Conner Brown, Stanford Law Student: Why Politicians Should Love Bitcoin

Conner Brown is a Stanford Law student, and frequent Bitcoin Twitter commentator. In this conversation, Connor and Anthony Pompliano discuss smart contracts. common misunderstandings of Bitcoin, why every political candidate should love Bitcoin, and the relationship between open source software, power, and the institutions of the modern day. BLOCKFI-----BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. CRYPTO. COM-----Crypto.com is a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. With the vision of "cryptocurrency in every wallet", the Crypto.com App offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well designed UX and high security. It is the best place to buy, sell and pay with crypto. COINMINE-----The Coinmine One is like an Xbox that turns your electricity into Bitcoin. You just plug it in, connect to wifi, and tap on the crypto you want. It’s so easy anyone can do it. Everything is controlled from the Coinmine mobile app and the Coinmine keeps getting better with over the air updates that add new coins, features and services to your Coinmine. Visit coinmine.com/pomp to get a Coinmine and earn crypto for powering a new world. ETORO-----This episode of Off the Chain is sponsored by eToro, the smartest crypto trading platform, and one of the largest in the world. Join 11 million other traders and create an account at etoro.com and build your crypto portfolio the smart way.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off the Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Connor Brown is a Stanford Law student and frequent Bitcoin Twitter commentator. In this conversation, we discuss smart contracts, common misunderstandings of Bitcoin, why every political candidate should love Bitcoin, and the relationship between open source software, power, and institutions in the modern day. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well. Skrt skrt. Wanna know who has the best URL? Crypto.com. That's right, Crypto.com.

• 0:42Anthony Pompliano?

  They're a crypto platform with one goal: motherf***ing mass adoption. That's why we're all here. We're trying to get crypto in every wallet. Crypto.com is helping people do that through buying, earning, lending, and card payment. Everything you could want at Crypto.com. Go help your boy out, tell him Pomp sent you. Download the app or visit Crypto.com. Pomp's got you, always. Ever wanted to get into mining and didn't know how? Don't worry, your boy Pomp's got you. Everybody got some electricity and wifi. All you gotta do is go to CoinMine.com, you buy a coin mine. It's like an Xbox or a Playstation that helps you turn your electricity into Bitcoin. That's right. You purchase it, it shows up at your doorstep, you pull it out of the box, you plug it in,

• 1:27Anthony Pompliano?

  connect to your wifi, five minutes or less, you're mining Bitcoin. All you have to do is control it from the mobile app they provide, and then you receive over-the-air updates that add new coins and new features on a consistent basis. Kinda like how Tesla does over-the-air updates and updates the car software. Just you're updating your coin mine. Consumer mining made easy. That's right, go to CoinMine.com, tell them Pomp sent you, and thank me later. As many of you know, crypto investors store their digital assets on exchanges or in cold storage for long-term safekeeping. However, this strategy doesn't help them grow their investment holdings or build overall wealth. With the new BlockFi interest account, users can now securely store their Bitcoin or Ether at BlockFi and receive 6% annual interest,

• 2:12Anthony Pompliano?

  paid monthly in cryptocurrency. 6% is an absurdly high rate. It's the best rate in the industry. I highly suggest you go check out blockfi.com/pomp. Again, that's blockfi.com/pomp to sign up and start earning crypto today. If you follow Bitcoin and crypto, you've probably heard of eToro. They're the world's number one social trading platform, and I love it. They've got more than 10 million other traders that love it, too. And guess what? They just launched in the United States. eToro offers access to the world's most popular cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and others. With the smartest trading tools and the ability to connect with the best traders around the world, there's no better place to build your perfect portfolio. If you're new to Bitcoin and crypto, you can test the waters with their $100,000 virtual

• 2:57Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:22Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:48Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. Sitting here with Connor. We are in San Francisco right now. Thanks so much for coming up to the city and doing this.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, thank you so much for having me here. It's really an honor to be on your podcast and be able to talk.

• 4:01Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, so I think a lot of people have, they've seen your tweets, they know that you are quite bullish on Bitcoin and a lot of the things that are going on in the ecosystem, but they don't know much about you to start. So a little bit about your background and kind of how you got to Stanford and into Bitcoin.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's been a long journey. So I'm, right now, I'm on my last year of law school at Stanford. I'm originally, I just went straight through from undergrad. I studied philosophy and sociology. And then I decided that, you know, a lot of the things I was learning about were pretty pie in the sky. And I wanted to sort of make more of a tangible change. And to me, that seemed like going to law school and sort of looking at, you know, where the actual, you know, power structures are. But, you know, when I was in law school, I wanted to sort of look at the most innovative, you know, new types of law. And so when I heard about this thing called smart contracts, then I was naturally sort of drawn to that.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  And I think over, you know, the past, you know, year and a half now, I've been sort of digging through this and trying to take a first principles approach and just stack up the arguments. My background is in debate. And figure out where the arguments are for, you know, what the strengths and weaknesses of these systems are and where the value is. That was sort of what I really, really cared about. And ultimately, while I was, you know, initially really excited about smart contracts, they seemed like a really novel approach, I became pretty disillusioned with them. But in the meantime, I found Bitcoin, which was much, much more interesting, actually. So that's kind of how I ended up here.

• 5:41Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, so before we go into Bitcoin specifically, let's talk about the smart contracts. Kind of what was the dream, if you will? And then kind of what took you off that path? Or maybe got you to be a little bit more bearish on it than you initially thought you would be?

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, so initially, smart contracts seemed like sort of the natural evolution of, you know, we have all of these written paper contracts, or, you know, we have all these lawyers who are working all these hours on drafting up these long contracts. And wouldn't it be great if we just removed all that friction? And if we somehow, you know, just had it all automated by a computer? And computers took care of it. And I think that's a pretty sexy idea, because law is, you know, pretty much universally hated, seen as greedy middlemen. And, you know, a lot of that is true. In a lot of ways, there are a lot of inefficiencies in the law. But I think that while a lot of legal structures are inefficient,

• 6:33Speaker 02

  there's a lot of very important concepts that are sort of overlooked and thrown, you know, you kind of throw the baby out with the bathwater with that sort of critique. And so I think initially, I had that hope of sort of making things more efficient. But when I dug into it, you know, a smart contract is really not anything more than code. And while code is extremely powerful, it really has only very specific logical parameters that it can encapsulate. So it can, you know, perform whether or not something is true or false based on the parameters that are fed to it. But that doesn't mean that it can handle the nuance of what a legal contract really represents. A legal contract at its most basic, basic level is a meeting of the minds between two people.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  So if Connor and Pom want to enter into an agreement, you know, and we want to, you know, let's say we have like a, we're, I'm going to be selling you something, and we're entering into a contract, and you're going to be purchasing these on a recurring basis. You know, there's a lot of things that I might put in that contract that could trigger certain clauses or could trigger different things. And the smart contract approach would say, oh, that's great, because we can just write a nice little logical function that will trigger if one of these clauses happens. But the real world is much, much more sticky and subjective and gray than black and white.

• 7:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's almost like the...

• 7:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Smart contract is only as good as the input and the structure of the contract itself. Right? So like if you create something that's so binary or black and white, one, you're counting on accurate information being inputted into the contract. And then two, you're counting on the fact that you, at some previous point in time, understood fully the entire situation so that smart contract can encapsulate all of that information and make a decision that ends up being accurate or correct. The problem I think you're highlighting is, one, it's almost impossible for you to understand the full situation in advance. And then, two, is if you can only get contracts to make binary yes/no decisions, that leaves a lot of edge cases, etc., that are either unaddressed, or, two, even worse, neglected. And when they

• 8:42Anthony Pompliano?

  get neglected, that's usually where you see the issues pop up. Is that fair?

