320: Jason Calacanis - The World’s Most Successful Angel Investor?

Jason Calacanis is a technology entrepreneur, angel investor, and the host of the popular podcast, This Week in Startups, and Angel. He boasts one of the top angel investor track records in recent history in Silicon Valley and has written a book to teach others how to replicate his success as well. This conversation was a little different than normal as we recorded a dual-podcast episode. Rather than argue over who got to interview who, we recorded one two hour episode where we interview each other throughout the episode. We covered everything from Bitcoin to early-stage investing to coronavirus to the recent protests. This episode was a lot of fun to record and hopefully you enjoy it. =============================== The Helium Hotspot is a new product that enables the people, not the telcos, to own and operate a wireless network in their city for Internet of Things devices. You can literally earn crypto for helping to build the network and providing connectivity to Internet of Things devices sending small bits of data. Join the movement and get your Helium Hotspot today with $50 off using the code POMP at helium.com. =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

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

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Jason Calacanis is a technology entrepreneur, angel investor, and the host of the popular podcast This Week in Startups, and angel. He boasts one of the top angel investor track records in recent history in Silicon Valley, and has written a book to teach others how to replicate his success as well. This conversation was a little different than normal, as we recorded a dual podcast episode. Rather than argue over who got to interview who, we recorded one two-hour episode where we interview each other throughout the episode. We covered

• 0:43Anthony Pompliano?

  everything from Bitcoin, to early-stage investing, to coronavirus, to the recent protest. This episode was a lot of fun to record, and hopefully you enjoy it as well. Before I get into the episode, though, I want to quickly touch about our sponsors. The first is the Helium Hotspot. It's a new product that enables the people, not the telcos, to own and operate a wireless network in their city for Internet of Things devices. That's right, they're democratizing access to owning a wireless network. You can literally earn crypto for helping to build a network and providing connectivity to Internet of Things devices by sending small bits of data. You can join the movement and get your Helium Hotspot

• 1:23Anthony Pompliano?

  today with $50 off using the code POMP at helium.com. The way this works is normally, telcos own the wireless networks, and you pay them to use their service for your connectivity. But now, the people are going to own the wireless network. No longer will the telcos have a monopoly on this. The Helium Hotspot helps you do this. I've got one set up in my apartment, and we're connecting everyone, everywhere. Helium.com, use the code POMP, and you'll get $50 off. Go get you one, and tweet at me once you have it. Also, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while

• 2:07Anthony Pompliano?

  sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com. pompletter.com. All right, let's get into this mega episode with Jason. I hope you guys enjoy it.

• 2:19Speaker 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.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Hey, everybody, and welcome to the Pomp Podcast. I'm not your host, Jason Calacanis. I'm the host of This Week in Startups, but my friend Anthony Pompliano, you know him as Pomp, and I decided we would try to do a crossover episode where the king of crypto and the prince of startups would get together and answer your questions. So it's a crossover episode between the Pomp Podcast. Now, if you're listening to my podcast, This Week in Startups, why don't you stop what you're doing in your podcast player and do a search for Pomp, P-O-M-P, and find the Pomp Podcast and subscribe to it. It's awesome. And he talks about crypto, and he's very objective, and he's been on my pod, and he's awesome, and it's great to catch up with you. Pomp, how are you doing?

• 3:29Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm doing great. This is also the Pomp Podcast recording, which means that you have to go subscribe to This Week in Startups. I'm laughing because right before we started, Jason said that this is a collab episode, similar to Nicki Minaj and Takashi 69, and we're still trying to figure out who is who in the episode of collaboration. But

• 3:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think it means one of us has to take our top off and put pasties on at some point. Did you see the new video?

• 3:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, I saw.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was like, what is going on in the world? Like, it's just like, people are just naked to get YouTube views. And I saw Nicki Minaj tweeted, like, this is the fastest to, like, whatever, 100 million views. I'm like, you're topless. Of course it is.

• 4:14Anthony Pompliano?

  My favorite thing is Tekashi69 keeps going on Instagram and making these videos that says, "Everyone said I was a rat," because he, you know, basically worked with the federal prosecutors.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  He ratted on his friends, yeah.

• 4:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep. And he still is under house arrest, actually. And he's like, "And I'm still doing better numbers than everyone else in the rap game, so you guys are just mad." And it's kind of like, "Look, man, he's literally under house arrest doing these collabs and going viral on the internet. It's pretty wild."

• 4:40Speaker 02

  So basically, they sent a video crew to his house, painted the corner of it red or something, and made like a little tiny box for them to jump around in. I mean, that kid's gonna get whacked. Based on my experience, from where I grew up, if you talk that much and you poke that many people, it's just a matter of time. And it's not gonna happen in the next two years. It's gonna be like eight years from now. Kid's gonna get whacked, car's gonna flip on a highway, maybe the brakes were not so good, but he's gotta be careful, man.

• 5:14Anthony Pompliano?

  He, before he released this latest video, he actually went on Instagram and did an hour-long livestream beforehand and literally had a list of rappers, everyone from Snoop Dogg all the way down, and just went one by one and just basically talked shit to them.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  Really?

• 5:29Anthony Pompliano?

  And I was like, "Man."

• 5:29Speaker 02

  I mean, he's terrible. I mean, I tried to sit through that song, and I was like, "My god, this, I could rap better than this." And I mean, I sound terrible. I have a terrible voice. He's horrible. Why do people like him? I don't get it.

• 5:44Anthony Pompliano?

  If you dropped, if you dropped a rap song, it would go viral for sure.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  100. Would somebody take this episode and just sample something we say that's clever and make a pomp and J. C. Howe crossover video, whatever? But anyway, you know, it's interesting. You and I have debated crypto a whole bunch. We actually overlap a lot more than people probably think, because people think I hate crypto. But I don't. I just hated the ICO scam, and you and I came to basic agreement on that. So my first question for you is about the ICO scams and that whole chapter of crypto. Is that actually over now? And did anything come out of that? Because I had the founders of Tezos on.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  I see they settled a lawsuit, and I'm wondering if any of the projects that we heard about, what is it, five years ago, four years ago, three years ago, when people going crazy about this? Did any of those projects ever result in an actual, real company that provides products or services that's notable?

• 6:50Anthony Pompliano?

  So let me separate two things here. One is, there is very few, if any, ICOs still happening in the form that they were happening, specifically in the United States and even internationally. I think that kind of came and went. We'll see if it comes back, but right now that's definitely been kind of tampered down by a lot of the regulatory pressure. In terms of what has been produced, the one thing that I definitely will give credit to is if you take Ethereum, right? So it's not a company that has a product or a service, it's a protocol. That definitely has become the second most dominant network in the space. So they get credit for that. They did an ICO, went well. They've been proven to not be a security and we're off to the races there. In terms of most of the other things, people

• 7:33Anthony Pompliano?

  will disagree with me on this, but I tend to think that you're right in that there just isn't what you and I would expect, kind of measurable success. There's some things that are, you know, maybe interesting, some people who have built a product and kind of are just now getting it out in the space. But if you're a business that raised 10, 20, 50, 100 million dollars in an ICO, you know, in the traditional technology world, you would expect a product, you would expect hundreds of employees, like you would expect some of these milestones to be hit. And we're just not seeing that yet. And I think that really was kind of the concern all along. Why are you giving people 250 million dollars? And they have an idea and a pitch deck? Like, I don't know.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  It is, that was another concern I had, and people were like, oh, you're hating. And I was like, well, honestly, I'm not hating because the second this becomes legitimate and legal, you can be certain I will be on top of it. And I have a big platform. So if ICOs turn out to be the thing, thesyndicate.com will be an ICO token and we will go all in on it. And we just took a very cautious, like, wait and see, because I have something to lose. Like, I've got a pretty great life. I don't want to go to jail. But looking down this list of ICOs, Telegram raised a billion seven, I'm just reading from a CNBC story. Dragon Coin raised 320, and I don't know if these numbers are even legitimate anymore.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  Something called Huobi, 300 million. HDAC, 258. Filecoin, I remember, because my friend Naval was involved in that, 257 million. And that one seemed like an interesting one to me because I believe it was going to be cloud storage. You give your hard drive up and it's going to be some sort of cloud storage. I had some mixed feelings on that one, but that one seemed real. I had Tesla's on the podcast. They raised 232 and they just gave some money back. They got sued. Seren Labs, 157, Bancor, 152. Of that list I just made, obviously Telegram's a real product, so putting that aside. Are any of those legit now? Or do any of them? Like, do you hear about any of them? Do you get excited about any of them?

• 9:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so I think that Hobi is a real exchange. It operates.

• 9:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Relatively large. I don't know how much of that is because of the ICO versus it was already going to be a successful thing and they had the ICO. The other ones, for the most part, are either still kind of, we're going to do mode, right? So we're gonna launch this. We're gonna do all of this. The one you didn't mention is there was an EOS that raised $4 billion.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  Brock Pierce.

• 10:05Anthony Pompliano?

  $4 billion.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And they paid a 20, I think a $25 million SEC fine on $4 billion raised. It's like the most profitable business in the world.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  I think that your credit card fees would be larger. I think it feels like a credit card fee, right? 2.5% on a billion. Pretty good deal.

• 10:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Here's what I, here's what I will say though, right? Is, so you and I are definitely on the same page of like, I was yelling and screaming, this is all chaos and nonsense. And like, I can't believe this is all happening. And I actually thought that the regulators would be much more strict. So the thing that I probably was wrong on was they seemed to have not been as stringent as I thought they would be. But this also happens in tech sometimes too. So if you look at, you know, there's magically, there's Quibi. There's a bunch of these companies, especially when SoftBank came into the market, that they raised hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars pre-product. And so I always go back to like, is that a sign of late-stage economy stuff? Or is that a sign of like crypto stuff, right? And I don't yet have an answer.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, let me, let me, I'll take that as a question because unpacking it, if we just take Quibi as an example, there you have one of the most successful media executives in the history of media, top five certainly, in Katzenberg. Pretty easy bet to make, even pre-product, and as much as they've been derided, I do think they have 3 million paid subs or something, which is, from a cold start in a new brand, not insignificant, right? Certainly, they've gone further than Netflix did in their first 10 years, I bet, in terms of the number of subscribers. So that was interesting. Magic Leap actually has real technology, and that is a groundbreaking space, AR, augmented reality.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  But it does seem crazy that people poured a ton of money in, but those were very sophisticated investors, obviously Andreessen Horowitz and other people. So as much of a mess as that is, people, I have not seen the technology, but people have, and there's something real there. So definitely part of it is late-stage capitalism, but I would think these are two very different buckets of capital, right? Like, an ICO investor was somebody who probably made a fortune on Bitcoin or Ethereum and was just rolling it over.

• 12:23Anthony Pompliano?

  That's definitely some of it, and some of it was actually people who missed kind of the early successful ones and then said, "Oh, well, what's the next one?" Right? Because remember, Bitcoin didn't have an ICO, right? So Bitcoin was kind of what you would consider a traditional product. It was released to the world and kind of went that way. Ethereum had the ICO, but there's a lot of investors. I mean, I literally remember in 2017, there was a number of times where people would be like, "Hey, this company is raising $20 million, and all you do is you send crypto to a wallet, and then just like fill in this Excel file with your name and the amount you sent."

• 12:57Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 12:58Anthony Pompliano?

  And it was like, "This isn't gonna end well."

• 13:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, anonymous money coming in like that, I mean, with that, with KYC, know your customer, and all the money laundering issues. Yeah, that's just a recipe for disaster. But yeah, I mean, we do see some weird things where a company pre-product. And so I think, on average, the ICOs were like the outliers in our industry. So I would freely admit that the outliers in our industry did look similar to some of those ICOs. But the interesting thing is, Quibi did get a product to market. Magic Leap did get their product to developers, I believe. Developers have the kits now. So it's, you know, the hit rate is going to be very different, I think. Why didn't they launch products, do you think?

• 13:43Speaker 02

  Was it just that the people who built these companies? And who were willing to take the risk of being, doing an ICO, which was unclear, were probably just not super qualified to build products?

• 13:57Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know for sure, right? Each case is kind of case by case. But what I will say is I think you get, um, there was definitely some people who raised money through ICOs that couldn't have raised it in a more traditional kind of venture capital type model.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  So that would be signaling, right? It was signaling people or selecting, it was a selection issue. People who couldn't clear market and venture cleared market with anonymous global wallets. Maybe that signals not as good of an executor.

• 14:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so like that was, and I don't know what percentage of them, but that was definitely 1%. Another part of it was people who believed in kind of the decentralization. So this whole idea of I don't want the venture capitalist, you know, to own a piece of my business. I want the people to own it. I can kind of bootstrap a network, all that. And then the third one is, I actually think that there was a lot of people who literally just said, well, if somebody's going to give me $250 million, I'm going to raise $250 million.

• 14:51Speaker 02

  Right, which I think was Tezos' position was, hey, let's do that.

• 14:57Speaker 02

  Awesome. Okay.

• 14:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Let me ask you, let me ask you this question.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 15:01Anthony Pompliano?

  What is the, what's the most money a company has raised in a seed round that you invested in pre-product?

• 15:10Speaker 02

  Okay, great question. Seed round pre-product, hmm. I am very much of the belief in investing in companies right after they launch their product and I can play with it. So I think a company like Superhuman, because Raul had done a company before, was able to raise a decent chunk of change in their seed round. It was, you know, many millions of dollars, but it wasn't over 10. And then, looking at, let's see. I was in a later round of medium, but I think Ev probably raised a decent chunk of change.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  So serial founders like a Mark Pincus, or Elon with the boring company. Forget about me being involved in them, I'm not in the boring company, but I am a medium, but a later round. They tend to raise 10 million for 10%. That's what I see a lot of the times. And so it's an outrageous valuation when compared to the average. And probably, the founders are getting a 5X, 10X premium on their previous experience, for good reason. You know they're gonna get the product to market. They've done it many times before.

• 16:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's just interesting how 10 million versus 250 million, right? It's just such a wide gap.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  It's huge, and it's, the problem with raising that amount of money, I've seen it happen in later stages, is the whole team gets off their game, entitlement goes off the charts, and you have so much money, you basically drowned an opportunity. It would be the equivalent of like, putting a chef in a Costco or something, you know? Like a giant warehouse and saying, turn it into a restaurant, and it's like, okay, where do I even begin? You know, like, there's every single food item in here, it's just too much. It's too overwhelming, to go that big, that fast. And you, it distances the core team from reality so much, and reality is the customer, that they start arguing over things like chairs, or the receptionist's desk,

• 17:18Speaker 02

  or where the office is located, or what the laptops are, and you know, how many gigs of RAM they have. Whereas in a regular company, you're like, holy shit, we're almost out of money. We better get this product to market. And you need to have constraint to be a great artist. Actually, a better analogy than a chef would be, just imagine you gave an artist a canvas the size... Of like a giant mural, you know, like the side of a building and you just gave them, you know, giant, you know, oil containers, truck, you know, milk trucks of paint. And you're like, go ahead. They're like, it's a little bit of a big canvas here. You know, where do I even get started? That's why like constraint makes great art. Bob Dylan said, like, they were like, hey, you know, why did this album come out? Why did you make the album? He's like, well, I owed it to the record label.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  And people are like, oh, that's completely disappointing as an answer. It's like, yeah, my back was against the wall. I had to get it out. I couldn't delay the record label anymore. So I had to, you know, get my term paper in. And this is Bob Dylan's case. It was the album.

