The following is a conversation with Anthony Pumpliano, entrepreneur, technology investor,
prolific writer, podcaster, and Twitter user on topics of finance, cryptocurrency, technology,
and economics. I highly recommend his popular podcast and daily letter called The Pump Podcast
and The Pump Letter. Quick thank you to our sponsors, Theragun Muscle Recovery Device,
Sun Basket Meal Delivery Service, ExpressVPN, and indeed Hiring Website. Click their links to
support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I'll be having many conversations in the
coming months about cryptocurrency with people of all kinds of backgrounds or worldviews. Those
who are proponents of Bitcoin like Anthony, Nick Carter, Robert Breedlove, Alex Glastine,
and many others, and those who are proponents of other cryptocurrency technologies like Vitalik
Buterin, Charles Hoskinson, Richard Hart, Sergey Nazarov, Sylvia Makali, 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 and 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 over some drinks, some good laughs, and a good conversation
one day. No matter the difference in style or substance, we're all just human after all.
This is an amazing ride we're all on together. Buy the ticket, take the ride, as Hunter S.
Thompson said. Whether you pay for that ticket with Bitcoin, Ethereum, the dollar, gold,
seashells, a beer, or just a good old smile. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here
is my conversation with Anthony Pumpliano. You served in the U.S. 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, difficult, or maybe lasting experiences from the time you served?
Sure. I joined when I was 17 years old. I needed my parents to basically sign in order to join.
I graduated a semester early from high school and thought I was going to play football in college
and enroll in the spring semester when that didn't happen. I basically was working at Chick-fil-A
in Quiznos and had in my mind, look, this is probably not the path in life that I want.
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. I walked into a recruiting office and just basically was like,
I'm assuming you guys need some help. They gave me the whole pitch and gave you a signing bonus.
You can go jump out of planes and go do all this crazy stuff. I just said, okay, let's do it.
This was close to 9-11. This was in 2006, about five years after.
So what impact, I mean, do you remember 9-11? What impact did that have on your thinking about this?
So I was in eighth grade, if I remember correctly, and I remember being in school when it happened,
and I walked into a classroom and the entire class, somebody else's class, they were all
talking to the teacher about something. The second that me and a couple other kids walked in,
everyone got real quiet and the teacher was like, hey, go back to your like, home room.
And so it was just kind of a weird, like what's going on. And the next thing I know,
they called all of the students into the cafeteria. And this is back before every
classroom really had a television in it and cable and all that kind of stuff.
And so when we were there, they basically just said, listen, there's been this event
that's occurred. All of your parents are going to come pick you guys up and they'll explain it to
you. And so to a kid in eighth grade, you're basically like, what happened? And so I got
home and I remember talking to my dad about it. And my dad basically gave me the core American
kind of talking points, right? Look, somebody from another country came here and tried to kill
Americans and was successful in doing that. And to some extent, he just said, and I'm willing to
bet, we're going to go back after them. Did that wake you up a little bit to the idea that
there's evil out there, that even just the idea of terrorism for many people, that was
when it hits you on your own land, it really shakes up your mind. In some sense, World War II,
that's why World War II was fundamentally different for Americans than it is for people
like in Russia, in England, in France, and in Europe in general. There's something about when
there's families, women, children dying on your own land, that's different. And that was one of the
first times in America where like on your, of course, it's Pearl Harbor, but like this is like in
recent history, it's like they hit us here. That was like a profound idea. I think America was very,
very good at exporting the violence elsewhere for a long time. And there was this element of
complacency, but also this element of, you know, really just American superiority that
doesn't happen here, right? And I think that that woke people up not only to kind of the idea that
other places around the world may not like the American ideals, may not like democracy and
capitalism and that, but also maybe we aren't as big, tough and secure as we thought we were,
right? And so obviously, I think you see the kind of the over rotation with a lot of the
kind of security theater that came after that of almost psychologically, let's make our citizens
feel like they're safe, even if the things that we're doing don't necessarily, you know,
kind of change that apparatus. But on top of that, I think that it really woke people up to
extremism around the world. And I don't know if necessarily there was a change in the extremism,
as much as it just was an awareness thing, right? How many people, you know, kind of drew a line
from was it 92 or 93 with the World Trade Center bombing to, you know, deep levels of extremism
and hatred of kind of the American industrial complex, probably not that many. 2001, a lot of
people. And so I think that was, you know, again, as a young kid, you don't understand a lot of
this stuff, you basically just, hey, somebody came here and tried to kill Americans. And so,
you know, we should go fight back, right, was kind of the response I think that I had.
What role did that have psychologically for you when you then in 2006 joined the army? I mean,
this is a very different joining the army than in a 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 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, one of the
actual most impactful data points, if you were, or kind of stories for me, was the Pat Tillman story.
So I played football in high school, and I was going to go play in college. And seeing, you know,
this NFL player who basically just one day said, hey, I'm going to go and do this instead,
and walk away. I don't know necessarily if it was a, I want to pursue the same story, right? And
obviously, he ended up dying. And so not exactly the end result that you want. But I think it was
almost like he made it okay, if you were on a certain trajectory in life, to go take this detour,
and to go do it. But the second thing is, I was 17, pretty stupid when you're 17, pretty naive
when you're 17, right? And so I almost kind of backed into the deployment because I signed up as
a reserve member. And so basically, the plan was to sign up for the reserves, I was 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 that we got pulled
out of school. And so at 20 years old, it's not exactly what you thought you were signing up for,
right? Especially to kind of leave school to go do it. And then on top of that, I probably had an
advantage over most people both on the entry to combat and the exit to kind of a combat situation,
which was football. So I always explain that in hindsight, you're in a male dominated testosterone
driven kind of combative sport, where it's us first them and there's training and, you know,
injuries and just kind of all of the things that go into playing a combat sport like football.
To now they give you guns, but you still have a uniform on still male dominated. It's just a
little bit, you know, more serious in terms of the injuries and potential death and things like
that. But also on the exit from that deployment, most guys I was there with, they're going back to
being, you know, prison guards, police officers working at the lumberyard, you know, just kind of
everyday Americans. And so I had the fortunate ability to go back into kind of that combative
environment, go back to play football. And so it was almost this like de-escalation on the way out,
where they take your guns away, we still got a uniform still male dominated, still combative,
and then eventually you're just a normal citizen. And so I think that in some weird way, I was,
you know, very fortunate to kind of on the entry and exit have that experience where other guys
didn't. So what you were deployed to Iraq, were there any memories, experiences that changed you?
Or in general, like you're probably a different man on the other side of it. How did that time
change you? I think there was two main takeaways that I took, right? So one was not a specific
moment, but on multiple occasions. I remember we were driving down the road and I would look and
there would be a 10, 12, 14 year old kid. And if you've never seen somebody who literally has
hate and disdain in their eyes, 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 if you've ever watched the movie, a 12 Strong, and in it, they've got this Afghanistan
warlord and he's talking to a bunch of soldiers. And he says, you know, you don't have killer eyes,
you do, you do. And he's just like, he can just tell, right? He's seen so many soldiers.
And so I think that that was a memory on a number of occasions where I just saw young kids and I
just said, they hate us, right? And it's not you personally, it's what you stand for. But the really
big event was when you first get to these combat zones, a lot of times what will happen is you
basically your unit teams up with a unit that's leaving and there's a handoff and happens over
a couple of weeks. And so you can imagine almost, you know, 1% of our team goes out with 99% of
their team, then 595, 1090, all the way till it's 5050. 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 and who to look out for what
signs, all that kind of stuff. And the last two or three weeks is you basically think you've
survived the deployment, you're looking forward to going home to become complacent, things like
that. And so we made it through that transition period with no issues. But the literally the very
first mission that we went out as a team ourselves 100%. There was two separate incidents. One was
we were driving in the middle of the night. And what we think was a sniper shot at a truck that I
was in, I was standing up outside of it, along with another guy. And that was kind of just a
wake up call again of never been shot up before. Right. And so I'll never forget. You kind of
heard this whiz go by and the guy next to me was from rural Pennsylvania. And he just said,
you know, look, I never been shot at before either, but I've done a lot of hunting, get the
fuck down. Okay. And so we kept driving that night. And later on in the night, an ID went off,
a guy ran over an ID who was at the front of the convoy. And when that ID went off, again,
I'd never been in a convoy that had been blown up before, but the training kicks in. And so
immediately, every single person starts screaming out ID ID, and they start looking and trying to
figure it out. And you realize the United States military did a fantastic job training us before
we went. Because in that moment, nobody thought about anything. You just did what you had been
programmed to do. And so ultimately, kind of through the end of that event, there was a soldier
that ended up dying, he was shot in the head. And when we got back to the base, kind of after
that entire event, I think it just hit us. We are at war. And if we make mistakes here,
that is the cost of, you know, kind of those mistakes. And this was somebody who I didn't
know. It was somebody who literally showed up kind of as secondary support for our unit.
And basically, was there to help us, right? And so it was one of those weird situations where
you have this emotional connection, because it's somebody who shared an event with you,
but you didn't know them, right? And you learn their name later. And you understand that they
have a family and they have young kids and all this stuff. And so again, as a 20 year old kid,
you're kind of processing all this. And you just realize, like, the gun I have in my arms,
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 are doing the army. So I think that was like the moment where I
said, Hey, I'm going to learn a lot here. And I got to make sure I get home.
And you snapped into the training. But nevertheless, I mean, you're somebody who
thinks philosophically about this world now, right? You're very intelligent and things deeply about
the world. So looking back, you mentioned hatred in the 14 year old kid's 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, you know, there's a reason there's a gun in your hand.
So there's a strategic element. There's like, you have to get the job done. There's a task in hand.
But at the same time, if you zoom out, there's a kid who has hate for you. Some of those kids
would probably if they could would kill you for the thing you stand for in the uniform. And then
there's bullets flying at you. And then there's people that some of them you might already care
for deeply are dying. What the hell do you make of that? Do you think about that? Does any of that
haunt you? How do you think about the world having witnessed that? Yeah, a lot of times
when we would talk about it, we were there. If I was that kid, I would want to kill that person,
too, right? I would have hatred as well, right? Imagine if in the United States,
tomorrow you and I woke up, and there was tanks rolling down the street from another country,
and they were basically imposing their rules on us, whether they thought it was the right
thing to do or not, the soldiers were there, they were doing this, we would probably feel
not so great about it, right? At kind of a minimum and at a maximum, we'd be really,
really pissed off, we would fight back. And so what you don't understand when you're in the
heat of the moment is why does this person feel this way? And so what's very weird is,
well, what happens if a year ago, 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 Latrell,
who's 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 is fought in Iraq and Afghanistan
that says, listen, maybe we shouldn't be running around the world being the police.
Maybe we shouldn't be going and invading all these different countries,
because when you actually get to see firsthand what happens,
it's just something that we should avoid at all 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, thinking about that kid with the hatred, do you think there will always be hatred in the world? Do you think,
from another perspective, do you think there'll be war always? Is that a fundamental aspect of human nature?
Or is that something we can escape?