• 8:45Speaker 02

  I think that's exactly right, because you have this nuance. A smart contract just can't handle. If I'm writing a contract, if you read a legal contract, all throughout it, you're going to see the words "material," you're going to see the words "reasonable." How does a logical true/false function parse out reasonableness, or these sorts of things?

• 9:03Anthony Pompliano?

  But do you think that the use of "material," "reasonable," etc., because those are human constructs and left up to be very subjective kind of determinations, that's actually the wrong way? Like, it's almost like if you flip it on its head, right? So if we try to fit smart contracts into the current legal structure, you get these challenges. But if you flip it and you say, "No, actually, the fact that everything isn't black and white in the legal language, and we should move towards black and white," then smart contracts are almost a better way to do law rather than the subjective version we have today?

• 9:33Speaker 02

  I think that's the dream, certainly. And I think that's how it's pitched. The problem is that you and I both know the world is very gray. And, like I said, contracts are a meeting of the minds, and you and I can both think that we agree on something. We can totally shake hands and think like we're 100% in agreement, and we will have different subjective understandings of the world. And that's why, you know, when there's a contract dispute, you need to have something like a judge. Because, you know, a judge, if it was really that simple, then we would have contracts that are written in black and white language, and a judge would say, "Okay, this is how this is resolved. It's pretty simple." But it's much more difficult than that.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  You have litigation that goes on for very long times for very, very high-dollar deals. Because when you're weighing these things, you have to think about justice and fairness and reasonableness and all of these sort of higher-level concepts that can't be reduced to code. And while you can abstract some of that away, certainly, you're not going to get much more functionality than like a vending machine. And that's useful, but is that going to... I think specifically, the promise of smart contracts is while we can take the entire financial infrastructure and put that into smart contracts. But this goes back to financial contracts are contracts of trust, right? If I'm entering into an agreement with you, let's say we're doing a credit default swap,

• 10:57Speaker 02

  and I'm trying to make sure that you're a trustworthy counterparty, there's a lot of things that can go wrong in a credit default swap. We can have a lot of disagreements on what does it mean to default? What does it mean to be late on a payment? What does it mean for all these different triggering clauses of the payout happening?

• 11:12Anthony Pompliano?

  And how much of the nuances and challenges are disagreements between you and I? Like, think of it as the two parties in the transaction versus there's external forces that could be macro or micro. But those external forces can change in real time what you and I agree on, right? It's almost like, if you look at a contract, a lot of times, there's multiple subjective if/then-type scenarios, right? So if you do this, then you're allowed to pay on this date. But if you prepay, then you do something else, or whatever the scenario is. To me, it feels like a lot of times, those external forces at play, there's a lot of renegotiating, right? There's a lot of rewriting contracts.

• 11:57Anthony Pompliano?

  There's ways that some of this stuff plays out that, again, you just can't pre-predict, and that's part of the problem, right? Or at least that's the challenge. I don't know if it's necessarily a problem, but it's just a challenge.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  No, I think that's totally part of it. You have contingencies that just can't be accounted for in black-and-white immutable software. Like, what sort of hedge fund would ever enter into an immutable... Contract when, you know, what happens if their lead trader goes skiing? And, you know,

• 12:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Gets hurt.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  Incredible brain damage and now they can't quite make the decisions they were and they have to enter into some contingency.

• 12:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Would it be fair to say that if you look at the body of law today, there are very distinct areas where smart contracts will become pervasive quickly in the sense of it's very black and white. It's very easy to implement this and, and there's very little controversy in that implementation versus other areas where it's so subjective that smart contracts are going to really struggle to be implemented. So kind of the implementation isn't even black and white. We get some areas that get automated in law and some that don't. Or do you feel like this is going to be either the industry adopts smart contracts or they completely deny them?

• 13:01Speaker 02

  I mean, I, I think in a way, smart contracts are what we've been seeing, like software is eating the world and smart contracts, you know, when, when I go and buy my airline tickets. Like it's, it's a smart contract in the sense that it's just a one time deal and like I type in my, my credit card info or hopefully I pay with lightning. And then I just boom, it spits out.

• 13:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  The ticket and that, and that's basically a smart contract. It's a little digital vending machine. Why that needs to be on blockchain, a little bit unclear.

• 13:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  And I think that we'll increasingly see that and things will get more and more efficient in that direction. But a smart contract for complex financial agreements where I need, I mean, if I'm giving you a loan, I need to know who you are. I need to know.

• 13:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  Why I trust you, right? And that's something that is incredibly difficult on smart contracts. And, you know, I, I think a lot of the hype is, well, we're eventually going to get to identity. We'll eventually be able to sort this out, but we haven't quite solved identity yet.

• 13:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  And, you know, that is a incredibly difficult problem because identity isn't just knowing who you are. Because all identity is relational, right? You might be pumped to me on Twitter, but you might be someone else to your family members, or you might be someone else to your government, right? And so who you are, your identity is relational.

• 14:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  And that's, that's really important for a contract. Because that is how you manage enforcement.

• 14:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  How do I enforce a contract against you?

• 14:27Anthony Pompliano?

  I always think about this as like almost pseudonyms, right? Of like you have you and like who you actually are as a human. But the way that you interact with colleagues in a corporate environment versus your significant other versus like maybe you play, you know, baseball on the weekends with your friends or whatever, you're actually different people to all of those different groups. They see you as the person you're acting at in that scenario is who you are, right? So like your significant other, however they see you acting in that situation, that's who they believed you to be.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:01Anthony Pompliano?

  If they then see you acting how you act in the corporate environment with your corporate colleagues, they a lot of times say, is that what you do at work? Right? Like it's almost like they've seen like a different side of you that is very contrasting to your original identity. We see that in human relationships. It becomes very weird when all of a sudden now you ask software to address all of those different identities in a way where let's tie it all back to one individual, but we have to account for these different identities in contracts, et cetera.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  Totally, and I think that goes to the idea of this, you know, we're going to have DeFi, we're going to decentralize finance. But you know, if I'm Morgan Stanley, right? And I'm trying to determine if I want to lend shares of a stock that you want to short to your hedge fund, then I need to know who you are because I need to assess your credit worthiness. What are your other contracts? What are your, what is your trading history? Who are you as a counterparty, right? And identity is very, having a stable, not synonymous, but the true identity of who you are is very important for me assessing your credit worthiness and actually making a deal with you in the first place.

• 16:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  If I don't know you, I'm not going to trust you. And trust is very important in making these things more efficient and kind of like being, you know, greasing the wheels of commerce because, oh, you've done a lot of these transactions. And I know that if things go south, then I can enforce a judgment against you in the United States. And so your identity is actually very crucial.

• 16:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  Having a pseudonymous identity. Doesn't give you those same guarantees. I can't know if this is the, you know, the 20th time you've tried borrowing with me and you screwed me over 19 times and now I'm supposed to trust you. I can't know who you are, where you're domiciled, so I can't know where to get a judgment against you. And so because of that, I have to fall back on, alright, I'm gonna over collateralize collateralize everything.

• 16:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 16:44Speaker 02

  I need to lend you a hundred dollars, I need 150 upfront.

• 16:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  Just to make sure you don't run away with my money.

• 16:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep. Well, and to some degree, that's what banks do today, right? Who do they lend money to? People who don't actually need the money.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally.

• 16:55Anthony Pompliano?