• 18:17Anthony Pompliano?

  And it feels like now, uh, the tools are available where people can create products so inexpensively and so quickly that they can get something, it, it, it maybe not even fully into the market, but to hand you that it's almost inexplicable, unless you're working on something that's a really hard tech problem. Why they don't, why, why would you go raise money before that? Right?

• 18:40Speaker 02

  This is such a great insight pump because I deal with founders all day long who tell me, if you give me a hundred thousand dollars or $250,000, I can build this. And then I say, you know, that's great. And I'm flattered that you're contacting me. I have a long list of people who've already created stuff and who have a hundred or a thousand users who are asking me for 250K at the same valuation. Why would I pick you over them? And like, well, I have great potential. I'm like, you're telling me that. They're showing me that. And, and really that's what I think a lot of young entrepreneurs don't understand is the, the, the people who get funded in today's market because of what you're saying. It's so cheap to build. If you wanted to build Clubhouse, or if you wanted to build a podcasting app, or whatever it is,

• 19:22Speaker 02

  you could build it in a weekend. Sweat equity, two, three people. You don't need all that money. And so you've basically signaled to the market that you are a permission asker. You're somebody who needs permission or validation in order to build. Whereas other people, they're, they're going to make their album. They're going to tell jokes if they're a comedian. They're going to make a short film if they're, uh, you know, they're going to write their screenplay. They don't need permission to do it. Right? And that's where founders get tripped up a lot is that they ask for. You know, they're looking for some validation from an investor, you know, and really, they should look at the investor as somewhere between a checkbook or ATM and a coach,

• 20:06Speaker 02

  or, you know, a close friend who can give them candid feedback, right? That's really what you're getting when you're getting an angel or seed investor. Somebody who can be candid with you with advice, maybe introduce you to people, just be a good friend. And on the margins, a little bit of money to spend on marketing or hiring that third developer. But you really want to be a developer, which is why Combinator says you have to have a technologist on your team. You need to have a developer, a designer, somebody who can actually build. And if you can't build, well, what's your goddamn excuse? Like, go on YouTube and type in how to build a website, how to write code. And people are like, oh, you know, that's ridiculous. It's not actually ridiculous. There's freecodecamp.org. I had them on the podcast. We made a small investment in Lambda School. There's Lambda School if you want to pay money, and you could do it on the come, right?

• 20:52Speaker 02

  You don't have to actually pay them upfront. You can pay it on contingency with an ISA, income sharing agreement.

• 20:57Anthony Pompliano?

  ISA.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  ISA. There's like so much interesting stuff out there. You really have no excuse.

• 21:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and I think part of what we've seen happen, at least over the last three or four years, is, you know, you had way more experience kind of early 2010s when people were just figuring it out. They're trying to build companies and the game of Silicon Valley wasn't yet identified and kind of popularized across all these media platforms. Now, literally, you'll get people who pitch you and it's just like, I know what you're doing. I know you read a blog post that said you're supposed to send this email or you're supposed to do this. I don't believe you.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  It's literally, it used to be opaque and you had to figure it out. Like, that was the game. You had to figure out what a term sheet was. You had to figure out, you know, how to get a lawyer in Silicon Valley. You needed to figure out how to get an office space or a lease or, you know, all this stuff was like, the first year was just figuring out the blocking and tackling. And now you can just go onto a website, trademark, incorporate, set up a cap table, all in a day.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  And get a WeWork space if you feel the need to have an office and an address. And it's all done in a day for a thousand dollars or something. So you're exactly right. And it's actually, I've had this blowback because I've been doing the podcast for so long and unpacking entrepreneurship, people pitch me and they know better what I'm looking for than I do because I don't remember all the things I've said and all the advice I've given over a thousand episodes. So they're like, they literally know you need to have the problem be personal because Garrett Camp and Travis couldn't find a cab in Paris, so they created Uber. So they come up with some fictional story of, you know, oh, I had this itch I had to scratch. I had this frustration in the world. And I've had people who are

• 22:44Speaker 02

  like, I've literally had somebody who's like, my dog got killed because he got hit by a car and I'm making something to protect against that. And I was just like, oh my God, like, and it was true in this case, but literally that making something personal as one example of how to unpack startups and pitch them is there. So then what's left? What's left is actually traction. So I've changed my game. All the things people know I'm going to ask, that's fine. But you know, the secret weapon is to just talk to the customers, right? You talk to the customers. It's very hard to fake customers. People can. There are techniques to fake customers, but we know them and we figure them out.

• 23:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And it feels like the reduction of friction is a net positive, right? It's better that people can get started faster, they can get office space, whatever. But there's just like this level of authenticity and you almost can smell when somebody's pitching you what they want, they think you want to hear rather than just doing it.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 23:41Anthony Pompliano?

  So it's pretty interesting.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  Well, think about like a sport like golf or tennis, like to just even understand how the scoring works in tennis or how to get a tennis court or how to, you know, get a tee, a tee time, right? Like, these are very hard things to do. If you're wondering why you don't see a large number of people doing those sports or skiing and you don't see diversity in those sports, it might be because it's really hard to even get started. Whereas, you know, playing baseball or basketball, you know, it's really all out there. Like, all you need is a basketball, you know, and a hoop. Like, there's, it's accessible to people. And I think that's why the NBA wound up winning and became such an amazing sport is because People in China, or Africa, or Europe, who wanted to play, just needed a basketball.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  And you see all these videos of them playing with like, a bucket pinned against the side of a wall. But they've got a basketball, and that's why I think the NBA became the world's sport, right? And soccer as well, because it's just so accessible. You just need to have a soccer ball in a field.

• 24:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, absolutely. What else you got?

• 24:44Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. So, explain to me why Ethereum was able to do essentially a token offering, an ICO, if it would be considered that? But they did a token offering, and they did not get in trouble with the SEC, but other people did. I've never understood this. And the times I've said it, people got very defensive on the social media, on the Twitter. Like, because I think, well, people are concerned, because they probably made a lot of money off of doing it. And I had people in the industry who were like, hey, pump the brakes on that. You know, your friends are in that. You know? So, why is that not considered an ICO? Didn't they sell all that and take all that money?

• 25:24Anthony Pompliano?

  So, obviously, I'm not a lawyer. I'm going to give you my layman's understanding of where regulators came out on this.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:31Anthony Pompliano?

  And it really, it really comes down to the decentralization of an existing network, before or after the sale. So there's some people who fell in a category of, hey, Jason, give me money. I'm going to go build this product, and at some point in the future, I will launch it, and it will be decentralized. Regulators have said, no, you're essentially raising capital, right? You're taking money, and that is going to be considered some sort of security, and you'll get in trouble if you didn't do everything you're supposed to do. In the case of Ethereum, what it sounds like is, regulators said, look, Ethereum, we are not going to make a decision on the time at which they did their token sale. So actually, the regulators have not said whether that was quote-unquote "legal" or not.

• 26:16Anthony Pompliano?

  But at this point, it is decentralized enough where it is not going to be deemed a security today.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 26:22Anthony Pompliano?

  And so part of the, the big question there is, something that previously hasn't been an option, is can you actually have a security that's offered, that then transitions to a non-security? So, in the case of Ethereum, was it a security when it was sold? But then, once the network is built and decentralized, could it transition to now be considered not a security? It sounds like regulators are open to that idea. I'm not by any means well-versed enough to kind of tell them where they're going to come out on that, but it is interesting because that's something that doesn't exist in traditional companies.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  It seems to be like it's the SEC is doing a reasonable job at balancing innovation and protecting consumers from scams. Would you agree with that or do you think that they've been slow?

• 27:13Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that they've been slow, which means that they've been doing a good job. Right, so both of those things are true. And what I mean by that is, nobody knows, right? Like, I mean, literally, people are experimenting and so naturally regulators are going to be slower than the innovators, but there's some things that are just outright scams. So if I say, Jason, give me $100,000, you know, I've got this great product, you give me the money and then it comes out that I didn't have the product, right? Like, okay, that's just a scam and I ran off with the money. Like, everyone agrees that's a bad thing, you know, go after those people. So I think that they've done a pretty good job, given how tough the situation is. There's plenty of people that wish that they would come out with more clear guidance and all this other stuff. They just don't know, right? And so I think that it's going to take time to get clearer guidance.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  One thing that I didn't understand that they didn't do, and I'm wondering what you think of my idea, which is, in the world I live in, when we do what's called a special purpose vehicle at thesyndicate.com or Angelus does it, or Seed Invest or other places that do SPVs, this is, they said, you can have 250 people, but you're capped out at $10 million per investment and somebody's got to be on the hook for managing all this and that happens to be me, in this case, the syndicate lead. And they have to all be accredited investors. So there was kind of a, you know, and if you have 100 people...

• 28:37Speaker 02

  You're not capped at the 250. So they were basically trying, I think that's, I think I got it right. People can look it up and correct me if I'm wrong, but ballpark, what they said was let's make, if there is a crater, if this thing does blow up, let's make it not create huge collateral damage, right? What I would have done if I was the SEC is I would have said, anybody who registers at this website, SEC.gov/crypto, if you register your project here, you can go through a quick registration process, which says you can have any number of investors capped at a million dollars. You can have up to $5 million capped at this number and 10 million at this number. And as long as your project stays within those bounds, you're good for five years.

• 29:22Speaker 02

  And if you want to go above that, then you've got to kick into securities mode or whatever it is. So you can, I don't know what the number is, but it seems to me that if a bunch of people are limited to, non-accredited investors are limited to $1,000 each, well, what's the harm there? You know, like even if they were paid minimum wage, they could get out of that hole in 100 hours of work, right? It wouldn't be what we call in poker and gambling, the risk of ruin, which is playing with your entire chip stack in one game. And you get a bad beat and somebody hits quads against your, you know, boat and you lose it all. So what do you think of that kind of approach? And do other people take that approach in other jurisdictions? I don't know the global jurisdiction reality these days.

• 30:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So the first thing that I'll say is people have to remember venture capitalists are professionals, right? You've got funds, I've got funds, everyone's got a fund. And our job is literally to take limited partners capital and go find the best deals that we can possibly find that are going to drive a return. And so that is the day job of these investors. And so naturally they're going to find quote unquote, the best companies and projects. Do they miss sometimes? Absolutely, right? So there's definitely some selection bias for people who choose not to go that path. Doesn't mean it's for everybody, but for sure, I think that's kind of, we have to remember that that's why venture capital exists, for projects that want to grow very big. Now, there is a subset of companies that have chosen to go through something like, let's call Reg A plus. And again, I don't know all of the details, but as far as I understand-

• 30:53Speaker 02

  It's like the mini IPO, basically. They have to do a little bit more-

• 30:57Anthony Pompliano?

  And you can raise like up to like, I think it's a million point oh seven dollars or something, right? So there is some things that are kind of trending in the direction you're talking about. But the reason why I brought up the venture capital model to begin with is it's actually less of a headache for the entrepreneur to go pay, if you have a good product, right? And you're believable in the sense of that you can actually go execute what your plan is. It's easier just to go pitch the venture capitalists to raise the money than it is to go and do, jump through all these hoops to use reg A plus or do an ICO or do all this other crazy stuff.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. And what that does is it sends the best deal flow to the most qualified people who have the biggest chip stacks and it sends what should be on average, the weaker deal flow, the deal flow that VCs didn't buy into. Now, again, you said perfectly that they may not always get it right, but maybe they get it right two out of three times, which means the deal flow that makes it to these other sites might be, you know, the apples at the bottom of the bush, let's say. Maybe they couldn't clear market. Maybe the return profile is different than them. And that works actually against the spirit of the law, which is you're, you're trying to make this more equal and fair. And so the unintended consequence is troubling.

• 32:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And the other thing I'll say too, is if you talk to younger entrepreneurs, first time entrepreneurs, the one thing I've noticed is there's a lot of focus on the economics of the deal, right? They want to squeeze out every last economic advantage that they can. And so they're constantly trying to optimize for the highest valuation, the, you know, the most money raised, all this kind of stuff. If you go talk to kind of serial entrepreneurs and things like that, the numbers are important, right? They're not going to give away the company, but who they partner with is way more important. They understand that the right investor can, can move the company, can introduce them to customers, can do all the things that they need help with. And so I do think also what you get is you get some selection bias of if you want to take money from retail investors at the highest possible valuation.

• 32:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that entrepreneur, the same entrepreneur that can walk into the best, you know, Sand Hill venture capital fund and raise from those investors? I don't know. Maybe in some cases, yes, but my guess is that more times than not, it's not that type of entrepreneur.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  I've literally had people in the industry, let's just say another accelerator that maybe the launch accelerator competes with. I've heard stories of people saying, you explicitly don't want sophisticated investors in your first round and advise founders to go after the dumb money that will not read the documents, that will pay the highest price and that will have no governance concerns and that you can roll over in later rounds. So literally, there's a group of people in Silicon Valley who would be advising startups to go to the dentists, to go to the naive investors and say, if you're going to raise the million dollars, instead of doing 500K from, you know, Aileen Lee at, you know, Cowboy

• 33:51Speaker 02

  Ventures or Hunter and Satya from Homebrew, instead of getting those sophisticated folks who are going to want good provisions, protective provisions, proper governance, eh, screw it. Just pass the hat and do what's called a party round in our industry. And so that is, you know, you may not see this out on the East Coast, but I see it out here where people actually do that as a strategy, like literally to try to get the dumb money to have less controls. And you know what? They wind up regretting it. I mean, the founders do. Because you want the smartest people on your teams and the incremental 20% on valuation, when your company does have trouble and the most skin somebody has in the game is 50K

• 34:32Speaker 02

  versus somebody like Aileen Lee, who might have 500K in, or I have 500K in, we're going to go to war with you. We're going to try to solve the problem. The person with 50K with the dentist is like, yeah, got to do like one more set of veneers and I'm good. I can make that money back, you know, just overcharge somebody for veneers and you're done.