Yeah. So war, I think, has like very negative connotations in terms of bullets and bombs and
death and kind of just very morbid type understanding. Conflict, on the other hand,
I think people look at and say, of course, there will always be conflict, right? You just can't
have billions of people all on the same planet without some level of disagreement,
whether that's a disagreement of ideas, disagreement over physical, you know,
geography or something else. And so I think conflict will always exist. The question is,
what form does war take moving forward? And so, in my mind, you know, it's starting to look a lot
more clinical, right? A lot more drones, a lot less soldiers on the ground, a lot more use of
special forces and kind of these small, highly specialized teams rather than kind of big mechanical
armies. And then you get into like the information warfare and kind of cyber warfare. And you start
to understand that we're at war with a lot of people right now, right? Doesn't mean we're
necessarily dropping bombs on their countries. It doesn't necessarily mean we're sending soldiers
there. But on a daily basis, we are engaged in these kind of, you know, cyber battlefields. And
so if that's where war starts to play out, it one changes the tools and tactics and techniques that
we need to arm our country and other countries will arm themselves with. But it also changes
the way that we think about war, right? It 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, there does need to be a fundamental difference between the, the Genghis Khan style.
Like if I would feel differently, if somebody like hand to hand with a knife, murder my family
versus cybersecurity, 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
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, 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 it's really
easy to show a battlefield where there's death on both sides and bombs being dropped and buildings
destroyed. It fits very well into propaganda for everyone involved, right? Regardless of
what side they're on. When you start talking about cyber warfare, how many times have we've
seen a big company get data hacked or information hacked? And we all, you know, read the headlines,
maybe throw a tweet out and then move on with our day and don't remember it anymore.
And so it's just very, very different, I think, in the motion and response that it invokes and
people when they hear about it as well. Given the conflict, do you think people are fundamentally
good? Are we all sort of like blank slates that could be evil given the environment or good
given the environment? Or can we kind of, is there some base that we can rely on that people,
if left to their own devices, will be good and trustworthy and honest?
I think you have to separate out intention from action. So if you talk to some of the
most heinous criminals in the world, they've rationalized their actions. And so you've got
to ask yourself, what is the level of which they understood what they were doing, that they intended
to be malicious, nefarious, and kind of do bad things versus the actual actions themselves.
And so 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, 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 in your house with a knife,
and you murder them, or you kill them, now we put you up on a pedestal as a hero.
And those are two very, very different responses. They may be just as morbid. They may be just as
violent. In terms of the actual actions, the intentions, the way it's perceived is very,
very different. And so I think that as a world, we like a very black and white, clean cut, you
know, good, bad. I think the world's a lot more messy than that. And I think that a lot of times
when you look at intention, it's hard for us to tell what somebody's intention is. But I've looked
at a lot of, 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 as opposed to the underlying ideology, the underlying intention
of the behavior? I think that intention gets at the question of, like, are people inherently good
or bad? Right? Is I think that they're generally inherently good. And the intention is driving
towards the thing that they believe is the best outcome or the best thing for them to pursue.
The action I think is where we spend most of our time focused on. And frankly, we actually may be
a better society or kind of kinder as a humanity to each other if we spent more time looking at
intention rather than action. But again, you know, if somebody walks down the street and murders
somebody, it's really hard to have a conversation and it may be inappropriate for us to have a
conversation about intention versus any level of action, right? So you're one of the prominent,
I would say even the faces of the world of cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, that whole entire
world, let's dive straight in and ask, do you think you consider yourself a Bitcoin maximalist?
I think that the way I really look at it is I work backwards off of what is the maximalism that I
believe in, and the world that I believe in is kind of an automated world that is run on these
open decentralized protocols. And what we ultimately do is we return sovereignty and individualism and
kind of personal responsibility and liberty to people over institutions. And what we end up doing
is we end up kind of taking what has historically been a very analog or physical world economy and
geographic rule, and we then kind of put it in the cloud. And this digital economy becomes the
prevalent way that we all conduct commerce, communicate, etc. And so it's less about any one
single technology to me, right? I think that it's pretty stupid for people to almost in a way put
an inanimate object up for some sort of obsession. To me, it's much more about the ideals, the ethos,
and the most rational and likely path to that kind of end result or that world that I think is at
this point just a foregone conclusion. So the distinction there, and maybe people don't know
the terminology, and maximalism is basically saying, I really think this is a good idea.
Like, you know, if you prefer a certain kind of diet, you could be a keto maximalist saying like,
this is probably, maybe he's not 100%, but probably the diet that's healthiest for humans kind of
thing. In the same sense, Bitcoin maximalism is saying, you know, of course, we don't know,
there's a lot of uncertainty, but this particular technology seems to be the best representations
of some set of ideals that defines progress in the future. But you're drawing a distinction between
sort of cult like obsession about an object of any kind, whether it's keto or Bitcoin,
and just sort of believing that a technology is the best representation of a particular set of
ideals. And you believe that sort of this moving into the cloud, both the distributed nature of it,
but also just the digital nature of it, is something that's going to be a positive step
for humanity. Yeah, I would even take maximalism a step further. And it's not just the kind of
singular viewpoint of this is the best. It's also an element of it's anti everything else.
Right. So, you know, take keto, for example, the keto diet is not only the best diet,
all the other diets are bad. Yeah, right. And so it's a very binary view of the world.
I think that what's probably most misunderstood about, let's take Bitcoin as a specific example,
is that most of the people who are labeled Bitcoin maximalist,
they would be open minded if they believe that something else came along that was a superior
technology or had a better kind of probability of achieving, again, that ultimate vision. I think
where there's this controversy and kind of clashing of ideas is that the Bitcoin community
believes Bitcoin is the best way to do that, and has very specific arguments as to why the other
things are not. 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, you're going to buy
Apple stock as the best stock, and there's no other stock that's worth anything. Yeah, right.
And then also, it's very weird if you said to me, you know, this stock is worth zero,
and that's where everything that I own, I've put on a short on one single company, right?
There's diversification, there's a much more kind of probabilistic thinking in finance in general.
When it comes to this specific world of cryptocurrency and kind of digital assets,
if you will, is there's two main groups of people who are trying to build two very, very different
things at the onset. But when you unpack it and you start to spend more and more time on it,
you realize they're actually trying to accomplish the same thing in two different ways. So Bitcoin
is seen, I think, as a digital currency, right? Kind of the idea that this is going to ascend to
become the next global reserve currency. It's a programmatic kind of transparent money. And
it's essentially just 180 degrees difference than the inflationary, you know,
non-transparent fiat currencies that exist in the world. You then look at kind of everything else,
right? And you have a lot of smart contract platforms and various things that they're all
going after, right? Ethereum with kind of the world computer approach, and you can kind of go
down the line with all their other arguments is what they're trying to build. I think the big
difference just comes down to innovation for security. And when you simplistically look at it
via that lens, you actually understand where both people are coming from.
When you say security, sorry to interrupt. Do you mean financial security? Or do you mean like
literally the security of the particular cryptocurrency?
The technical security of a blockchain. So when you look at, let's say, Bitcoin versus Ethereum,
right? Bitcoin has decided and that community has decided security is the number one thing that
you have to optimize for. So decentralization over everything else in terms of transaction
speeds, costs, anything that you could come up with that is something that would be important
for a currency, the number one thing to optimize for is security. And as we have seen with a lot
of technologies, right? Facebook's Libre or now what's known as DM is a great example,
not having decentralization is susceptible to the nation state. And so a lot of these other
platforms and blockchains, they say security is important, but it's not the most important thing.
We believe there's a tradeoff between a little less security and transaction speed or
composability or whatever it is. And so take Ethereum as kind of the second largest 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? So the tribalism of like, you're right, you're wrong,
to me is a little childish, just in the sense of like the market is going to decide what is most
valuable. And then when you go inside of that community, like there's a lot of dumb ideas
people are trying to build around Bitcoin. There's also a lot of really, really great ideas
of people trying to build around Bitcoin. Same thing in the Ethereum world. And so what you
end up getting I think is the tribalism really comes out of the idea that there's a ticker price
that 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? Just the market is going to decide we're both going to work on it and try to
make ours successful. Here, 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 whether it's through ICOs or some other forms of
capital raising, there's arguments for it saying, hey, look, this now gives kind of the little guy
some sort of access and ability to do it. But there's also arguments against it. Some people
say, hey, it's easier to dupe them and it's easier to run scams and kind of all this stuff. And so
ultimately, I think that crypto is this like arena of ideas. It is literally the war of attrition.
And what will end up happening is 10 years from now, you and I will talk. And we're going to say,
well, the market said X was valuable and Y wasn't. And so all of the tribalism from between here and
there, it's fun, it's engaging, whatever. But ultimately, it doesn't really matter.
Yeah, because the public is involved, there's a lot of personalities. And so a lot of times,
we focus on the extreme personalities that do a lot of maybe pardon the French shit talking. And
so we kind of focus on that. But that's not necessarily representative of the communities
involved. Let's talk about Bitcoin first, and then it'll help us use as a kind of a comparison
to Ethereum or whatever else. So when you think about what is money, right, that's kind of the
first question people really kind of go down the rabbit hole on. And ultimately, today, it's a belief
system, right? And you may believe that one currency has more value over another, because it's backed
by a certain military or a certain government has a monetary policy that you believe in or don't
believe in. But ultimately, it's a belief system that there is nothing backing this, other than
a government asks you to pay your taxes in it, right? And they can have a monopoly on violence
in terms of they can put you in jail if you don't pay your taxes, they can go to other countries
and they can invade and do all this stuff. It wasn't always like that, right? It was historically
a layer one technology was gold. And so gold was a fantastic store of value. You knew that if you
held gold, it wasn't going to be inflated away. It was sound money was outside the system and
no one could create more of it. The reason why that's important is because that optimization
for store of value served as the bedrock of the entire stack of money for 5000 years. And so
the problem with that though, again, trade off between store of value is it was really hard
to transact with, right? If I came in here and I and you said, Hey, I want a couple of ounces
of gold and I had a whole bar, I'd have to literally shave off the ounces of gold. 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. And so ultimately, what people said was, Well,
let's create a second layer on top of that gold in order to make it easier to transact.
And so we created paper claims on the gold. So, Hey, don't carry around the gold in your pocket
anymore, put it in a vault or a bank, they're going to issue a paper claim. Now you and I
can trade these paper claims around. And at any point, if you want the gold, you just show up
and you say, Hey, give me 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 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, kind of electronic QCIPs
all the way to credit and other systems on top of that gold. 1971 comes around and obviously,
we DPEG 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 the optimization
for security, similar to gold store value, people hold it, purchasing power has gone up a lot
year over year, it's like a 200% year over year compounded annual growth for over a decade,
right? And so you measure this in kind of the US dollar exchange price, etc.
But there's still a lot of people who will yell and scream about it's slow, it's costly, right?
All the things around those transactions that are obstacles or challenges. And so there's
basically two schools of thought. And this is where we kind of get into the bifurcation.
Some people just said, Hey, this technology is antiquated, we can't use it, it doesn't make sense.
And so what we're going to do is we're going to go build something new. And so you go get,
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 too,
where it's easier to transact, it's cheaper, it's faster, etc. And so I actually think that
both of those worlds are going to coexist in the future. The big question is just,
which one has more importance, right? So again, get out of 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 is 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 our human brains. Well, and especially in light of kind of the macro economy,
right? So like what's so fascinating about the last 12 months is in investing in general,
the best return, trying to kind of put that near quotes a little bit, is something that is different
than everything else and right. So being different and wrong just means you're an idiot, right?