  They, if you need the money, they don't want to lend it to you because they're scared you won't pay them back.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, and even when you don't have pseudonymous identities, when you just have your actual identity and real credit score with like peer-to-peer lending, like LendingTree, LendingClub, you know, those things went so far south because people just run away with the money. And it's, it's really, really hard to have trust and that requires rigorous identity. And I know that's not sexy to the decentralize all the things, you know, sort of apply the cypherpunk ideals to, you know, modern finance. But lending, finance is a trust-based interaction.

• 17:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  And it is, you know, money, Bitcoin, you can take trust out of it and you actually have a much, much better product.

• 17:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  You take trust out of lending, so I don't know who I'm giving my money to and you're going to have a nightmare on your hands.

• 17:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, it, it's only a nightmare if you don't have the over collateralization, right? Like, one of the things that I'm really interested in the spaces, so if I put Bitcoin, let's say I take a hundred dollars worth of Bitcoin and I put it into BlockFi or one of these other platforms and I receive 30 or 50 dollar US dollar loan, right? The trust is, or the need for trust is minimized because it is so over collateralized. They have control of my asset or collateral and then I'm able to take a loan. But to your point, there's very few people in that situation who, you know, it's a very nuanced use case where I have enough collateral to post in that scenario to then receive a 30 to 50% LTV loan. Normally, it's the exact opposite, right?

• 18:27Anthony Pompliano?

  It's, hey, I want to buy a house, I put down 10, 20%, somebody gives me 80% of the value of the home and then I'll pay it off over time. There's no collateralization there and that's where identity becomes important.

• 18:36Speaker 02

  That's, that's exactly right. And so the over collateralization, like it has some use cases for sure. I'm not saying it has zero, but is it going to replace the wheels of finance? Not at all, because... You're gonna see two options. You can either tell us who you are and, you know, maybe you post 20 or 30% collateral at a clearinghouse, or you completely over-collateralize and it's almost impossible for you to even make money.

• 18:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  Much less, you know, how do you start a business where you need financing to start a company, but you have to give me more money than you already have just to get the loan for the company? I mean, that can obviously never work.

• 19:10Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. So I want to switch gears a little bit. You've done a bunch of writing and tweeting recently about like the common misconceptions of Bitcoin.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And we were talking about trust earlier, and frankly, I think about there's this idea that even like the most hardcore Bitcoiners trust certain narratives, right?

• 19:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:25Anthony Pompliano?

  And so that doesn't mean that the narrative's right or wrong. It's just that there is definitely consensus thought around certain ideas. I want to start with one that you recently wrote about Bitcoin is not deflationary, right? So what did you kind of, what was the point of that kind of talk track for you and kind of why you felt compelled of like, hey, this narrative is something that a lot of people have consensus around, but it actually might not be true?

• 19:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's a couple of these floating around, and I wrote that piece specifically because, you know, you hear this talked about a lot, especially in mainstream economic circles, sort of this specter of deflation that's haunting the economy, and central bankers are doing everything they can to prevent deflation. And so deflation is seen as this, this pretty negative thing. And so I wanted to sort of write this article to say, you know, it's easy to say Bitcoin is deflationary in terms of, well, prices are going to go down, but if you look at the actual monetary supply, the monetary supply is not decreasing. So in a very strict sense of deflation being a, or deflation and inflation being decrease or increase in the base money supply, Bitcoin is not deflationary. It's, it's actually constant because it levels off to that 21

• 20:32Speaker 02

  million hard cap.

• 20:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so this, and this is a nuanced piece of it, right?

• 20:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:37Anthony Pompliano?

  So there, there's a separation. I think the first is the, the disinflationary monetary supply schedule.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 20:42Anthony Pompliano?

  So this is the, the amount of Bitcoin that is getting injected into the circulating supply, right? So there's 21 million, we know as a hard cap of kind of total supply.

• 20:50Speaker 02

  Right.

• 20:51Anthony Pompliano?

  But today, we just crossed over 18 million that have now been put into supply.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 20:55Anthony Pompliano?

  And, and that'll continue to accelerate or increase over time, but actually, it won't accelerate, it'll increase over time, but the amount every 10 minutes is getting... Is going down every four years, etc.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  Small proportion.

• 21:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep. And so that disinflationary monetary supply schedule is different than what you're talking about, which is the, you're addressing the total supply, which is that 21 million. Now, I think a lot of people will say that, yes, that's true that the total supply is 21 million, but it's quote-unquote "deflationary" because every time someone loses one, it gets destroyed, etc. It's essentially being taken out of the supply. Your point, I think, is, yes, it may get taken out of the circulating supply, but that doesn't change the total supply. Is that accurate?

• 21:37Speaker 02

  Well, I would say, I would say actually even further in that. While coins are being lost all the time, you know, the highest amounts of losses are in the very earliest days of Bitcoin. 20 years from now, the amount of Bitcoins lost per day is going to be

• 21:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Much lower.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  Much, much lower. We're going to have incredible custodial solutions, we're going to have complex multi-save, we're going to have multiple spending scripts, so that even if, you know, worst-case scenario, you can still redeem it in a couple of years and you can bring those coins back online. We'll just be much more professional. And so there might be less coins hitting the market and less mined per block, but at the same time, we're losing less. And so that actually kind of reaches this sort of equilibrium. And I think by the time we roll around to 2140, the concept of losing hundreds or thousands of coins, which might actually still happen today, much, much more uncommon.

• 22:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  And eventually, you know, maybe it's not 21 million is the final cap we reach, but let's say it's like, you know, however many are lost, let's say it's around 18 million or 17 million is like our final, you know, amount that hasn't been lost. Then the point is that it does reach a constant. It reaches an equilibrium. And that can be, you know, sort of this base measurement system for our prices. And that having a nice, stable constant for our prices is very important in the same way that, you know, a meter is important or all these other measurement systems, that money is just the measurement system for prices.

• 23:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep. I think that's fair. What are the other misconceptions that you think people kind of have consensus thought about, but may not be accurate?

• 23:07Speaker 02

  I think that another thing that really comes up a lot is this idea of intrinsic value. And this is actually pretty prominent in both the gold community. It's prominent in popular understandings of why money is useful. And it's also popular in other sorts of, well, ETH is going to be more valuable than Bitcoin because it's going to have all these use cases. And we need these use cases for the Internet of Things and for supply chain. But when it comes down to it, money has monetary properties that make it valuable. It's scarce, durable, verifiable, transferable. And those monetary properties are very important. Its intrinsic value, its other use cases are sort of the trade-off for that.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  And so when you talk about, well, gold can be used in all these other industrial use cases, that's actually a net negative to money. Explain why. Because it goes back to the idea, if we want our monetary base to be relatively pure, we want it to be a nice, solid, constant measuring stick for signaling to market participants about prices. And if we have this other industrial use case that's taking gold for other sorts of uses and putting it in aerospace or all of these other... Jewelry. Jewelry, dental equipment, whatever it might be, then you're using it for a non-monetary purpose. And that can actually create distortions.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  And so when we have, for the first time in human history, a pure monetary object, then we can sort of get these distortions out of our pricing mechanisms and use it simply as this is a way of communicating prices honestly. And I think that what we're seeing, right now, we're in San Francisco. Housing here is an absolute nightmare. And that's because people don't have sort of a great store of value thing. And so we use other objects for their monetary purposes. And we create other distortions in the economy because now housing is skyrocketing because we need other monetary objects. We need to kind of take their monetary properties and use them as piggy banks instead of as homes. And so you see other distortions for monetary...

• 25:17Speaker 02

  Like things and then that just wreaks havoc on local economies because we don't have the sort of pure money that is separate from all other use cases.