• 34:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, one of the frameworks I really like is you can optimize for the economic advantage that you get out of a fundraising round, or you can optimize for the intellectual advantage. And again, it just goes back to this idea of like, you want the smartest people and the most experienced people running into the fire with you, right? Kind of your point of like, hey, if the investor knows what they're doing, like, that's who you actually want. And so giving up 1% more, 10% more, whatever the number is, they, those investors, if they are actually good, will make that back for you, you know, tenfold later on down the road.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  Let me ask you a question about, you know, we were debating, you and I, having a fun time on the Twitter, talking about like all the speculation in crypto. And, you know, you'd come at me about like, hey, what about Theranos and the outliers? Great. Now, and people love to gamble, we have Wall Street Bets, we have Robinhood day traders. And full disclosure, I was an early investor in the, in Robinhood. And it's probably my third biggest, right now on paper, it might be the third biggest return I have after Uber and Com. And that's really not a disclosure as much as a flex, to be clear. But they

• 36:07Speaker 02

  had 3 million people, I think, during the pandemic, I read. And Wall Street Bets is going crazy. El Presidente from Portnoy is going crazy. Okay, so we have crazy speculation in crypto, crazy speculation in startups, and now we have crazy speculation coming to the public markets. What do you take from what's happening at this very moment? Any general hot takes or observations about what's going on in that little crevice of Reddit?

• 36:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Three things. One, anyone who thinks that Dave Portnoy is not performing and entertaining and creating media content, they're confused as to what he's doing. He's the best in the world at it, right? And that's not a knock against him at all. Actually, it's a complete tip of the cap of, he has literally gone from this guy who ran a sports site that was Highly successful $450 million valuation and on literally the flip of a coin pivoted into an industry that prides itself on the suits and ties and you know the the Wall Street finance all this kind of stuff and he's just taking it by storm. I mean they they literally can't avoid talking about him, right? Like he is dominating headlines. And so I think that

• 37:19Anthony Pompliano?

  uh when I see what he's doing, uh one, it's incredible, but two, he's not doing it from a I just trying to make money. He's obviously got larger kind of entertainment driven ambitions, which um which is important to remember. Two is on the Robin Hood traders and kind of the retail speculation. It's all the same. Like everything you just mentioned from ICOs to uh sports gambling to public marketing uh gambling. Everyone is chasing easy money, right? And what you can quickly identify is what's the strategy? And literally people will tell you kind of all kinds of crazy stuff in the ICO boom. They'll tell you all kinds of crazy stuff right now. But if you've been around

• 38:00Anthony Pompliano?

  and paying attention, like buying a bankrupt stock and having, you know, 150,000 people owning hurt stock after the bankruptcy. It's kind of just like, okay, that's where we are. Like, sure.

• 38:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, it makes no sense. And uh the people that hurts, it makes no sense to them either. But if you're looking at it as gambling and entertainment, it makes total sense. Because people are just doing this like they might bet on the Knicks to, you know, beat the spread. They know they're gonna get demolished by, you know, whatever team LeBron decides to be on, you know, for this next three years sprint. We know we're gonna get crushed. It's just a matter of do we even, can I entertain myself during being crushed like that? I mean, I think Dave is just amazing at, you know, entertaining people. I mean, he literally makes eating a slice of pizza entertaining. And he

• 38:55Speaker 02

  understands who he is as a character, which is obnoxious and successful and does not care about anybody's opinion. He's like the classic ENTJ, you know, if we were to use uh, you know, horoscopes for men, the Myers-Briggs. He's like that classic ENTJ leader. I know better than everybody. Uh, I'm obnoxious. I don't care about your opinion. Um, and I'll tell you what the pizza is. It's a 7.2, it's an 8.2. And it's kind of fun to watch. Uh, but yeah, it's not serious. The thing I love

• 39:26Speaker 02

  I think there's something great about this because when I invested in Robinhood, Vlad and his partner walked up to me in a bar called Antonio's Nut House and they said, "You're Jason Calacanis." I said, "Tell me about your startup." He said, "How do you know we have a startup?" I said, "You recognize me." Right? This is the ultimate tip off. Like, "I'm not famous, I'm only famous with founders." And he said, "We want to create a trading platform for millennials on their phones." And I said, "Let me stop you right there. You do know that they're on their parents' Netflix accounts, they will not buy a car, they only take Lyft and Uber, and these are the most commitment-phobic people in the world. They will not sign a lease. And you want them to buy stocks for a future 50 years from now when they're retired?

• 40:11Speaker 02

  It's just not going to happen." And by the way, all retail investors went away after 2008 in the dot-com bust. Like, we've demolished them twice in recent memory. And they said, "But Jason, that's the opportunity. What if we do?" And I was like, "That's the right answer, actually." They said, "All right, fine. Tell me how you make money." And they said, "Well, that's the kicker. We're going to make it free." And I was like, "Okay, I'm in. Look, this makes total sense to me." Right? And it makes no sense in one way, but if you're saying, "If it does work and it's a long shot, what happens to the world?" And I just said, "What if they get a million people doing this? And now here they are with 13." If all these kids are taking their money for they would have bet on sports in the NFL and the NBA and they're just putting it into stocks? Well, I think they got a better chance of winning and they're going to learn about finance.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  I mean, these kids know more. I've never done a put or I've never done like puts and calls and shorted stocks. I've never done any of that stuff. I buy stock, I hold it until I don't like it anymore, then I sell it. I'm not buying futures or anything. You know, my nephew, you know, Director Nick over here, he's explaining to me calls and puts and how to use Robinhood. I'm like, "I don't have any... I just want to buy Uber and hold it for 20 years. Like, that's it." So I think that that's the silver lining, which in a way is what the crypto speculation did as well, which is, in order to speculate in crypto, you at least have to get a wallet. So you have to know that. You have to know your hash. You've got to know your password. You've got to know all this stuff, right?

• 41:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I'll take it a step further, right? And you respond to this how you want, but what you just described about

• 41:44Anthony Pompliano?

  low probability, but high potential of Robin Hood when they pitch you on that?

• 41:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Is I think exactly why people are so excited about Bitcoin. Because right now, maybe people would say, you know, five years ago, the the potential for Bitcoin to reach, let's say, global reserve status, right? Less than 1%. Now, I don't know, maybe we're 3 to 5%, right? Still incredibly low odds. But if it gets there, you're talking about an asset that's, you know, 150, 200 billion dollars in value, that would eventually get into the tens of trillions of dollars.

• 42:21Speaker 02

  So there's 100x from here.

• 42:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, easy. I mean, just look at the, look at the global monetary supply, right? So 100x from here is only 15 trillion. And I think global money supply is, you know, in the 70, 80 trillion dollar range. So you're actually talking about 4 or 500x.

• 42:41Speaker 02

  The thing that I think is super fascinating about also Barstool, and I'll just wrap that up, is I think he's creating Barstool Finance. Like, you know, you have [email protected]? He's just creating Barstool Finance. And so, you know, he's got sports. He's got finance. I think with Call Her Daddy, he's got kind of his own love line or romance or sex kind of property. Like, what else is a property that Yahoo had back in the day? Movies and entertainment. So does Barstool do movies and entertainment yet? No. But he'll back some movie at some point and be a producer or director. And he'll be like, I'm going to be a producer of movies. I'm giving money to these movies. And then those movies will actually work.

• 43:19Anthony Pompliano?

  You'll love this. So March 31st, 2017. This is right after Peter Chernin and, and his team bought a little over 50% of Barstool for about 7, 8 million dollars, right? I wrote a blog post that said, this is going to be a billion dollar company. And at the time, people were like, you're nuts, all this stuff. And I laid out, you know, here's what I think happens. And one of the key points was they're going to get outside of sports. And I didn't know if it was politics or news or kind of how they would do it. But I think you're dead on in that, once you have the attention of the audience, it's very easy just to add another personality that touches in a new area, right? So whether that's finance, whatever.

• 44:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What I do wonder about Barstool is they, they have been a very non-traditional media company for a long time, right? In terms of the way that they've built it, it's highly profitable, all this kind of stuff. But they sold a third of it to this gaming company, Penn National, which on the face looks super interesting. Now Penn National has kind of got this great marketing arm through Barstool. Barstool's got exposure to the public markets, all that kind of stuff. But what I do wonder is, would they have been better off if they were the ones buying a gaming company?

• 44:33Speaker 02

  100%, yeah. Yeah, I mean, and that's probably just Dave doesn't have a ton of experience, you know, in big business and he's just got this asset and he just wanted to cash his chips in and mission accomplished. You got a hundred million dollars, right? In that.

• 44:46Anthony Pompliano?

  But, but he didn't cash in. So to his credit, this is what, this was pretty crazy is he, a hundred million dollars. I think he took more than half of it in stock.

• 44:54Speaker 02

  Smart.

• 44:54Anthony Pompliano?

  So he, so he, he still is betting on himself, I think. But, but the whole model of just as you look around businesses, right? And this kind of gets into just early stage companies today. They used to build the product and you would invest and then they would go try to find customers.

• 45:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 45:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And that's, that's the risk you were taking was kind of can they find the customers? What I do see more and more companies starting to do now is they go build the audience. And then they say, hey, I already have the customers. Now I'm going to build products for them.

• 45:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And that.

• 45:21Speaker 02

  Instagram did that. I mean, that was like, Instagram's like, hey, we, we're a tool for making photos look better. And now, you know, they've finally are, they've turned on the ability to buy stuff inside of Instagram. Like it's literally an Amazon competitor, a Facebook advertising competitor. So it's going up against Google and Facebook for ads. And now it's going up against Shopify where they're in partnership with Shopify. They'll eventually try to kill Shopify because that's what Zuckerberg does. You slit the throat of anybody he partners with. So, Toby, if you're listening.

• 45:50Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, you know, I worked at Facebook, so I'm biased.

• 45:54Speaker 02

  Are you telling me he's not the most cutthroat person in business?

• 45:59Speaker 02

  Name somebody more cutthroat than Mark Zuckerberg and how he approaches competition.

• 46:04Anthony Pompliano?

  If you had to pick Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos, who's more cutthroat?

• 46:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I gotta go with Zuckerberg and I'll give you my rationale. Yeah, it's because he has absolutely no moral compass when it comes to stealing other people's innovations. And he literally does not care what anybody thinks about him. So he told the Instagram, the WhatsApp founders, hey, just copy Snapchat. Just do exactly what Evan Spiegel is doing. Just copy it. Do not even think for yourself. You know, that's all on the record. And I don't think Bezos thinks like that. I think Bezos wants to think like, hey, it's day zero. Let's really think about this product. How would we do it? He's not looking, Bezos isn't looking at the competitors and saying, whatever innovation they do, go do it and kill them. Maybe on the margins for Amazon Web Services, they do that. They look for, you know, Twilio or something and try to compete.

• 46:55Speaker 02

  But I just think Zuckerberg has a cutthroatness that is just unbelievable.

• 47:02Anthony Pompliano?

  So the one thing that I will say is I think that those two generalizations are probably more PR than not. And the Zuckerberg stuff, you know, I'm not gonna change your mind on that. But like, if you take Bezos, for example, like, didn't he with diapers.com, all these things, like, he basically would go to them and say, hey, your march is my opportunity. I'm literally gonna sell items at a loss and try to run you off the, you know, the competitive field. And then when you're literally bleeding out, you'll come to me and I'll buy you for, you know, pennies on the dollar.

• 47:33Speaker 02

  I think that's implied, yes. I think that is implied. I think that's the, that is, and this is actually an interesting discussion for us just to have, to take it away from the personal. Because if you told me who are the two most cutthroat people, I would have picked them and just in a different order than you. You probably would say Bezos then Zuckerberg.

• 47:52Speaker 02

  Got anybody else you'd put in there?

• 47:53Anthony Pompliano?

  It

• 47:54Speaker 02

  Scary to go up against?

• 47:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I would say at least out of the people who run big businesses, those are the two.

• 48:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you don't feel like Apple is gonna come in and do, Apple would never do what, no, I don't think, Apple might have their own interesting anti-competitive approaches, but they would never do what Zuckerberg would do with Snapchat, right? Which is, we gotta copy that product until we kill the company and just keep going on it. What I think is really interesting about Amazon, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on it, is, do you think Amazon should be stopped from creating Amazon basic products? And why?

• 48:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Meaning what?

• 48:34Speaker 02

  Do you feel that's anti-competitive? People are now, there's investigations going on with regulators in the United States and in the EU around this concept of Bezos and the Amazon team study what's selling from third-party sellers who are half of the, I think roughly half of what's sold on Amazon. And if you make some great, amazing, charging, you know, power strip, they're gonna make an Amazon basics one. Should they be? Should the government interfere and stop Amazon from both selling third-party and creating their own products? Or not? And why?

• 49:14Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that's the wrong trade-off to look at. I don't think the problem is that they make a competing product. I think it's when they promote their competing product above yours in the search results, or they take away your distribution and hurt you in exchange for promoting their own.

• 49:35Speaker 02

  Okay, so let's, like Google does with their search box, right? They move Yelp down and they put Google Local above Yelp, literally.

• 49:44Anthony Pompliano?

  If you're the third-party reseller on Facebook or on Amazon, and I'm Amazon, and I see that you're, you know, you're selling microphones and they're doing really well, and I go make my own, and I put it into the marketplace, and we're on completely, completely equal footing, so I get no advantage. In the search rankings, all that stuff. I don't think that's as big of a problem. I think where they get kind of in the murky water and people get really upset and then probably where they end up getting in trouble. Is if then I say, hey, Jason, I'm no longer going to send you traffic. I'm going to promote my microphone above yours.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  Right.

• 50:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, all of a sudden, you're you're you're playing a different game.

• 50:20Speaker 02

  So placement is the issue. And this is where Google got away with it. Because Google had Matt Cuts, who was in charge of search spam or whatever, go out and lie for them. Over and over again, where he said, we have not changed the organic search results. And he's such a liar and so insincere, it was incredible. He said, and while that is true, they moved the first organic search result 400 pixels down the page. And put a box at the top for shopping, a box at the top for travel, a box at the top for your stocks, a box at the top for, of course, Google Local. So they're they're so smart, right?

• 51:01Speaker 02

  And they're Matt's such a clever guy that they had convinced themselves that they were not just absolutely lying and evil. And what they did was they moved everything down 400 pixels. So it's below the fold and then put their widget up top. And this is why, you know, they really had a chance of getting sanctioned. Because they did exactly what you're saying, which is gave preferential treatment to themselves. But they said, oh, no, no, no, no. We didn't change organic search. Organic search is the same. It's like, yeah, but if you, everybody knows 90% of the clicks are above the fold. The first 400 pixels, 90% of the clicks. Then they moved it down. Amazon is not doing that. The thing they actually have concerns about Amazon is that they're studying which products are selling well and then creating products like those.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  Which, by the way, Amazon puts that in for, this is why I think Amazon, I would argue, Amazon shouldn't be stopped from doing this. I agree with you, they shouldn't get preferential treatment. If your power strip, if your microphone, if your podcast microphone, POM's podcast microphones are better selling and better reviews, they should go up in the search and Amazon should go down. I agree on that. The people think that they're using the data to pick which products. Well, I don't have a problem with them doing that either. If that data is also shared universally because they have it

• 52:20Speaker 02

  for the public, right? You can see the reviews. All the reviews are right there.