Being different and right means that that's where kind of the outsized returns are.
And so if you look around the world at currencies today, they're all the same.
They're all inflationary, unlimited supply controlled by a government 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 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 kind
of a relative analysis that goes on here. If you compare Bitcoin to the dollar, there's all kinds
of arguments to make that the dollar is better as a medium of exchange today. But if I go and I
tell you what about in these kind of extreme examples of Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Turkey, etc.
And so I think that that's kind of one perspective to view this through is security versus all of
the innovative components of a medium of exchange, etc. The second thing, though, that I think is
really, really important is around censorship. And so when you look at, again, every currency in
the world today, every single financial service, they're highly susceptible to censorship. And
actually, I would argue the United States is in the business of censorship in terms of 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 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 have just argued, listen, we shouldn't hurt anyone at the expense of punishing
one person or a group of people. There's other people who argue against that. But I do think that
if you really kind of zoom out and you say, I'm going to take myself out of the western world view,
and I'm simply going to look at this as we're all part of the human race,
it's censorship. And there might be an argument for censorship, but there also might be an argument
against the censorship. And so what Bitcoin does as that specific kind of payment network is it says
anyone in the world with an internet connection, I don't care where you are born, what language you
speak, what religion you are, your wealth status, your education status, none of it matters.
If you have an internet connection, you can plug into this monetary system and you can move value
around the world to anyone else without asking for permission. And in the United States, we basically
have that ability in the US dollar kind of traditional banking system, I can pretty much
send money to almost anyone I want, unless they're a really bad person that's on some list or something.
Most people in the world don't have that capability. And so what you're essentially doing is you're
democratizing access to a true store value and a medium of exchange. 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. You and I had no say at all when not only the Federal Reserve and elected
officials here in the United States, but central banks around the world over the last 12 months
decided to create trillions of dollars and inject it into the monetary system. They have arguments
and some of 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. They have very elaborate and
well-articulated 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 and you say, you know, what is Bitcoin and why is it important to the world,
it is giving access to anyone in the world with an internet connection to a store of value
and a monetary network that allows them to peacefully protest and to opt out of a system
that pretty much is not working for a majority of people in the world.
So it's moving the power from these centralized places, sometimes unelected to the individuals
and to the people. So the dollar does seem to work for Americans and for many people in the world,
but you kind of have a vision. You paint a picture of a future where potentially we move to
cryptocurrency. So what kind of trajectory do you see where Bitcoin can become the main currency
in the world, or at least cryptocurrency become the main way of storing value in the world and
basically overtake the dollar? Yeah. So I always go first to, we don't need to have competition
like in terms of like a direct competition between the dollar and Bitcoin, right? If you
look at most technologies in the world, the really valuable ones are actually market expanding
technologies rather than simply just market share stealing technologies, right? So if you
look at Uber, for example, Uber didn't just say, hey, I'm going to go take out all the taxis,
right? It actually drastically expanded the market for people. Now there's literally
millions of people in the United States who don't have cars because they use Uber, right?
And so I think that Bitcoin is very similar in that, yes, there is a component of medium of
exchange in terms of the dollar, but also there is this component of just store of value assets
in general. And so when you start to look at Bitcoin specifically, I think that what you're
seeing is you're seeing a generational gap where young people say, I grew up with a phone in my
hand. I'm digitally native. The whole idea of going to the bank and sending a wire or going
to an ATM and getting physical cash is an antiquated idea in their mind, right? I one time asked my
brother, he's 24 years old, and I said, hey, how do you send money to your friends? And then he gave
me one answer, which I expected, which was Venmo. And the second answer I didn't expect, he said
Uber. I said, how do you send money via Uber? He said, well, we get in a car together and at the
end we split the ride. And so again, you and I have probably both done that, but I never thought
of it as a way to send money to each other. And so it is a psychological difference between even
me who's only a decade older than him or so and his peer group. And so I think as we're watching
kind of Bitcoin continue this ascent, ultimately what we're seeing is an entire generation of
kids are saying, listen, if I look at financial assets across the board, I have stocks, I have
bonds, I have currencies, and I have commodities, I know that bonds from a real rate return perspective
is flat to negative, right? I'm going to make no money on this because I have a belief that my
dollar is being devalued. And actually what we're starting to see is again, the internet has broken
down these walled gardens and kind of these centralized hubs of information in that if you
were to look at, let's say the stock market from 1971 to today in dollar terms, it's a 45 degree
angle right up into the right, right? You know, it's kind of seven, eight, 10% growth every year
and it's amazing. Just get invested in the stock market and you'll make money over a long period
of time regardless of the dips along the way. If you denominate that same stock market in gold,
the stock market is down since 1971. And so is it so much that the stock market is accruing true
value or is it that the underlying currency in which it is denominated in is being devalued,
right? And I was being devalued in a very disciplined way, right? In terms of it's not
like it went 50% devaluation 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 is 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're going to be an investor. So I think saving technology for Bitcoin standpoint is if
you buy Satoshi's or Bitcoin, over time it will increase from a purchasing power standpoint
because there's a fixed supply and demand continues to rise. But then you start to look at, well,
what other assets do people put in their portfolios? Whether it's art, it's real estate, it's precious
metals or something else. Most of those assets are not because people actually think that they're
going to go up in value over time. They're using the store value, right? The reason why somebody
buys gold is because the store 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 value. When you
look at it though, we don't know how much gold exists in the world. We have a good estimate,
right? But we don't actually, we can't prove how much there is. We don't know how much is
coming out of the ground every day. Again, great, fantastic estimate, but we can't prove it. And we
don't know what the total supply is. And that's what you mean by narrative driven. We can't really
prove it mathematically. UI 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 in 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 our parents could tell us a 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, right? He comes back and usually tells
my parents how you got the story wrong, right? And so I think that that, that provability or that,
that validation ends up becoming really, really important. And so, you know, look at something
like gold. I think that people are drastically underestimating the shift that's underway right
now. Gold is one down in value since April, I'm sorry, August of 2020. And so in a time frame
where central banks have had historic quantitative easing, literally $6 trillion in the United States,
the one asset that historically has been the best store of value and has, you know, in 2008
financial crisis hit an all-time high based on the government response has actually suffered
for a main part of this financial crisis. You then look at central banks around the world who
have been very large holders of gold for a long time and net buyers on a monthly basis.
For multiple months, over the last six months, they've been net sellers of gold. And then you
start to look at jewelry demand, so the actual non-monetary value of gold. And that demand
for gold jewelry peaked in 2013 and has continued to fall since. And so what you start to say to
yourself is take just the asset of gold, which about $10 trillion market cap, and you say, okay,
well, jewelry demand continues to fall, even if it's at a slight rate, but it continues to contract.
You have central banks that now at sometimes 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 its use 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, et cetera, 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 central banks quietly potentially switching out from sort of gold to Bitcoin,
like naturally just seeing the pattern that you're referring to now, but more drastically
into the future where there's a complete shift? If you line up the gold community and the Bitcoin
community next to each other, they'll agree on all the problems that they see in the world.
They'll actually agree on the solution that sound money is the solution,
where they differentiate is the gold community believes that it's the analog application of
sound money, the physical gold, that is the solution. The Bitcoin community believes the
digital application of sound money, Bitcoin. Can you define sound money, by the way?
Sound money is just outside the system and no one can create more of it. So nobody controls it.
This is scarcity is fundamental. Exactly. Why is scarcity important in money?
I think scarcity just has this very high correlation to value across all assets,
not just money. Money happens to be the unit of account that we use in terms of daily commerce,
but whether it is, as we're seeing now, sneakers or whatever it is, scarcity ultimately is that
signal of value, I think, and that's just been the way that humans derive value for literally
thousands and thousands of years. Yeah, I got to say, that's my view on life and love in general,
is scarcity is what makes it valuable. People talk about immortality. I would like to be immortal,
but it does seem that when you let go of the fight netness of life, I feel like that meals and
the experiences you have get devalued significantly. The longer you live, the less value there are in
infinity. If you live forever, I worry that all the meaning will dissipate. The same thing would
love a quick criticism of dating culture and all that kind of stuff. I haven't had a shocking
revelation that I've never been on attended data or any of those things. I believe that scarcity
and dating and interaction intensifies the value of when the interactions do happen. When love does
happen. In that sense, there's something magical about scarcity in the more subjective psychological,
social world as well. Perhaps money is just another version of that. 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, which is, what is money? Money is time, ultimately. The pursuit of the
acquisition of money, whether it's a currency or true money, is because that should give you more
time. One of my favorite movies ever, and it's funny because Justin Timberlake is in it, is this
movie In Time. I lose most people at that point. In Time. Basically, the premise of the movie is
that everyone has a clock that's embedded into their arm. If you go to work, you basically put
your arm underneath when you leave, and there's time that's deposited into your clock. If your
clock ever hits all zeros, you're dead. You die on the spot. There's a number of scenes where people
are basically running to get to you. I give you a little bit more time so that you can get to work
on Monday and then you work to acquire time. Basically, time becomes this currency. 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.
In this movie, everyone at the age of 25 freezes from a biological aging standpoint. Everyone
stays the same, but you may have lived for a thousand years. What becomes so fascinating about
it is that rich people have time, poor people do not have time. 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. Now, he's attending all of these gallows and poker nights and all
that stuff. 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. Therefore, why would I walk down the street? I must run down the street.
In the highest level of society, no one runs anywhere. In fact, if you run, you are seen as
lower class because wealth is time. That movie, it's got a ton of things that you can pull out
of it, but to me is the perfect epitome of money is time. When you start to think about the
acquisition of money, it goes to this whole idea of time billionaire. I know that
there's probably a lot of people who have heard about this already, but if you think of a million
seconds, it's about 11 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. If I said to somebody, you have to
switch lives with Warren Buffett, would you do it? Some people would say, sure, that'd be their
initial reaction. I said, but you got to have to be 92 years old. Is the money worth the lack of
time? Most people would say no. There's this guy, Graham Duncan, who really articulated this well
and ultimately what ends up happening is you realize time is more valuable than the money,
but you acquire the money to gain more time. The reason it's valuable is because of the scarcity
of time. We currently have the biology, the physics. It 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.
In that sense, the scarcity there gives value to time. It's fascinating to think about all
the thought experiments here of if that could actually be on the economy, if you could actually
convert time in a frictionless way to money. 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, 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.
A million dollars doesn't get you what it used to get. It's kind of an old adage. What you're
doing is you're pursuing something that ends up losing value. It's the constant rat race.
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, 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. Ultimately, what ends up occurring is that
the Bitcoin community and many people in this idea of sound money is you want to be able to
acquire an asset that not only will hold the value, the store 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. Now some of that's
just in the early days 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. And so 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 where it's going. Now all of a sudden, you and I can transact back
and forth that value. And it is a representation of time because what I can essentially do is if
I gather or acquire more of that wealth, I then can apply leverage to my life. I can use machines,
humans, or some other resources and basically now free up my time.
Yeah. And it's not fundamental 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 conceptualization of the world or just Eric in general?
He's got a lot of love in his heart and he's got grace in the way he communicates.
But he also loves to play with ideas and seems to have touched a sensitive point
with the Bitcoin community. Is there anything you could say
that's hopeful and inspiring about that whole dynamic that went down?