• 25:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep, and I think this is part of like Murad's argument, right? Which is that we're asking individual market participants to have a job that drives income. So whether you're a teacher, a firefighter, an investment professional, whoever. There's a very small subset of those people who also are financial professionals. So everyone else who's not a financial professional ends up going to work. You know, I'm a teacher, I go to work every day, I teach these kids, I get paid my income. And now because of the structure of the financial system, you're asking me also to be an investor and understand how to manage my capital. Because if I leave it in cash, it will actually devalue over time. So I need to be able to invest it somewhere. Do I do that into real estate, into stocks, bonds? I don't know, I have to either hand my money over to somebody else to do it for me, or I have to understand that.

• 26:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And one that's a pretty big ask and probably one we shouldn't be making.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's nearly impossible.

• 26:15Anthony Pompliano?

  But also the second thing is, imagine if the unit of account was something where you could just simply leave your wealth into that asset. And it wouldn't be devalued away. And so therefore the quote-unquote savings mentality would work because you can simply continue to stack, right? That that amount of money that you have and kind of save over time.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  Right, totally, totally.

• 26:34Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, what other misconceptions do you think are out there?

• 26:37Speaker 02

  I think another big one is simply the, I don't even know if this is a misconception, but it's something that frustrates me a lot. And it's it's simply the idea that people have this sort of natural immune response to hearing ideas that seem too good to be true. And I think this is what causes a lot of apathy for Bitcoin. Because I've talked to a lot of people about Bitcoin and in some ways I've almost stopped trying to talk to, you know, my friends or my relatives about it. Because people have this sort of ingrained immune response. Like if you're listening to the radio and you hear about this amazing real estate deal that just sounds too good to be true, you're not going to look into it. Of course not, because you know, we all know these things are scams, right?

• 27:20Speaker 02

  And so Bitcoin, when you're talking to someone, actually can sound so good. Because it is such a revolutionary breakthrough that it causes people to naturally turn off because. You know, it's kind of like a scaling solution to being subjected to so many advertisements day in, day out, that it causes people to sort of like not subject it to rigorous logic. Because if you did that for everything, if I went and heard the radio ad for the amazing real estate opportunity, and I tried to like logically parse through why it's a terrible idea, I would be spending every day, all day.

• 27:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, too much time. Well, and I think also, it's such a big idea that it's also scary. Right? It's the idea of like, hey, we could replace money with something that's better. That's like so asinine in many people's mind, that they're like, nah, I think I like the current environment. Like, it's safer, it's, there's less chaos, there's less uncertainty, I just want to go buy some food, and like, I don't care what, you know, you guys are talking about this money thing. And so, it's the combination of a big scary idea with the, it almost sounds too good to be true, and when you put those two things together, the human nature, we've been conditioned over time, really, what you're talking about, to reject those, or kind of turn away from them, and kind of stay with the comfortable, certain, you know, kind of path forward.

• 28:36Speaker 02

  Totally, totally. I think that's, and it's frustrating, but that's, you know, the way of the world.

• 28:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Early adopters is a real thing.

• 28:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, for sure, for sure.

• 28:45Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, so you've got a bunch of ideas around Bitcoin and politics.

• 28:49Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:50Anthony Pompliano?

  The thing to me that, I want to kind of caveat this part of the conversation with is, there are people who absolutely hate Bitcoin, think it's the worst thing in the world, they want to ban it, etc., both in the US government and other governments, and then there's a lot of people who are supporters, right? So it's not so much the government, you know, kind of air quotes, is overgeneralized as being negative towards this, because there are a lot of people who are actually supportive, and proponents, and want to see adoption, etc. Why do you think that the presidential candidates, whether it's Trump or others, should like Bitcoin, and actually should be attracted to it, rather than trying to fight it?

• 29:25Speaker 02

  I mean, I honestly think Bitcoin is just such a win-win-win for all politicians, because you can, you know, you can look at Bitcoin through each of these lenses, and, you know, separate from which side of the aisle you agree with, no matter which side you're on, Bitcoin is a massive boost to, you know, your message. So like, let's say you're Trump, you have a very strong sense of nationalism, of an America-first mentality, and, you know, being an early adopter of Bitcoin is just such a massive boon for you, if you want to be one of these early adopters. You know, like we said, if... You're this first mover. Imagine if the United States builds up substantial position

• 30:06Speaker 02

  in Bitcoin, maybe 100,000 coins, a couple hundred thousand. I mean, let's say a big position.

• 30:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  And then suddenly announces, "All right, we've built up a massive position in Bitcoin, and we think it's the future."

• 30:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  That announcement alone causes like a 10x return.

• 30:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 30:21Speaker 02

  I mean, it would just be so overwhelmingly massive in the response that you could see this like if America does take this leadership approach, just from a pure like profit margins principle, like you are making a massive return, like instant return on your investment.

• 30:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, in part of this, I keep saying, and if somebody out there is listening wants to build this, please DM me on Twitter or something. But I think it would be powerful and funny at the same time for somebody to build a scoreboard and literally put like the US and China on a webpage and keep track of how many Bitcoin each country has, right? Or add other countries in. And you can kind of back into it probably by how much they've seized, right? Because that's pretty much how they're all getting it today. But over time, right? You kind of keep track of, look, there's 21 million of these things. What country is kind of has the biggest position or is most bullish? But you use the proxy of how many Bitcoin do they actually hold on their balance sheets in order to measure

• 31:17Anthony Pompliano?

  that? Again, you can see them doing this quietly and not announcing it. And then there's some announcement, whether that's the US or some other country.

• 31:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Or you can see like what we're seeing in China today, where they just come out and say, "Look, we think blockchain, so not just Bitcoin, but blockchain is the future. We're going all in on it." And that kind of like gave the green light for everyone. Okay, like now let's go, right? Let's start announcing what we're doing, etc.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  Exactly. And I think that's where the competitive advantage comes in. You know, if the United States says, "Well, actually, you know, you might want to be using blockchain for surveillance and, you know, restricting your citizens' personal liberties. We're going to use it to make ourselves great, to make ourselves rich." I think that would be an incredibly compelling narrative. It even lines up with, you know, the founding fathers' ideas of letting people interact how they want and being free from, you know, centralized control. And I think that you could spin this in a very pro-America, America-first Uh, move and you know, Trump really, really cares about jobs, about the economy. And you know, the, the truth is a lot of the manufacturing jobs, they're not going to come back.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  Right. There's other places that do it better, but um, mining is something that no one really does incredibly well yet. I mean, we're still super, super early. Um, and what if we, you know, did a big Bitcoin mining initiatives? Uh, a push towards, you know, reinvigorating the Midwest with, with mining opportunities. And, you know, we, we love our oil and natural gas industry and we know the massive benefits that Bitcoin can bring to making previously unprofitable and unsustainable or non-environmental energy and natural gas industries and bringing those online because now you can use Bitcoin to, you know, capture that

• 32:58Speaker 02

  and profit off that, that extra energy. So, um, it, it is a win-win-win for the American workers, more jobs, more profitable sectors of the economy and overall, um, it might even get America out of this, you know, sort of debt crisis that we have, have looming because now we have this sort of very, very, you know, digital gold of the, uh, uh, digital frontier.

• 33:17Anthony Pompliano?

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• 33:59Anthony Pompliano?

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• 34:42Anthony Pompliano?

  and receive 6% annual interest paid monthly in cryptocurrency. This rate actually compounds, so you receive a 6.2% APY, which is very attractive given the alternatives. So you can actually take your Bitcoin, you can deposit it with BlockFi and get paid an interest rate of 6% in return. Go check out blockfi.com/pomp. Again, blockfi.com/pomp to sign up and start earning interest on your crypto today. And so you really hit on the kind of the nationalistic or America first type approach as to why Bitcoin? What about the other side of the aisle, which is more like the Bernie, the Elizabeth Warrens, Joe Bidens, et cetera, even maybe the Andrew Yangs of the world?