• 52:24Anthony Pompliano?

  I'll even go a step further. I don't want to say the companies because I don't know if this is known or not, but there's literally a business that's based in New York. Their whole model was they would go hit the APIs. They would pull the search traffic. And basically what they were looking for was items that had big margins that were not owned by one single product. And where they felt like they could get the supply chain. So these are physical products that they could build the supply chain quickly. And then they would, because they're technologists, figure out how to win that search term on Amazon. So thinking of Amazon as a search engine. And they had, I don't know, 50, 75, 100 products, whatever it was.

• 53:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:05Anthony Pompliano?

  But when you saw it, it's like, look, that's what Amazon's doing. So like the fact that a third party could use data in a similar manner.

• 53:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, fair game.

• 53:13Anthony Pompliano?

  As long as there's not preferential treatment, I don't have a problem with it. What do you, what do you think about the Apple? What do you think about the Apple and hey?

• 53:21Speaker 02

  Well, that's a good one.

• 53:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Email thing.

• 53:22Speaker 02

  So just to put a pin in the, or just to, just to wrap up the, the Amazon one. I think we always have to think about what's good for humanity and society. It's pretty great for society that you can buy a $4 lightning charging cable that goes to USBC from Amazon Basics as opposed to giving Apple $30, right? And so

• 53:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 53:48Speaker 02

  It just, as you lower the price of goods, people's lifestyle goes up, even if, and this is the problem I think we have as a society with how people perceive how they're doing. Everybody sees Bezos or whoever having a private jet, a private island, whatever it is. That's just seems so otherworldly that it makes you feel small. But as your dollar goes further, even if your wages were stagnant, if dollars go further, in other words, you can stay in an Airbnb for 50 bucks in Kyoto or Tokyo. A person who is a barista who could never in their life ever imagine going to Tokyo on vacation,

• 54:29Speaker 02

  well, now their hotel is, you know, $500 for 10 days, they can actually conceive of it. Whereas they previously would have been in for $3,000, $4,000, $5,000. So it's an important thing for society that we actually have rabid capitalism. Like, how amazing is it that there's that company that's studying where can we lower prices massively and take over a search term? Like, that's good for consumers. In terms of the hay.com, go ahead.

• 54:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Real quick on that. So there's this guy, Jeff Booth, who used to brand a podcast. His whole, he wrote a book on the idea of technology being deflationary. And the fact that actually the capitalism and the competition ends up over long periods of time, driving prices lower, which is a net good for society. Right, exactly what you're talking about.

• 55:17Speaker 02

  The fact that being driven somewhere in a car used to be only for the elite to be driven somewhere, to show up and get out of the backseat of a car was, you know, like there were cabs, but, you know, to get out of the back of a car and have a private driver was like, oh, you must be really wealthy and live on the Upper East Side somewhere in a townhouse. And it's like, no, I work at, you know, McDonald's and I'm taking an Uber and so or it's a Lyft line and I got two other people in the car. Getting a point-to-point driver even to come to your house and wait for you outside is incredible win. And if you, I remember that my neighbor, when I was in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, bought a Mercedes at some point with a sunroof.

• 56:00Speaker 02

  And he would take us for a ride in over the Verazano Bridge and let all the kids stand up and stick their heads out the sunroof. It was like something from Mad Men. But I was just amazed at the power windows and that he had like this incredible cassette tape and it had air conditioning. And I just think like, power windows? Like, you can't buy a car without power windows. Like, all of these things are just standard now because of the power of capitalism. But it really is an interesting thing with hay.com.

• 56:32Speaker 02

  If you look at, the reason why Apple wants to control the ecosystem is because they want to preserve, and I actually do believe this, it's not just to put a 30% tax on everything. They want to preserve the quality of that phone. By having things go through an approval process, you increase the quality of the phone, and you'll have less spyware, you'll have less crashes, and overall, the product will trend towards a better user experience, because there's uniformity. Now, if there were five app stores, you could get lower prices, you could get crazier stuff, but you could also get your phone hacked, and you could also have your phone crashing and need to be rebooted, which, by the way, is what happened on the Windows operating system for a long time and happens on Android.

• 57:17Speaker 02

  If you're on Android, the chances of you getting hit with spyware, and I think Android now has like a preferred partner program or something where they actually review stuff. So the review process was always intended to make things work better, but it was also used for nefarious reasons. Like, you couldn't have a third-party browser in the beginning, you couldn't have a third-party video player, and now you can get those things. So even Apple knows they can't overplay their hand. And what they've run into with, you know, Jason and DHH over at Basecamp, over at 37 Signals with his new product hay.com, which is just, you know, I actually started using it today. It's kind of a clunky-looking email client, it's not very good-looking, it's got a great

• 58:00Speaker 02

  domain name, and it has really one killer feature, which is the first time somebody asks you, first time somebody shows up in your inbox, they put them in the screener, just like you might screen a phone call, and then you decide, should this person be allowed to email me or not? And you give them a thumbs up or thumbs down. So for somebody like me who's a super router, that's just a killer feature. So we're investors in Superhuman, and I was, I told the Superhuman team, like, this is the feature. This is the killer feature of hay. It needs to be in Superhuman yesterday, and it needs to be-

• 58:36Anthony Pompliano?

  You're Mark Zuckerberg.

• 58:37Speaker 02

  I'm Mark Zuckerberg, absolutely. No, I mean, it's just a feature of that platform, but it is a really killer feature that people do need to pay attention to. But- The 30% tax is reasonable if you compared it to selling something in Amazon or selling something in a store, right? What's the markup in retail? So when people used to put software in retail, the retailer would get half the money, right? You would give them Photoshop or some video game, Chessmaster for $50. They'd sell it for 50, the store got 25, they got 25. So that used to be 50% markup. So 30% is reasonable unless it's subscriptions and then it becomes meaningful. So they dropped, I think the second year subscription goes down to 15%.

• 59:21Speaker 02

  So people renew, you pay 30% on the first year subscription, 15%. So what I tell my startups is pay the vig to Apple. If you play nice with Apple and you let them make money from it, they can invest in the App Store and then they might promote you or they might write a feature about you, et cetera. So com.com has people pay for subscriptions in the App Store. And if you do that, then you're on the paid ranking list as well, which is why they have a list of the top paying, top revenue generating apps. If you don't, and like Netflix and Spotify no longer allow you to subscribe to the App Store, you subscribe on their website and then you go there. That's actually an interesting debate, but I think people should be allowed to make that

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

  decision for themselves, the app providers like Netflix and Spotify had, have.

• 1:00:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, again, everyone should just be treated the same. So if you're gonna say, hey, anybody who you want to sign up off the App Store and they're gonna pay you there, we're not gonna take anything? Okay, fine. If they pay in the app through the App Store, we're gonna take a piece of it? Okay, fine. I think where it gets kinda, again, a little gray area is when you say, we're gonna treat you one way, but Netflix does the exact same thing, they get treated a different way.

• 1:00:43Speaker 02

  And I just give credit to DHH for knowing that this would happen and then creating a brouhaha. And he was on CNBC today and see it, but I saw him tweet about it. I mean, he's just so good at fighting. Every time he comes on the podcast, it's like a double, triple. Have you had DHH on the pod yet?

• 1:00:58Anthony Pompliano?

  I haven't.

• 1:00:58Speaker 02

  You get him on your pod. He's, he's good.

• 1:01:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Austin from Lambda said, literally, this is a, a chapter out of their book. And then he screenshot, it's like chapter six of rework and they talk all about.

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  Fighting up.

• 1:01:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Literally, yeah, pick an enemy, right? This bigger than you, make a big stink, have people pay attention. So what, what I do think is interesting is, uh, do you think it was intentional that they picked the fight?

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  100, 100, 100.

• 1:01:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, really?

• 1:01:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, he, and he had pre picked the fight with superhuman. Because superhuman has the tracking pixel that tells you if people opened it and when they opened it. You know, just like every other piece of software has, every Gmail plugin has, Outlook has. But he's made that like, oh, we're gonna stop the evil superhuman from, you know, you know, tracking you. And, uh, yeah, here's the quote actually from Austin. It's literally a chapter out of their book. Having an enemy gives you a great story to tell customers too. Taking a stand always stands out. People get stoked by conflict. They take sides, passions are ignited, and that's a good way to get people to take notice. And, you know, it's, I, I have him on my pocket. It's just so we can debate venture capital versus not venture capital.

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  Um, you know, uh, and in fact, us having a debate about crypto or not crypto, the fact that we largely agree now just kills our ratings. I mean, if we were at each other's throats, it'd be so much better.

• 1:02:16Anthony Pompliano?

  But it's. Did you, have you bought Bitcoins since last time I was on?

• 1:02:18Speaker 02

  You know, I had bought Bitcoin when it was in the.

• 1:02:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Early.

• 1:02:22Speaker 02

  Very early. The, the whatever 10 Bitcoins I had got hacked because the, back then there were no exchanges really. There was no, uh, you know, there, there weren't a lot of exchanges. So that got hacked and I probably lost 10 Bitcoins. Uh, and then my wife had bought a bunch when it was at $300 or $800. So we're massively up on that. I haven't bought more. And the, I, I've actually thought about just putting 1% of my net worth into Bitcoin. Um, because of the hedge you talk about, the thing I've been impressed about and has. Evolved my thinking on Bitcoin is that it has not been hacked or had like, you know,

• 1:03:03Speaker 02

  a 51% attack or any, I mean, I know it's been manipulated. I know it's anonymous or pseudo-anonymous. So there's all these, you know, edge cases, but the fact that a government hasn't been able to either shut it down or, you know, hack it explicitly. I know they can hack, you know, your wallet or hack Coinbase or spoof you, but the fact that the core has not been compromised to me is just extraordinary. Why, there's so much at stake in hacking Bitcoin. The fact that it hasn't been hacked, to me is phenomenal. It's the number one target in the world, correct?

• 1:03:42Anthony Pompliano?

  So I would separate this in two pieces. One is, there is an argument that hacking the actual protocol itself would ruin all the value, right? So the second that somebody goes and hacks it, like the $200 billion of market value goes to zero, right? Because it's no longer unhackable. But with that said, I've had a lot of success talking, especially to institutional investors about this, but I think a lot of technology investors get it as well. So if I said to you, hey, I want to own part of Google's search algorithm, right? You would say, go buy Google stock. If I said to you, I want to own Facebook's social network, you'd say, go buy Facebook stock.

• 1:04:21Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:04:22Anthony Pompliano?

  If I said to you, I want to own the strongest computing network in the world, which is the Bitcoin network, you would say, go buy, but there's no corporation to go buy. There's no equity. And so what you have to do to get financial exposure is you have to buy Bitcoin itself, right? And so part of what I think is really interesting here is there was a very long period of time where maybe a couple of people in Silicon Valley were into this, but really, for the most part, a lot of people missed Bitcoin in terms of the amount of capital that could have been put into it, right?

• 1:04:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Some people got personal exposure, whatever. But when you think of it as just the strongest computing network in the world, and I ask people like, what's that worth? I don't think you and I are going to be good at putting a future value on that. But if it remains the strongest computing network in the world, I think it's worth trillions of dollars at a minimum, right? And so to put some exposure into it, I think just is generally a good practice.

• 1:05:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, my thesis was, this is what I came to over the last couple of years, since it did not get hacked and it's still stable. I said to my, and we had people on this podcast talking about Bitcoin when it was under a dollar. So just to be clear, I mean, I've been tracking this forever.

• 1:05:37Speaker 02

  My belief the last couple of years has been majority chances it goes down to zero or low hundreds of dollars and gets replaced by a better technology, because that's what always happens. Almost universally, some technology gets replaced. Now, there are some that have not, that have become built to last. Email, as an open protocol has, and the web. RSS kind of got deprecated because Google gave up on Reader. And so it doesn't always happen that way. And FTP and Gopher and SEND and all these Usenet, other things that were open protocols have gone away or just are not used all that often. But it feels, it felt to me like the second somebody made something better than Bitcoin,

• 1:06:19Speaker 02

  you know, really better, and that also had the increase in value, then it would be game over for Bitcoin, because the people who were holders and were holding, holders, they would say, you know what? I want to, I want to do what I did with Bitcoin. I want to go 10x, I want to go 1,000x. So I'm going to move my exposure over here. And that would start this degradation of the price, right? And nobody would buy it because there was no upside. So why hasn't that happened? Because I still think that's, I would put it at 50/50 that that's what happens.

• 1:06:53Anthony Pompliano?

  That analysis would be dead on, except for one thing. This isn't a technology problem. It's a money thing. And so what you have to remember is money is a belief system. Like, why, why will you take dollars from me and I take dollars from you? It's because we both believe that dollar has value. Now, the best way to highlight the difference in what you just said and what I think Bitcoin provides is if you're in a country where your nation state currency fails, like it literally hyperinflation, the whole nine yards. And then the government comes to you and says, hey, Jason, sorry that that happened. Uh, but we got this new currency that we created. Just use this one. You are very, very unlikely to believe them on the second one. Right? You, you, they, they violated your trust.

• 1:07:37Anthony Pompliano?

  And so when I think of Bitcoin, what I think of is we, we being the citizens of the world get one shot to separate state and money. One shot at it. That is Bitcoin. If it happens, tens of trillions, if not hundreds of trillions of dollars in value. If it doesn't happen, Bitcoin goes to zero and there will not be a replacement because it has too much momentum and too much buy in at this point. It has kind of the, the mental, um, uh, kind of capture. This is the shot to separate state and money. And so when I think of it that way, it's if Bitcoin was to fail, I actually don't think people would buy into the next one, uh, mentally because it would say, oh, you can never separate state and money. Right? There's too many people who are seeing this for the first time.

• 1:08:22Anthony Pompliano?

  And so it's like, we get one shot, you know? Hey, all you speculators that are speculating in the public market and stuff, don't go put a hundred percent of your assets into Bitcoin, but also don't get caught having zero exposure.

• 1:08:34Speaker 02

  Right. I, I think that's, I, I think that's a pretty good analysis, actually. Um, and maybe I'll just, after this podcast, go put 1% into Bitcoin. What, what is it? Wasn't this supposed, this is a question I have for you. Wasn't a world changing event, a world shattering event supposed to be the moment where Bitcoin shined? Well, we just went through this crazy pandemic. That I think is the definition of that. A global shutdown that like none we've seen. And there was supposed to be this massive flight into it. And then there was this other reason that y'all kept saying was, oh, you guys are printing so much money, right? Money printer goes brrr or whatever that meme you guys have and you fight your wars

• 1:09:17Speaker 02

  in memes, which I think the VC community needs to learn from. We got to get better at meme warfare in the investment community here in Silicon Valley. But why didn't Bitcoin spike over the last, you know, year? I mean, I know it was at like 6,000 and went up to whatever, seven or something. Or actually, maybe it's at nine. So shouldn't it have gone crazy or no?

