh, Libra or now what's known as DiEM is a great example.
Uh, not having decentralization is susceptible to the nation state.
And so a lot of these other platforms and blockchains, uh, they say security
is important, but it's not the most important thing we believe there's a
trade off between, you know, a little less security and transaction speed or
composability or whatever it is.
And so take a theorem as kind of the second, uh, largest, uh, community
and blockchain by market cap.
It was created because somebody wanted to, or a group of people
wanted to do something on Bitcoin.
They felt like they couldn't do it.
And so they said, Hey, we're going to go create something that has the smart
contracts that we can then go do here.
Again, this is technology, right?
And so the tribalism of like, you're right, you're wrong to me is a little
childish, just in the sense of like the market is going to decide what is most
valuable.
And then when you go inside of that community, like there's a lot of dumb
ideas, people are trying to build around Bitcoin, but there's also a lot of really,
really great ideas that people are trying to build around Bitcoin, same thing in
the Ethereum world. And so what you end up getting, I think, is the tribalism
really comes out of the idea that there's a ticker price that is attached
to all of this, right?
If you go back in history of technology, venture capitalists didn't sit around
the table and yell and scream at each other in this like religious zealot way,
right? Because you bet on one type of cloud computing platform.
And I bet on another one, right?
It's just the market's going to decide, we're both going to work on and try to
make our successful, uh, here in the world.
I think that the sensitivity and mainly it 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,
um, there's arguments for it saying, Hey, look, uh, this now gives kind of the
little guy, some sort of access and an ability to do it.
But there's also arguments against it. Some people say, Hey, it's easier to dupe
them and it's easier to run scams and kind of all this stuff.
And so ultimately I think that, uh, crypto is this like arena of ideas.
It is literally the war of attrition and, uh, what will end up happening is 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, you know, here and there, uh, it's fun.
It's, you know, engaging.
Whatever, but ultimately it doesn't really matter 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, uh, pardon the French shit talking.
And, and so we kind of focus on that, but that's not necessarily a 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.
Um, but ultimately it's a belief system that there's nothing backing this, uh,
other than, uh, a government asks you to pay your taxes in it, right?
And they can have a monopoly on violence, uh, in terms of they can put you in jail.
If you don't pay your taxes, uh, they can, uh, they can, uh, they can
go to other countries and they can invade and do all this stuff.
It wasn't always like that, right?
It was historically a layer one technology was gold.
And so gold was a fantastic store of value.
You knew that if you held gold, it wasn't going to be inflated away.
It was sound money was outside the system and no one could create more of it.
And the reason why that's important is because that optimization for store
of value served as the bedrock of the entire stack of, uh, money.
Uh, for 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 I, and you said, Hey, I want a couple of ounces of gold and I
had a whole bar, I'd have to literally shave off the ounces of gold.
Uh, it's heavy to carry around.
If you said to me, Hey, you're in one city, mail it to me, really expensive.
You know, there's all these issues with it.
§04Transcript · 34:57–46:02
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 with it.
That gold in order to make it easier to transact.
And so we created paper claims on the gold.
So, Hey, don't carry around the gold in your pocket anymore.
Put it in a vault or a bank.
They're going to issue a paper claim.
Now you and I can trade these paper claims around.
And at any point, if you want the gold, you just show up and you say, Hey, give
me three ounces of gold or two bars or whatever.
And so that actually made the store of value.
It was allowed that to be the anchor and kind of the most important part, the
security of your, of your purchasing power, but now it became easier to transact.
And then eventually we built layers even on top of that.
So everything from electronic money, uh, kind of electronic UCIPS, all the way
to credit and other systems on top of that gold 1971 comes around and obviously
we D peg from that gold, right?
And it was a temporary measure at the time.
We ended up not going back to it.
And so what you moved or transitioned from was sound money, which was outside
the system, no one could create more to now the government had full control.
They could create as much as they wanted to.
They tried to be responsible and disciplined, but obviously hard to do.
Sometimes we've been really good at it.
Sometimes we've been less good at it.
And then you go around the world and some countries have absolutely sucked
at it and some have been good at it.
And so when you look into the Bitcoin world, I think that when you look at
this 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.
Uh, and so what we're going to do is we're going to go build something new.
And so you go get, you know, kind of all of the various versions there.
The Bitcoin community says, no, just like gold had paper claims and other
things built on top and layer two, three, four, five, we're going to do that here.
And so they've already started to build kind of this layer two where
it's easier to transact.
It's cheaper, it's faster, et cetera.
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 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, right?
Like that is the most important thing because you can always improve
the other components, but you can't go back and fix that kind of core piece.
So money, money's a, an idea that we all it's like an emergent
idea that we believe in.
You're saying that security is one of the most fundamental catalysts or fuels
for that idea to sort of take hold and be stable and sort of take over the world.
The other stuff is really nice to have, but if you don't have the security,
you're not going to, like, it's not going to spread in the viral
sense in, in our human brains.
Well, and especially in light of the kind of the macro economy, right?
So like, what's so fascinating about the last 12 months is, um, in
investing in general, the best returns, right?
I kind of put that in air quotes a little bit is something that is different
than everything else and right.
So being different and wrong just means you're an idiot, right?
Being different and right means that that's where kind of the 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 done and
decisions made in a very non transparent process.
And what we've watched is the manipulation of all of those currencies
over the last 12 months in direct contrast to that is this thing, Bitcoin,
which is outside of the system, has a finite supply, transparent and programmatic
monetary policy. And so when you see those two systems kind of, um, in comparison
to each other in the United States, there's a lot of people who say the dollar
works great for me. I can go to the ATM, I can get out physical cash.
If I want to swipe a card, I could do that.
My money in my bank doesn't lose 50% of its value in a day in terms of
purchasing power. Like the dollar's pretty good.
When you go to other countries, that might not be the case.
And so I do think that there's a kind of a relative analysis that goes on here.
If you compare Bitcoin to the dollar, there's all kinds of arguments to make
that the dollar is better as a medium of exchange today.
But if I go and I tell you, well, what about in these kind of extreme examples
of Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Turkey, et cetera.
And so I think that that's kind of one perspective to view this through is
security versus all of the innovative components of a medium of exchange, et
cetera. The second thing, though, that I think is really important is
around censorship.
And so when you look at, again, every currency in the world today, every
single financial service, they're highly susceptible to censorship.
And actually, I would argue the United States is in the business of
censorship in terms of 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 it, when you talk about censorship,
do you mean just the censoring your ability to operate freely in the world?
Well, look at it a little bit differently, which is that the United
States has kind of the American superiority because we have the bombs,
the bullets, the soldiers and 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 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 just argue, listen, we
shouldn't hurt anyone at the expense of punishing one person or a group
of people. There's other people argue against that. But I do think that
if you really kind of zoom out and you say, I'm going to take myself out
of the Western worldview, and I'm simply going to look at this as we're
all part of the human race, it's censorship. And there might be an
argument for censorship, but there also might be an argument against
the censorship. And so what Bitcoin does, as that specific kind of
payment network is it says anyone in the world with an internet connection,
I don't care where you were 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're not going to
care. If you have an internet connection, you can plug into this
monetary system. And you can move value around the world to anyone
else without asking for permission. And in the United States, we
basically have that ability in the US dollar kind of traditional
banking system, I can pretty much send money to almost anyone I want
unless they're a really bad person that's on some list or something.
Most people in the world don't have that capability. And so what
you're essentially doing is you're democratizing access to a true store
value, and a medium of exchange, right. And so what you see in many
of these countries is that when their currency starts to fail, the
first thing that a government or a group of people in power and
influence do is they lock the citizens into the currency with
capital controls. Why? Because if you let them out, it exasperates
the problem. And so now what we're seeing is we basically are giving
a tool to billions of people around the world that is a peaceful
protest. Right? You and I had no say at all. When not only the
Federal Reserve and elected officials here in the United
States, but central banks around the world over the last 12 months
decided to create trillions of dollars and injected into the
monetary system. Right? They have arguments, and some of them are
very good arguments as to why they should do that. They're
trying to mitigate short term pain. Long term, they'll figure
out the other issues, right? They have very kind of elaborate and
well articulated kind of viewpoint as to why they're
doing it. But you and I had no say. And so when you start to
look at, we have a very small group of people in this world,
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? Why
is it important to the world? It is giving access to anyone in
the world with an internet connection to a store of value
and a 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 gonna 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 value assets in general. And so
when you start to look at Bitcoin, specifically, I think
that what you're seeing is you're seeing a generational gap,
where young people say, I grew up with a phone in my hand, I'm
digitally native, the whole idea of going to the bank and
sending a wire, or going to an ATM and getting physical cash is
an antiquated idea in their mind, right? I one time asked my
brother, he's 24 years old. And I said, Hey, how do you send
money to your friends? And he gave me one answer, which I
expected, which was Venmo. And the second answer, I didn't
expect he said Uber. I said, How do you send money via Uber? He
said, Well, we get in a car together. And at the end, we
split the ride. And so again, you and I have probably both
done that. But I never thought of it as a way to send money to
each other. And so it is a psychological difference between
even me, who's only, you know, a decade older than him or so,
and his peer group. And so I think as we're watching kind of
Bitcoin continue this ascent, ultimately, what we're seeing is
§05Transcript · 46:02–57:24
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 gonna 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, 810% growth, every year, it's amazing, just get invested
in the stock market, and you'll make money over a long period of
time, regardless of the dips along the way. If you 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 6040 type global portfolio
doesn't work anymore, right? 40% of it in bonds is just not going
to get it done. And so when you start to look at this, people
first look at Bitcoin via two main ways, in my opinion, they
look at it one as a store value, should I actually go and put
some of my wealth there use it as a savings technology, right?