• 35:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, how do you see Bitcoin fitting into those narratives?

• 35:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, Bernie and Elizabeth Warren should 100% love Bitcoin. Because Bernie and Elizabeth Warren are really cut from this Occupy Wall Street idea that we have these plutocrats that are controlling our political process. They're just privatizing the gains, publicizing the losses. And so if you start talking to them, well, what do you think allows them to do that? Perhaps it is the Cantillon effect. Perhaps it is printing money that is financing the financiers, right? So who should be against printing money more? I mean, Bernie is like first in line because the people that are profiting off this and who are reaping these massive gains are, like we said, the financial elite

• 36:13Speaker 02

  that have this, not only are they touching the money first, but they have much more deep financial knowledge.

• 36:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  And I think that You can look at wealth inequality and a lot of metrics of inequality started to increase as soon as we left the gold standard in the early 1970s. So I think returning to a sound money, a sound place where workers can store their hard-earned time and energy and it can't be diluted is going to be, I mean, it seems like such a natural idea that comes from this sort of Occupy Wall Street mentality of not trusting the people that earn money. Instead, I mean, it fits this criteria of this is the people's money. You know, this is built from the ground up, a bunch of people just working hard, open source developers, just contributing freely.

• 37:03Speaker 02

  A lot of those ideals are what's in the Bernie Sanders movement. And, you know, when you look at the Federal Reserve Board, it's a bunch of white men that are sitting around. I think that it seems very natural that they would want to criticize this as being, you know, a racist or gendered institution of the Federal Reserve Board, which props up, you know, the military warfare state that they criticize a lot. It seems to have a lot of the sticking points that they would want and they could point to a lot of problems in the money printing business that align with their narratives.

• 37:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, for sure. And to me, it also feels like if you're a politician, there's what I'll call the policy angle, right, which is kind of the, hey, this can actually help people who need help, right? I'm going to make some sort of decision here where the policies are implemented. Then you have what I'll call more the narrative benefit, right? Which is, this is the Andrew Yang, automation is coming, right? You know, Bitcoiners are cool. This is Trump, America first, right? And what you're doing is you're benefiting from the highly engaged community that's already built there, right? So it's just kind of a popularity contest type thing. But then the third thing is, there is a technology angle here, right? And when I go to the technology angle, I think, you know, look...

• 38:24Anthony Pompliano?

  The people who are 100% exposed to the legacy financial system and 0% exposed to the new financial system, right, or this alternative financial system, they're making a binary bet. And if they're wrong, they end up blowing themselves up, right? But if you are less of a binary person and you could say, hey, you know what? As president, I'm going to put 95% of our resources in the legacy system, but there's this new thing and we want to have a hedged bet, basically, here. And if this becomes thing, we want to be the leader, we want to be out front, we want to really dictate, make sure that the American ethos are incorporated into this democracy, blah, blah, whatever. But we're not going to go 100% into the new system, right? So it's kind of this balance and really trying to almost have a confidence level on each

• 39:06Anthony Pompliano?

  system, but making sure that you're going to be a leader in either system regardless of which one wins.

• 39:10Speaker 02

  No, I think that is 100% the case. And this kind of goes to like the third approach. You have your left and your right, your strong political candidates, but you also have the establishment. You have your Brad Shamans of the world who are, you know, they're not trying to beat around the bush. They know that they care about one thing, which is maintaining the US supremacy and, flexing our might around the world. And that's fine. And there's a debate to be had there. But even if you're Brad Sherman, even if you think that Bitcoin could eat your lunch, it could expose your country to weaknesses abroad, and it could start to erode your power.

• 39:53Speaker 02

  Do you really want to take a zero bet against it? Do you really want to have nothing allocated to it? It's sort of this, if it is so scary, then of course you should build a position. Of course you should protect yourself against it because worst-case scenario, you spend so much time railing against it and defending the status quo that you're not playing the long game. And you let China build up a position when you didn't. And that puts you in an even scarier position. So you kind of have to address the realities as it is and you can't just daydream about the yesteryears where you had the complete monopoly over what people use for their everyday transactions.

• 40:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Speaking of politics, Bitcoin's one component of it, right? But when you look back at whether it's DeFi, whether you look at smart contracts, etc., kind of all the other aspects of the ecosystem or industry, how do you see that playing into the political narrative and especially as the presidential election comes up? Is it just a, hey, focus on Bitcoin if you're a candidate? Or do you think that the rest of this is just as important and are things that they should be addressing as they propose their plan for the country?

• 40:58Speaker 02

  I mean, honestly, that's a tough question. And I think that campaigns are trying to adjust their strategy towards this sort of new, weird, viral environment that we see. And I think that honestly, that's what led to a lot of Trump's success, is a brilliant campaign of viral, you know, things that he knew would go viral and would resonate with certain people through memes. I think meme warfare is the new sort of, you know, it's not going to be establishment media anymore. Right before this interview, we were looking at sort of the Project Veritas stuff, the Jeffrey Epstein stuff. And that's a really powerful new force that I don't really think anyone knows.

• 41:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain a little bit about what's going on there.

• 41:41Speaker 02

  So Project Veritas is this sort of, it's a campaign or it's an organization, a group that's trying to expose biases in traditional media outlets. And just this morning, they released a video of, I think it's one of the hosts of an ABC talk show who is, you know, on a hot mic and she was talking to producers about how, you know, she had all this information about Epstein that people weren't letting it come out and they were sort of trying to suppress the stuff that she had been doing for years and that she thought it was interesting, all this was coming to light and people started to care. But she had been, you know, kind of pushed to the background for a long time and said no one cares about this, even though they had extremely damning evidence. And, you know, this is sort of this...

• 42:28Speaker 02

  Really strange outcome that I don't think that anyone can do anything about. Where you have, you know, as the internet becomes more and more powerful, suddenly you can't stop people from saying things in the way that you could previously. And so you have all new sorts of information and disinformation warfare that I don't really know how we handle going forward, but it'll be really interesting.

• 42:51Anthony Pompliano?

  It's this idea that like viral content is just propaganda for the masses.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I think it is, and that's not surprising. And in a way, we had, it's not that there's more or less truth, but there's just more sources of it. Now that we're sort of entering this information age, and I think it's overwhelming right now, and hopefully it'll sort of get better, but I don't know. I think a lot of the things that we're seeing in Hong Kong and simultaneously in other parts around the world, and Argentina, and Lebanon, and Catalonia, and all of these sort of populist movements that are now virally connected and can see their successes and failures in other parts of the world, is another part of this. And it's sort of a broader shift that Bitcoin is a part of, which is a shift from, you

• 43:35Speaker 02

  know, the sort of cathedral environment of very closed systems. And, you know, I was just rereading Cathedral and the Bazaar just a couple of days ago, and it was really striking how true not only it is from the open source software perspective, but just for so many legacy institutions, whether it be education, or healthcare, or a lot of these sorts of things that it's becoming more and more obvious that the less cathedral approach we take to things, the more we open things up and say, alright, you can just learn whatever you want now.

• 44:15Speaker 02

  I mean, we've basically made liberal, or like liberal studies degrees, your social sciences degrees, those are basically useless now.

• 44:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  When you can learn a lot, I mean, in college, I studied philosophy, I learned... Probably like five times as much just from reading online.

• 44:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 44:31Speaker 02

  About philosophy than anything I learned in class.