• 1:09:44Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's go back in history to understand what's happening now. In 2008, when the financial crisis hit, gold, which is widely considered a store of value, it went down 30% over the summer of 2008. And the reason is there was a liquidity crisis. So people looked around their portfolios and said, the world's ending. All chaos has broken loose. I want to sell any asset that's got a liquid market to it. And so they sold everything, right? They sold stocks, they sold gold, they sold...

• 1:10:13Speaker 02

  Scared people.

• 1:10:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And so in response to that liquidity crisis, the Federal Reserve printed at the time hundreds of billions of dollars, right? And then gold two X'd in value from there, ended up hitting an all time high in 2011. What we just saw so far and are still in, I would argue, is there was a liquidity crisis starting in March where people looked around the room and sold everything, right? I mean, Bitcoin went down 50% in one day at one point, right? Stocks went down 30%. Gold went down 15%. All this stuff. But if you look from the beginning of this year to now, Bitcoin is up 30, 35%. It's actually the best performing asset of all the asset classes, right? It's better than most commodities, better than stocks, et cetera. And so what it's doing is it's hyper volatile.

• 1:10:58Anthony Pompliano?

  And the best comparison, I think, is if you look at like Amazon, right? So Amazon's been one of the best performing stocks since it went public. It's gone down double digits every single year it's been public. And the average intra-year drawdown of Amazon stock is 30 plus percent.

• 1:11:16Anthony Pompliano?

  One time it went down over 90% in a time period. And so when you look at that, Amazon stock's been hyper volatile, but it's also led to incredible growth, a lot of innovation. It's been one of the best performing stocks. Bitcoin looks very similar in the sense that it's hyper volatile. When there's times of liquidity crisis, all assets trend towards a correlation of one. Bitcoin went down, but on the rebound, where we see the Federal Reserve printing all this money, Bitcoin has performed all of their assets. And so if you look at somebody like a Paul Tudor Jones, his argument is, look, I believe central banks are going to continue to print trillions of dollars and inject liquidity into the global economy. I want to own what he called the, quote, quote, "the fastest horse." And he believes that to be Bitcoin.

• 1:11:58Anthony Pompliano?

  So he put 2% of his assets, you know, a couple hundred million dollars into Bitcoin and said, "I think that this is just going to outperform everything else that central banks just pump these assets to the moon."

• 1:12:08Speaker 02

  When will Bitcoin hit a new all-time high? And what would be the likely scenario that would cause it to do that?

• 1:12:15Anthony Pompliano?

  So...

• 1:12:16Speaker 02

  Because what was the high?

• 1:12:17Anthony Pompliano?

  All-time high? 20,000, yeah. All-time high's a little hard. What I will say is, and I've said publicly a couple of times, is in 2017, all of these kind of models, right? If you think of how is price determined its supply and demand, the advantage Bitcoin has over all other assets is that you know with 100% certainty, you can verify how many Bitcoin exist and how many are coming in in the daily supply. So gold, for example, you kind of sort of know how much exists, you kind of sort of know how much being produced on a daily basis, but with Bitcoin, you know it's 100% fact. So really what you've got to be able to do is model out or forecast demand. And if Bitcoin's demand continues to grow how it has for the last decade, it was supposed to hit $10,000 in December, or in 2017, and it's supposed to hit $100,000 by the end

• 1:13:02Anthony Pompliano?

  of 2021. In, obviously, 2017, we saw it go from 10,000, over 10,000 to $20,000. It went from 10,000 to 20,000 in 18 days in Q4 of 2017.

• 1:13:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was like the holidays, like Thanksgiving and December. I remember my wife was like...

• 1:13:18Anthony Pompliano?

  It's a blow-off top.

• 1:13:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was incredible. And I was like, "Sell it." And I spoke at, I spoke at that crypto conference down at the Santa Monica Airport, and I said, "Listen, I know a lot of you bought this..." Nonsense for a hundred bucks and you charge 20,000 now? Please sell half. Because this never happens in the world that you have a 10x, 20x, 200x in this period of time. I know you think it's gonna go 200x from here. Please sell half and buy a house. And nobody did it. Maybe some people did it, I don't know. Well, I guess there had to be somebody on the other side of the trade, right?

• 1:13:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, what I think happens is it went to 20,000, it was there for like, I don't know, 24 hours, right? It's not like it hung out there for a while, crashed all the way down to around 3,000. I think what will happen over the next 18 months is we're gonna see another massive bull market. So we're gonna see Bitcoin, you know, go hit $100,000 by the end of 2021. It's gonna be the same thing that you saw in 2017. It's gonna be mass chaos, people aren't gonna sell, they're gonna be piling in and FOMOing and doing all this stuff. And so what ends up kind of happening is like, look, markets are markets, right? We've talked about how many markets today where people FOMO in and they're speculating. So it's just kinda like, you know, you can warn people as much as you want, but they're still gonna speculate, right? Human nature takes over and greed takes over.

• 1:14:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, why are people not making purchases with cryptocurrency? Like, why does that, why did they, because that was, everybody seemed to think 10 years ago we'd be buying pizza with crypto. It would be so easy. Is it just that the other credit cards and everything is just too good? And there's no real advantage to paying for stuff in crypto? Or is it because people don't wanna, they wanna hold all their crypto?

• 1:15:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's play a game. You ready?

• 1:15:07Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:15:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Who do you think has more annual volume last year, Venmo or Bitcoin on-chain? It's not exchange traded volume, but actually on-chain transactions.

• 1:15:18Speaker 02

  I have no idea. Good question. I mean...

• 1:15:23Speaker 02

  But aren't the transactions on Bitcoin, those include speculation? That's just people trading Bitcoin back and forth, not buying something from a store?

• 1:15:31Anthony Pompliano?

  So not trading on exchanges, so all the exchange traded volume is not accounted for here? And also, it's something called an adjusted on-chain metric. So also, all the transactions to and from exchanges is taken out.

• 1:15:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:15:44Anthony Pompliano?

  So this could be, I could be trading with you, or I could be buying from a merchant, but they're generally much smaller amount.

• 1:15:50Speaker 02

  I guess it's gotta be Bitcoin, as you're asking. But that would be, because the nature of you asking the question, but I am shocked to hear that it is Bitcoin, if it is.

• 1:15:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Who do you think had more annual volume last year, Apple Pay or Bitcoin?

• 1:16:03Speaker 02

  Well, Apple Pay's brand new, so it's gotta be Bitcoin, right? But I wouldn't, I don't know if I'd say that in 10 years, but yeah.

• 1:16:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Who do you think had more annual volume PayPal or Bitcoin last year?

• 1:16:14Speaker 02

  I would go PayPal on that one. It was Bitcoin, huh? Wow.

• 1:16:18Anthony Pompliano?

  And so when you look at that, right? Part of what is-

• 1:16:21Speaker 02

  Do you think any of that is fugazi? And like, people are just shipping money around to "paint the tape" is the term for creating volume? And we've talked about this before, I think, on previous episodes, but "painting the tape" is occurring, or some automation is occurring to, you know, kind of make it seem like these exchanges are more vibrant than they are.

• 1:16:41Anthony Pompliano?

  So this is important detail. On the exchanges, absolutely that's happening, right? All the wash trading, all that stuff is absolutely happening, especially on exchanges outside the United States. The metric I'm specifically referencing is adjusted on-chain transaction volume. So this is, I literally sent it to you, right? And it doesn't include the exchange volume, which is important, because that's very similar to like, sending Venmo, PayPal, Apple Pay, whatever. But, but I think, look, at the end of the day, where I come out on it is, I have been shocked at how global Bitcoin is. Like, we're so spoiled in the Western world. We just look at, what are people doing down the street? We forget that, you know, take Lebanon for right now. I just did a, an episode with, with Suna from Volt Capital.

• 1:17:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Her family lives in Lebanon. Their Lebanese lira has collapsed 75% against the dollar. In the last couple of weeks. And so what do they all do? They want dollars. They can't get them. So next best thing is Bitcoin, right? Because you only need an internet connection. So I think that'll continue to happen over time. And, you know, again, look, it it's a speculative, very binary outcome for Bitcoin. But I think my message more is just have exposure to it. Don't have zero exposure.

• 1:17:51Speaker 02

  All right, we made it to 70 minutes. I know that you got a lot of questions for me and I got a lot of questions for you. Let's do lightning round of the questions you got.

• 1:17:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Ready? I go first.

• 1:18:00Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:18:01Anthony Pompliano?

  If you were president, you get three days. What are the things you do?

• 1:18:05Speaker 02

  Wow. What a great question. I hope you answer it as well. I want to be thoughtful about this. But assuming I could get things done, assuming I get things done, hmm, let me think this through.

• 1:18:20Speaker 02

  Well,

• 1:18:23Speaker 02

  if I could do an executive order to get rid of unions, police and teachers unions, this is seems to be causing a massive amount of injustice in the world. And there's there's a really big debate to be had of what's causing more damage

• 1:18:43Speaker 02

  to people of color in the country, the the absolute horrible state of education, or the fact that people are being murdered for being, you know, asleep in a drive through at Wendy's.

• 1:18:58Speaker 02

  And though that is, that seems to me to be something very easy to fix. I think resetting the relationship with China and demanding that they do things to help human rights. And if not, we're going to move our changing our dependency on China is the way I would phrase it.

• 1:19:16Speaker 02

  That would be a really good one. And then, yeah, so there's something about education and, you know, those unions that I think are the blocker. Something about the relationship with China.

• 1:19:28Speaker 02

  And then I would also make.

• 1:19:32Speaker 02

  I would.

• 1:19:34Speaker 02

  Decrease spending on military and I would increase spending on colleges and trade education specifically. And I have been thinking about reparations and trying to read up on it and understand this issue, since we're talking about a timely issue. And it's very hard to understand, there's a big debate in the, in the whole reparations community and people who are pro it, of how you would actually execute it and how you would give money to people. What if somebody's mixed race? Do they get half as much? If, you know, your father was black and your mom was white? How would you even execute on this? I think a very easy way to do it is to create an ability for people who have gotten a

• 1:20:18Speaker 02

  bad deal in America, a horrible deal, and give them a really great deal for education, trade schools, and small business loans. We are really good at spending money in this country. We, we can't get masks on people, we can't even get testing going. But we were able to pour money into PPP at a rate that was just obscene. I mean, I was talking to somebody, you know, and everybody's got Trump Derangement Syndrome and they hate Trump and I hate Trump and I consider it like the existential, biggest existential risk for the planet, even more than like global warming is Trump, because, you know, he could literally start a war.

• 1:20:54Speaker 02

  And it just seems to me, yeah, the whole thing is super troubling. But anyway, that, something there, I said to them, you know, you, you look at how quickly he got money to everybody. Like, we can solve for that, but we can't solve automatic weapons, we can't solve teachers' unions, we can't solve police unions, we can't solve the college debate or healthcare. But we could ship 500 billion, you know, trillions of dollars to the other markets? It's obvious we just need to have the wherewithal. So, I also would state that I think the two-party system needs to be cracked in this country.

• 1:21:38Speaker 02

  And I think the only silver lining I could ever see with Trump's presidency is that it inspires people to forget about Republican versus Democrats, since he's a demagogue and he doesn't fit, you know, he's destroyed the Republican Party for all intents and purposes. There might be... Something there that we could do to do a crossover ticket, I think that it should be Biden and Condoleezza Rice. You know, something like that that brings America together. We say, hey, let's take somebody from the right side. Let's take someone from the left side and let's try to meet someone in the middle. So that's mine. I don't know if you want to answer that one as well. Now that you've heard mine, or react to it. But I have one for you.

• 1:22:17Anthony Pompliano?

  I think the two things that jumped to the top of my head, and I should have thought about this, knowing that I was going to ask you, is criminal, criminal justice reform, that all kinds of nuances in there, but basically like, we shouldn't put as many people in cages as we do.

• 1:22:32Speaker 02

  Three million people. It's crazy on a percentage basis. Yeah.

• 1:22:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I just absolutely nuts. And then the other thing I would say is, I don't think that I would abolish the Federal Reserve, but I would definitely make material changes. And really with the idea that inflation is the largest driver of wealth inequality in America. And so figuring out a way to address that, probably not going as far as just absolutely getting rid of the Federal Reserve. Something in there.

• 1:23:03Speaker 02

  Selu asks you, not including your investments, which five startups IPOs are you most excited for? Yet startup IPOs that you are excited for.

• 1:23:15Anthony Pompliano?

  I think DraftKings is going to be super interesting in the sense that that whole space around sports to include esports, etc. is going to be really big.

• 1:23:25Speaker 02

  Wagering.

• 1:23:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I think that'll be big, especially if they can crack into like, financial betting, right? You start getting into all that kind of stuff. I think it'll be interesting.

• 1:23:34Speaker 02

  Prop bets, right? Like, what do they call those trading markets? They call them...

• 1:23:40Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, imagine when they start betting on like, how long is Jim Cramer's, you know, monologue gonna be at the start of, you know, whatever TV show?

• 1:23:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. Who's gonna win the press? Yeah, or... Who's going to be president of the United States, right? Who will be vice president?

• 1:23:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely.

• 1:23:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, those prop bets are really interesting.

• 1:24:01Anthony Pompliano?

  So I think that space is interesting. Definitely, the cannabis space, I think, is still very, very underappreciated by a lot of people. I don't necessarily have an individual company there. A company that I think actually doesn't get enough love in the United States, we're investors, so I'm definitely biased, is Robinhood, or not Robinhood, is a Robinhood competitor, eToro in Europe. And so, for everything I know, eToro is actually a bigger business, but much lower valuation. And so, they've just done it in Europe, Robinhood's done it in America, and now they're trying to, like, switch places, right? Where eToro's trying to come to the US, Robinhood's trying to go international.

• 1:24:42Speaker 02

  So this could be like the Uber, Lyft kind of competition, or, yeah?

• 1:24:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but it's interesting because Uber and Lyft both started in San Francisco and then, like, went through global domination at the same time, right? Two different strategies, but still same type of rollout.

• 1:24:59Speaker 02

  Sounds like these two could merge, yeah, and create it.

• 1:25:01Anthony Pompliano?

  They could merge, and also, they, there's a question of Uber and Lyft, you could put both on your phone and just see who's the cheapest, who has the fastest car to get to you? I don't think you do that with a brokerage account.

• 1:25:13Speaker 02

  No, that's a little hard, yeah. And nor do you need to, right? I mean, these things are, I think it's an and, not an or, too. Like, you might have Netflix and Disney. If you see value in both of the platforms, they do something slightly different. Unless they're not commoditized and they have the same offering, you might have two, right? I could see people, as people, as the gamification of finance continues and people have, what is it? Coinbase is the big, you know, app for crypto trading. Yeah, you'd have like Coinbase, Wealthfront, Robinhood, eToro. You might have like six or seven of these apps eventually. And, you know, you might have Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, some old ones that have these

• 1:25:54Speaker 02

  janky apps, but, you know, I think that they're going to have these, like, super refined set, and people might just bounce between them.