I don't know all of the details, but what I will say is I've listened to a number of his podcasts
and him and there's a whole bunch of people like him. I basically put them in the bucket of
they're an independent thinker who are courageous enough to speak their truth, whatever that may be.
They are humble enough to revisit their ideas and say, I got this right, I got this wrong,
information changed, I'll change my mind. It's obviously a sign of intelligence to be able to
do that type of stuff. And I actually think that one of the most scarce things in our society
are those independent thinkers who are able to do all this, right?
Speaking of scarcity, yeah.
And so to me, 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 vehement blowback
as well, right? Because that's part of what they're doing is that they're eliciting, hey,
I'm going to throw an idea into the arena. If it doesn't get attacked, they actually may be more
nervous than if there is some level of kind of war of attrition, if you will. And so what I've seen
with a number of the people who have done this, everyone from some of the best hedge fund managers
and 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 play with them and they all arrive at the same conclusion.
And sometimes it takes a month, sometimes it takes years, but they arrive at this Bitcoin
thesis. And what's so interesting about it is it highlights something that many people view as a
bug, but I think people in the Bitcoin community view as a feature, which is that community.
And so what ends up happening is when you have something that is as ambitious as
creating a global reserve currency, doesn't mean it needs to unseat any of the existing ones,
but become the global reserve currency of the internet, 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 in the word of mouth and kind of not only promote it, but also protect it,
this technology that is this decentralized thing, which uses a financial incentive in order to
elicit the buy-in, not from a financial perspective, but from a mental energy standpoint,
has built one of the most rabid, powerful, and engaged communities on the internet.
And what ends up happening is those people have thought more about these ideas and
actually challenged those ideas more than anyone else in the world. And so I've got a lot of folks
who will just say, there's this guy Marty Bent who we'll talk all the time about,
the Bitcoin critics haven't done their homework in a lot of cases. So they show up and sometimes
it's super intellectual, lazy arguments. Sometimes it's actually very well thought out
arguments on the counter to the Bitcoin thesis. But ultimately what ends up happening is you're
talking to somebody who's an expert. They've been thinking about it for five, seven, eight,
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 he paints 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 how much you understand. And that's actually the process about learning that 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. If I step in and make declarative statements
about Bitcoin, I read a long time ago, the white paper, at the cursory level, I felt
that I understand the technology. This is basic intuitions. I didn't think about the
social dynamics. I didn't think about any financial implications and a lot of the deep,
actually the ongoing innovations and all that kind of stuff. But I thought I understood that
technology. So I stepped in and made 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 outputting 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 most 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 a PhD and stuff. I did some hard shit that it could be in farming or it could
be in whatever. I've lived life and I've really thought deeply and I really care. 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, I know what I'm talking about
about certain things and I could be wrong about a lot of things. And there's 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... The way it was explained to me is that for so long, that community was bombarded
with just bad ideas, criticisms. They're just overly sensitive now to bullshit. They're 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 I guess develop patience and so on,
especially when you feel like in my case that the person is coming from a good place. I don't
know if there's something you could say that's positive about the future of this kind of
overcome as 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 overindex on kindness and stupidity. And there's some people
who overindex 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 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 try to out their lawyers,
their regulators, their lobbyists, 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. If you bring it
back to the battlefield. And so when you think about this, you have to lean into the advantage
that you have. And so what ends up happening is you and I would absolutely lose it if we saw JP
Morgan or Goldman Sachs with the Federal Reserve start tweeting memes. It would almost be the
validation it would give to the medium and the even playing field that it would provide would
pull these establishments down to the level of what is this upstart. But now what you're starting
to see is that the Bitcoin community, even though there's some level of toxicity at times, even though
there's this visual reaction, sometimes there's even what I would call bullying or kind of outward
projection of things, right? Even though it may be a small percentage, it'll happen every once in a
while. What they do understand though is that these establishments are made up of humans.
And what you can actually do, one of the best ways to pick apart an institution
is to recruit from inside of them one by one. And so what you're starting to see now is I get
the messages on Twitter and LinkedIn all the time, hey, I'm a banker by trade, but I'm a Bitcoiner
at heart, right? And so what you're doing is you're essentially infiltrating the organizations,
not in physical population, but with the ideas and with the philosophies.
Banker in the streets, Bitcoiner in the sheets. I like it. That said, in terms of shitposting
and memes, I gotta say, bring it on because I believe in terms of asymmetry of power,
I believe in that love will save the world, not memes, or at least good vibe memes as opposed to
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, or for outsiders versus insiders, laser eyes, which seems
absolutely ridiculous, elementary and frankly beneath anyone in any level of power influence in
the world, somehow has congressmen and senators who have done it. They're not trying to convince
their colleagues in elected positions to become Bitcoiners. They're speaking directly internally
to the Bitcoin community. Yeah, there's some sense in which, yes, memes is love, even if you're
hearing Bitcoin is love, they're trying to convert me. You have to laugh at, right? Probably my
favorite one out of all of it is I've seen on multiple occasions, Mark Cuban a couple of years
ago, Kevin O'Leary, wealthy people, billionaires, et cetera, and you have people on anonymous
accounts who knows who they are, telling them, have fun staying poor, right? 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. 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. Diff thoughts about him
specifically, about that whole world and about the journey, maybe of others, they're going through
the same process because Ray is, at least from my perspective, I'm a bit of an outsider. He's
one of the most insightful and deep thinkers about investment, about finance, about economics in
general, actually about life. So it's interesting to see him go 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, 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
is 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, cashish trash, investable 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 missing the last part, which is Bitcoin's the solution, right? And so he was gold and some
other ideas. But I think that he's a perfect example of when you are part of the establishment,
people view you in a very static way as the leader of a part of establishment.
But whether it's Bill Gates, Ray Dalio or somebody else, each one of these people were
innovators and challengers to a system. They were upstarts at one point. And so it's kind of this
idea that if you live long enough, you eventually become the man, right? And so Gates is a good
example, right? Warren Buffett is a good example, Ray Dalio is a good example, 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 of our family 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 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, started to have financial institutions started
to now you're seeing corporations start to do it, right? Eventually, there's going to be a central
bank that does it. And so you kind of walk through that line. And what you understand is like,
it's the same thing every time, it's just somebody new, right? That path, right? That Bitcoin or
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. 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
and, you know, maybe it takes two days to transact rather than actually mailing it across the other
world. Now what we're seeing is a transition from those electronic 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 DM. And there will be others that will try to do this.
And so when you get everything digital, right, and I think that's the kind of the first step
that everyone focuses on, the competition at the technology layer essentially goes away.
You get some level of feature parity and sure there's bells and whistles on each kind of
implementation of a digital currency. But at the end of the day, the technology is
relatively the same. And ultimately, what it will do is it will facilitate the adoption of
digital wallets. So you have to have a digital wallet regardless of what digital currency you
have. Same with me, same with everybody else in the world. But what it does do is when you kind of
push away and reduce the friction of competition at the technology layer,
it moves the competition to the monetary policy layer. And so when you get to that layer,
now also 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. 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 gonna get paid in dollars, you have to pay your taxes in dollars, you're gonna
start to see people operate in a multi currency environment where they say, okay, I got paid
in my digital dollar, click a button, I save in Bitcoin, it stays there, protects or grows my
purchasing power. Oh, I need to pay my taxes. Let me switch back into dollars with click of a button
and pay. When you go to a multi currency world, it's not just about currency. It's now multi asset
world because not only is the currency digitized, but that same technology is used to digitize
stocks, bonds and commodities as well. And so today we live in a very fragmented financial world
where basically I have a brokerage account, I have a bank account, I may have an alternative
asset account, etc. When I can put all those assets in a single digital wallet, and I can then go
from asset to asset without having to go back to a single unit of account.
Very 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 a
settlement time. So you can't get true automation. 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. Well, that can't happen right now because
literally the transaction won't go through. And so I always joke that in an automated world,
it's like a CD-ROM, but we're trying to take cassette, take player assets and put in the CD-ROM.
It's just incompatible technology. Reference is nobody understands at this point.
By the way, you need to update your references. I probably do. It's like taking a CD-ROM,
trying to put an MP3 player into 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? Like you just can't do it.
Yeah, it's funny. The vision of the future you're painting, it's kind of an exciting one.
And it almost makes me sad looking into the future when we'll look back at this time. It's like
it's how incredibly inefficient financial transactions were like the transaction of value
of any kind. Like how like what to pay each other. Like there has to be processes. There's like
payroll and all this kind of just the entirety of transactions is just like painful. Almost all
transactions are painful. And even and the companies that innovate to make the transactions a little bit
more frictionless like Amazon with a one click purchase button, like went out huge. But even
that's really painful. There's actually really interesting, especially then you start to move
that into the space of data. 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 a service for free if you hand over the data, but there's like explicit
transaction going on. So you can empower all those kinds of things that 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. And so when you dig into why is that,
a lot of times it's not that the people don't have the money. It's actually a mismatch of the
payments. So what ends up happening is you get paid on the first and the 15th, but on the 12th
your Netflix bill hits on the 13th you went grocery shopping and on the 14th your car payments hit,
you overdraft and then on the 15th you actually get the check and then you're able to pay not
only the overdraft but for the expenses that you have. And so something as simple as just
getting paid at the end of every day immediately would eliminate 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 mechanisms of financial movement of money as opposed to you,
which is what we want to do as human beings operating in a high layers of like providing
services for others of like following your passions and like working for others, like doing cool
shit or basically providing value, exchanging value in the world and not thinking about the
money. The money takes care of itself and then you see the results of it. So you're able to think
in terms of money but not have to know how the like the accounting works.
Automation simply frees humans up to do more creative work.
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 usher us into that
world. And I think the most fascinating part of this entire industry is people who are trying to
figure out now that we're going to have these digital technologies, how do we usher in that
automated world faster? And so there's people who are building all kinds of incredible things.
There's literally some technologies where you can stream for paying for consumption of content.
Yeah. Right. I saw somebody recently who they basically said, hey, I have created something
but it's not going to be released until everyone in almost like a go fund me type situation pays
for it in combination then it gets unlocked. And so when you start to think about this,
it's not only innovation on the technology front, it's innovation around the way that we form
capital. It's the way that we organize resources. It's the way that we build companies. It's the
business models. It's the application of those technologies. All that stuff starts to change.
And go back to 2007. It's when the iPhone came out. Uber wasn't possible.
Rami's going online. 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. We like to think linearly and
that's not how the world works. Yeah. I do find it kind of interesting. It is NFT based but I
don't think it has to be this idea of I think big 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,
automated financial system, then you could do a bunch of interesting things about what it means
to add value to the world. I mean, I don't know if BitCloud is currently an efficient
representation of that, but I am truly happy that however that thing works, I'm just one
notch above Vladimir Putin, which is one of the, that's like one of the bucket list items for me,
to have a list where I'm one notch above Putin. Well, what I think you're talking about here
is important because there's historical examples. You could invest in a patent in some situations.
You could invest in an organization that has an idea. So these are super inefficient given
kind of the vision that you're painting in terms of like investing directly in an idea in a super
efficient automated fashion. But that's how the technology evolution works. It's really hard
to do it first and then slowly kind of becomes easier and easier as technology is more prevalent.
The other thing that I think is interesting is this whole idea of investing in people.