We ask people in the traditional world, if you're a teacher, a
fireman, an accounting, you know, mid level manager, we say,
hey, go do your job, be best in class as a fireman or as a
teacher. And then Oh, by the way, you 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 got to go be an investor. So I
think savings technology for Bitcoin standpoint is, if you
buy satoshis 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, 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 the store of value. Right? The reason why
somebody buys gold is because the store of value, right
historically, that's a narrative driven type asset, though,
right? We tell people it's scarce, we tell people that it
is a store of value. When you look at it, though, we don't
know how much gold exists in the world, we have a good estimate,
right? But we don't actually we can't prove how much there is.
We don't know how much is coming out of the ground every day.
Again, great, fantastic estimate. But we can't prove it.
And we don't know what the total supply and that's what you mean
by narrative driven, we can't really prove it, like
mathematically, we you I and everyone else in the world has
lived in a narrative driven world for the last couple of
decades, right? And what the internet and digital technologies
have done is it opened up the possibility and the desire from
people to have a world now where I can validate things. So when I
see that headline, I want to see you say whatever happened to the
news, if you're the subject of the news, rather than have
somebody else tell me the story. If I see that you say something
is scarce, prove to me that it is scarce. And so I think that's
kind of a psychological shift, the younger generation is
starting to understand because ultimately, you and I probably
grew up in a world where parents could tell us the story. And we
just believed it. You know, dad or mom says it 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, oh, you got the story wrong, right. And so I think
that that that provability or that that validation ends up
becoming really, really important. And so, you know,
look at something like gold, I think that people are
drastically underestimating the shift that's underway right now.
Gold is one down in value since April, or I'm sorry, August of
2020. And so in a timeframe where central banks have had
historic quantitative using 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
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's continues to contract. You have central
banks that now at some times are net sellers and sometimes net
buyers, right? So okay, again, contraction there. And then from
the investment standpoint, the actual price, the daily price of
this continues to fall, which is a signal that there's a
contracting demand from an investment perspective. That's
93% of all use of gold, only 7% of it's used for actual
technology and metal conduction and things like that. And so
you have a $10 trillion 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 and the elite, but also from financial
institutions, corporations, pension funds, etc. into this
kind of digital sound money.
So you're saying that there's a kind of shift from gold to
Bitcoin, because they have a lot of the same properties, except
one is in the physical space, the other is 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 is seeing a pattern that you're referring
to now, but more drastically into the future, where there's
a complete shift,
if you line up the gold community and the Bitcoin
community next to each other, they'll agree on all the
problems that they that they see in the world, right? They'll
actually agree on the solution that sound money is the solution
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, someone is just outside the system, and
no one can create more of it. So nobody controls it. This is
scarcity is fundamental. Exactly why scarcity important in money?
I think scarcity just has this very high correlation to value
across all assets, not just money, right? Money happens to
be the unit of account that we use in terms of daily commerce.
But whether it is, you know, as we're seeing now, sneakers, or
you know, 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, you know, thousands
and thousands of years. Yeah, I gotta say, that's my view on
life and love in general, is scarcity is what makes it
valuable. People talk about immortality.
You know, I would like to be immortal, but it does, it does
seem that when you let go of the finiteness 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 with love, I think
criticism of sort of dating culture and all that kind of
stuff. Like I haven't had shocking revelation that I've
never been on a tinder date or any of those things. I believe
that scarcity in dating and interaction is like, intensifies
the value of when the interactions do happen. So, when
they like when love does happen. And so in that sense, there's
something magical about scarcity in the more subjective
psychological social world, as well. And perhaps money is just
another version of that, right? It's just it's all about the
stories and ideas we tell ourselves.
I think they're actually more interconnected than you're
giving it credit for, right? Which is, what is money? Money
is time, ultimately, right? The pursuit of the acquisition of
money, right, of whether it's a currency or true money, is
because that should give you more time, right? And that's
what would 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 a lot of me, 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
the arrows, you're dead, you die on the spot. And so there's
a number of scenes where people are basically running, you know,
to get to you, and I give you a little bit more time so that
you can get to work on Monday, and then you work to acquire
time. And so basically, time becomes this currency. But what
becomes very fascinating about it is there are sections in
society, where literally, there's physical places, if you
only have, let's say, 72 hours or less, you're allowed to go to
Section 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 1000 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 these
galas and, you know, poker nights and all this stuff. And
one of the first things that he learns is that in the lower end
of society, everyone is running everywhere at all times in the
movie, because time is so finite, and it is so scarce.
And so therefore, why would I walk down the street, I must run
down the street. In the highest level of society, no one runs
anywhere. And in fact, if you run, you are seen as lower
class. Yeah, because wealth is time. And so that movie is, you
know, it's got a ton of kind of 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 who've heard about this
already. But if you think of a million seconds, it's about 11
§06Transcript · 57:24–1:09:36
days, a billion seconds is 31 years. And so if I said to
somebody, you have to switch lives with Warren Buffett,
would you do it? Some people would say, Sure, that'd be
their initial reaction. But you got have to be you know, 92
years old, is the money worth the lack of time? Most people
would say no, right? And there's this guy, Graham Duncan, who
really articulated this well. And ultimately, what ends up
happening is you rest time is more valuable than the money.
But the you acquire the money to gain more time. And the reason
is valuable is because of the scarcity of time. We currently
have the by the biology, the physics means that this is not
just the narrative we tell ourselves, maybe it is, I don't
know, but it feels like pretty sure we're mortal. And in that
sense, the scarcity there gives value to time, it's fascinating
to think about all the thought experiments here of if that
could actually be on the economy, if you can actually
convert time in a frictionless way to money.
Well, and if you start to pull on this a little bit and say,
okay, a young person today, let's say somebody in their
20s, has about 2 billion seconds left in their life, right, kind
of 60 years, give or take, based on life expectancy. They
usually, until they start to understand this concept, think
of wealth in dollar terms. But dollars are being devalued. And
so you know, a million dollars doesn't get you what it used to
get, right is 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 $100,000. When I get the $100,000, the
$100,000 five years from now doesn't buy me what I thought it
did. So now I need 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 in
kind of this idea of sound money is you want to be able to
acquire an asset that not only will hold the value, right, the
store of value over time, but it will actually appreciate over
time. And so when you look at something like Bitcoin against
the dollar against other types of assets, all of these assets
are down compared to Bitcoin, right? Now, some of that's just
in the early days of kind of the pricing of an asset, you go from
very small to something much larger. But now what you start
to look at is well, if you have a finite supply of something,
what ends up happening is people begin to value it more. And so
in a world where dollars are infinite, and other fiat
currencies are infinite, Bitcoin becomes very, very interesting,
very special, and something that is very aspirational. And so I
think that's where you're starting to see people say,
wait a second, this is something where that finite, secure store
of value is essential to wealth generation and preservation over
a long period of time.
And if Sam Harris is right, that free will is an illusion. This
is really interesting to think about. Maybe time is a kind of
blockchain, 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 it'll be
time, once we crack open that, in fact, the universe is fully
deterministic. So maybe that's what like Eric Weinstein is
afraid of, once you figure out the theories of everything of
physics, 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. 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. And there's arguments and
controversy over how fast that's happening, but it's
happening. The people who are holding the assets that have any
level of scarcity, right, real estate may not be finite, but
it's scarce, right? Art may not be finite, but it's scarce. Gold
may not be finite, but it's scarce. Those assets continue to
appreciate against the devaluing currency. And so when
you then say, No, I have complete finite supply, with
provability, and this transparency around it, where
everyone knows how much is there and what where it's going. And
now all of a sudden, you and I can transact back and forth that
value. And it is a representation of time. Because
what I can essentially do is if I gather or acquire more of
that wealth, I then can apply leverage to my life. I can use
machines, humans, or some other resources. And basically now
free up my time.
Yeah, and it's not fun 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 talk to him a lot. He seems to have
stepped into the beautiful dance of human communication and the
social dynamics that is the Bitcoin cryptocurrency
community. Do you have thoughts on gauge, theoretic concepts,
conceptualization of the world, or just Eric in general? He's
got a lot of love in his heart, and he's got a grace in the way
he communicates. But he's also 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,
inspiring about that whole dynamic that went down?
So I don't know all 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 they're an independent thinker who are courageous
enough to speak their truth, whatever that may be. They are
humble enough to revisit their ideas and say, I got this right,
I got this wrong information change, I'll change my mind.