• 1:26:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, my turn.

• 1:26:03Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:26:04Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the, what's your best Elon Musk story that no one's ever heard before?

• 1:26:09Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. Wow. You know, I try not to talk about Elon all that much because we're, we're obviously very good friends and I, you know, he's so famous that it is,

• 1:26:24Speaker 02

  you know, just people are obsessed with him. So it's, it's really crazy, but I, I'll say the one that I think is kind of interesting is I had a birthday party for a friend of mine and Elon came, Jeff Bezos came,

• 1:26:44Speaker 02

  and Sam Harris was there. And I introduced

• 1:26:51Speaker 02

  Sam and Elon to each other. And then I think Elon and Bezos had maybe met once before or traded emails, but I basically introduced them to each other again, reintroduced them at my house. Which was, you know, I think Blue Origin was just getting started. It wasn't really that big of a deal, but that was a very interesting circle to be in, you know, 12 years, 10, 12 years ago, when you're sitting there with Sam Harris, Bezos and Elon. And it was really before Elon has got this, you know, ginormous reputation he has here now, right? He had just started SpaceX and I don't even know if he was CEO of Tesla at the time, but

• 1:27:31Speaker 02

  I thought that was a, a pretty, you know, being in my garden at my little house in Brentwood with those three people.

• 1:27:37Anthony Pompliano?

  What was that, what, what was their conversation? Did they just stare at each other like competitor, you know, like gladiators in an arena?

• 1:27:43Speaker 02

  I think actually people were most interested in Sam Harris, who, you know, was really talking about at the time,

• 1:27:51Speaker 02

  you know, consciousness, they, the, you know, where has consciousness come from was a big discussion we used to have back then. And we used to talk about AI a lot because Elon was very into AI and Sam was very into consciousness. And then also talking at the time about

• 1:28:08Speaker 02

  religion and, you know, Sam is obviously a very well-known atheist. Then he became very interested in AI and you know psychedelics, meditation. He's got a really interesting range. And that, those were some of the funnest. Conversations I've been involved in in my life. And listen, I've been involved in a lot of great conversations, but Sam, myself and Elon would go get dinner on a pretty regular basis and just shoot the shit. And man, you want to feel like you're outgunned at a dinner conversation. Imagine like sitting there with, you know, being me with Bezos, Elon and Sam Harris. That's why I think it's probably my best story.

• 1:28:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Did you ever hear Joe Rogan and Naval's episode on the Rogan podcast?

• 1:28:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I think I heard like the first hour of it. It's kind of hard to get to hour three of Joe Rogan.

• 1:28:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, so what's so funny is I remember watching one time and being like, Joe probably has held his own with every single guest that I've ever heard him with, except for Naval at one point was like, I felt like it was a Ferrari and like a Toyota Camry, right? Like Naval was just like on another level. And it was so interesting to kind of watch Joe just be like, yeah, okay. So like, what else you got for me? Like, just keep, just keep the insights coming.

• 1:29:23Speaker 02

  Naval's a really cool cat. You know, Naval and I were, I think we were good friends. You know, in the early days, 12 years ago, when we were both like seed investors, he was doing Venture Hacks and I was doing something called Open Angel Forum. And Venture Hacks became Angel List and I was the first syndicate on there. And then we, we had like a little mini falling out because I left Angel List and started the syndicate. But not like, not like we're not friends falling out. I think we're still friendly. But I, it's kind of a bummer for me because he became a bit of a recluse, you know, he doesn't socialize anymore. And he's pretty upfront about that. He doesn't really do a lot of podcasts. I invited him on the pod, you know. And when he was doing Angel List, he was on the pod

• 1:30:07Speaker 02

  all, he used to speak at every event. Cause I think he had something to sell and something that he needed to promote. And I was good at that. But, you know, since he made all his money and Angel List kind of hit the high notes, he doesn't want to come on the pod or talk or he said he stopped doing pods except his own. And he just wants to be quiet and he's kind of a recluse now. Like he doesn't go out, he doesn't, you know, even pre pandemic. So I was kind of bummed about that, you know, I still really like hanging out with him.

• 1:30:37Speaker 02

  It was like one of the more interesting people I knew, but I think he's just gotten too philosophical, too introverted.

• 1:30:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I mean, look, part of it is, we probably get the benefit of him doing all of that, but also the people that knew him and hung out with him the most, right? Like, you're saying, hey, you know, maybe you can't go to dinner with them, or whatever, but I don't know.

• 1:30:56Speaker 02

  People tend to...

• 1:30:57Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm a fan.

• 1:30:58Speaker 02

  I remain a fan, and I think, you know, the thing I loved about San Francisco before this kind of, like, you know, polarized country with Trump and the left and the right being at each other is when, one of the things that attracted me to our industry was how independent and free-thinking and tolerant people were. San Francisco used to be the ultimate tolerant place in terms of people thinking differently, you know, and, you know, somebody like Naval or Tim Ferriss, just it was like a really interesting eclectic group of people who did not agree with each other and loved to debate. And then something happened, and I really pin it on the Trump presidency, where just

• 1:31:41Speaker 02

  people felt powerless, or whatever, things got so charged, and everybody wanted to cancel everybody, and social media certainly has added to this, where people don't feel they can float an idea without getting canceled, without, you know, and I feel like that whole kind of thing has moved to podcasts, right? And the Intellectual Dark Web, or whatever, you know, where people feel very nervous about talking about race, or religion, or atheism, or psychedelics, or whatever, you know, put the item on the list that's hard to talk about, and people are really scared to have conversations.

• 1:32:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think that that will lead to people leaving San Francisco?

• 1:32:22Speaker 02

  Well, sure, I do think that.

• 1:32:24Anthony Pompliano?

  And that changes the way you've got to invest?

• 1:32:26Speaker 02

  I don't know if it changes the way I've got to invest, but, you know, Tim Ferriss left, Kevin Rose left, Chris Saka left, a lot of that early, interesting cohort, which, you know, all did very well, made a bunch of money, which, you know, if you're here in Silicon Valley for a decade and you don't make money... As an investor, you know, like you've really either timed the cycle totally ridiculously, or you're bad at your job, right? Like, this is a money printing casino that is unlike anything that's ever existed in the history of humanity, I think, legitimately, because these are real companies getting built. It's not, it's speculation on top of a real base of change in the world. But I'm just saddened by it, I'll be honest. Like, it just doesn't

• 1:33:09Speaker 02

  feel, it's kind of like, I guess, after the 60s, New York felt like, oh, yeah, Bob Dylan's not playing on Bleecker Street, and the folk movement's gone. And, you know, it's kind of feels like the 70s or something, where it's like, oh, yeah, it used to be really cool and innovative, but now it's not. Right? Like, it's, something's been lost. And that's why I'm actually, I think the pandemic will be a silver lining that comes out of it, is it's a reset. And people are leaving, and not seeing the reason to live in New York, not seeing the reason to live in San Francisco. Well, that'll make all this office space and all this, all these apartments, super cheap, hopefully, in the coming years. And then you start the cycle anew, right? Where another group of people's like, yeah, you know, there's

• 1:33:51Speaker 02

  some really smart people there, and there's capital there, and maybe we get a reboot. Or maybe it's Austin, you know? It seems like a lot of people are picking Texas and Florida, which are places that, you know, have low tax, and they're much more classic America, more right wing, probably. They've typically been red states, I guess Florida's a purple.

• 1:34:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Would you move? Would you leave San Francisco?

• 1:34:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course. I mean, I'm not like particularly tied to here. I think it's the best thing for my business. But yeah, I'd consider it. I mean, I would really love to move back to New York and buy the Knicks. That's kind of my, my long-term goal right now. You know, and I loved living in LA, but I would consider living in Austin. I like Austin. I was kind of looking at houses there, you know? If the pandemic were like going to become a permanent situation, I, my accelerator moved to virtual. So, you know, it's not like I have to be physically here anymore. And now the podcast is virtual. So, not by choice, I, you know, I want people, you came to the studio, right? Like, when we had to our first podcast, and I told you probably, like, yeah, when you can, I'd love to have you on the pod, when you're here next, or book a trip around it, and it's just used to come out, and...

• 1:35:03Speaker 02

  You did a bunch of meetings when you were out here, but I insisted on people be in person. I would never do a remote and now I've only done remotes.

• 1:35:09Anthony Pompliano?

  I was the same way. I literally would not do it pretty much unless people were there in person. And now it's like, ah, you know what? Maybe I'll just go 100% remote.

• 1:35:18Speaker 02

  Do you feel like, what do you feel you've lost and gained in the interview process and doing the pod?

• 1:35:25Anthony Pompliano?

  The consistent, the consistent quality of guest is much better remote. Because obviously you don't have to worry about people being physically in New York City.

• 1:35:35Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:35:36Anthony Pompliano?

  So you can always get people to come on.

• 1:35:40Anthony Pompliano?

  It sounds weird to people who have never done it before, but you'll get it. Like the quality of the conversation, maybe you just lose 5% or 10% of the quality.

• 1:35:48Speaker 02

  I agree.

• 1:35:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Because there's just something about being in person, sitting across from somebody and looking them in the eye and having the conversation. So, you know, is it better to have higher quality guests with a 5% less?

• 1:35:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:35:59Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, valuable conversation, probably.

• 1:36:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what I've come to the conclusion of is I'm, I have the same experiences. It's easier to get folks because they don't have to leave wherever they are. And they all have set up their podcasting studio now. So it's not like asking them to turn on Zoom or get a microphone or put an ethernet cable in their computer is a, is a hard thing. Cause they're like, yeah, you know, I need to do that. I need to get a green screen. I need to get lights for my Zoom meetings. Yeah, this is an excuse for me to do it. I feel like my edge was in person. I got maybe 10 to 20% more out of guests. But I'm not sure that my audience notices that, right? So I feel like I'm so good in person with a person that I would only do it. And now I feel like I may have, I may have gotten 10% better at interviewing, you know, like.

• 1:36:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I'm actually surprised. I saw somebody tweeting about, I forget who it was, so I can't give him credit. But somebody was like, hey, we should create a work from home box, which basically you pay, you know, $500 and a microphone, a light, a green screen. Like all this stuff shows up and it's just like, hey, get set up. I'm pretty surprised that no one, at least that I know of, has tried that yet. Because it just feels like in this remote world, you know, there's four pieces of equipment everyone needs. And there's a business there. I don't know how big it is, but there's definitely a business there that somebody's going to create.

• 1:37:17Speaker 02

  We, and this is something you can copy for your podcast if you don't do it already, we do a tech check. You know, I've got resources here. Obviously, the podcast is a big business for us, but, and we don't do it for the business. We do it for the deal flow, but, and I just, because I personally love doing conversations, I love talking to people like you who are interesting. We actually now, when we do our tech check, we just send the person a microphone, we send them a proper headset, you know, and we'll send them an Ethernet dongle. It may cost us a hundred bucks to do that, and it may cost us an hour or two of the producer's time, but F it. It's such a great flex that we take it seriously when a microsonic shows up. And actually, here is on the screen our remote AV checklist which we created, which

• 1:37:59Speaker 02

  is here's the MPo 071 USB headset, get a 50-foot Ethernet cable, get the USB-C anchor, USB-C Ethernet hub, get this USB adapter, and here's the agenda of what we're going to do. We're going to do an internet speed test, we're going to do a screen share, we're going to run through your deck, we're going to do it all quality. And the fact that we, in our accelerator, because we have, you know, the authority over the people in the accelerator, we say, if you want to be in the accelerator, you have to have an Ethernet cable in, you have to have a proper headset. Like, we won't let them use AirPods like you're using, because we know there's a chance the battery will die. Right? And we know that sometimes the fatality comes off. So we make them buy the stupid headset, you know, and it's really been an unlock for us, because we don't have technical issues, because we just eliminate

• 1:38:43Speaker 02

  them. We have very few, maybe one in 50 presentations. How much do you spend? Here's a question from Oliver. How much time do you spend on content creation versus your work at Morgan Creek Digital?

• 1:38:56Anthony Pompliano?

  I spend more time on Morgan Creek than content, for sure. We're actually pretty similar in the sense of, all the content to me is deal flow stuff. Right? Like, it just, you know, for all reasons that you do it as well. I would say that it is probably one-third content, two-thirds investing. And out of the two-thirds of my time that's on investing, like, probably half of that is spent with existing portfolio companies, half is looking at new companies.

• 1:39:25Speaker 02

  Well, people also don't realize about that. Yeah, the third of the time where you're doing these interviews, I don't know if you have this experience, but I consider this... You and I doing a strategy session, right? Like, there will be some outcome for you and I. Hundreds of thousands of people between our two pockets will listen to this conversation and get great value out of it and hopefully some entertainment. You and I will get out of this and I'm gonna look and go, I'm gonna go home today and say, "Maybe we should put 1%, 2%, or 3% into Bitcoin and make a big trade." Right? Because I've been sitting on that trade. I've been sitting on the Bitcoin trade.

• 1:39:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Listen, I'll tell you right now. If you go home and you buy 1% to 3% Bitcoin and you tweet out that you did it, I promise you, you will take 50% of your haters and turn them into the biggest Jason fans in the world.

• 1:40:12Speaker 02

  Here's the reason. Because I just thought this thing is... I thought it would have much more volatility than it's had. The fact that it's traded in a range to me is a very promising sign. You were talking about the volatility. For me, I don't consider 5K, where it went down to 3,500 and up to 10,000 in the last 2 years is probably the range. I think I'm right?

• 1:40:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, generally right.

• 1:40:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so it's probably been around 6. Like, that to me is success for Bitcoin. The fact that it's only been a, you know, a 3X range? That feels pretty good for something that has no central authority. It feels like a tight range to me. And it feels like a confidence builder that it hasn't gone... If it went back up to 20 and to 3,500, or went to 40 and then back down to 2, that would be very concerning and I would stay away. But am I right about that, do you think? That the tighter range is good?

• 1:41:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, 1 for sure. But 2 also, like, imagine if the first 3 years of Uber, there was a public stock price.

• 1:41:17Speaker 02

  Ugh.

• 1:41:17Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, it would have... It'd be chaos.

• 1:41:20Speaker 02

  Be huck-inducing, yeah. Talk about a distraction.

• 1:41:23Anthony Pompliano?

  And by the way, 50% of the early investors would sell. Because humans suck at timing markets. And so there's almost like an... It's almost like you had an advantage, right? And so did every other investor. You basically invest capital in an early-stage company. It's super volatile. You don't see the volatility. And you get to the other side of it and either you made a bunch of money or it went to 0.