If you really think about the origination of that is I would hire somebody, right? I pay you
money and then you're going to create production, but I take the 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. You see it in professional sports, you see it in a lot of
these things. And so I just think that a lot of the focus right now is on the technology.
But ultimately, these are ideas that are very old and have had lots of success 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 that 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,
I hate the term, but killer apps, cool ideas that are implemented effectively at scale
that transform the world. There's been a lot of different ideas popping up.
There's a lot of ideas about social networks that are built on top of the technology and
all that kind of stuff. 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, which is part of why it has values,
because you're giving up value. So in one way is to exchange energy and computational power
for Bitcoin. So you can mine it. You can literally take computer power that you have,
you can rent it to the network and run that software, and then it will pay you a portion
of the kind of daily revenue off that system. You can acquire Bitcoin 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. I used Cash App. There's Coinbase. There's
all these exchanges. How do I convert my $100 to Bitcoin? Is there something disclaimer?
This is not financial advice. And this is just us talking in just your opinions. Do not use this
to invest or take as financial expertise. That said, is there something you recommend
that's an easy entry point for somebody that's like, hmm, I wonder if I can convert this $100
into whatever amount of Bitcoin? What do you recommend? What are the options?
So there's a lot of options. I'm heavily biased. I went out and I scoured the market, looked at
all of them. I've invested a lot of money in a company called BlockFi that basically
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 kind of the one that I'm biased towards because I...
So BlockFi is Bitcoin only or is it in exchange with other crypto?
It's got a bunch of different ones. They basically are agnostic to what it is,
but they provide kind of financial products to crypto investors.
Okay. So you mentioned a few interesting ideas that'd be nice for people who would not be familiar
with it, cold storage, hot storage. What does that mean? So I go to a website and I convert dollars
to Bitcoin. That's a kind of storage. That's like online banking. What else is there?
So there's a couple of different things that you can do. 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. There's all these kind of benefits in the legacy system to make sure that
as long as I don't have millions and millions of dollars there, I'm going to be protected pretty
much if anything happens through FDIC insurance. If I want to do that, I'm taking that counterparty
risk though. So it's mitigated, but there's still counterparty risk. I'm counting on that bank.
But it is easier to move it around, right? If all of a sudden you call me up and say,
hey, send me some money, I can press a couple of buttons on my computer and it'll send it to you.
If I want deeper level of security, I can go and I can get the physical dollars and I can go and I
can put it under my mattress, right? And I can say, you know what? It's not going to be as easy
to send it to you immediately. But if I really want to, I can go underneath my mattress pretty
quickly. I can grab it. I can get it back to the bank and then I can send you the money.
The third thing I could do is I could basically take those physical dollars out of the bank
and then I could go and I could go put it literally in a vault somewhere that I don't have control
over that's behind 10 passwords and biometric scanning and it's really difficult to even get to
it, right? So you can almost look at it as like there's three stages of security that you could
have in the traditional world. The same thing is true in Bitcoin. So you could buy Bitcoin
on any exchange. You can do it on BlockFi, but you also can do it on places like Coinbase,
Gemini, Kraken, et cetera. Also, Cash App. Cash App. You can do it on Cash App.
I think there's still sponsor in the spot, yes. 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 and billions of dollars of assets, they have higher levels of security. That's why
they're well known. That's why people trust them, whatever. But you are taking counterparty risk.
It is easier to quickly send to somebody. So the trade-off of ease of use,
but counterparty risk is big. And in the Bitcoin community specifically,
this is a huge thing of they really, really have a keep for not leaving
the Bitcoin there 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 what I'll call a second layer of
storage. That second layer storage could be a hardware device that you can quickly just grab
off your desk and plug into your computer and immediately use. That's what they call a hardware
wallet. Or you can have some sort of software wallet 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 or cold storage. And this is literally there was
a company called Zappo that would put things in deep cold storage and it was literally buried
in a mountain. So like the odds that somebody's physically going to go there, there's armed
guards, there's kind of all of this type of stuff. But again, you're taking some level
of counterparty risk because they have your Bitcoin. And so the saying or the phrase is
not your keys, not your coins. Or as my buddy Isaiah Jackson came up with, he said,
not your keys, not your cheese. In terms of sovereignty is important. And ultimately,
this goes back to kind of the beginning of our conversation around Bitcoin's ethos, sovereignty,
right? Giving the power back to people. You don't have to rely on this infrastructure in order to
be able to participate in this monetary kind of economy, which you are now able to do as 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 a cash app and the BlockFi and Coinbase,
like you can store it there. You can purchase and trade it there and store it there and so on.
But ultimately, they're saying, you want to keep some of it there, but you want to move it to the
hardware wallet. And cold storage of the hardware wallet is like you can disconnect it from the
computer because ultimately stuff that's connected to the internet can be compromised, can be
controlled by governments and other parties and so on. What are your thoughts about, sort of practically
speaking for maybe like a regular citizen, what should be the role of the hardware wallet in their
lives? Yeah. So at the highest level, I just think that learning about it is important. So even if
you only have $5 equivalent of Bitcoin, going and understanding here's how it works, here's why
it's important, here's how I would actually withdraw from an exchange under the hardware wallet,
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 do it. Yeah.
Yeah. It's kind of like if I said to you, hey, we're going to go buy an asset and you never went
and you looked at it, you never went and made a decision like, sure, maybe I did it or I didn't
do it, but you didn't actually experience it. And so I think that that's an important part.
The second thing is each person is different from how they view this asset. So there are some people
who are speculating. There's three use cases for Bitcoin. There's store value, medium of exchange,
and speculation. And the people who are speculating, they can't put it in deep cold storage because
they need to be able to trade it. So what ends up happening is they fall in the bucket of 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, I bought one Bitcoin
and I'm going to save it for my child, right? And I'm going to give it to them on their 18th
birthday. 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 the US dollar price still doesn't move. And so
these are kind of the long-term holders, right? These are the iron fist or as recently as become
popular, the diamond hands, right? Diamond hands. They're just, they're not going anywhere. And so
I think that those people are much more likely to not have their Bitcoin on exchanges or in
software walls. They've got it in some sort of like highly secure environment. 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 ABCD company
and that counterparty risk ends up actually being fatal or detrimental.
So again, this is not financial advice disclaimer, but let me ask, in terms of investment advice on
Bitcoin. So you see Bitcoin is 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 your wealth in Bitcoin and you're basically
buying only and storing long-term. So that's something that's a legitimate way to approach
Bitcoin in your recommendation. Go to other cultures. So if we remove ourselves from the
western world culture of investing and 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. Your great-grandfather gave it to your grandfather, your grandfather gave it
to your father, your father gave it to you. 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 dominated 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.
And so I think that for me personally, I've got over 95% of my net worth that's in this.
Over 95% of your net worth. There's two important caveats to this. One is I didn't buy
some Bitcoin in 2011 or 2012. And then all of a sudden it appreciated a bunch and it grew into
that. But from a cost basis perspective, I 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 of 2018, I said, take about 50% of my net worth and convert it from
dollar-denominated assets into Bitcoin. So it was a very kind of intentional decision with a very
specific view on the world as to why I was doing it. I then essentially just let it
sit there, grow, whatever, until the spring of 2020. And when I saw the government step in
and start to say, hey, we're going to really be aggressive in terms of interest rate manipulation
and quantitative easing, I then decided to go ahead and take basically the remainder and start
to convert it as well. And so it became very aggressive in doing that. And so the way that I
look at it is that's actually my savings. And so in some weird way, if I said, what's the dollar
worth, you'd say, well, a $1 bill is worth $1. 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. I denominate everything in Bitcoin. When I make a purchase in my head, I'm calculating
how much Bitcoin am I spending right now? Well, guess what happens? When you have a
devaluing currency as the denominator, doesn't matter, right? You're finding some incentivize
to spend or invest trying to consume. When you have an appreciating currency, all of a sudden,
you become much less consumptive in your behavior. Because you're actually trading off
future purchasing power for the consumption today. It's fascinating to think that if when
you move about this world, you think in Bitcoin, you behave differently is if you think in dollars.
That's really fascinating.
But here's the thing is, the last 50 years or so is actually the outlier in history.
Most people used to think this way. It's only when a fiat currency got introduced that one
argument, the positive argument or perspective, is there was an explosion in growth.
But really, it's because there was a financial incentive to consume.
There's nobody better in the world than the United States at consuming. We consume
anything and everything. If you want to see a great example, look at how big the Coca-Cola's
are at McDonald's. You go to other places, they don't serve them that big. The other example,
or the negative argument, is we have to consume. Because if not, you end up being the bottom 45%
of Americans that have no investable assets and actually are just having their wealth devalued
away. Holding the dollars end up being a very bad economic decision. When you then switch
to this sound money, you say, wait a second, why would I, if today I can trade one Bitcoin
back in October of last year, one Bitcoin for US$10,000, why would I spend that if at some
point in the future, whether it's a month from now or 10 years from now, I could trade it for
something much, much more than that. You just become much more of a anti-consumer and much
more of a long-term thinker. Yeah, from the individual perspective, that's pretty powerful.
I wonder, I mean, I think that's an interesting debate. What's better for the long-term economy?
No, better for the growth of the civilization. Because capitalism is fascinating. It seems to
work pretty well. There's this kind of like Eric Weinstein says that one of the problems is,
for the past several decades, this whole economy, society is built on the idea that we have to
keep growing. It depends on that idea. And it's a good question, whether that's going to result
in huge problems, or if a college student on a deadline, the dependence on growth will mean
that we'll have to grow. The fear of death will force us to grow. But I think there's
a false equivalency between we're dependent on growth, and then if the world was denominated
and sound money, we don't grow. What I think ends up happening is we remove a lot of the
society's bullshit. Because right now, when the money is free, or the currency is free,
you can come up with all kinds of crazy stuff and people will give it to you.
When all of a sudden, it's really, really valued by the population.
The decisions are better. Yeah, you have to provide real value in the goods and services
you provide in order to get them to give it to you. There's less room for corruption, less room for
manipulation. That's not actually productive. Yeah, definitely. So you said you moved a lot of
your investment into Bitcoin. When you look, 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 plug like me, in terms of just investing and moving into
thinking about cryptocurrency, is there a strategy that you recommend? What are the
different options about investing into Bitcoin? Yeah, so I think that there's just kind of
timeless advice when it comes to investing or acquiring an asset in general. Dollar
cost averaging is usually the best way to think about it. And what I mean by that is
most people don't just have a pile of currency sitting in it, right? It's not like they have
a million dollars sitting in their bank. They're like, what do I do with it? That situation aside,
what happens is they trade their hours and their effort for currency. And so as they get paid every
two weeks, let's say, the best way to acquire Bitcoin without having to worry about timing
markets and being a professional trader is to simply take whatever the percentages that you want
and to buy Bitcoin when you get your paycheck. So if you get paid on the first and 15th of every
month, on that day, you should go take, you know, let's say it's 3% of your paycheck. Take 3% go
buy Bitcoin. Don't worry about what the price is. Just do that over time. And the reason why that's
important is if in December of 2017, when Bitcoin was at $20,000, it was the height of kind of this
last big upwards movement, you had taken all of your money and you had put it into Bitcoin.
You would have had to wait almost three years just to get back to, quote unquote,
break even in US dollar terms. If at the same time you had simply bought then and over the next
three years bought every two weeks, you would have been up hundreds of percent three years later,
because what ended up happening was you bought a bunch of Bitcoin when it was at $15, $12, $10,
$9, $8, $3, $4, $5, $5, $5, you know, all the way back up on the other side.