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 kind of thought process. They're willing to talk
about things that others may think are taboo, right? They're
willing to change their mind, which all of a sudden has become
a bad thing rather than a good thing. And so when I see the
exploration of ideas in public, I actually think that those are
the people who are most open to the kind of VM it blowback as
well. Right? Because that's part of what they're doing is that
they're eliciting, hey, I'm going to throw an idea into the
arena. If it doesn't get attacked, they actually may be
more nervous than if there is some level of, you know, kind of
war of attrition, if you will. And so what I've seen with a
number of the people who have done this, everyone from some of
the best, you know, hedge fund managers and kind of money
managers in the world, all the way to what I'll consider some
of the most intellectual people in the world is they play with
these ideas. And they play with the ideas and they play with
them and they put 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
needs to unseat any of the existing ones, but become the
global reserve currency of the internet, right, this digital
economy, you need shepherds of it. And so just like a
technology company wants to find those loyal fans that are
willing to go out and market and word of mouth and, and kind of
not only promote it, but also protect it. This technology
that is this decentralized thing, which uses a financial
incentive in order to elicit the buy in, not from a financial
perspective, but from a mental energy standpoint, has built one
of the most rabid, powerful and engaged communities on the
internet. And what ends up happening is those people have
thought more about these ideas, and actually challenged those
ideas more than anyone else in the world. And so I've got a lot
of folks who will just say, there's this guy Marty Bent, who
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 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 for five, seven, eight, 10
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. 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
sort of 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 like how much
you understand. And that's actually the process about
learning, then you realize you don't understand much. What
I've noticed with the Bitcoin community is they're not as
patient with the basics of the Dunning Kruger effect. Like if
I step in and make declarative statements about Bitcoin, like
I, you know, I read a long time ago, the white paper, like at
the cursory level, I felt that I understand the technology,
this is basic intuitions. You know, I didn't think about the
social dynamics. I didn't think about any like financial
implications and a lot of the deep, actually the ongoing
innovations and all that kind of stuff. But I thought I
understood that technology. And so I step in and make
declarative statements. I think those are the 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
§07Transcript · 1:09:36–1:21:40
off putting to me. I'm somebody that tries to communicate love
and live that with everything I do. And there is a level of
disrespect that I've experienced, not directly just
observing others, people have been mostly kind to me. And I
appreciate that. But if you're going to criticize me about my
exploration of ideas in Bitcoin, you have to also
acknowledge that I'm a human being that got like a PhD in
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've
really thought deeply and I really care. Like I know a lot
of shit. And it's possible that I actually have a lot of ideas
that you can learn from. Now, if it's agriculture, fine. Or if
it's artificial intelligence, fine. Like I know what I'm
talking about, about certain things. And I could be wrong
about a lot of things. And there's like an exchange of
ideas that 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. They're just overly
sensitive now to bullshit. They're like triggered by
statements. 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, I guess, develop
patience and so on. Especially when you feel like in my case
that the person is coming from a good place, right? I don't
know if there's something you could say that's positive about
the future of this kind of overcoming this toxicity.
I think there's a couple of trends that are all kind of
coalescing here in these types of experiences. So one is when
you look at a community, there's always a spectrum in
terms of there's some people who over index on kindness and
stupidity. And there's some people who over index on
intelligence and basically just being an asshole. And then you
get everyone in between. And so naturally, as we know, the
extremist ends of any community end up being the loudest
usually. The second thing is there is from the outsider
view, like at the beginning of the exploration of ideas, it's
very much a learning process. 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. The truth is probably
somewhere in between there. 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 internet culture and narratives better
than almost anyone. And so you see this with kind of 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 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 because they're going to trot out their
lawyers, their regulators, their lobbyists, right? Like all this
stuff. If you instead say, I'm going to meme you to death on
the internet and I'm going to 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 the conflict. 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 or the
Federal Reserve start tweeting memes. Yeah, right. It it would
almost the 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 visceral reaction, sometimes
there's even what I would call bullying or or or kind of
outward projection of things, right? Even though it may be a
small percentage, it'll happen every once in a while. What
they do understand, though, is that these establishments are
made up of humans. And what you can actually do, one of the
best ways to pick apart an institution is to recruit from
inside of them one by one. Yes. And so what you're starting
to see now is I mean, I get the messages on Twitter and
LinkedIn all the time. Hey, I'm a banker by trade, but I'm a
bitcoiner at heart, right? And so what you're doing is you're
essentially infiltrating the organizations, not in in
physical, you know, population. Yeah. But with the ideas and
with the philosophies, banker in the streets, bitcoiner in the
sheets. Yeah. Okay. I like it. With that said, in terms of
shitposting and memes, I gotta say like 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 shitposting. 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,
are 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 I keep hearing Bitcoin is love. They're trying
to convert me. The one that you have to laugh at, right?
Probably my favorite one out of all of it is I've seen on
multiple occasions, you know, Mark Cuban a couple of years
ago, Kevin O Leary, whoever, you know, wealthy people,
billionaires, etcetera, and you have people on anonymous
accounts who who knows who they are telling them have fun
staying poor, right? It's just, you know, it's just, again,
part of a community and I think it's a feature, not a bug.
There's bad aspects to it at times but I do think it's a net
positive. Yeah, 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. It just added
my own curiosity but I've talked to Ray Dalio a few
times. So, Ray Dalio, I think was one of those people that
took that journey, the Bitcoin journey. Do you have thoughts
about him specifically about that whole world and about the
journey maybe of others that are going through the same
process because Ray is, at least from my perspective, I'm a
bit of an outsider. He's one of the most insightful and deep
thinkers about investment, about finance, about economics
in general. Actually, about life. So, it's interesting to
see him go on 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. Yeah. Right? There's no denying that they're
incredibly intelligent. There's no denying that actually,
especially in the hedge fund world, they're some of the most
open minded people in terms of they're willing to change their
mind when they get new information. There's no doubt
that they are historians in the sense of having studied
financial markets and cycles over time. And also, 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. He, for a while now, has been all over and
famously said, you know, cash is trash, investible assets,
right? He kind of like just knew all of it. And for a long
time, Bitcoiners have said, Ray, you understand the Bitcoin
argument, you're just missing the last part, which is Bitcoin
is 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, you know, Gates is a good
example, right? Warren Buffett is a good example. Ray Dalio is
a good example, etc. And so, you have to give credit, I think,
to Dalio in the sense of he kept an open mind about all of
this and more so than many of his peers has continued to do
the work and come around to this idea. And now, I don't
want to know if I 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, Ray Dalio,
Howard Marks now 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 for our family, right?
And kind of we've had exposure to it. I think what it does is
more than anything, it's not going to convince somebody to
go and take it seriously or go ahead and make an allocation.
It reduces career risk. And so, if all of a sudden when Paul
Tudor Jones and Stanley Druckenmiller come out and
say, hey, I own Bitcoin and here's why, every other
investor on Wall Street now can say to an investment
committee, well, it's good enough for Paul Tudor Jones,
it's good enough for Stanley Druckenmiller. And so, I think
that it's very interesting because 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, sort of
financial institutions started. And 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
§08Transcript · 1:21:40–1:32:26
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 if you
short circuit the journey, it's almost like somebody doesn't
appreciate it, right? If you take, let's say, somebody who's
a young kid and you just give them a bunch of money and they
didn't have to work hard for it. They don't really
appreciate it. Well, 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. 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,
right, physical deed to a home, 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, you know, maybe it takes
two days to transact rather than actually mailing it across
the world. Now, what we're seeing is a transition from
those electronic QCIPs 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, RMB. 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 DiEM 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 becomes interesting because all of the
currencies are the same except for this one right now and maybe
there will be others in the future. 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 somebody. And so, when you then have that pretty big
difference in that competition at the monetary policy layer,
it's actually not going to matter where you get paid.
Right? And what I mean by that is like you and I both live in
a single currency environment. I get paid in dollars. I
historically have saved in dollars. All of the assets in
my life are denominated in dollars and I owe my debts in
dollars, whether it's taxes or in the private market. And I
don't have to worry about foreign currencies. I don't
exchange anything. The only time I would ever think about
another currency is if I'm going to another country in
their single currency environment. And in order to
change or exchange my currency, I go to the bank or I go get
ripped off at the airport. Right? Those are my two options.
So, it's 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 click of a button, switch into 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 in 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 grows my purchasing
power. Oh, I need to pay my taxes. Let me switch back into
dollars with click of a button and pay. When you go to a
multi currency world, it's not just about currency. It's now
multi asset world. Because not only is the currency
digitized, but that same technology is used to digitize
stocks, bonds, and commodities as well. And so, today we live
in a very fragmented financial world where basically I have a
brokerage account, I have a bank account, I may have an
alternative asset account, etc. When I can put all those assets
in a single digital wallet, and I can then go from asset to
asset without having to go back to a single unit of account.
Like frictionless going 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 QCIP currencies or assets either because
there's too long of a settlement time. So you can't
get true automation, right? So the whole idea of the car's
going to drive over a strip in the road and it's going to
pay the toll, right? Well, that can't happen right now
because literally the transaction won't go through,
right? And so I always joke that in an automated world,
it's like a CD ROM, but we're trying to take cassette tape
player assets and put it in the CD ROM. It's just incompatible
technology. Reference is nobody understands at this point.
By the way, you need to update your reference. I probably
do. It's like taking a CD ROM and trying to put an MP3
player into a 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 technology is created, you can
do two things. You can either create new things the world's
never seen before, or you can use it to improve the old
world. Most people, because it's the easiest thing to
think about, want to improve the old world. So an equivalent
of this would be when the internet came along, a media
company that had newspapers would say, hey, we should take
a PDF of the newspaper and we should put it on a website. And
now anyone in the world can go to this website 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.
And so what I think we're about to watch happen is we're going
to digitize the assets. We're going to put them all into
these digital wallets. You're going to get automated
technologies where machines can now 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 the
technology problem. They can't keep track of it all. How do
they pay everyone every day? How do they pay everyone every
hour? 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. And it almost makes me sad
looking into the future when we'll look back at this time.
It's like how incredibly inefficient financial
transactions were. Like the transaction of value of any
kind. Like how to pay each other. Like there has to be
processes. There's like payroll and all this kind of just the
entirety of the transactions is just like painful. Almost
all transactions are painful. 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. It's
actually really interesting especially when you start to
move that into the space of data. There's a lot of people
thinking about privacy and data and like can we put, can
we like convert data into like 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 the service for free if you hand over the data
but there's like explicit transaction going on. So you
can empower all those kinds of things that will just like
fundamentally change our world. That's really, really,
really exciting.
One of the most interesting things to me is I invested in
a company called Bridget and 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 1st 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
some big percentage of those $8 billion of value that flows
to large institutions on overdraft fees.
Yeah and also I mean this whole process with overdraft fees
and just many of the financial transactions we have to live
through today forces many of us to be like accountants, like
to understand 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 high layers of
like providing services for others, of like following your
passions and like working for others, like doing cool shit
or you know basically providing value, exchanging value
in the world and not thinking about the money. The money
takes care of itself and then you see the results of it.