• 44:33Anthony Pompliano?

  How much of the college experience, though, in those liberal arts, uh, do you think are driven less about the knowledge that you can obtain because you can go read that online in books, etc. And it's more about the, um, the kind of interactions with other people who are thinking about the same things. It's the, it's the debates, it's the disagreements, it's like kind of the conversation around the information, uh, which I would consider is the more subjective component of what you're able to get online.

• 44:57Speaker 02

  I think that there's a lot of glamorization, romanticism around this sort of thing, but the reality is, a lot of kids don't go to class. Not many people really care. A lot of people just kind of show up for the credits. Uh, a lot of people are just, you know, oh, I'm taking this required music class because I have to get my music requirement.

• 45:14Anthony Pompliano?

  I have physical education.

• 45:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. No one, no one cares. But when you look at things like Twitter, like, there's a lot of really, really interesting, just sort of like radical philosophy that happens on Twitter and these like crazy threads. And, and so Twitter I see is like, or, or, you know, similar platforms to it. I think Twitter's a good example of, you can have the sort of open source, uh, education, open source debate and discussion. If you really like these sorts of co-mingling of ideas, I mean, that's exactly what Twitter is. Each tweet is about the size of something you would, you would say in a conversation because a conversation, it has natural back and forth.

• 45:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  And so tweets can kind of go back and forth, but not only that, you can have functionality that you can't have in a classroom because a classroom conversation is necessarily linear. But in a tweet, you can say something and then you can take all three responses to it and each of those can branch out and create their own debates. And so when you take it online, you can actually have much, much more stimulating, valuable and free and interesting because the people aren't forced to be there. You don't have a forced participation on Twitter. The people that talk on Twitter, the people that care. And, and I think Bitcoin has shown just how powerful this can be.

• 46:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  That when you have an open source pursuit of truth. That you can resist corporate attacks, you can resist all these sorts of corruptions that that sort of eke their way in. I think the UASF and the resistance of SegWit2X is an amazing example of how powerful these new, you know, the academic institutions are. I would consider Bitcoin Twitter an academic institution. And you're not there because of your tenure position. You're there because you make a damn good argument and people agree with you. And you you sort of build up that following through, you know, just making strong logical points.

• 47:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I think a lot about Twitter is a war of ideas, right? And like, people that don't understand the nuances of Twitter think that it is a conversation. But what I've come to find out is it really is a war of ideas. And I use the words "war of ideas" specifically because what ends up happening is you get people who come with their own perspective on the world and the the nature of Twitter is you have to post that publicly, right? So you have to to post this to the masses and then you have to sit and defend, right? So you go from an offensive position where, hey, this is an idea, and then it's just an attack. And especially around Bitcoin, where people are definitely, there's a camaraderie, right? Around like, hey, we all are going after the same thing.

• 47:51Anthony Pompliano?

  But Bitcoiners are very, very quick, whether I like you or not, if you say something I disagree with, like, we are here to have that that kind of attrition, right? And like, what are the best ideas? What can survive the attacks? And so it's the one place in the world where I feel like you can put ideas out to a large mass of people, you can then immediately like become defensive as they attack it, get to defend it, right? All this stuff. But at the end of it all, we all are there for the same reason, right? And so it's like it's like this very interesting, kind of like the salons of, you know, many decades ago. But Do you think that the way we are communicating today is changing the way that people actually think?

• 48:34Anthony Pompliano?

  And what I mean by this is, so think of Twitter, right? Very short form, kind of microblogging. Think of memes, right? And kind of the way that we are able to meme things, whether it's through text, or visual, or video, etc. Like, does the communication delivery, right? Or the, almost the media format, change the arguments? Does it change the way that we think? Does it make us almost dumber? Or do you think that this is just us adapting to technology? And we still have the same level of intellectual curiosity and depth? It's just now we're just kind of fermenting that in a different form factor?

• 49:08Speaker 02

  I think, I think it's tempting to say we're getting dumbed down. And I think it's given you choices. You know, maybe things were more rigorous, or higher quality, or like the average level of content, or something, previously, and you only had sort of like, alright, you have three TV channels, and you can only listen to what's on there, and you sort of get the standard narrative.

• 49:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  I think this internet has certainly given you the freedom to just purely just download garbage to your brain. But, on the other hand, it is incredibly liberating, and I think can promote

• 49:44Speaker 02

  people who are, you know, your modern-day DaVincis, you know, people who are the polymaths, the Satoshi's of the world. They now have the liberty to explore whatever they want, to engage in incredibly rigorous discussion and debates, and thinking through very, very high-level topics on 20 different issues, 20 different fields. And it could be someone who just has an internet connection anywhere in the world. And that, I think, we're gonna see, I mean, it's crazy to imagine how powerful that is.

• 50:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  You know, if in the past 500 years, there have been thousands of potential DaVincis, but only a few of them had access to the resources and the libraries that made their ideas come to life and make these mass improvements? Well, if we're democratizing that, if we're opening up these conversations, so you can join these salons whenever you want, you can read these, you know, very important texts whenever you want. Maybe some people are gonna download garbage, but those people probably would have done something relatively useless either way.

• 50:44Anthony Pompliano?

  It's the same thing, like you could read the Washington Post or you could read the National Enquirer, right? And you could have done that three decades ago.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 50:50Anthony Pompliano?

  And so it was your your choice of information. You actually have more choice now. And not only do you have more choice, but the thing I love is the the the power shift from the institutions to the individuals, right? On Twitter, there is no difference between an individual and the Washington Post. Because at the end of the day, you may actually trust that individual more than the Washington Post, right? And that's not a knock against the Washington Post. It's just that the that the Internet specifically creates the opportunity for authenticity. And when you have authenticity, that's where trust is going, right? And so I think that it's very hard for an institution to have authenticity because it's not a human, right? And it's a collection of humans. And so which human represents the authenticity? Well, you really don't have an answer to that, right?

• 51:33Speaker 02

  And so at that level, when you are, you know, going back to the idea of pseudonyms, when you're on a pseudonymous level, the only way I can tell if you're authentic enough is if you have a good logical argument behind you.

• 51:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  The credibility that many of these very powerful institutions have, you know, sort of rested on for so long is being called into question because here are people making very strong credible arguments. And if that is a strong argument, then it gets retweeted and it goes viral. And, you know, you sort of see this power dynamic come into play where you can't simply just be a traditionally credible thing. You have to back up what you're saying with strong arguments.

• 52:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep. And so when you think about kind of the, we'll call it the verification, right? There's a lot of similarities between the verification of ideas and content on Twitter as there is with Bitcoin as money, right? This whole idea of like fully transparent system that I can verify every transaction, etc. Do you think that that is, that mechanism or model will permeate itself into all aspects of our lives where people will just demand the ability to verify? Or do you think that it will still be certain aspects of society where I just trust this institution or this individual and I don't need that ability to verify? Like, does the Internet break the model and require verification?

• 52:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Or is that just on the extremes of maybe information, money, maybe one or two other areas?

• 52:49Speaker 02

  I see this as sort of like a much longer shift. I think that, you know, in the 40s or 50s, maybe we had strong trust. But as we've gotten better at peeling the layers back and seeing what's actually happening in other parts of the world. I think Vietnam War was like, the Vietnam War was a very big turning point for American identity. Because we started to see the official narratives started to be questioned by, okay, here's real journalists on the ground. Here's what they're saying about kill counts. Here's what they're seeing about soldiers fragging their own officers. Here's what they're seeing about who's actually being killed. All of these were just like symbolic shocks to official narratives. And I don't see, I just see this as being a progressive thing.