And so dollar cost averaging is one of these weird things that 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. 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,
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. If you don't believe in Bitcoin and you just want to,
let's say you just want to do the S&P 500, 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 2% higher or lower than where you bought it? It doesn't really matter.
And buying often makes you, I guess, resistant, robust to the volatility of the market or the
volatility of the Bitcoin price and so on. That said, Bitcoin price is volatile. And
again, the argument I've heard is like everything that's going to be a lot more valuable in the
future. If you look at the history, companies like Apple, like Tesla is now, but let's look at
companies that have now stabilized, right? Apple is a good example. It's like volatile in the
beginning. And so the argument for Bitcoin is like, yeah, this is the early stages because
it's going to be a lot more valuable. Right now it's volatile. And this is why you have to have
these kinds of strategies to ride out the volatility. Of course, everything that goes to zero is also
volatile. Like the early days are volatile. Do you see like this volatility as like a feature
or a bug? Or is it just like a way of life? So Amazon is the one that I know the numbers on
in terms of the early volatility. Every year since it has gone public, it's had a double digit drawdown
in that year. The average is over 30%. And one time it drew down over 95%.
Sounds a lot like Bitcoin, right? Like, oh, wow, 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, another way that I look at this is every asset priced in Bitcoin is down
significantly. So over the last one, three, five years, the dollar priced in Bitcoin has
crashed 99%. If you denominate stocks, it's down like 80%, 85%. If you dominate gold,
if you do not dominate bonds, if you just go down the line, real estate, et cetera,
it's all down massively against Bitcoin. Now, you could argue that that's because Bitcoin
is appreciating in US dollar terms. Or you could actually argue that the world is re-pricing this
asset, doing price discovery on this asset. And it's essentially comparing. It's saying,
hey, Bitcoin versus the stock or Bitcoin versus this ounce of gold or Bitcoin versus,
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 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 a majority of people, that's dollars. And so when you look
at the US dollar price, you get all this volatility. The beauty of this is that 60% that doesn't move
regardless of price upward or downward in movement, those people aren't looking at the day-to-day
price. What they've basically said is I've acquired X amount of Bitcoin, and I'm just going to hold
it for years. And every time somebody's done that, right? If you bought Bitcoin at any point in the
last 12 years and you held it till today, you are up in US dollar terms. Now, if we had this
conversation 18 months ago, couldn't say that. So it's all about not only the acquisition price,
if you will, it's also when are you looking at it, right? Because there was a point in 2017,
you could have said the same thing, but in 18, you couldn't. And so I tend to think a lot about
humans are really, really bad at short-term decision-making because we're so emotional,
especially when something has a price tied to it.
Yeah. So in terms of our strategies and decision-making, we should be long-term and have a regular,
almost think like an algorithm in that kind of way. So I think you've tweeted that you believe
that Bitcoin has a chance of reaching 1 million. I don't know what it is currently. I think it's
50, 60, 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.
But you're even crazier apparently thinking that it can reach a million. So do you think it's
possible for it to reach a million? Is there some kind of transformative effects you have to see?
First, when might it reach a million? What are the signs that we would look for what's required
for it to reach a million? So let's just look at it from a macro perspective. Gold is a $10
trillion asset. And when you compare the technology of gold to the technology of Bitcoin,
Bitcoin is superior in every single way. It's more portable. It's more divisible.
It's more verifiable. It's more scarce on everything. And so some people would argue it's
a 10x improvement. Some people argue it's a 100x improvement from a technology standpoint.
And so we don't need Bitcoin to actually capture the full 10x or 100x improvement from a
market cap standpoint. If Bitcoin simply captures 2x the value, it'd be a $20 trillion market cap,
which would put Bitcoin at about a million dollars. So just from a macro perspective,
if you have a 10x or 100x improvement from a technology standpoint and you directionally get
some value capture in that direction, you're hitting around a million or more dollar price
point. Can I ask a question, which is what's the current market cap for Bitcoin?
The current market cap is right around a trillion, just over a trillion dollars.
And you're saying gold is 10 trillion. And 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 dollars.
Right. So you can kind of see there's... Or single Bitcoin. So if you capture the entirety of the
gold market, then it would be value of a single Bitcoin. The price of a single Bitcoin would be
500,000 dollars. Okay. To reach a million, it would be double that. That's where the 20 trillion
comes from. Correct. Got it. So if you then say to yourself, okay, how does the pricing kind of
cycles work, right? Or the boom and bust cycles? Gold is a very kind of linear type supply schedule,
meaning that there is a certain amount of gold that comes out of the ground each year. The
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, or maybe one goes out of business. But for the most
part, the kind of inflationary increase to the supply of gold is pretty stagnant year over year.
Bitcoin has a very unique feature, which every four years, there is a programmatic supply shock,
meaning that in the beginning, 50 Bitcoin every 10 minutes was introduced into the supply.
After four years of that happening every 10 minutes, it was cut in half. So in a single
moment, it went from 50 to now it was 25. Four years every 10 minutes, 25, got cut in half again
to 12 and a half. And then recently in May 2020, got cut to 6.25. When you have an asset that is
determined the price based on supply and demand, you normally have two inputs to the equation.
What is the supply and what is the demand? In an asset like gold or a stock or anything else,
we have to do our best guess at the supply, both the existing supply and the incoming supply.
And we have to do our best guess at the demand. And we're actually pretty good at this a lot of
times in terms of directionally saying it's going to go up or down and here's kind of some
price point milestones. Bitcoin's unique in that there's 100% verifiable proof of the existing
supply, the total supply, and the incoming daily supply. So we know 100% that can show you on the
actual blockchain or in the code that there's 21 million Bitcoin. And that's all there will
ever be. I can show you that there's 18.6 million give or take Bitcoin that actually are in circulation
today, right? And I can go all the way back to show you every single transaction that's ever
occurred since January 3rd, 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's a supply shock to them. And so probably the best
thing that I've done over the last couple of years was in 2019, I started to talk about the idea that
we were going to have both the supply shock and the demand shock in 2021. Or I'm sorry, in 2020.
I didn't know when this bull market that we were in was 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 gyrations in the repo markets,
a lot of CEOs leaving their jobs, all this kind of stuff. And all I said was at some point,
when the market turns over, the government's going to have to step in. We are addicted to
stimulus. They're going to have to pay interest rates down and they're going to have to print
money. I had no clue that there was going to be a global pandemic, that they were going to have
to step in in such an aggressive way and move rates not down, but down to zero, and that they
not only were going to print hundreds of billions, but they 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, et cetera. And right as they do that, it appears at the same time
there's going to be this supply shock. So you're going to get a supply shock and a demand shock
that are both positive for the price. And I call it rocket fuel for Bitcoin. Well, it happened.
And here we are. I now look for and I say, okay, we are likely going to see 100,000 Bitcoin,
$100,000 Bitcoin this year, right? At some point, I don't know when it happens,
but we're moving in that direction. So you think in 2021 we'll see 100,000?
That would be my most conservative view. I've said $100,000 since 2019 and people thought that was
insane and crazy and all stuff. Now I'm the conservative guy in the room because I stick
with $100,000 and people are saying, you know, multiples of that number. So we'll see what
happens. But I think that there's still a lot of room 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 625 to whatever. 50% reduction. Yeah.
And so that's what I think will basically when we get that next supply shock that I'll
carry us up over a $1 million Bitcoin price, which if historical examples persistent again,
sometimes it's hard to use historical examples to look at future events.
But if that happens, we would see $1 million 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 kind of top of the next market.
Hopefully without a coupling to another pandemic.
Yes. 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. But like fundamentally, there's going to be a huge move in your prediction of
value into Bitcoin. I mean, that's a fascinating world to think about.
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 future,
which Bitcoin will be at the center of. But from my perspective of
thinking how like I and others can build technologies on top of this kind of decentralized
world, I'm thinking about different technologies out there, different cryptocurrencies out there,
Ethereum being one, but there's a lot of others. So I'd love to get your sort of ideas about some
of these. But so first, let me ask you about what the hell is shitcoin? Is this connected to
our previous discussion of the meme? Does shitcoin cover basically all coins that are not
Bitcoin? Is it mean? Is it beautiful? Is it a mixture of both?
As with most things in life, depends who you ask. The most kind of enthusiastic and
parts of the Bitcoin community, shitcoin is anything else. If you ascribe to kind of a
maximalistic view of the world, shitcoin would be anything. If you look at people who I would say are
Bitcoin proponents, yet see value in other things, shitcoin may be the bottom half of
the other things. 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. And it's used to articulate the idea that
whatever you want to put in that bucket has no value. So shitcoin are coins that have no value.
What is fascinating about it, and I think that again speaks to the power of the Bitcoin community,
is there was congressional hearings a couple of years ago. And at one point, a congressman from
Ohio, Warren Davidson, who was definitely open minded and excited about Bitcoin, asked an individual
on the congress floor during testimony to talk about these other coins. And at one point, basically
read into the record, the terminology of shitcoin. He said the word shitcoin. I can't remember if
he said it first, or if the other person did, and then he repeated it. That's awesome. But he
definitely he was trying to get that read into the record, for sure. And so you can imagine one,
again, the meme speaking insolently to the Bitcoin community was made him very well liked.
But also two was it does go back to this idea almost of if you and I sat down with 10 CEOs,
and we interviewed each one of them. And then we went in a room and we deliberated and we said,
we have to pick the person who's 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 naturally get tribalism,
but you also get things like shitcoin because what it does is it's not only a kind of verbal
attack towards others, it's a rallying cry for internal. What's so funny is that it was started
with the Bitcoin community talking about everybody. But now you've seen adoption in other communities
who use it, basically say, well, we're not a shitcoin. It's the next guy.
Yeah. I mean, the meaning, to be honest, it's sometimes misused. I think 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 that they become mean. But when you do it with grace, it can tear down
an argument and at the same time have love and respect underneath it. I mean, it's a beautiful
dance they have to be good at. People just can suck at communication and even a powerful weapon
like a meme in the wrong hands just fires in a way that doesn't get anything done. But this is
like a war of humor and memes. It's kind of fascinating, exactly like you formulated that
there's asymmetry of power. So you have to have guerrilla warfare in this internet game,
especially when there's no leader, like you said, in the distributed culture.
The other thing I would say here that is really important, I think, is from a society standpoint,
we've become very soft and very kind of coddling and not in a way that's like, I think people
take this argument too far sometimes. But what I mean by that is it's almost like if you're the
person who holds somebody accountable, you become the bad person. If you're the person who
says, hey, that's wrong, you're the bad person. And so in a world where I think in this kind of
influence, all positive, if you have any negative feedback or constructive criticism like you're
the bad person, it's the ultimate echo chamber. And so I think that what the Bitcoin world does
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. 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. They say, hey, you made X claim, prove it. And as you can imagine, a great example is like
the financial media meets Bitcoiners. And it's a bloodbath in kind of the arena of ideas because
what do they do? The financial media is used to the soft opinion pieces, etc. And Bitcoiners show
up and they're like, here's data point A, B, and C. Here's example one, two, and three, and you're
wrong. And then all they yell and scream about is like, I'm wrong. I'm wrong. I'm wrong. You can't
say I'm wrong. And they're like, no, just prove what I just said. And so you get in this very,
very weird. It's fascinating. It's a fascinating benefit. But I do want to say I've been watching
this. It's kind of interesting. I think that the pursuit of truth through like tearing down bad
ideas can be done with grace. And to do it with grace requires a lot of skill. Like what people
don't realize about disagreement. They think that disagreement is easy. Like they see the lies or
the inaccuracies in the statement. And they just think they can say wrong. Yes, you can say that.