So you're able to think in terms of money but not have to
know how like the accounting works.
Automation simply frees humans up to do more creative
work.
§09Transcript · 1:32:26–1:43:52
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
Like that's it.
Yeah.
And what we
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 ushers 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 and almost like a GoFundMe 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
a 2007 that's when the iPhone came out Uber wasn't possible
right I'm just going to lie 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 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 this idea of I think big clout
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 big cloud is currently an efficient
representation of that but I am truly happy that however that
thing works I'm just one notch above Vladimir Putin which is
one of the that's like one of the bucket list items for me to
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 yeah but
that's how the technology evolution works right is it's
really hard to do at 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 lion's share and you don't now there's things like these
ISAs these income sharing agreements where basically I
will educate you on something train you on something I'll put
up capital right and then over time you'll pay me back plus
profits as some version eventually I don't know what it
looks like but being able to get upside in somebody's success
for having risk capital early on doesn't seem that far off
see it in professional sports you see it in you know 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 and 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 this stuff's
going to happen it's just how I think the world is waiting and
some of us are trying to create that future world which is like
what are the applications of this technology that will
transform the world and then you know I hate the term but
killer apps like cool ideas that are implemented effectively at
scale that transform the world and there's been a there's been
a lot of different ideas popping up like the there's a
lot of ideas about social networks that are built on top
of the technology and all that kind of stuff so but let me
actually 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 and you can acquire Bitcoin in
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
use cash app the you know they 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 and just your opinions this do not
use this to invest or take as financial expertise that said
like is there something you recommend that's an easy entry
point for somebody that's like hmm I wonder if I can convert
this hundred dollars into whatever amount of Bitcoin what
do you recommend what are the options so there's a lot of
options 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 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 wallet there's kind of all these storage
options so BlockFi is you know kind of the one that I'm biased
towards because I'm sorry to interrupt so BlockFi is Bitcoin
only or is it an exchange with other crypto 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 like I go to
a website and I convert dollars to Bitcoin that's a kind of
storage that's like online banking right what else is
there so there's a couple of different things that you can
do right and let's use the legacy system as kind of an
example so if I want to 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 you know
millions and millions of dollars there I'm going to be
protected pretty much if anything happens through FDIC
insurance if I want to do that I'm taking that counterparty
risk though so it's mitigated but there's still counterparty
risk I'm counting on that bank but it is easier to move it
around right if all of a sudden you call me up and say hey send
me some money I can press a couple buttons on my computer
and it'll send it to you if I want deeper level of security I
can go and I can get the physical dollars and I can go
and I can you know put under my mattress right and I can say
you know what it's not gonna be as easy to send it to you
immediately but if I really want to I can go underneath my
mattress pretty quickly I can grab it I can get it back to
the bank and then I can send you the money the third thing I
could do is I could basically take those physical dollars out
of the bank and I could go and I could go put it literally you
know in a vault somewhere that I don't have control over that's
behind 10 passwords and biometric scanning and like it's
really difficult to even get to it right so if you can 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 BlockFi but you also can do it on places like
Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken, etc. Also Cash App. Cash App. You can
do it on Cash App. I think I think they're still sponsoring
this podcast. I'm not biased at all. So once you get Bitcoin
on any of these venues you can leave it there on that venue.
Now the trade off is you're taking counterparty risk so
somebody else is responsible for the security and the
protection of it in many cases big well known companies who
have billions of billions of dollars of assets they have
higher levels of security that's why they're well known
that's why people trust them whatever but you are taking
counterparty risk it is easier to quickly send to somebody so
that so the trade off of like ease of use but counterparty
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
an exchange and you can put it in some level of kind of what
I'll call a second layer of storage that second layer
storage could be a hardware device that you can quickly
just you know grab off your desk and plug into your
computer and immediately use that's what they call like a
hardware 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 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 like the exchange software wallet
hardware wallet and then there's something called deep
storage right or cold storage and this is you know
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 like the odds that somebody's
physically going to go there there's armed guards there's
you know kind of all this type of stuff but again you're
taking some level of counterparty risk because they
have your Bitcoin and so the saying or the phrase is not
your keys not your coins whereas my buddy Isaiah Jackson
came up with he said not your keys 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
§10Transcript · 1:43:52–1:55:57
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 what you are now able to do is
you're able to use digital sound money you're able to
keep control of it you and you alone are responsible for it
so the idea of personal responsibility and then also
you and you alone make the decisions as to whether you
hold on to it or you use it without censorship right no
one can tell you what you can do with it or can't do with it
and so the purchase and the storage what I find is
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 sort of comment on that because you
have both sort of cash app and the BlockFi 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 wanna you know keep some of it there but you wanna move
it to the hardware wallet and the cold storage of the
hardware wallet is like you can disconnect this from the
computer because ultimately stuff that's connected to the
internet can be compromised can be controlled by governments
and other parties and so on what are your thoughts about
sort of practically speaking for maybe like a regular
citizen what's what should be the role of the hardware wallet
in their lives yeah so at the highest level I just think
that like learning about it is important right so even if you
only have five dollars equivalent of Bitcoin going and
understanding here's how it works here's why it's important
here's how I would actually withdraw from an exchange under
the hardware wall like that alone just as an intellectual
exercise is a worthwhile pursuit I think people should
go do that actually go through the process of the steps so
you feel like you can you can do it yeah yeah it's kind of
like if I said to you you know hey we're gonna go buy an
asset and you never went and you looked at it you never went
and you know made a decision like sure maybe I did it or I
didn't do it but like you didn't actually experience it
right and so I think that that's important part the
second thing is each person is different from a how they view
this asset so there are some people who are speculating
right there's three use cases for Bitcoin their store value
medium of exchange and speculation and the people who
are speculating they can't put it in deep cold storage because
they need to be able to trade it right so what ends up
happening is they fall in the bucket of like high risk high
reward they're trying to trade they're trying to do all these
things and sure maybe there are profits that they can generate
if they're good at it but also they're introducing a lot of
risk and so that person is very different than the person who
says hey you know I bought one Bitcoin and I'm gonna save it
for my child right and I'm gonna give it to them on their
18th birthday yeah and so when you start to look at this what
you end up saying is what are you actually purchasing this
for kind of like why are you doing it and then what's your
time horizon and what ends up happening is more and more
people in the Bitcoin community have longer time horizons one
of the advantages to this community right if you look at
the on chain metrics 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 the iron fist or or as recently has 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 ends up
actually being you know fatal or 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
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 can just buy only and I believe I've heard that you
own quite a large percentage of of your wealth in 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 go to other cultures 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 if not thousands of years families
basically saved their wealth in gold and in jewelry and in
these hard assets with the expectation to pass it on to
the next generation and so it would be blasphemous to sell
the family's gold in that culture right you know your
great grandfather gave to your grandfather your grandfather
gave 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 you know 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 you know buy
some Bitcoin in 2011 or 12 right and then all of a sudden it
appreciated a bunch and it grew into that but from a cost
basis perspective you know put $100 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 was falling and
falling and falling and in December 2018 as I take about
50% of my net worth and convert it from dollar denominated
assets into Bitcoin so it's 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 so
became very aggressive in doing that and so the way that I look
at it is that's actually my savings right and so in some
weird way if I said to you know what's the dollar worth you'd
say well a one dollar bill is worth one dollar right Bitcoin
to me I denominate my wealth in Bitcoin so I think of one
Bitcoin is worth one Bitcoin not one Bitcoin is worth 60,000
or 55,000 or 70,000 right I denominated everything in
Bitcoin when I make a purchase in my head I'm calculating how
much Bitcoin am I spending right now right well guess what
happens when you have a devaluing currency as the
denominator doesn't matter right like your financial
incentivize to spend or invest right to 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 if when you move about this
world you think in Bitcoin you behave differently is if you
think in dollars that's really fascinating people but here's
the thing is the last 50 years or so is actually the outlier
in history most people used to think this way yeah it's only
when a fiat currency got introduced that one argument the
positive argument or perspective is there was an
explosion in growth but really it's because there was a
financial incentive to consume yeah right and there's nobody
better in the world than the United States at consuming and
we consume anything and everything and if you want to
see a great example look at how big the coca colas are at
McDonald's right you know you go to other places they don't
serve them that big and so the other example though or the
negative argument is we have to consume because if not you end
up being the bottom 45% of Americans that help no
investable assets and actually are just having their wealth
devalued away so holding the dollars end up being a very bad
economic decision and so when you then switch to this sound
money you say wait a second why would I if today I can trade
one Bitcoin you know back in October of last year one Bitcoin
for 10 thousand US dollars why would I spend that if at some
point in the future whether it's a month from now or 10
years from now I could trade it for something much 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 a 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 it seems
to work pretty well there's this kind of like Eric Weinstein
says that one of the problems is for the past several decades
this whole economy society is built on the idea that we have
to keep growing like it depends on that idea and it's a
good question whether that's going to result in huge
problems or if like a college student on a deadline the
the dependence on growth will mean that we'll have to grow
like the fear of death will force us to grow but I think
there's a false equivalency between we're dependent on