• 1:41:44Speaker 02

  Well, that's what I tell people who are getting into this game. Because I have so many new angel investors because of my book, Angel, that one of them today was like, "I'm in 18 deals and so many of these deals are going to 0." And I was like, you also invested in the 4 million and the $250 million round of com.com. You hit an outlier in 18 investments. Most people, it takes them 50 to 100 to hit an outlier. And he's like, well, I just find this all so depressing. Like, why can't we pick winners? And why are there, why are there no singles and doubles? I'm like, by design. I told everybody with the syndicate.com that I'm swinging for the fences.

• 1:42:24Speaker 02

  And I want the top two or three deals to be the absolute 90% of the portfolio. We're not playing for singles and doubles. You can get singles and doubles all day long in the public market. Right? You time it right, you hit something that doubles your money in two years. Time it wrong, you lose half your money.

• 1:42:41Anthony Pompliano?

  A lot of people don't know this, but there's actually in the kind of more traditional finance world, the absolute best returning institutions have abnormally large allocations to venture capital. So obviously you look at Yale, they're kind of top five always. But there's two GMO, which is Jeremy Grantham's thing. And then this thing in Pittsburgh, which is the Dietrich Foundation. And so Jeremy Grantham was recently on Patrick O'Shaughnessy's Invest Like the Best podcast. And he said that he's got, I think it was 60% of his assets are in venture capital, which I thought was just incredibly high for somebody who's not in technology, is not a venture capitalist.

• 1:43:21Speaker 02

  I mean, that's bizarrely high.

• 1:43:24Anthony Pompliano?

  And then the Dietrich Foundation is over 80%.

• 1:43:28Speaker 02

  So they're swinging for the fences and you know, that might be that they understand. See, this is the thing people have to understand. When you make these bets on venture funds, what I try to explain to people is, you know, if you look at the history of it, you might on average have the same returns as the public markets or a little bit less or a little bit more. But if you had the money locked up for that period and you had a chance of getting into a benchmark for a Sequoia fund, where it's 5X or 10X, it's almost like, you know, you're playing at a poker table where

• 1:44:03Speaker 02

  Every once in a while, you can make 10x the money that's at the table, right? You have this like crazy outlier. And that's what I try to train people when I'm training them on how to be an angel investor. I say, listen, you got to get to 30 investments and you should only invest the money you can afford to lose, which I say is 5 to 10% of your net worth for a high net worth person. That's where I like to tell people, you know, to live because if you lose it all, you lose half of it, you're probably not going to feel it. You shouldn't feel it, right? But if it does go 5 or 10x, oh my Lord, you're going to feel it because you're going to double your net worth, right? And so, and this, I think it's the same argument you make for Bitcoin, which is what if it does go 100x, well, that's generational wealth, right?

• 1:44:45Speaker 02

  Even if it was, if it goes 100x and it was 1%, you've doubled your net worth. If you put 3% into of your net worth into it, I don't know what you tell people should be in the percentage of your net worth into Bitcoin. I'm interested to hear that. And it goes 500x, oh my Lord, you have what happened to me with Uber or what could potentially happen to me, hopefully, knock on wood, with com.com. What percentage would you tell a high net worth individual, i.e. me, to put into Bitcoin? Because right now, my Bitcoin exposure is well under 1%.

• 1:45:16Anthony Pompliano?

  I think most people are going to end up in the 1 to 5% range.

• 1:45:21Speaker 02

  What would you tell me, somebody who is a crazy gambler? What should I do? Tell me right.

• 1:45:25Anthony Pompliano?

  You want me to tell you what I've done?

• 1:45:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Over 50%.

• 1:45:31Speaker 02

  You're 50% in a single crypto, over 50% in a single cryptocurrency? I'm just trying to get my head around that. How do you, how do you sleep at night looking at it go up and down like this?

• 1:45:44Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't look.

• 1:45:45Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. Well, that's a good answer.

• 1:45:46Anthony Pompliano?

  It's the same thing like, again, if you had a stock price, if you had a stock price on Uber, right? At one, at one point, Uber was probably way more than 50% of your net worth. And at that point, if there was a public stock price and you were staring at it, you would have sold it. You'd just been like, look, just, I can't sleep.

• 1:46:04Speaker 02

  Let me tell you something, those were a couple of, those years were a couple of the, I wouldn't say anxiety producing because I'm not like an anxious guy, but those were some of the. I wouldn't even say nail biting, but I would say I was on high alert about it because people kept trying to buy my Uber shares from me at 5 billion, 10 billion, 20 billion, 30 billion. And I did liquidate some at 50 billion and 60 billion, something in that range. Uh, and then I still have a lot left. And yeah, that was a little gut check moment for me when it went down to 15 or 16 dollars during the pandemic. But I just looked at it and I said, well, this pandemic is not lasting forever. If it is, I got bigger problems than Uber stock because we're never going to leave our houses again.

• 1:46:43Speaker 02

  And so do I see a world where Uber doesn't exist or isn't the number one company and the lead? No, I don't. So I'm, I'm sticking around, right?

• 1:46:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. The, the other thing too is, uh, I'm 32, right?

• 1:46:57Speaker 02

  I'm 49, so I do have a different.

• 1:47:00Anthony Pompliano?

  So, and, and so the way I look at it is if it all went to zero and I lost 50%, that's the equivalent of somebody at 50, losing 10%, right?

• 1:47:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's probably right.

• 1:47:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Pretty similar.

• 1:47:13Speaker 02

  Uh, all right. So let me get, I got a couple more questions for you here.

• 1:47:17Speaker 02

  Chris asked, considering he shills for Bitcoin 110% of the time, how deep in debt is he with Bitcoin? You're not in debt with your Bitcoin position. This is money you have.

• 1:47:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Come on, come on.

• 1:47:28Speaker 02

  That, that would be the definition of insanity to, to lever yourself up with a cryptocurrency.

• 1:47:34Anthony Pompliano?

  The craziest stories that I've heard of people, and this is, uh, like 2012 or 2014, there were definitely people who sold all their possessions. I didn't hear about people like going in debt, but I've definitely heard stories of people who like sold their car or sold their house or whatever, took the money and put it in Bitcoin. That alone was insanity. Now played out, but still doesn't mean it was a good decision, right? In terms of the, the way they made the decision, but I haven't heard too many people going into debt to buy Bitcoin.

• 1:48:00Speaker 02

  Oh, in the last podcast with Pop, you asked him this question, what company is most likely to be the Amazon of crypto is a great question. Will it be within decentralized finance? Perhaps? We still don't know the answer. Does he have a better idea?

• 1:48:15Anthony Pompliano?

  So I'm going to answer this in a little bit of a weird way. One of the companies that we invested in very early, we definitely didn't invest enough. And we've continued to invest pretty aggressively in this company called BlockFi. And the reason why I bring them up is if you think of the US dollar as a unit of account in the legacy financial world, the, one of the most valuable types of companies is financial infrastructure, right? So banks. And so what I think Coinbase and all the other exchanges are doing is they're acting more like brokerage type accounts. Whereas BlockFi has specifically said, look, we want to look and feel more like wealth management. They can't use the word bank in their marketing materials because of regulatory reasons,

• 1:49:00Anthony Pompliano?

  but wealth management services. And so they can give you a US dollar loan against your crypto collateral. They have an interest-bearing account where you can earn, you know, up to 8.6% interest, all this stuff. And to me, what ends up being really interesting is in the legacy world, like if you're anywhere outside the United States and you want to participate in US dollars, you got to go to a bank, physically walk in, show them papers, like do all this crazy stuff that the technology world forgets about, right? Because we just have Stripe and whatever.

• 1:49:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Crypto changes that. Like now you just need an internet connection, right? And so if you can just sign up for an account and then Jason can send me money and I didn't have to actually go get like a traditional bank account. To me, that is a Trojan horse because the wallet is the equivalent of like Amazon's Prime membership.

• 1:49:48Speaker 02

  All right. Hit me with another one. Hit me, pump.

• 1:49:52Anthony Pompliano?

  How has your target percentage ownership changed in companies?

• 1:49:55Speaker 02

  Great question. When I was a scout for Sequoia 10 years ago, I was putting in 2550K checks. That generally was well under 1%. Then I had my first fund, Launch Fund One, like whatever, seven years ago, started to own 1, 2, 3%. So for something like Superhuman, we own 2%.

• 1:50:14Speaker 02

  Then we had the syndicate and for something like COMM, we did a little bit from our fund and a bunch from the syndicate, put in 378K, own 5%. And so 5% of a billion dollar company, $50 million. Well under 1% of a $50 billion company, hey, $100 million. Like you can, you can see that owning a larger percentage does better. Now, we have our accelerator where we get 6% of the company in a company like, let's say Fitbod, which has been a breakout company for us, which is a subscription app that's doing over 10 million a year. So that would, you know, generally these companies get 10x, 20x top line revenue if they're high growth. Could be as little as 5, could be as high as 30 in our world, but let's just put it at 10.

• 1:50:57Speaker 02

  Then we will put in money from our syndicate and our fund, and we're on our third fund now, so we'll put a little more money in. And target now is 10 to 20% in the winners. And so we are acting more like a seed fund slash venture fund, but we will be totally fine with 5% and we'll be totally fine with 20%. And so you never want to miss that in a great company. And we now will make regularly five or six bets because the syndicate, a lot of the members keep want to bet, keep wanting, they want to keep betting, even if the company's at 100 million or 150 or 250 million. We had a lot of the COMM.com investors not want to sell at the 250. We did sell 10% when it hit 250 million.

• 1:51:41Speaker 02

  We had other ones who wanted to buy. And those people who bought, you know, maybe they did 4X their money or 5X and maybe ultimately they'll do 10X hopefully, maybe even 20, but they're not going to do 200, right? This is not, it's not possible. But when you get into those later stages, you're obviously reducing risk massively. And so it's a balance. It was a great question. And I also like to have a board seat too. Do I have any more here for POMP? Let's see. Who is actually interviewing who? You guys should make up your mind. That's a good observation. Tim asks is a funny one. Which one of you is more confident? That's interesting. Do you feel confident in what you do? Do you feel like at the age of 32, knowing what you know, do you feel, on a scale of 1 to 10, how confident are you in your ability?

• 1:52:27Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm going to separate investing from the content stuff.

• 1:52:30Speaker 02

  Great.

• 1:52:30Anthony Pompliano?

  The content stuff, much more confident in the, really because it's my personal opinion. So just the fact that like, I know what, how I think now.

• 1:52:39Speaker 02

  Oh, you feel like you have clarity of your own thought.

• 1:52:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and I know what I'm good at and what I'm not good at. And like, you're just more self-aware.

• 1:52:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:52:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Investing, it's very much like, the more you learn, yeah, you're improving there, but you also realize the less you know. Type situation.

• 1:52:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:52:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, and so I think that different things call for different level of confidence, but definitely investing is, is, uh, every day you're just like, damn, there's people out there who are really, really good at this game. Uh, and I'm improving and they're still pulling away.

• 1:53:11Speaker 02

  Well, you've only been, how long have you been doing it? A decade or half a decade, five years?

• 1:53:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, no. Uh, four, four and a half, five years.

• 1:53:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think when you get a decade under your belt and you get a couple of big wins, that's what really tips over for you. And then you start to realize, like you're saying, who you are, you have that self-awareness, you realize things are out of your control. Um, and that the way you get good at this is by consistently showing up and doing the work. So I feel supremely confident, uh, just on the investing side of the business. I feel supremely confident because I'm so aware of the randomness of it that I am at peace with never hitting an Uber again. Knowing that I can make an exceptional career out of hitting Robinhoods and comms,

• 1:54:04Speaker 02

  thumbtacks, you know, Trello's, Wealthfronts, whatever, desktop metals. I don't need to have grand slams, uh, or three-peats. I could just win a championship every two years, right? And that's just, that's a great career, right? You don't need to be Michael Jordan, you could be Kobe, you could be Shaq with four, you could be the Warriors with three rings, right? And on an interview basis with the content, I feel like I could sit with anybody and interview them and my blood pressure would not change. And I would be able, I could sit across from Trump, or Obama, or Putin, or Kim Jong-un. I don't think my blood pressure would change, and I would have absolute fearlessness in asking them any question.

• 1:54:50Speaker 02

  So I feel like I'm probably slightly more confident in you, but I'm 17 years older than you, so I should be.

• 1:54:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that's fair.

• 1:54:57Speaker 02

  But it feels like you're very, see, I don't think I had the self-awareness that you maybe had at 32, when I was running my first media empires, my little mini media empires, with Silicon Valley Reporter and Weblogs, Inc. That's a super important observation I think you're making, which is, you have to be aware of your own limitations, right? And that's what I've learned, is when I see Sequoia, and I worked with Sequoia, I was like, oh, so in awe of them. And then I realized, oh, you know what they do better than everybody? They show up for fucking work. And I see all these people I know in my contemporaries, who don't go to work anymore. They're fucking around and not actually showing up at the office. Putting the pandemic aside, I would go to Sequoia, and I would just be like, there's Michael Moritz,

• 1:55:42Speaker 02

  there's Jim Getz, there's Doug Leone, there's Ruloff, there's Alfred Lin. They're all in the office all day long. And you know what they're doing? Meeting with founders. That's it. There's no, there's no big secret here to their success, other than they just work harder than everybody else. And they do it consistently, and it compounds, and it compounds, and it compounds, right? I mean, in a way, if you look at Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, and I know Dave Portman's doing his like, you know, I'm smarter than them, or whatever. And you know what? It's completely possible Dave is. Will Dave do it for five decades? Will he show up for work for 10 years and do it? I think Dave's out in three weeks.

• 1:56:27Speaker 02

  I think he's had fun. How long you think he does daily day trading?

• 1:56:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, okay, so daily day trading is different than, and I'm at an advantage here because you probably don't know the backstory for him. So he started Barstool. So you'll love the story. He started Barstool, I think it was 2003, 2004, and he started actually as a physical newspaper.

• 1:56:49Speaker 02

  No, I didn't know that. Azim.

• 1:56:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, yeah. And here's the best part is he literally went and stood at the trains in Boston and was like handing them out like a paperboy.

• 1:56:59Speaker 02

  That's literally what I did with my magazine. So I got a reporter. I used to hand it out at parties and I put in my masthead. It said, Jason Calacan, a CEO, editor, publisher, and paperboy. I literally put the word paperboy. That's hilarious.

• 1:57:11Anthony Pompliano?

  So he did this, eventually started the online like blog, right? And then eventually social media comes along, all this kind of stuff. And it wasn't, so he started 2003, 2004. And if I remember the story correctly, it wasn't until I think 2015, maybe, when Churnin made the first investment. And, you know, they valued the company at 15 million bucks. They bought 50% of it. And the way that this current CEO, Erica Nunez, tells it, she's like, shows up to work for the first day as the CEO. And she's like, there's like checks laying around the office that are uncashed. Like, these guys had no clue what they're doing, right? But they were great at content. So, you know, look, it's somebody who sticks it out for now almost 20 years.