But if you want to be effective, it requires great skill. Like you look at, I don't know,
a beautiful verbal shit poster, which is Christopher Hitchens, right? It requires a lot of skill
through your words to tear down an argument, to criticize, and to take a step towards truth.
What I'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 shitposting, 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
get good at it, like any skill. It's a 10,000 hours. Like get improved deliberate practice,
self criticism, all of those things. Just because you're anonymous doesn't mean you won't get
deep joy and actually have an impact on the world if you get good at shitposting.
But I think this is really, really important, because you're right in that it's all about
intention versus action. If your intention is to tell somebody that they are wrong in an effort
to get them to see the truth, that's very different than if your intention is to tell
someone they're wrong and hurt their feelings. And so when you can unpack intention and action,
and you really quickly can tell what somebody ultimately is trying to accomplish,
I also think that one of the craziest things that I've seen play out is memes. When I use
that term, I'm not just talking about like a static photo, right? When I'm talking about these
elaborate kind of edited videos and kind of all this stuff. When done right, it is the most
articulate way to deliver a blunt message. And it's done in such a way that is humorous and
entertaining, yet really hammers the point, huh? 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? But it does take practice. And you can tell, look, there's people who are
fantastic meme lords. And there are people who absolutely suck at it. And it's like anything.
It's just how good are you at communicating? And I've heard the idea a bunch of times. So I don't
know who to kind of credit for it. But whether it's emojis, it's gifts, it's memes, whatever.
This is the extension and evolution of just hieroglyphics, right? Like, we have been doing
this for literally centuries. It's just that now we're doing it on the internet and you can press
a button and go to millions and millions of people immediately. But speaking of memes, what the heck
do you think is up with Elon Musk talking about Dogecoin a lot? Sort of from the cryptocurrency
community, I've been talking to a lot of technologists, I guess, and reading papers on
cryptocurrency. It's like nobody really sees Dogecoin as a revolutionary crypto technology. A lot
of people talk about its security issues. There's a bunch of issues it has. Nevertheless, you did
say that money is the kind of social construct, right? And Elon Musk's combination of humor
and brilliant engineering in the various companies he runs, combines to create a kind of value
and excitement behind Dogecoin. He says that the most amusing outcome is the most likely kind of
idea, which sounds silly, but there could be like profound truth to it. It's like, what do you make
of Dogecoin philosophically or technically? Is it possible that Dogecoin will overtake Bitcoin
and run the entire world? I can't even, because it could happen. But if there's any serious way
to answer that question. Well, we have to start with Techno King of Tesla and Master of Coin,
as they are so articulately called in the latest SEC filing. Because he officially changed his
title to Techno King. Techno King of Tesla. And the CFO's new title is Master of Coin. And so
when you have a sense of humor and frankly, a level of self-confidence and an appreciation
for irony in the world, Dogecoin is actually one of the least crazy things that you could talk about
when you're willing to go to Techno King of Tesla, Master of Coin and all this stuff. And so
I think that Elon doesn't get enough credit, frankly, for his understanding of internet
culture, understanding of memes, and understanding of, frankly, human psychology and marketing.
And so in some crazy way, every time he talks about Dogecoin, it's a rallying cry for an
entire generation of kids. It's a rallying cry for an entire industry in terms of cryptocurrencies
and digital technologies. But this is the flag. And this is the thing that he can yell and scream
about and tweet about without worry of punishment. So he could be talking about Bitcoin, he could
be talking about cryptocurrency, but that's not going to be as beautifully humorous and whatever
the hell internet culture is as Dogecoin. He's finding the right language. He's speaking the
language of the people of the of the individual age. If you want to reach weird people, you can't
be serious. And most people are weird. The masses are weird. So he's speaking to the masses.
Yeah. And even further than that, I think, is he essentially is, he's using Dogecoin as a way
to say, I'm doing this because I can. He couldn't do it with securities. He couldn't do it with
certain types of other assets, right? I almost look at it as a Venn diagram. What's the thing
that a bunch of people know about, care about, think it's funny, whatever. And also overlay
that with the things that he could actually talk about that he won't get in trouble for.
That's a big F you to the SEC. I could see the people just freaking out. I mean, I love it,
but I don't know if I would have the guts to do it myself. But I think he's an inspiration to a lot
of us to be like, well, maybe you should grow the guts. When you're the techno king, you can do
whatever you want, right? And I mean, that's something to aspire to is to be the techno king
in your own little world. If you also think about it in the sense of when you're somebody on a mission
to create interplanetary life, when you're trying to solve or put a dent in the climate crisis,
or create electric vehicles and be the first American company and have a 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 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 a really kind of game of like
3D chess that, frankly, I'm not privy to, right? And I'm kind of watching from the sidelines and
figuring out alongside everybody else. But I also don't think that it's just Elon bought a bunch of
Dogecoin and tweets about it because he thinks he's going to a dollar and he's gonna make money,
right? I don't think it's an economic argument as to why he's so interested in it. I think it's
much more, it's almost like meta message for a lot of other stuff.
Yeah, he's kind of trying to break apart internet communication from first principles,
like he does so many other problems. It's kind of fascinating to watch. I know he's been,
he's taught me quite a bit about communication. And at least for me, it's been liberating to not
give a fuck about the old school way of things. I've been always bothered by a place I deeply
admire, which is MIT. But there's problems, bureaucracies and hierarchies that hold back
innovation brilliant minds. And in that sense, Doge is a kind of FU to the system that's kind
of positive, but also kind of, but it was also an FU. So in that sense, I think Elon has a
perspective on the world that's similar to Bitcoin folks, which I really like, which is
like thinking long term, how visionaries think is like, how, if I take these ideas, and the ideas
hold true, what will the world look like in 20, 30, 50 years? And think about everything in that way.
Yeah, I like Bezos' view, which is 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 fortunate enough
to live to, and then look backwards and say, this decision that I'm going to make, I have two
options. Which one is going to be the one that I least regret? And if you continue to make decisions
that way, one, you have that long term view kind of built in because you're working backwards,
two, you are ultimately going to optimize for 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 Bitcoin has kind of this proxy for time,
as we talked about, interplanetary travel, where there's multiple steps from creating a reusable
rocket to landing it to all this stuff, all the way to simple things just like, if you're simply
if you're simply trying to figure out where the world's going to be 30 years from now, you know,
Bill Gates says that we overestimate what we can do in one year, underestimate what we can do in 10.
Well, to me, it's a kind of degree of mistake, if you will, 10 years, maybe you're off by 10%.
Well, if that line of progress continues 20 years, you may be off by 100%. And 30 years,
you may be off by 1000%. 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 refusal to kind of move or budge off of that. It's what makes them special. One of the
things that garnered a lot of excitement in the crypto community is NFTs. I have no idea
really the depths, the fundamental technological, philosophical depths of this technology,
whether this is just like a little bit of a fad, or if there's some deep lessons to learn,
whether it's Bitcoin or cryptocurrency in general about it. Do you have thoughts about like the
long lasting fundamental aspects of NFTs? I think there's probably both things happening,
fad and things to learn, right? And if we just start with like, what is an NFT? It's a non-fungible
token, meaning that there's no fungibility. Fungibility is a fancy word. I always describe it
as if I took a $100 bill and I put it on the table with a bunch of other $100 bills and we mixed
them up and I just grabbed a $100 bill and left. I'm no worse as long as they're all official $100
bills, because as long as I have $100, I have $100. I don't need that exact same bill back.
So that means that those $100 bills are fungible. Non-fungible would be like art. If I took 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 and it wasn't the Picasso,
I lose because the Picasso is really important there, right? So the non-fungibility is important
in art. What these non-fungible tokens essentially are doing is they are creating scarcity and
originality in a digital environment. And what I mean by that is take a music file. If I had a
music file and you wanted it, you said send it to me, I press send. It essentially creates a copy
and you get one music file, I get another. We don't care. You can listen to the music,
I can listen to the 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 and I get a copy, there's a problem. And so ultimately what I think is playing
out with NFTs is it's a technology regardless of where it plays out from blockchains or
what in communities or environments that just brings true digital scarcity to the internet.
And so naturally what do people do? They look at the legacy world and they say, well, what's
scarce there that has value? How do we bring that to the digital world? So art is a perfect
example, right? And frankly, last year I started to look at this because it felt like this was
going to be really, really big. And the conclusion I came to was just as Bitcoin is going to be
bigger than gold, right? The digital application of something is going to be bigger than the
analog application. The same thing is going to be true in art. The digital art world is going
to be bigger than the traditional art world. People think that sounds crazy at first until
you start to realize it's very, very similar. The art is more portable. It can be divisible,
right? It's got a larger demand market in terms of the internet rather than an auction, right?
All 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 that's how I was going to store value. What I find fascinating though is that I now can
take that concept, which most of the wealthiest people in the world have a significant portion.
Some people have 20% in terms of number of billionaires, 20% of their wealth is in art.
And you can bring to this digital realm, which is much more kind of natural to a digital native.
And so the best way I know how to describe the importance is imagine a serial number
being placed on something. Take the Eiffel Tower. The only Eiffel Tower that has value is the first
one. Every replica of it, regardless of size, location, who made it, where they sent it,
they have no value. Eiffel Tower 001 is the most important. And so I think that's ultimately what
we're starting to see here. And what we're looking at is probably 1% of what it's going to grow into.
So you're bullish on this. You're saying it could grow into something for 1%. It could grow
into something significant, like all the kinds of different applications. Strip away all the
applications right now and just think about is digital scarcity going to be important on the
internet. Right. Moving all the things that are scarce in the physical world into digital space,
us trying to figure out which things can be moved and not. And also there's things in the digital
space just like you're saying that don't exist in the physical world that might also benefit from
gaining scarcity. People are, I guess, creating NFTs out of tweets or whatever. So you have a
fun Twitter account. You could say 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 can invest in people.
You can invest in art can be defined broadly as any kind of creation. Right. In some sense,
this whole idea of scarcity can overtake the entirety of the digital world. It can consume
all of the markets we see as financial markets and just turn everything into a market.
Well, so if I take you on like a 10-year fast forward and I paint a picture of
something today that seems absolutely insane, but there's early signs that people are building
this and let's just give them the benefit of the doubt that some of the early iterations will work
and most of them won't. There's a world where you and I are participating in a digital economy
in a virtual world where whether it is a piece of art, it is a digital sculpture,
it is a digital skin from a video game, it is a digital good that we purchased somewhere online
and we bring it and we display it in a digital museum or a virtual museum.
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. 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. 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.
It means I'm going to take you and I'm going to physically move you to geography after geography
after geography. It's going to take time. It's going to take resources and ultimately it's going to
take lots of effort. If I now said to you, hey, I'm going to transport you in this virtual world
to multiple geographies, but you're going to experience it in this virtual 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, 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. In a six-month period, you've actually
made three times the progress than you would have if you had to do the physical world.