• 53:31Speaker 02

  I think as time progresses, we're going to see more and more questioning of official narratives. And instead, we're going to see more sort of populist, I don't even know if populist is the right word. Viral movements, I think, is the right one. And I don't even know if it's necessarily democratic, because I think there's also some question about democracy as well. Going into the 21st century.

• 53:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Who's driving the narrative as well, right? I think like, one of the things I've become really interested in is these ideas that, hey, there's this cause, right? So let's take two examples. One would be, quote-unquote, Russia meddled in the election and they caused dissent between American citizens. And then they create chaos and controversy, and that had an impact. The other would be that you're a political candidate, I'm a political candidate. You are going to have a rally, so I, through my campaign, fund counter protesters to show up, right? And I'm literally paying them to be there. Those two things seem pretty similar to me, right? And so it depends on, where's the line, right? So is it just another country or government? We don't want them to do that.

• 54:38Anthony Pompliano?

  But you and I meddling with each other is okay, because we call that democracy. But where this all kind of materializes is like, do you think that the ethos of Bitcoin and Bitcoiners is going to drive change in the world? Or do you think that simply the popularity of those ethos is the product of a change that's happening in the world, right? So like the causation?

• 55:00Speaker 02

  Yes, I think the second one is right.

• 55:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, explain that more.

• 55:04Speaker 02

  I think this is definitely a shift towards distrust of any sort of larger institution. Money being one of them, education being another, media being a third. And I don't think, I think- Honestly, it's hard because I think that personally Bitcoin has changed my perspective. And so I can see them feeding on each other. I think the reason people are drawn to Bitcoin is this idea of, you know, it makes sense to have an algorithm instead of a person that I'm trusting and to sort of minimize trust. And I think that that's largely something that has come about more with this sort of peer-to-peer internet culture as people are becoming more cynical about the world. But I also think that Bitcoin realigns your values.

• 55:48Speaker 02

  It's definitely realigned mine where I found myself much, much more skeptical of any sort of interference and any sort of tinkering or optimization. Instead Bitcoin represents sort of this pure base where it doesn't matter necessarily what the numbers are. It doesn't matter, you know, what the block size is. There's some like wiggle room there. It doesn't matter exactly how many coins are. But the fact that it is a unflinching, just constant in my life and in knowing what it guarantees me is something that is incredibly powerful. And I see that as being something that money is uniquely based on trust right now.

• 56:34Speaker 02

  And I think we could move away from that. Other things, it's hard. It's nice to take trust out of money, but you can't do the same thing with a lot of these other institutions that are going to be facing a reckoning. Because, you know, how do you remove trust from academic arguments? You know, you still need to parse out logic. You still need to go through these other, how do you remove trust from, you know, media or something like that? Eventually someone has to be selecting which arguments are good or bad. And you have to understand where the logic is coming from. But I don't know, it's very deeply complex.

• 57:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And so it's definitely complex, for sure. And there's no black and white answer. I guess really what ends up, the way that I think about this is if you continue to use technology to break apart the corporations and kind of the trusted narratives and kind of all of this stuff and you end up hitting at like... What do we, what can we verify and if we can verify, then we trust it. How that permeates because if you look at the major quote-unquote institutions of our society, these are all things that actually require the default trust. So government, money, right, you know, media, etc. And if you start to break those down into, I need to be able to verify, what you get is a world that looks very, very different.

• 57:52Anthony Pompliano?

  And my greatest fear is that there's a lot of pain between where we are and where we're going. And it's how do you navigate that pain?

• 57:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the, I think a lot of people, I, I think everyone knows something is, is wrong. And it's, it's not just a fear, it's reality, you know? Pensions don't have the money, our government's insolvent, the eurozone is insolvent. China is just, you know, propping itself up on debt, on top of debt, on top of debt. You know, all of these massive legacy financial institutions do not have a much runway left. You know, maybe it's 10 years, maybe it's 20 years, maybe it's two years, I don't know, who knows? No one knows what the straw is gonna break the camel's back. But we know that something is going to have to give in these traditional systems. And, you know, The Sovereign Individual is a fantastic book that talks about this sort of shift

• 58:42Speaker 02

  and how it's, it's going to happen, it has to happen because these things aren't sustainable, much like the shift from, you know, the, the power of the church and how it eventually became this sort of parasitic institution that eventually had to be cleansed.

• 58:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 58:57Speaker 02

  But that wasn't a fun time.

• 58:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 58:59Speaker 02

  That was a hard time, a very hard time.

• 59:02Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure.

• 59:02Speaker 02

  And that brought a lot of pain. And I think there's no clean way to get from where we are now to this sort of new, open, more bottom-up system without pain along the way because so many people are still relying on narratives that you and I both know are just bunk at the end of the day. And, you know, when, when it comes down to people's, I mean, this is, this is serious. This is people's life savings, this is people's pensions that they've been working for four years as a teacher because they know they're gonna get that nice pension at the end of it. And that's why they've been making these sacrifices. And on the other end, and they're either not gonna get their money or the only way they can get their money is through massive tax increases.

• 59:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 59:45Speaker 02

  On the other local citizens.

• 59:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 59:48Speaker 02

  Who have been planning not to have those tax increases and have been, you know, you know, scrupulously saving and trying to make ends meet just to make sure they can have their retirement. And suddenly, are you going to raise taxes on those people to pay the pensions that need to be bailed out?

• 1:00:02Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure.

• 1:00:02Speaker 02

  Or are you just going to print money? And inflate away.

• 1:00:05Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think?

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  Other people's savings. I mean, that's obviously the.

• 1:00:09Anthony Pompliano?

  The plan.

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  The sexy political move, but that's also, and this goes back to what we were talking about earlier. Inflation is a, one of the worst ways to handle problems in your society because it's so regressive.

• 1:00:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  Inflation hurts the worst off because the, the people in, in higher level incomes, they can, you know, shield their money and these sorts of different financial assets.

• 1:00:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:00:32Speaker 02

  But the, you know, the lower brackets of income.

• 1:00:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Fifty percent of Americans can't afford $400 emergency payment.

• 1:00:38Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:00:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 1:00:39Speaker 02

  Exactly. And they keep their savings in their bank accounts. They don't keep their savings and.

• 1:00:42Anthony Pompliano?

  They don't have real estate, they don't have stocks. Yep.

• 1:00:44Speaker 02

  No, of course not. Of course not.

• 1:00:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  And we shouldn't expect them to. We shouldn't expect them to, but inflation then becomes this silent regressive tax that you can sort of, you know, scapegoat around and say, oh, it's, you know, all these different things. Except for what's actually happening. I, I don't know how any of these play out.

• 1:01:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:01:01Speaker 02

  And I think anyone who says they know how it's going to play out, you should run the other direction. Because we're dealing with monumental complexity, but I think what we do know is there is going to be pain. Unfortunately.

• 1:01:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:01:13Speaker 02

  Because, you know, we've been sold a system that's just broken.

• 1:01:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  And it's been running on fumes for a while and maybe it'll continue.

• 1:01:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  Um, but I see Bitcoin as a safe haven for that because I know no matter where I'm at in the world, no matter who is in charge, 21 million.

• 1:01:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  Is going to stay.

• 1:01:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:01:31Speaker 02

  Um, and that is something that is just unbelievably powerful. Looking at these long-term consequences, five, 10, 20 years down the road.

• 1:01:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, for sure. What, um, as we go to wrap up, what are you most excited about kind of over the next 12 months? Like, what are you paying attention to? What, what do you think is, uh, is really exciting?