growth and then if the world was denominated in 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 come with all kinds
of crazy stuff and people will give it to you right when all
of a sudden it's really really valued by the population the
decisions are better yeah you you have to provide real value
in the goods and services you provide in order to get them to
give it to you there's less room for corruption less room
for manipulation that's and like that's not actually
productive yeah definitely so you said you moved a lot of
your investment into bitcoin is there when you look so you're
a 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 club 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 uh kind of timeless advice
when it comes to uh investing or or acquiring an asset in
general uh dollar cost averaging is usually the the
best way to think about it and what i mean by that is um most
people don't just have a pile of uh currency sitting there
right it's not like they have a million dollars sitting in
§11Transcript · 1:55:57–2:08:27
their bank like what do i do with it uh that situation aside
what happens is they trade their hours and their effort for
currency and so as they get paid every two weeks let's say
um the best way to acquire bitcoin without having to worry about timing
markets and being a professional trader is to simply take whatever the
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 three percent of your
paycheck take three percent 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 um if in december of 2017 when bitcoin
is at twenty thousand dollars it was the height of kind of this last
uh big upwards movement you had taken all of your money
and you had put it into bitcoin you would have had to wait almost three
years just to get back to quote unquote break even
in us dollar terms if at the same time you had simply bought then and over the
next three years bought every two weeks you would have been up hundreds of
percent three years later because what ended up
happening was you bought a bunch of bitcoin when it was at
15 12 10 9 8 3 4 5 5 5 you know all the way back up on the
other side and so dollar cost averaging is one of
these weird things that uh it almost sounds too easy but what we
find is in america we have a lack of financial education
and so rather than try to be smarter than markets what most people are better
off doing is just saying hey set your what's called an asset
allocation plan i want 30 in stocks i want 10 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 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
and over a 20 year period you're gonna end up buying it at all kinds
of different prices but you're gonna get kind of a blended average
and the more important thing is the compounding and the time in the market
then did you buy it at you know two percent higher or lower than where you
bought it doesn't really matter and buying often makes you i guess
uh resistant robust to the uh to the volatility of the market or the
volatility of bitcoin price and so on that said uh you know bitcoin price
is volatile and you know again the argument i've heard
is like everything that's going to be a lot more valuable in the future
like if you look at the history like companies like apple like teslas
now i mean but let's look at companies that
have now stabilized right uh apple is a good example
it's like volatile in the beginning and so the argument for bitcoin is like
yeah this is the early stages because it's going to be a lot more valuable
right now it's volatile and this is why you have to have these kinds of
strategies to ride out the volatility of course everything that goes to zero is
also volatile like the early days are volatile uh
do you see like this volatility as like a feature or a bug
or is this just like a way of life so amazon is the one that i know the
numbers on in terms of early volatility uh every year since it has gone public
it's had a double digit drawdown in that year uh the average
is over 30 percent and one time it drew down over 95 percent
sounds a lot like bitcoin right like oh wow this is crazy
but it's one of the best performing stocks in the last 20 years if not the
best performing stock and so volatility is not positive or
negative it's positive or negative compared to the
position you're in so if you're long and it's volatile to the
upside it's positive if you're long holding something and
it's volatile to the downside you see it as a negative it's all about
perspective with that said um another way that i
look at this is every asset priced in bitcoin
is down significantly so over the last one
three five years the dollar priced in bitcoin
has crashed 99 percent if you denominate stocks it's down like
80 85 if you denominate gold if you
denominate 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 dollar terms
or you could actually argue that the world is
repricing this asset it's doing price discovery on this asset
and it's essentially comparing it's saying hey bitcoin verse
this stock or bitcoin verse this ounce of gold or bitcoin verse
you know this dollar which is more valuable and it continues to move up in
the rankings in terms of the value that the world
ascribes to this some of that's based on lindy effect just
the longer it persists the more likely it is to survive some of that's based on
like the underlying fundamentals of how much computing power the usage
transaction volume things like that but some of it also is that as more
and more people wake up to the fact that it's a finite supply asset that has a
place in the world and demand increases people just naturally
compete and ascribe more value to it and so the
volatility i think all comes back to like what do you
price your life in for majority 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 and movement those people aren't looking at the day
to day price what they've basically said is i've
acquired x amount of bitcoin and i'm just going to hold it for years
and every time somebody's done that right if if uh you bought bitcoin at any point
in the last 12 years and you held it till today you are up in us dollar terms
now if we had this conversation 18 months ago couldn't say that
so it's all about not only the acquisition
price if you will it's also when are you looking at it
right because there was a point in 2017 you could have said the same thing but
in 18 you couldn't and so i tend to think a lot about um
humans are really really bad at short term
uh decision making because we're so emotional
especially when something has a price tied to it and so it's in terms of our
strategies and decision making we should be long term and have like a
regular almost think like an algorithm that
in that in that kind of way so i think you've tweeted that
you believe that bitcoin has a chance of reaching 1 million i don't know what it
is currently i think it's five the 60s which is incredible
i think i remember when it was at least in the double digits i think i remember
it was in the signal digits of a dollar so the fact that it's cross 50 is crazy
uh but uh you're even crazier apparently thinking that it can reach a million
so do you think it's possible for it to reach a million is there some kind of
transformative effects we have to see first
when might it reach a million like what are the signs that we would look for
what's required for it to reach a million so let's just look at it from a macro
perspective uh gold is a 10 trillion dollar asset
and when you compare the technology of gold to the technology of bitcoin
bitcoin is superior in every single way right it's more portable it's more
divisible uh it's more verifiable it's more
scarce on everything and so some people would argue it's a
10x improvement some people argue it's 100x improvement from a technology
standpoint and so we don't need bitcoin to
actually kind of um capture the full 10x or 100x
improvement from a market cap standpoint if bitcoin simply captures
2x the value be a 20 trillion dollar market cap
which would put bitcoin at about a million dollars
right so kind of just from a macro perspective if you have a 10x or 100x
improvement from a technology standpoint and you directionally get some value
capture in that direction you're hitting around a million or more
uh dollar price point can ask a quick question which is uh
what's the current market cap for bitcoin uh the current market cap is
right around a trillion just over a trillion dollars and you're saying gold
is 10 trillion and uh sorry where did you get the 20
trillion 20 trillion would just be 2x gold market cap
got it right so if it's a 10x technology improvement let's just say it only
captures 2x the market cap got it right and so again if it was to
capture just gold market cap kind of the equivalent
puts you around 500 000 right so you can kind of see there's bitcoin
so if you capture the entirety of the gold market
uh then it would be value of a single bitcoin uh the price of a single bitcoin
would be five hundred thousand dollars okay
to reach a million it would be double that that's what the 20 trillion comes
from correct got it so if you then say to yourself
okay how does the uh the pricing um kind of cycles work right or the
boom and bust cycles gold is a very um
kind of linear type supply schedule meaning that
uh 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 out of business but for the
most part the kind of inflationary uh increase to the supply of gold
is pretty stagnant uh year over year bitcoin has a very unique feature which
every four years there is a programmatic supply shock
meaning that uh in the beginning 50 bitcoin every 10 minutes was introduced
into the supply after four years of that happening every
10 minutes it was cut in half so on a in a single
moment it went from 50 to now it was 25 four years every 10 minutes 25 got cut
in half again to 12 and a half and then recently in may 2020 got cut to 6.25
when you have an asset that is determined the price
based on supply and demand you normally have
two inputs to the equation what is the supply and what is the demand
in an asset like gold or a stock or anything else
we have to do our best guess at the supply
both the existing supply and the incoming supply and do our best guess at
the demand and we're actually pretty good at this a lot of times in terms of
directionally saying it's going to go up or down and here's kind of some price
point milestones bitcoin'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 i 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
occurred since january 2009 and then i can show you on a daily
basis that 900 bitcoin a day are coming into the circulating supply
and so when you have 100 confidence because you can prove
the supply side of this equation you can hold it constant
i know with 100 accuracy the supply side so now i've reduced the mathematical
equation that i need to do to determine price movements
to a 50 reduction i only have to worry about demand i don't have to worry about
supply and so when i look at demand i can do
all kinds of things i can take the demand over the last 10 years and
the growth and just extrapolate it out i can increase it i can decrease it
whatever but what you find is that these supply
shocks lead to significant price appreciation
as the asset gets repriced because there there's a supply shock to
and so probably the best thing that i've done over the last couple of years
was in 2019 i started to talk about the idea that we were going to have both 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
going to 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 rep uh gyrations in the repo markets
§12Transcript · 2:08:27–2:21:51
a lot of ceos leaving their jobs you know all this kind of stuff
and all i said was at some point when the market turns over
the government's gonna have to step in we were addicted to stimulus they're
gonna have to manipulate interest rates down and they're gonna have to print
money i had no clue that there was 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 could
print trillions of dollars but the framework that i used to think
about this was when they do that everyone is going to
run to store value assets they're going to run the gold they're going to run the
bitcoin etc and right as they do that it appears at
the same time there's going to be this supply shock
so you're gonna get a supply shock and a demand shock that are both positive for
the the price i called it rocket fuel for bitcoin
well it happened and here we are i now look forward and i say okay we are
likely going to see a hundred thousand bitcoin
a hundred thousand dollar bitcoin this year or at some point i don't know when
it happens but we're moving in that so you think in 2021 we'll see a hundred
thousand that would be uh my most conservative
view uh i i've said a hundred thousand dollars
since 2019 and people thought that was insane and
crazy and all stuff now i'm the conservative guy in the room
because i stick with a hundred thousand dollars and people are saying
you know multiples of that number here uh so we'll see what happens but
but i think that there's still a lot of room kind of to run from a 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 6 to 5 to whatever 50 reduction yeah
yeah and so that's what i think uh well
basically when we get that that next supply shock that'll carry us up over a
hundred or over a one million dollar bitcoin price which if historical
examples persist and again sometimes it's hard to use historical examples to
look at future events um but if that happens we would see
a million dollars of bitcoin by the end of 2026
after that wave so 2024 basically is the supply shock and within
you know 18 to 24 months you would see the uh