That's where I think we're heading. 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, we lived most of our productive and social lives in this digital world
and increasingly essentially create a simulation where the biological basis is just there to
sustain the brain that's used to operate in the virtual world. Taking us back to the original
when we started talking about war, I wonder what conflict looks like in that world,
that the people who are born today maybe will be fighting wars in the space,
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. In that virtual world,
is it about death and destruction of human life and the physical analog world? Or will it become
more important to attack or defend virtual property and virtual life and some level of
virtual sovereignty? In my opinion, the latter is more likely. 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? In many cases, something as simple as the ability to connect with somebody
is really important. 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.
I don't need to physically harm you if I can psychologically harm you.
I don't need to actually convince you through a monopoly on violence, on physical violence.
What if I can psychologically change the way you see the world through misinformation,
through all sorts of nefarious activities? I think that 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? I think it's very likely. It's almost obviously
likely that we're moving into the digital world. One of the features of the digital world is that
artificial intelligence systems can operate with much more power in a frictionless way
in that world. Currently, as we understand it, it's hard to build robots that operate at scale
and do arbitrary large amount of impact damage or positive in the physical world. It's much easier
to do in the digital world. Do you ever think about AI systems just swimming about
doing extraordinarily powerful, destructive things in the digital world? Is there something of a
concern to you or is this something into a very distant future? I think a lot of artificial
intelligence is in the name. It's simply the replication of human intelligence at scale,
automated, and programmatic, meaning that in the analog world, you could go hire 1,000 employees
or, in 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. When you look at that, when technology is created, everyone uses it
for good or bad, but both get used. Whether we're talking about cell phones, beepers, the internet,
guns, whatever, it's always used for good and bad. The big question is, and I think that
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. To me, that's what I don't know enough.
You know much more about this and there's plenty of other people who do as well, but I do think
that there will be nefarious actors and malicious people, but we're going to treat them the same
way we've always treated people who use technology poorly. We're going to understand it, we're going
to identify it, we're going to control it, and then we're going to end up reversing it or preventing
that from doing that. It's the inadvertent things that I think are actually the most dangerous
because when you have something that can think for itself and there is no way to
leverage a monopoly on violence for control, it's a very scary thing.
The thing that's scary to me is that it can scale arbitrarily, so it can outnumber humans very
quickly, even if it's dumber than humans. I don't know if we're able to reason about a world.
Let's look at the physical analog where all of a sudden, let's talk about something
kind of like humans, but dumber than humans like chimps. Imagine that all of a sudden chimps could
multiply arbitrarily quickly and you could have a trillion chimps the next day when you only had
maybe a million the day before. How does that world look different? Where the fuck do all these
chimps come from? Then we can pretend to be like, well, let's hope the chimps don't get violent
because they don't seem to get violent when the resources aren't constrained, but we don't know.
The problem is it all starts by building that first chimp multiplier device and everyone's
like, okay, yeah, there's a lot of good applications. You can make all kinds of arguments for why you
have more chimps. Maybe they can help you out around the house or something like that in the
physical space, but ultimately it's the unintended consequences that you're referring to. You don't
know what's going to happen. I'm really worried about DOM AI agents 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. It's kind of terrifying
because a lot of people are terrified or concerned about super intelligent systems.
I think I'm definitely much more concerned about super dumb systems at scale. That's terrifying.
I always think about the inadvertent, but as you're talking, what it made me think of is
also the irreversible. So it's one thing if there's inadvertent negative impact,
but we have reversibility built into a system and we can fix our mistakes. I think the really
scary part is when you overlay inadvertent mistakes with the irreversible aspect of it
and therefore humans have no control. Yeah, if you have the trillion chimps, you can't.
They're not going to like it when you try to start killing them off.
All right, but back to Bitcoin. Those chimps in the Bitcoin community.
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? Do you have an amazing
podcast? That's not just about Bitcoin or cryptocurrency. It's about everything, including
life, but you do have a lot of really amazing conversations about this whole digital world,
but obviously you also have a newsletter that's incredible on Substack.
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 email are the two most selfish
things I do because the podcast is a way for me to learn from other people. So I get them to come
on and tell me all the things they're thinking about, and I get asked some questions. What was
it called, by the way? Just a podcast. And so in doing that, it really is informative for me,
and I think that my whole goal is just like, if I'm learning, other people will be learning.
And then the email, I read it every morning because it forces me to collect my thoughts and
actually articulate them in somewhat of a coherent way. And so it's just something that
is like a practice that I probably would do, even if no one read it.
And then by being able to publish it, what does it do? It elicits, you know,
both the good and bad responses. And so people will let me know if they think I'm an idiot,
and they'll usually not respond if they think that it's something smart. And so
those two things are really educational for me, and I think kind of forced me to be able to articulate
a lot of ideas. But a lot of what I share or learn on those things come from these other resources.
So I'm definitely subscribing. People should subscribe. But what are Bitcoin resources books
that you recommend? I think you got to start with Bitcoin standard. That one to me feels like
it really lays out the picture nicely. There is Bitcoin money you can't fuck with. I was
written by our friend, Jason Williams, as you can imagine, basically what it talks about.
There's another book, Layered Money. It's written by Nick, who's done a great job kind of laying it
out. There's a book called Bitcoin in Black America written by a guy, Isaiah Jackson, and he
basically lays out the argument for why the black community can benefit in a asymmetric way from
something like Bitcoin. And there's a whole bunch more, I'm going to forget them all. There's the,
I think it's called The Cost of Tomorrow, a guy, Jeff Booth, wrote it. And just if you get on
Twitter, basically, you're going to see all these books flying around. But I do have to say that
from a psychological concept or philosophical concept, the number one book that I've ever read
that aligns with Bitcoin ethos but doesn't say a word about Bitcoin is a book called The Dow of
Capital by Mark Spitznagle. And so what he essentially does is he just reiterates over and
over and over again, long-term thinking, outliers, disruption, all the stuff. And so he's a guy who
he runs a fund that essentially they just do tail risk hedging. And so in March or February
of 2020, they're up like 4,000%. By the way, they pretty much lose money for eight, nine years,
then that happens. But they're still one of the best performing funds if you look at it over
years and years. And so it's just this mindset of everyone is so short-term focused. And so I
think it's just a great reminder to long-term thinking. And also, I mean, I've gotten quite a
bit of value just reading the papers. And that's perhaps more like for technical folks. There's
quite an active research community. And also going back to the original white paper and just
original documents, old school. Old school is still, like a few years ago, still really interesting
to think about, to look at what people were thinking about. Because the principles are carried
through with other cryptocurrencies as well. Like 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 fascinating place for news and resources. Is there books outside of all
this cryptocurrency sort of technical fiction philosophical that impact on your life?
Because you have interests that are all over the place. Is there something that
you would recommend to others? So Dow Capital is definitely probably my favorite book.
Books that have been impactful. I read when I was 20, actually, sitting in the desert of Iraq,
Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Thinking Girl Rich, and the Rich's Man in Babylon.
And I don't think I took a single thing and like implemented it from like an execution
standpoint. But it was a complete shift in mentality and understanding a relationship
with money and just kind of what I wanted to do with my life and stuff like that. So I think those
three books and I read them in succession were really impactful. And then I think one of the
best books probably ever written is, I think it's called When Breath Becomes Air, or air becomes
breath, I can't remember. But it's basically a doctor or medical professional who's dying.
And he essentially writes about the experience and thoughts and kind of all the stuff. And
I think that it's just one of these things where if you said to me, you know, what's the number one
thing I took out of my experience in Iraq, that's a book like that also gives you is we're all gonna
die, right? 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 more so than anything else. And I think that's part of your message and it's a great
one. Do you think you like literally meditate on your own mortality?
I necessarily think I meditate on it as much as I'm...
Are you afraid of death? Are you afraid of death when you're in Iraq? I mean,
if you're coming face to face with it, are you afraid of death today?
No, I think that it was just one of these things where like,
if you fixate on something and you worry about it, then at least to me, 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
going back into the college environment and like, things people worried about, I was like,
listen, let me explain to you, you know, what the real world's like, right?
But I think even today, right, if you talk to people who know me really well,
I don't get worked up about a lot of stuff. I don't get, you know, in either direction,
good or bad, anything, because ultimately it just comes down to if that's the final result,
let's enjoy it.
It's fascinating to ask you, because this reformulation of money, essentially buying time,
and, you know, there's the old question of does money buy happiness?
Do you think money can buy happiness in the context of money being able to buy time?
Or 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
if you have time and you spend it the way that you want to spend it, then that's ultimately
happiness. So I always say to people, if you think that money doesn't buy you happiness,
what if I told you that if you had more money, you could spend more time with your family?
It reframes it. And now it's 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 to them, 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 got to 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. That said, you kind of imply there's, there's a reason behind this
whole existence of ours as 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 answered in a way that isn't meant to be
accurate. It's meant to be the right answer for me, which is ultimately, you know, and I talked to
a lot of people who always ask like, what's the, what are you doing? Why are you doing this? I
say it's to be happy. And the reason why I think of it that way is I've got a friend, Jonathan
Geller, who talks about, you know, enough being enough. And recently he talked about it in the
context of Bitcoin. And so Bitcoiners are have two things, any Bitcoin or 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 only think that they don't own enough and they
want to acquire more. And so at some point, you say to yourself, what is enough? And I think that
the whole meaning of life is to understand kind of what your level of satisfaction is. And for
some people, that's a monetary thing. Some people, that's a freedom of time thing. For some people,
it's an impact thing, whatever. But just understanding that's important. And then going and
accomplishing it. And what I've found is that the people who I know who have done this and been
intentional about it, they accomplish it on a much shorter timeline than people who don't.
Right. There's some people who start thinking about us when they're 60.
Naturally, you're not going to accomplish it before you're 60 if you start thinking about it
60. People who start thinking about it earlier can do it. And so I think that's really it for
me. It's just like the meaning of life is to enjoy it. The way I think about it,
that's because it's a really nice formulation. 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 to being like deeply self critical
and nothing is enough. Nothing you've ever done is worth anything. It's the Marvin Minsky said,
like the secret to success is hating 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.
It's 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 mad man comes out kind of thing. I also think it's kind of purpose driven
in the sense of there's a lot of people who have the, I need to do more, but in a somewhat
altruistic way. So they're, you know, take Elon as an example. The idea of colonizing Mars,
sure, if he is successful, he will be very rich. I don't think you or I or many people
believe he's doing it for the money, right? There's a lot of other things 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 again, like altruistic non-monetary purpose.
And I think that there's a lot of people who spend their whole life looking for that and
they don't know what it is. And so again, some people may not think of it that way,
but if you can find something to do that, you win. I don't think there's a better way to end it,
Anthony. I'm a huge fan. It's a huge honor that you waste all this time with me today.
You know, I thank you for just educating the world for teaching me, inspire me to learn more
about this new set of technologies that look like they have a potential to change, transform all of
human civilization. So thank you for coming today and thank you for being who you are.
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Anthony Pumpliano and thank you to our sponsors.
Theragun Muscle Recovery Device, Sun Basket Meal Delivery Service, ExpressVPN, and indeed
Hiring Website. Click their links to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words
from Mahatma Gandhi. Freedom is not worth having if it doesn't include the freedom to make mistakes.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.