• 1:01:49Speaker 02

  Gosh, I, I think there's so many things that are really exciting. I, I honestly, um. In terms of Bitcoin development itself, I'm just really excited for how the Lightning Network is being built out. I was just in Berlin for the Lightning conference. Awesome. How was that? Oh, it was fantastic. Everyone there was really, really interested in building. And not, you know, I also went to the Blockstack conference. And it was a completely different mentality at the two different conferences. One was very interested in ideas and theories and, you know, what can we do beyond Facebook? Whereas Lightning conference was, here's what we're building. Here's how it works. Here's how we expect this to work six months from now. Here's how this is going to be an integral part of a brand-new financial infrastructure.

• 1:02:34Speaker 02

  And this is only going to get exponentially better. And here's new layers on top of this, and here's the research we're doing. And, you know, they're not pulling punches. They're not trying to dumb anything down. And the people there are ridiculously motivated at making things, not making money. And that's a very, very different approach. And it's the open-source ethos of the best things are going to be built when people who care about them are building them. And not people who, you know, have $7 million and they're trying to think about what's the best way to allocate this. It's people that just want to build stuff. And so, you know, what's happening at Lightning, specifically with different ways of routing, so atomic multipath payments, so you can break up different routes.

• 1:03:17Speaker 02

  So if I want to send you $10, I can send it $5 through two different channels instead of one $10 channel. Massive improvement in Lightning UX. And I think, at this point, we're beyond proof of concept. Like, we're really building this stuff out. And we're not just theory crafting. We've done it. We've basically finished replacing the Federal Reserve. It's just a question of time. We're just waiting for these things to come to fruition. But all of the difficult questions, the innovations are there. It's just a question of, you know, iterating, iterating, iterating, and making this all happen. And in the context of the macro backdrop, that is sort of the one thing that helps me feel confident about the future.

• 1:04:01Speaker 02

  If we didn't have Bitcoin, it would be much, much darker. And, you know, I don't even like to think about that, honestly. What's the most important book you've read? Most important book I've read ever. Honestly, the first thing that comes to mind is a Nietzsche Reader by R.J. Hollendale, who put it together.

• 1:04:24Anthony Pompliano?

  What is that?

• 1:04:25Speaker 02

  And it's basically a collection of Nietzsche's philosophical writings.

• 1:04:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting.

• 1:04:28Speaker 02

  It was really, really important for me going into college because Nietzsche was kind of this philosophical person who just blew open traditional understandings of philosophy and said, "All these guys that are put in these brilliant philosophy chairs and all these high institutions, they're wrong. They're just preaching about stuff that shouldn't be accepted as truth." And that truth is much, much stickier than a black and white, good and bad, but that all these things are much more gray. And I think that that mentality of questioning whoever claims to have an understanding of

• 1:05:09Speaker 02

  truth, questioning that, has been really important for orienting my politics and my view of the world and turning it more towards what really Bitcoin represents also, which is we should just let people do what they want. We should trust in people's opinions to whatever they voluntarily choose to do. And I think it also helped me sort of parse through mainstream economic understandings of Bitcoin versus where does the logical argument stack up? And if you can make a good argument, it doesn't matter what titles you have, what credentials you have, but where you should go is where the logic structures are.

• 1:05:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep, for sure. Before I end, I always let you ask me one question, but we talk about aliens. Believer, non-believer?

• 1:06:03Speaker 02

  Honestly, aliens, I am very disappointed in basically all modern representations of aliens.

• 1:06:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:06:10Speaker 02

  Um, because, you know, if, if you look at Star Wars, or you look at these, you know, popular understand, or even, even, uh, what, what people claim was here at, at the Roswell stuff.

• 1:06:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:06:21Speaker 02

  Uh, the aliens are always very, very humanoid, you know, they have arms, they have legs, they even have eyeballs. The idea that aliens will even have the same sensory organs as humans, um, you know, we, we come from a nice, clean little genetic line, going back all these millions of years to our ancestors, but over the years, we've kind of developed certain sense organs, eyes, ears, you know, whatever it might be, and, and most animals on earth have that, but there's no reason to think that other alien species will have the same way of even interacting with the physical forces of the universe. So I, I think we could get a lot more creative with our aliens, uh, but I definitely think they exist, just

• 1:07:05Speaker 02

  statistically, they have to exist.

• 1:07:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:07Speaker 02

  I mean, let's just be real. Uh, I just want to see some more creative thought in aliens.

• 1:07:11Anthony Pompliano?

  That's fair. What, uh, what one question you have for me to finish up?

• 1:07:14Speaker 02

  One question I have for you. It's really hard, Tom.

• 1:07:20Anthony Pompliano?

  No, no question is perfectly fine. It makes my job easy.

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  Um, I would say, what is your, I, I'm curious, um, what is your favorite podcast in crypto right now? Aside from your own?

• 1:07:37Anthony Pompliano?

  My, my favorite podcast in crypto, um, man, that's really good. Uh, so I can't pick one, I'm gonna pick two, uh, and it's because they, they come at it from very different perspectives. So, uh, I would go with, uh, Telson the Crypt, Marty Bent, Matt Odell, uh, and then, um, Peter McCormick, what Bitcoin did. I think both of them, one is much more, uh, individual focused, right? So like when Peter's interviewing people, et cetera, he just did one with Nick Sabo that I thought was fantastic.

• 1:08:04Speaker 02

  That was good.

• 1:08:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, yeah, he, he's got a number of other ones that, uh, that, that I would highly recommend. Um, and so it's, it's. To me, I get to learn a lot from somebody that Peter is asking questions to and kind of talking about. When it comes to Marty and Matt, their, what do they call it, rabbit hole recap, I think is what it is. To me, the part that I like about that is you get to follow their thought process, right? And so it's like, you're hearing them constantly sharing like their perspective on the news. And I think that what I find valuable to them specifically is they come from a much more kind of Bitcoin centric, earlier time

• 1:08:47Anthony Pompliano?

  period, right? Where they've just been around for much longer than a lot of people. And so they have kind of historical context of Bitcoin specifically. And then they have a very specific perspective on the world, right? And that perspective is not actually very widely shared by a lot of people. And then they're just entertaining, right? And so when you kind of like wrap all that together, for me, it's like, it's enjoyable, but it's also educational and I learn a lot from it. And so I actually think that's one of the biggest problems with podcasts today is a lot of people are very focused on making them educational, but not entertaining. And that's always my advice to people. It's like, hey, if you're gonna do some sort of content, like make it enjoyable and entertaining, and then make it substantive behind it. But I think that first part gets left out, which they've, they've obviously done a great job with. And so those are the two I probably

• 1:09:32Anthony Pompliano?

  would recommend.

• 1:09:33Speaker 02

  Awesome.

• 1:09:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. All right, man. Listen, thanks so much for taking the time to do this. I think people will, will enjoy it. I'm sure plenty of people will be mad at us about talking about politics, Bitcoin, and the social constructs of the world.

• 1:09:44Speaker 02

  I mean, that's what we're here for, right? But thank you so much for having me on Pump.

• 1:09:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Exactly. Where can people find you online if they want to reach out?

• 1:09:50Speaker 02

  The best place was just on my Twitter. It's underscore Connor Brown underscore, and that's Connor with an ER at the end.

• 1:09:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Somebody had Connor Brown, just at Connor Brown?

• 1:09:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:10:00Anthony Pompliano?

  We need to go track them down, man. Give it back.

• 1:10:02Speaker 02

  One of these days, I'm gonna get it.

• 1:10:04Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, man. Appreciate it. Hey everyone, Pomp here. If you liked this episode of Off the Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, Spotify, and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review, and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off the Chain.