the kind of top of the next market hopefully without a coupling to the net
to another pandemic yes we we would like to do all of this without a
public health crisis so that would take it to
20 trillion you don't have to compare it to the dollar
essentially in some sense that the dollar could also lose value i mean
there's a lot of kind of dynamics at play here
now but like fundamentally there's going to be a huge
move uh in your prediction of uh value into into bitcoin
i mean that's a fascinating world uh to think about
uh i mean but i do have to kind of ask you about the whole space of
technology there because we're talking about the value of security we're
talking about the the future which bitcoin will be at the
center of but from my perspective of
thinking how like i and others can build technologies on top of
this kind of decentralized world i'm thinking about different
different technologies out there different cryptocurrencies out there
ethereum being one but there's a lot of others
so i'd love to get your sort of ideas about some of these but
so first let me ask you about what the hell is shit coin
is this connected to uh to our previous discussion of the meme
uh this shit coin cover basically all coins that are not
bitcoin is it uh uh mean is it a beautiful is it's a mixture of
both as with most things in life uh depends
who you ask um the uh most um
kind of enthusiastic and uh uh parts of the bitcoin community shit
coin is anything else right kind of if you ascribe to kind
of a maximalistic view of the world shit crime be anything if you look at
people who i would say are bitcoin proponents uh yet
see value in other things shit coin may be the bottom half
of the other things right so i think again it's really important kind of who
you ask is how you'll get that answer so
there's tiers and the way you divide those tiers might be different depending
who you ask ultimately what it is is it's a meme yeah
and it's used to uh articulate the idea that whatever you want to put in
that bucket has no value so shit coin right are coins that have
no value yeah uh what is fascinating about it and i
think that again speaks to the power of the bitcoin community
is uh there was congressional hearings a couple years ago
oh no and at one point uh a congressman from ohio warren davidson who uh
who's definitely uh open minded and excited about bitcoin
asked a an individual on the congress floor
uh during testimony to uh talk about these other coins and at one point
basically read into the record the terminology of shit coin
he said the word shit coin uh i can't remember if he said it first
somebody else did or if uh the other person did and then he uh um
you know repeated it that's awesome but he definitely he was trying to get that
read into the record yes uh for sure and so uh you know you
can imagine one again the meme speaking insolently to
the bitcoin community was you know made him very uh very well
liked uh but also too was um it does go back to this idea almost of
uh if you and i sat down with 10 ceos and we interviewed each one of them and
then we went in a room and we deliberated and we said we have to pick
the person who's going to be the most successful
one of the inputs not all the inputs but one of the inputs would be
who's the person who we believe has the best ability to
raise capital recruit people and tell a story
to the world that will get them to follow and so somebody like elon would
probably be the best example of this when you have decentralized products you
have no kind of leader right in the sense of 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 teams or which technologies have been able to coalesce
these groups around it and in some way build the same level of
engagement and protection and things like that and so
you actually get tribalism but you also get things like
shitcoin because what it does is it's not only a um
kind of verbal attack towards uh others it's a rallying cry for
internal what's so funny is that it was started with the bitcoin community
talking about everybody but now you've seen adoption in other communities who
use it you know basically say well we're not a
shitcoin it's the it's the next guy yeah i mean the meaning to be honest
it's it's one it's off it's sometimes
misused i think like with anything it's like
people adopt memes that used to be brilliant or still brilliant
and they're just not good at using them so they become
mean uh but when you do with with grace it can tear down an
argument and at the same time have like love and
respect underneath it i mean it's a beautiful dance they have to be good at
like you know people just can suck at communication and even
uh like even a powerful weapon like a meme in the wrong hands
just uh fires in a way that doesn't get anything done but this is like a war
of humor and memes it's kind of fascinating exactly like you formulated
that there's a symmetry of power so you have to
have guerrilla warfare in this internet game especially when there's no leader
like you said in a distributed culture i would say here that is um
is really important i think is from a society standpoint
we've become very soft and very kind of coddling and not in um
not in a way that's like i think people take this argument like too far
sometimes but what i mean by that is um it's almost like if you're the person
who holds somebody accountable you become the bad person right if you're
the person who um says hey you know that's wrong you're
the bad person right and so in a world where i think in um
this kind of influencery you know all positive if you have any negative
you know feedback or constructive criticism like you're the bad person
uh it's the ultimate echo chamber right and so i think that what the bitcoin
world does in in 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 yeah
you look at a blockchain and you can prove something
or you can't and so naturally people who are attracted to that
have a very similar approach in life yeah right they say hey
you made x claim prove it and as you can imagine
you know a great example is like the financial media meets bitcoiners
and it's a bloodbath right in kind of the the arena of ideas because
what do they do the financial media is used to the soft
you know opinion pieces etc and bitcoiners show up and they're like
uh here's data point a b and c here's example one two and three
and you're wrong and then all they yell and scream about is like
uh i'm wrong i'm wrong i'm wrong like you can't say i'm wrong and they're like
nerd like disprove what i just said and so you get in this like very very weird
it's fascinating it's a fascinating battlefield but
i i do want to say it's 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 they see the the the lies or the inaccuracies in the
statement and and they just think they can say
wrong uh yes you can say that but if you want
to be effective it requires great skill like you look at
i don't know um a beautiful uh verbal shit poster which is Christopher
Hitchens right it requires a lot of skill
through your words to tear down an argument
to criticize and to take a step towards truth
what i'm disheartened by internet culture like the negative side
is people don't put a lot of effort in their tear downs
like into your shit posting into your memes
you should put effort and see it as a skill that you want to if you want to be
a part of this culture you want to uh get good at it
like any skill it's the 10 000 hours like get improve deliberate practice
self criticism all of those things uh 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 but i think this is really really
important right because you're right in that
uh it's all about intention versus action if your intention is to
uh tell somebody that they are wrong in an effort to get them to
see the truth yes that's very different than if your intention is to tell
someone they're wrong and hurt their feelings yes
right and so when you can unpack 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 uh memes when i use that term i'm not
just talking about like a static photo right when i'm talking about these
elaborate uh kind of edited videos and kind of
all this stuff um when done right it is
uh the most articulate way to deliver a blunt message and it's
done in such a way that is humorous and entertaining
yet really hammers the point home and so it's a skill set that many people don't
have i don't make those i'm assuming you don't make them either
right i see them i share the ones that i like right
uh but it does take practice and you can tell
look there's people who are fantastic meme lords right and there are
people who absolutely suck at it and it's like anything it's just
how good are you at communicating and uh i've heard the idea a bunch of times so
i don't know who to kind of credit for it but uh whether it's emojis
it's gifs it's memes whatever this is the extension and evolution of
just hieroglyphics right yeah like like we have been doing
this for literally centuries it's just that now we're doing it on
the internet you can press a button and go to
millions and millions of people immediately uh but speaking of memes
what the heck do you think is up with elon musk talking about dogecoin a lot
sort of uh from the cryptocurrency community i
§13Transcript · 2:21:51–2:35:33
from i've been talking to a lot of sort of technologists i guess
and reading papers on cryptocurrency it's like
nobody really sees dogecoin as a revolutionary
crypto technology a lot of people talk about 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 uh elon musk's
combination of humor and brilliant engineering in the various
companies he runs combines to create a kind of value
and excitement behind dogecoin it's like
um what is it he says uh 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 dogecoin philosophically or technically is is it
possible that dogecoin will overtake bitcoin and run the
run the entire world i can't even because it could happen
it could happen but what uh if there's any serious way to answer that question
well we have to start with uh techno king of tesla yeah and master of coin
as they are so articulately called in the latest scc filing
he officially changed his title techno king yes no king of tesla
and the cfo's new uh title is a master of coin
and so uh when you have a sense of humor yeah and frankly uh a level of uh
self confidence and uh an element of uh an appreciation for irony in the world
dogecoin is actually one of the least crazy things that you could talk about
when you're willing to go to techno king of tesla master of coin
uh and all this stuff and so i think that
elon uh doesn't get enough credit frankly for his understanding of internet
culture understanding of memes and understanding
of frankly human psychology and marketing and so
in some crazy way every time he talks about dogecoin
it's a rallying cry for an entire generation of kids
it's a rallying cry for an entire industry uh in terms of cryptocurrencies
and digital technologies but this is the flag yeah
and this is the thing that he can yell and scream about
and tweet about without worry of punishment
so he could be talking about bitcoin he could be talking about cryptocurrency
but that's not going to be uh as beautifully
humorous and whatever the hell internet culture is as dogecoin
he's finding the right language he's speaking the language of the people
of the 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 um he's using dogecoin as a way to say
i'm doing this because i can yeah he couldn't do it
with securities he couldn't do it with certain types of other assets right
like i almost look at it as like a venn diagram what's the thing that a bunch of
people know about care about thinkers funny whatever and
also overlay that with the things that like he
could actually talk about they won't get in trouble for
that's a big f you to the sec i could see the
the people just freaking out i i mean i love it
but um i i don't know if i would have the guts to do it myself
but i i think he's an inspiration to a lot of us
to be like well maybe you should grow the guts
when you're the techno king you can do whatever you want right
and i mean that's something to aspire to is to be the techno king in your own
little world if you also think about it in the sense
of uh when you're somebody on a mission to create interplanetary
life yeah when you're trying to solve a or put a dent in the climate crisis
or create electric vehicles and be the first american company and you know
however long frankly the sec
or other things in your life that just don't
you don't ascribe that much importance to compared to those things
they're almost uh nuisances and that's scary i think for shareholders
of a company when the person that you're trusting to lead
you to the promised land and create shareholder value
doesn't put value on certain things but at the same time
i always look at it as a tug of war how much of the actions of what he's doing
and calling attention to actually change the way
that regulators lawmakers politicians countries whatever act he may not be
able to say do acts i'm the techno king and they go do it
but with every step he makes he changes some of their behavior and so i
think that it's um a really kind of game of like 3d chess
that frankly i'm not privy to right i'm kind of watching from the sidelines and
uh figuring out alongside everybody else but i also don't think that it's just
elon uh bought a bunch of dogecoin and tweets about it because he thinks he's
going to a dollar and he's gonna you know make money right like i don't think
i don't think it's an economic argument as to why he's so
interested in i think it's much more uh 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