• 1:57:50Speaker 02

  All right. So then I'll give more credit. Here's the thing about him, or about that story that I think is, you know, super important. What you don't know about business, you can learn, but being able to create a vape, a great product is the true gift and skill in the world. And if you can make something that is a transcendent product, then whatever you think about, you know, Call Your Daddy, or Barstool Sports, or whatever, I don't even know what their products are besides those two. Whatever you think about them, they have connected with a very large audience in a very deep, meaningful way. He is a savant at making content.

• 1:58:26Anthony Pompliano?

  They have again captured the one thing that I think people are just now catching up to, which is, I sell time.

• 1:58:35Anthony Pompliano?

  He who holds the audience has all the power now.

• 1:58:38Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:58:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Because, you know, I mean, Elon's actually a very good example of this. You cannot quote-unquote cancel Elon Musk because Elon Musk has a bigger audience than every single media corporation.

• 1:58:50Speaker 02

  Right, he's got 30 million followers, right? No, he can route around anybody. He can just route around the press. And if he gives access to the press-

• 1:58:57Anthony Pompliano?

  That's what Trump's doing.

• 1:58:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:58:58Anthony Pompliano?

  That, as Trump has the same thing, right? I mean, there's many people, both political, not political, across both aisles.

• 1:59:04Speaker 02

  Joe Rogan falls into this category.

• 1:59:06Anthony Pompliano?

  It's just they have a bigger audience now.

• 1:59:08Speaker 02

  On a very small percentage, you know, I reach more people on my podcast than when I go on to CNBC. Right? I still do CNBC because it's a different group of people and I just love the challenge of going in there and dunking on everybody and having fun with it. Because it's entertaining for me and fun. But that's the other thing is people forget fun. Like, you could see we're having fun in this conversation. Dave is having fun. Elon is having fun. Chamath is having fun. And that is important. You have to love the journey. And this has been quite a journey. Oh, there's another question. Okay, here we go. It's not about my, is it about my persistence versus

• 1:59:45Anthony Pompliano?

  No.

• 1:59:45Speaker 02

  privilege tweet that I, they tried to cancel me on, speaking of being canceled. They didn't cancel me on that one.

• 1:59:50Anthony Pompliano?

  No, you ready?

• 1:59:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:59:51Anthony Pompliano?

  I saw you go on CNBC, I think the last time you were on, and you had the, one of the fieriest hot takes and segments I've seen in a while from you.

• 2:00:00Speaker 02

  Here we go.

• 2:00:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What is the one thing, if you went on tomorrow, you would bitch and complain and yell and scream about? What's like the one thing that's top of mind right now that you would just go crazy on television over?

• 2:00:15Speaker 02

  That is a good one. Yeah. I, I, it's interesting. I forgot what I went-

• 2:00:20Anthony Pompliano?

  I think it was, I think it was Zuck and Facebook.

• 2:00:22Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, that's just infuriating to me. Yeah, that was, you know, just the fact that people don't get it after like, you know, how many years he's been doing the same thing. You know, right now, I am particularly upset at the lack of leadership in this goddamn country from top to bottom. Now, you'll see some great moments like Cuomo doing his daily briefing. And the reason that Cuomo doing-

• 2:00:50Speaker 02

  You know, a 20-minute briefing with 20 slides seems so extraordinary, and it's not. I consider that table stakes. You and I do that every day. But the fact that he does that, and the fact that Trump, or London Breed here in San Francisco, who gets credit for some things, but this city's a disaster, or the governor of this state, Gavin, you know, they just have done a terrible job communicating and leading. And leadership is absolutely critical in a crisis. And when there's a crisis, that's when you find out if you actually elected somebody who has any fucking idea of what they're doing. And I'll go off on the rant right now.

• 2:01:31Speaker 02

  The fact that Trump or Pence and these dipshits can't walk up to the microphone with a goddamn mask on and say, "I'm wearing my mask right now, but everybody's six feet away from me. I'm gonna take it off. You should wear your mask too, because there's zero downside to it, and it costs 10 cents for these, and they're available free everywhere at every post office. Every cop has a bunch in their car. You can get them for free." And why wouldn't we do it? Because, man, people losing their jobs sucks, and not being able to go out and have our lives and go to school sucks, so just wear this mask, please. And if you don't wear it, and you see somebody not wearing it, you should just all say, "Shame on you," and just say "shame," like they did in Game of Thrones. And if we all do that, we'll be fine. I just did a better job off the top of my head than nine out of 10 politicians, right?

• 2:02:16Speaker 02

  And then the fact that nobody can go on TV and say, "Listen, not all cops are criminals, and we have a serious problem in, you know, how policing is done. We need to sit at a table, and we need to just look at the 100 calls that come into a police precinct every day, and decide who should respond to them." Because, trust me, the police do not want to come to a domestic dispute that could be resolved by a social worker. They do not want to go to an addicted person or a mentally ill person who could be handled by a counselor. We all are on the same team. Let's make a new plan and start fresh today. And for the love of God, please do not resist arrest.

• 2:02:57Speaker 02

  And for the love of God, please do not take your gun out of the holster and shoot somebody who's running away. Both parties need to stop this immediately. And we have to realize we're all Americans and we have to be on each other's sides. And nobody wants to go to a funeral, whether it's a cop's funeral or it's just somebody who had a couple of drinks and is eating a goddamn chicken sandwich in the Wendy's fucking drive thru, does not need to fucking die. It's fucking infuriating. And that's what I would say if I was allowed to curse on CNBC. I'm sorry, I'm getting all emotional about it. But you know, I come from a family of cops. My brother was a cop, my cousin's a cop, my uncle's a cop, my grandfather's a firefighter. It's a hard job.

• 2:03:38Speaker 02

  And then on the other side, you have these sadistic, insane people kneeling on somebody's neck and just torturing them to death or shooting somebody in the back who you just had a 40 minute conversation with. I mean, let the guy run away. You have his driver's license, you know who he is. And we don't have leaders who can do this. And that's the goddamn problem is you need to have a leader who can come out and say it the way I said it, which is be a goddamn human being and understand that we're all on the same team. It's called humanity. We're all on the same rock, planet Earth, we're all in the same country, America. Supposed to have some common decency and some common thread amongst us to get through these problems together.

• 2:04:21Speaker 02

  And leaders are so self-absorbed and clueless and incompetent that they can't just say what I just said, right?

• 2:04:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, they definitely, one, aren't saying that. And two, you know, what do they say? Common sense isn't so common anymore, right? It's this weird thing where you get the retweets and what are perceived to be votes by having a very black and white view of the world. Obviously, the world's not black and white. But the idea that nobody should die, either a cop or a civilian, is not, or should not be a controversial one. Wild idea like that. Sounds like pretty simple objective to me.

• 2:05:00Speaker 02

  Right. But you know, there's somebody who'll take this clip and say, cancel Jason because he says not all cops are not, you know, criminals. And then something on the other side will say like, well, you know, you ran from the cops and you stole their taste or you deserve to get shot. Like literally those two statements will get more likes and retweets. Then what you and I would say is just, nobody wants to die. No mom and father wants to bury a son or daughter. Nobody wants to go to a funeral. We all want to die of old age in a, you know, playing checker somewhere. And shitting our pants in a diaper at 92. Like, how great would it be if the two of us, I'm 92 and you're 82 and we're sitting here in a, you know, chopping it up on a podcast, playing chess, you know, or our brains are on some pedestal.

• 2:05:44Anthony Pompliano?

  And you're a gazillionaire because of your Bitcoin position.

• 2:05:47Speaker 02

  The Knicks have three rings, you know, three championships, you know? Trust me, you want to see me cry? The Knicks in a ticketed parade, I'll be bawling, I'll be bawling.

• 2:05:58Anthony Pompliano?

  That, that is one interview I would pay to watch is you and James Dolan going at it.

• 2:06:02Speaker 02

  You know, here's the thing about James Dolan.

• 2:06:06Speaker 02

  He wants to play music. And being the son of a billionaire and inheriting a bunch of money and a bunch of responsibility is a big burden. He doesn't want to do this job. He wants to play music. He should sell now. The market could, couldn't possibly be at a bigger peak. He can get a ton of money for it. And you know what? God bless. Go play the blues. When you see him playing the blues, he is smiling. I saw him play. Go find a church with Jewel and a bunch of other people. Now people, it's easy to make fun of somebody, you know, who's not a professional musician and who's a trust fund kid.

• 2:06:52Speaker 02

  But he's got pure joy. And then I see him sitting at the garden. And he looks utterly depressed and sad.

• 2:07:01Speaker 02

  This is a message to James Dolan. Pursue your life's work, which is singing the goddamn blues and you love it. I see it on your face. And you know what? He loves to go to a club of 10 people or 20 people and just play the blues. There's a video of him online where somebody was yelling at him, sell the Knicks while he's playing some music festival. He's playing a music festival in the afternoon.

• 2:07:23Speaker 02

  With 20 people in front of a stage and he is loving it. He's a billionaire. He owns the Knicks, the Rangers, Radio City Music Hall, the Beacon. He's not happy about that. He's happy being the opening act to the five other opening acts. And he's humble and in pure ecstasy. Do that, James. Do that, Jim. Sell the Knicks to me. Give me the goddamn Knicks. Just give them to me. Please, just give me them Knicks. Let me do it. I will get it done. I promise you I'll get it done and I will give you all the credit in the world for having the foresight to pick me as the next owner of the New York Knickerbockers. Thank you, James Dolan. What's more, Steve, what's your dream? What's your dream, Bob?

• 2:08:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Giants.

• 2:08:09Speaker 02

  The Giants? Yeah, yeah, come on. You know, my dad's season tickets and I used to go to Phil Simms, Phil Simms and Lawrence Taylor. I was at all those games. I watched Lawrence Taylor. He'd come out of that halftime, he'd done three or four lines of blow and he would just run through the, he would run through the line and just, he'd get two or three sacks in a game. You sat there watching it and Phil Simms was just like, we would just be doing the like prevent defense, we would run the ball. They would never let Phil Simms throw it. But we won. We won. The underdogs won. And man, you watch Lawrence Taylor, oh

• 2:08:53Speaker 02

  my lord. That was like watching an alien. Like it was literally like watching a predator playing with a bunch of humans. You know the Predator, the movie I've watched on my daughters? They're like eight feet tall. Imagine you had a predator in the middle of a football game, what would happen? That was what Lawrence Taylor did. Has anybody ever done anything equivalent to what he did? In terms of sacking people and just being so incredibly intimidating?

• 2:09:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Probably not. The only person I could think of, a different position, but maybe like a Sean Taylor, if he had gotten to play a little more. But other than that, I mean, there's just not that many people that are that distraught.

• 2:09:32Speaker 02

  Broke that guy's leg. Remember that?

• 2:09:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Crazy.

• 2:09:35Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 2:09:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:09:37Speaker 02

  I mean, when has anybody ever gotten sacked and broken their leg? Is that the only time that's ever happened in the, in the history of the NFL? I gotta think it is. All right, listen, you've been listening to the Pomp, uh, and this week in Startup's Crossover. Everybody who's in my audience, go subscribe to Pomp. You heard him here today. He's awesome. He does what he does. And he's A. Pompliano. Pompliano on the, uh, you can't get P-O-M-P on Twitter? Who's got that? Somebody-

• 2:10:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Liter- literally, no, a radio DJ in Texas, and he keeps trying to sell it to me, and I keep telling him to kick rocks.

• 2:10:12Speaker 02

  Well, what does he want? A grand? Two grand?

• 2:10:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Nah, he wants more than that, but, uh, it's the pure-

• 2:10:18Speaker 02

  I'll tell you this, for five grand or less, you should buy it. I wouldn't buy it for 10. I would buy it for 5.

• 2:10:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that's what he wants. I think he wants 10.

• 2:10:26Speaker 02

  All right, listen, to the, come on, man. DJ guy.

• 2:10:31Speaker 02

  He'll give you the, he'll give you five dimes, five dimes, and he'll give it to you in Bitcoin.

• 2:10:36Anthony Pompliano?

  You want to know the best part? Nah, listen, this is the best part, is, uh, people obviously tag him all the time. They tag at Pomp.

• 2:10:42Speaker 02

  Right, right, right, right.

• 2:10:43Anthony Pompliano?

  And so his only way to, uh, to fight back from that is he blocked me.

• 2:10:47Speaker 02

  Here's what you do. Find out what his name is. Before we publish this episode, find out his name, and then go, uh, and, um, oh, he's protected. Go find out his name, his full name, and buy every domain name possible, and on every other service, get his full name, and say, "Listen, I got all your full names for you right here. You can have all your full names. I'll trade you those. You give me that." Right?

• 2:11:10Anthony Pompliano?

  It's not a bad idea. It's not a bad idea at all.

• 2:11:12Speaker 02

  But do, don't publish the show until he does it. So get his full name, get his last name, go buy hislastname.net, dot org, dot com. Say, "Listen, I got a collection of 300, I got the Instagram name for you. I got everything." And then you trade him those for what you have. Because I've had people do that with me before, and, you know, it's, it's a compelling trade sometimes. You know, sometimes somebody needs like a couple of draft picks, or they need a point guard, and you trade for the point guard, knowing that-

• 2:11:34Anthony Pompliano?

  You know what I heard? You know what I heard you have? I heard that you have, uh, at Fortune.

• 2:11:40Speaker 02

  I have at Fortune and at Libra.

• 2:11:44Speaker 02

  And Libra, they tried to buy it from me. And we couldn't get a consulting agreement done. You're not allowed to sell these things, but I was gonna do a consulting agreement with them and we just couldn't get it done because they wanted to talk to me on the phone, the Facebook people. And I just told them, I was like, listen, if you want it, I'll break bread with you. We'll talk about it, but I just, please stop calling me on the phone. Just send money. I'll do a consulting gig for you and then you can have the domain. That's the way to do it, right? You can't sell the handle, but you could sell your consulting services. So you could, he could be a consultant to you and you could pay him in Bitcoin for something else and throw in the domain name. Or whatever.

• 2:12:17Anthony Pompliano?

  How you got at Libra, I don't even want to know.

• 2:12:19Speaker 02

  Well, no, it was, in the early days, somebody on my team got all the signs of the Zodiac for me. I also have contests. I have, I have contests. I have,

• 2:12:31Speaker 02

  I also have autos. I've got a bunch of handles. We use them. We have at Video Games. I have at Santa Monica. I've got a bunch of weird ones on the Twitter. All right, listen, everybody. We'll see you next time on the Pomp Podcast and This Week in Startups. Pomp, you gotta say goodbye to your audience.

• 2:12:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Go subscribe to This Week in Startups. Jason knows what he's doing.

• 2:12:52Speaker 02

  There you go. You go invest, yeah.

• 2:12:56Speaker 02

  We're not giving any investment advice. Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer, but we love to gamble. The end. Great job, Pomp. All right, see y'all next time. Bye bye. Back kicked ass.