uh he's he's taught me quite a bit about communication
and uh at least for me it's been liberating to not give a fuck
about the old school way of things i've been always bothered by
a place i deeply admire which is mit but there's
problems the bureaucracies and hierarchies that hold back innovation
brilliant minds and in that sense doge is a kind of fu to
the system that's kind of positive but also
uh kind of uh but it was also an fu so in that sense i think
elon has a perspective on the world that's similar to bitcoin folks
which i really like which is like thinking long term
it's how visionaries think is 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 uh bezos's view which is uh is essentially how do you minimize
regret how do you accelerate your life mentally
and go to 80 90 100 150 years whatever we end up
being you know fortunate enough to live to and then look backwards
yes and say this decision that i'm 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 uh two you are ultimately going to optimize
for uh minimal regret but also three is
even if you only look forward 10 years that's much much further than most
people do and so it gives you a significant
advantage and i think that um bitcoin has kind of this like um
you know proxy for time as we talked about uh
interplant uh planetary travel where there's multiple steps from creating a
reusable rocket to landing it to you know all this stuff all the way
to simple things just like if you're simply trying to figure out
where the world's going to be 30 years from now
you know bill gates says that we overestimate what we can do in one year
underestimate what we can do in 10 well to me it's a um kind of degree of
uh mistake if you will 10 years maybe you're off by 10 percent
well if that line of progress continues 20 years you may be off by
100 and 30 years you may be off by a thousand percent
right like almost the further you go out the more inaccurate you become
and so i think that people who want to iterate their way to success right
that's a common thing in like the startup world
end up actually following kind of the breadcrumbs to where the
world is taking them but people like an elon musk a jeff
bezos a jack dorsey all the way down the line all these
innovators they actually say to themselves there is
a point in time in the future where there's a world i want to
construct and then they go and they construct it
regardless of the short term iterations and incentives
it is just they're driving towards that point and i think that it's this whole
idea of having this like you know kind of set vision and this
uh refusal to kind of move or budge off of that
that's what makes them special one of the
things that garnered a lot of excitement in the crypto
community is nfts i i have no idea really the depths the
fundamental technological philosophical depths of the second of this technology
whether this is just like a little bit of a fad or there's some deep lessons to
learn whether it's bitcoin or cryptocurrency in general about it
do you have thoughts about like the long lasting fundamental aspects of nfts
i think there's probably both things happening fad
and things to learn right and um if we just start with like what is an
nft it's a non fungible token meaning that um there's no fungibility
and fungibility is a fancy word um 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 hundred dollar
bill and left i'm no worse as long as they're all you
know uh official hundred dollar bills because as long as i have a hundred
dollars i have hundred dollars i don't need that exact same bill back
so that means that those hundred dollar bills are fungible
non fungible would be like art if i took a picasso and i put it down on the table
and you brought three artists that no one's ever heard of before and we mixed
them up and i just took any random piece of art
it wasn't the picasso i lose because the picasso is really
important there right so non fungibility is important in art
what these non fungible tokens essentially are doing is they are uh
creating scarcity and originality in a digital environment and what i mean by
that is um take a music file if i had a music
file and you wanted it you said send it to me
i press send it essentially creates a copy and you get one music file i get
another we don't care you can listen to music i
can listen to music we're super happy if i instead though have a digital file
that entire premise is based on scarcity and i hit send and you get a copy and i
keep the original or you get the original i get a copy
there's a problem and so ultimately what i think is playing out with nfts is
it's a technology regardless of where it plays out from
blockchains or uh what in communities or environments
that just brings true digital scarcity to the internet and so naturally what
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's 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 this kind of stuff when you display it it can have motion
and music and all of these aspects to it that are better than the traditional
art what the traditional art market has that
the digital art market has not had is the narrative narrative based world
scarcity kind of in digital sense and so what i think the entire world is
going through right now is an exploration of how do we use this
technology to create new things frankly
we're not going to be good at it for a while
and so the only place i've really focused on is
digital art itself and i've always been interested in art but i wasn't going to
go buy a painting and hang it on the wall
right in the sense of uh that's how i was going to store value
what i find fascinating though is that i now can take
that concept which most of the wealthiest people in the world
have a significant portion some you know some people have 20 percent in terms of
you know number of billionaires 20 percent of their wealth is in art
and you can bring to this digital realm which is much more um
kind of natural to a digital native and so the best way to describe the
importance is imagine a serial number being placed on
something take the eiffel tower the only eiffel
tower that has value is the first one every replica of it regardless of size
location you know who made it where they sent it
§14Transcript · 2:35:33–2:49:24
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 one percent of what it's going to grow
into so you're you're bullish you're saying
it could grow into something for one percent 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 on the internet moving all the things
that are scarce in the physical world into digital space
us trying to figure out which things can be moved and not
and also there's things in the digital space just like you're saying that
don't exist in the physical world that might also
benefit from gaining scarcity like you know people are i guess creating
nfts out of like tweets or whatever so like you're you have you
have a fun twitter account you know you could say like you
could put value to a single tweet and then be
able to invest in it and trade it and buy parts of it and all those kinds of
things you know you can invest in people you
can invest in you know art can be defined broadly as
any kind of creation right and in some sense
this whole idea of scarcity can overtake the entirety
of the digital world it can like consume the
all of the markets we see as financial markets and just turn
everything into a market well so if i take you on like a i don't know
10 year fast forward yeah and i paint a picture of uh something today that seems
absolutely insane but there's early signs that people are
building this and let's just give them the benefit of the doubt that
some of the early iterations will work and some of or most of them won't
there's a world where you and i are participating in a digital economy
in a virtual world where uh whether it is a piece of art
it is a digital sculpture it is a digital
skin from a video game it is a digital good that we purchased somewhere online
and we bring it and we display it in a digital museum or a virtual museum
and so now all of a sudden you can charge people for entry
you can consign digital goods it's the replication of what happens in the
analog world now just in digital and when you do that
what you do is you take the addressable markets
of these assets or these mechanisms and they explode
in the digital realm and so now all of a sudden
how fast does the human race accelerate when it comes to human
production intelligence learning all in the digital
output it's just if i said to you 20 years ago i'm going to give you a
global education that means i'm going to take you and i'm
going to physically move you to geography after geography after
geography it's going to take time it's going to
take resources and ultimately it's going to take lots of effort
if i now said to you hey i'm going to transport you
in this virtual world to multiple geographies
but you're going to experience it in this virtual
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 in 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 are being charged for access
and perhaps we plug in our senses which means we start to operate more and more
in a virtual reality augmented reality virtual reality way
with this digital world and increasingly going to this world
basically lived most of our productive and uh
social lives in this digital world uh and increasingly essentially create a
simulation where the biological basis is just there
to say sustain the brain that's used to operate in the in the virtual world
uh taking us back to the original when we started talking about war
i wonder what conflict looks like in that world
that uh the people who are born today maybe will be fighting wars
in the space in in that museum world in that digital world remember what i said
we're moving from a world of conflict surrounded
and determined by bombs bullets and soldiers
to a battlefield that is determined by war of information
and cyber capabilities and so in that virtual world
is it about death and destruction of human life in the physical analog world
or will it become more important to attack or defend
virtual property and virtual life and you know some level of virtual
sovereignty in my opinion the latter is more likely
and so what you start to understand is well
what do you truly value in your life is it the physical analog materialistic
consumptive goods or is it virtual
and in many cases something as simple as the ability to connect
with somebody it's 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 it's terrifying yeah i
don't need to uh actually convince you
through a monopoly on violence on physical violence
what if i can psychologically change the way you see the world
through misinformation through all sorts of
nefarious activities and i think that you know the united states has been
struggling with this idea over the last couple of years in the political arena
but what happens when it starts to come to other aspects of our life
and i think it's very likely it's almost obviously likely that we're moving into
the digital world
the one of the features of the digital world
is that artificial intelligence systems can operate with much more power in a
in a frictionless way in that world currently as we understand it it's hard
it's hard to build robots that operate at scale and do like
arbitrary large amount of impact damage or positive
in the physical world it's much easier to do in the digital world
do you have do you ever think about ai systems
just swimming about uh doing extraordinarily powerful destructive
things in the digital world is that something of a concern to you
or is this something into a very distant future
i think a lot of artificial intelligence is
uh in the name it's simply the replication of human intelligence
at scale automated and program uh programmatic meaning
that in the analog world you could go hire a
thousand employees or in you know an amazon case hire
millions of employees and set a mission or a goal and push
them to go do that that requires recruiting retention
training resources all that stuff in the virtual world or in this digital
economy what if you can just program the resources
and gain the same leverage and do it at scale and do it in a very
programmatic way and then have them actually make decisions
in a way that doesn't require you to have thought of every single
potential scenario or edge case that's ultimately what we're talking about 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
uh 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 i don't know
enough you know much more about this and there's plenty of other people who do as
well but i do think that there will be
nefarious actors and malicious people but we're going to treat them the same
way we've always treated people who use technology poorly right we're going to
understand it we're going to identify it we're going to control it and then we're
going to end up reversing it or preventing that from doing them it's the
inadvertent things that i think are actually the most dangerous
because when you have something that can think for itself
and there is no way to leverage a monopoly on violence
for control it's a very scary thing and it can i mean the the thing that's
scary to me is this it can scale arbitrarily so it can outnumber humans
very quickly even if it's dumber than humans and so
i don't know if we're able to reason about a world
like let's look at the physical analog where all of a sudden
uh let's talk about something kind of like humans but dumber than humans like
chimps okay imagine that all of a sudden chimps
could multiply arbitrarily quickly and you could have
like a trillion chimps the next day when you
when you only had maybe a million the day before
like how does that world look different where the fuck all these chimps come
from and they like and then we can we can
pretend to be like well let's hope the chimps like don't get violent because
they 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 uh 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 uh but
ultimately it's the unintended consequences that you're referring to is
you don't know what's going to happen i'm really worried about
dumb ai agents uh like having impact when they're multiplied
to a million to a billion and are allowed to operate in the digital space
especially as we clearly are moving more and more
of our lives into the digital space so it's kind of terrifying because we you
know a lot of people are terrified or like concerned about super
intelligence systems i think i'm definitely much more
concerned about super dumb systems at scale that
that's terrifying i always think about um the inadvertent
but as you were talking what it made me think of is
also the irreversible irreversible that's right so it's one thing if there's
your inadvertent negative impact but we have
reversibility built into a system and we can fix our mistakes yeah i think
the really scary part is when you overlay inadvertent mistakes with the
irreversible aspect of it and therefore humans have no control
yeah if you if you have the trillion chimps you can't
they're not gonna like it when you try to start killing them off
uh all right but back to bitcoin those chimps in the bitcoin community
anytime you bring up chimps some people 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 you obviously you also have a newsletter
that's incredible on substack and and um
but do you have recommendations maybe it would be great if you could talk about
first of all your podcast and the newsletter but also other
resources that you recommend people should check out in order to learn
about bitcoin yeah so the podcast and uh email are like the two most selfish
things i do because the podcast is a way for me to
learn from other people so i get them to come on and tell me all
the things they're thinking about and i could ask some questions what's it
called by the way uh just the pomp podcast
and so in doing that um it really is informative for me and i think that my
whole goal is just like if i'm learning other people will be learning
and then the email uh i read it every morning because it forces me to
collect my thoughts and actually articulate them in somewhat of a
coherent way and so it's just something that um is
like a practice that i probably would do even if no one read it
and then by being able to publish it uh what does it do it elicits you know
both the good and bad responses and so people will let me know if they think
i'm an idiot and they'll usually not respond if they think that
§15Transcript · 2:49:24–3:01:55
it's something smart and so um those two things are really um
educational for me and i think kind of forced me to uh to be able to
articulate a lot of ideas but a lot of what i share or learn on
those things come from these other resources
so i'm definitely subscribing people should subscribe but
what are bitcoin resources books that you recommend
i think you got to start with bitcoin standard uh that one to me feels like
uh it really lays out the picture nicely um
there is uh bitcoin uh money you can't fuck with
i was written by our friend jason williams uh as you can imagine it's
basically what it talks about uh there's another book layered money
um it's written by nick who uh who's done a great uh great job
kind of laying it out um there's a book uh called bitcoin in black america
written by a guy isaiah jackson and he basically lays out the argument for
why the black community um can benefit in a
asymmetric way from something like bitcoin um and there's a whole bunch
more i'm gonna forget them all um there's the uh i think it's called the
cost of tomorrow a guy jeff booth uh jeff booth wrote it
um and just if you get on twitter basically you're gonna see all these
books flying around um but i do have to say that uh from a
psychological concept uh or philosophical
concept the number one book that i've ever read uh that aligns with bitcoin
ethos but doesn't say a word about bitcoin
is a book called the dow of capital by mark spitznagel
and so what he essentially does is he just reiterates over and over and over
again long term thinking outliers disruption
all the stuff and so he's a guy who he runs a fund
uh that essentially they just do uh tail risk hedging
and so in you know march or february of 2020
they're up like four thousand percent right
by the way they pretty much lose money you know
for eight nine years then that happens and so
uh but they're still one of the best performing funds if you look at it over
you know years and years and so it's just this mindset of
uh everyone is so short term focused and so i think it's just a great reminder
to long term thinking uh and also i mean i've gotten quite a
bit of value just reading the papers 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 is still
what uh like what a few years ago still really interesting
to think about to look at what people were thinking about
because the the principles are carried through
with uh other cryptocurrencies as well like it's it's all
it's all there even in the early documents so
that's kind of fascinating to see that whole history from if you're more
like tech savvy and like you said twitter is actually an interesting place
if you can look past all the shit coin talk
it's a 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've you have interests that are all over the place is there
something that um you would recommend to others so
doubt capital is definitely probably my favorite book
um books that have been impactful i read uh when i was 20 actually sitting in the
desert of iraq um rich dad poor dad thinking grow rich
and the richest man in babble on and i don't think i took a single thing
and like implemented it from like an execution
standpoint uh but it was a complete shift in mentality
and understanding a relationship with money and um
just kind of what i wanted to do with my life and stuff like that so i think
those three books i read them in succession
were really impactful um and then i think one of the best books probably
ever written is uh i think it's called uh when breath becomes air
um or air becomes breath i can't remember uh but it's basically a
doctor or a medical professional who's dying
and he essentially writes about the experience and thoughts and kind of all
the stuff and i think that it's just uh 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 gonna die right and you and i can want to 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 uh more so than anything else and i think that's part of
your message and it's a great one do you think do you like literally
meditate on your own mortality i necessarily think i uh meditate on it
as much as um are you afraid of death were you afraid of
death when you're in iraq i mean if you're coming face to face with it
are you afraid of death today no i i think that it was just one of these
things where like if you fixate on something and you
worry about it then at least to me like you become
uneasy about it and so after an experience like going to war
i think that everything is just so not important compared to that
right like when i came back i remember uh going back into
the college environment and like things people worried about i was like
listen let me explain to you you know what the real world is like right
but i think even today right if you talk to people who know me really well
i don't get worked up about a lot of stuff i don't get you know in either
direction good or bad uh anything because ultimately it just
comes down to if that's the final result
let's enjoy it it's fascinating to ask you
because this reformulation of money essentially buying time
and uh you know there's the old question of does money buy happiness
do you think money can buy happiness in the context of money being able to buy
time or is happiness something else that is
beyond all of this when people talk about this question i
think that they really focus on money as a means to getting materialistic
things so they want a big house they want a boat they want a fast car they
want you know whatever they think that's the stuff that will
make them happy what i think about it is if you have
resources you can have time and if you have time and
you spend it the way that you want to spend it then that's ultimately
happiness so i always say to people if you think that money doesn't
buy you happiness what if i told you that if you had more money you could
spend more time with your family it reframes it yeah and now is all
about i want to do certain things in life but
there's a lot of people who spend their life
not doing those things because they feel the need to pursue economic
means as a way to provide a living or
whatever and so i explain this listen in my opinion again it's my opinion it's
what makes me happy if i can leverage financial resources to
create more time to do the things i like i'm happier
might not work for everybody but like that's what works for me and so there's
this element of like i don't care what other people think if
they like that or not because they're not me right like there's
almost this element of like you gotta figure out what works for you and if it
works for me then like no i think that resonate that that will
resonate with a lot of people i think that's a brilliant reframing of it
uh that said uh you kind of imply there's a
there's a reason behind this whole existence of ours there's a meaning to it
so let me ask what is the meaning of life
anthony do you think about these ridiculous big questions
that have no answer every once in a while or do you just enjoy the shit out
of every day i answer it in a way that um isn't meant
to be accurate it's meant to um
be the right answer for me which is ultimately you know and i talk 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 galler who talks about uh
you know enough being enough and recently he talked about it in the
um context of bitcoin and so bitcoiners are have two things any
bitcoiner if you talk to them they believe the same two things one
they don't want the us dollar price to go up because they actually want to
acquire more bitcoin right and then let it go once they feel like they've got
enough but two is no matter how much they own they think that they don't own
enough and they want to acquire more and so at some point you say to yourself
what is enough and and i think that the whole meaning of life
is to understand kind of what your level of satisfaction is and for
some people that's a monetary thing some people that's a freedom of time thing
for some people it's an impact thing whatever but just
understanding that's important and then going and accomplishing it
and what i've found is that the people who i know who have done this and been
intentional about it they accomplish it on a much shorter
timeline than people who don't right there's some people who start thinking
about this when they're 60 naturally you're not going to accomplish
before you're 60 if you just start thinking about it 60
people who are thinking about it earlier can do it and so i think that's really
it for me it's just like the meaning of life is to enjoy it
the way i think about it that's because it's a really nice formulation i i
almost like to sort of oscillate back and forth so
majority of the time is spent at the moment of enough is enough
of gratitude of basically being content with where you're at like deeply
appreciative of every moment and all the bitcoin whatever bitcoin you
have being deeply appreciative 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 being yeah 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 everything you've ever done so like that mode of just hating
everything you've ever done and just like trying to improve trying to make
stuff better nothing 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 at work
that's the madman comes out kind of thing i also think it's um
kind of purpose driven in the sense of there's a lot of people who have the
uh i need to do more but in a somewhat altruistic way
so they're you know take elon as an example
the idea of colonizing mars sure if he is successful he will be very
rich i don't think you or i or many people
believe he's doing it for the money right there's a lot of other things he
could do that would be much easier that would make him tons of money
and so in some weird way he has enough because he's able to free himself from
the constraints of i need to acquire more resources
and he can focus on what is the thing that i want to work on regardless of
money and so in that pursuit that is
non economic you can be as selfish as you want
because ultimately you're not tied back to
this like measurement tool and so it's this
uh again like altruistic non monetary purpose and i think that there's a lot
of people who spend their whole life looking for that and they don't know
what it is and so again some people may not think
of it that way but if you can find something to do that
you win i don't think there's a better way to end it anthony i'm a huge fan
it's a huge honor that you waste all this time with me today
uh you know i thank you for just educating the world for
for teaching me uh 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 pampliano
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to support this podcast and now let me leave you some words
§16Transcript · 3:01:55–3:02:19
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