#1030 Adam Singer Shares His Bitcoin Concerns With Pomp

Adam Singer is a digital marketing executive and the writer of the Substack "Hot Takes" In this conversation, we have an open-minded debate about Bitcoin. Adam shares is concerns around many aspects of the digital currency in an attempt to find answers to these concerns and to find common ground on both sides. ======================= Since 2018 Copper has been at the forefront of institutional digital asset development. From award winning custody solutions, to creating the first truly off-exchange settlement function, Copper pioneers technology, products, and services, in lock-step with a rapidly changing world. No other infrastructure provider covers as many assets, across as many exchanges, with the speed and security that Copper can offer. To learn how Copper helps the world’s largest institutional investors secure their digital assets, head over to copper.co Copper - the unfair advantage. ======================= Exodus is leading the world out of the traditional financial system by building beautiful and user-friendly blockchain products. With its focus on design and user experience, Exodus has become one of the most popular and loved cryptocurrency apps. It’s supported on both desktop and mobile, allowing you to sync your wallet across multiple devices so you can have access to your funds anywhere. You can instantly exchange around 100 different cryptocurrencies straight from your wallet. Interactive charts let you view an asset’s price history and your portfolio’s performance over time. And maybe the best part, Exodus is integrated with the Trezor hardware wallet - making advanced security easy for everyone. Visit exodus.com/pomp for your free download or search Exodus on the App Store or Playstore. ======================= Bullish is a powerful new exchange for digital assets that offers deep liquidity, automated market making, and industry-leading security. Combining the innovations of DeFi with the regulated environment of traditional finance, Bullish empowers users to trade with certainty and earn passively at scale across variable market conditions, in an environment backed by multibillion-dollar liquidity contributions from the Bullish Treasury. Visit bullish.com/pomp today to learn more. Note: Bullish is licensed by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission. Virtual assets and related products are high risk. Consult your investment advisor and trade responsibly. Bullish is available in select locations only and not to U. S persons. Visit bullish.com/legal for important information and risk warnings. =======================

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

• 0:02Anthony 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. Now let's kick this thing off. Adam Singer is a digital marketing executive. He's an advisor to many startups, and he also has been spending a bunch of time writing his own personal Substack, which you can find at adamssinger.substack.com. In this conversation, we talk about his concerns around Bitcoin, and we spend a bunch of time going point by point around what I would consider the cautiously optimistic viewpoint on the digital currency. I really enjoyed this conversation with Adam, and I hope you guys enjoy it as well. Before we get into this episode though, I first want to talk about our sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by Copper. Since 2018, Copper has been at the forefront

• 0:46Anthony Pompliano?

  of institutional digital asset development. From award-winning custody solutions to creating the first truly off-exchange settlement function, Copper pioneers technology, products, and services in lockstep with a rapidly changing world. No other infrastructure provider covers as many assets across as many exchanges with the speed and security that Copper can offer. To learn how Copper helps the world's largest institutional investors secure their digital assets, head over to copper.co. Again, Copper, the unfair advantage. Check them out at copper.co today. Today's episode is brought to you by Exodus, the world's leading desktop, mobile, and hardware crypto wallet. They offer beautiful, user-friendly blockchain products that sync

• 1:27Anthony Pompliano?

  across all of your devices, making it easier to send, receive, and exchange over 150 or more crypto assets in one place. And with world-class customer service available to you 24/7, Exodus always has your back. But the fun doesn't stop with staking and trading. They recently launched a new NFT marketplace where you can buy and sell your favorite NFTs on the Solana network. By partnering with the popular NFT platform, Magic Eden, they're offering the full Monty on verified collections, with more added every single day. Ready to check it out for yourself? Run, don't walk. Over to exodus.com/pomp for your free download today. Again, if you want the world's leading desktop, mobile, and hardware crypto wallet, go to exodus.com/pomp today.

• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

  This episode is brought to you by Bullish. Bullish is a powerful new digital asset exchange built for institutions that delivers the innovations of DeFi in a regulated environment. The Bullish hybrid order book pairs the high performance of a traditional central limit order book with the automated market making powered by deep Bullish liquidity pools backed by the multi-billion dollar Bullish treasury. So you can trade with certainty and at scale across variable market conditions. You can learn more at bullish.com or follow bullish on Twitter because the future belongs to the bullish. Now, this is not investment advice. Digital assets and cryptocurrencies are high risk products. Consult your professional advisor before dealing in them. Bullish's services are available in select locations only and not to U.S. persons.

• 2:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Visit bullish.com/legal for important information and risk warnings. Go check them out at bullish.com or follow at bullish on Twitter.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Adam, my friend, how are you?

• 3:26Speaker 02

  Hey, man. Good to see you, Pomp. Thanks for having me on and I'd just like to say that Joe is spot on that Reese's are in fact the best dessert.

• 3:36Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't agree with that, but that's all right. It's everyone's own personal opinion.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  I mean, how does peanut butter make anything worse, right?

• 3:45Anthony Pompliano?

  That is true. That is very true. All right, we got a whole bunch of stuff to talk about. Here's what I want to do first. You fire questions, concerns, or topics at me and we'll discuss each one. Some of them I think that we'll end up agreeing on, some of them I think we're going to vehemently disagree on and we'll kind of work through your whole list.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  Sure, let's go. And just to level set, you know, I'm all bought in on the idea of Bitcoin making sense as digital gold. Like I fully wrap my brain around it, fully makes sense to me, totally get it. So actually let's lead into the first question with that. So what's the scenario if Bitcoin never gets beyond digital gold? What if it doesn't get to the point it actually is a highly used currency? It's always seen as, you know, like a bar of gold or the gun in your drawer. You don't ever want to actually have to use it, but you don't want to not have one.

• 4:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes, I think there's two scenarios, maybe three scenarios where this could play out, right? So the first is if Bitcoin, for some reason, the world decided they didn't want it, right? And we can get into why that may happen in the future. I don't think it's a high probability, but that would be one is just everyone says, oh, okay, we don't like Bitcoin anymore, they move on. Then obviously it never transitions past that. The second is the world says, hey, Bitcoin is digital gold. It's very valuable, but we don't want to use it for anything else other than digital gold. And I think that people who view that argument would make a comparison to gold itself. You could almost think of it as, okay, what percentage of people or how much value goes into the gold market today? It's about $10 trillion, give or take.

• 5:21Anthony Pompliano?

  And so maybe it's Bitcoin's market cap is 10 trillion and it kind of is equivalent to gold. Maybe it is able to eat into other store of value assets like art or real estate or something like that. Maybe it ends up being more than 10 trillion. But there's some world where Bitcoin is a store of value and it never gets used as a currency itself. And I think that's what would happen there. The third one is actually where I think that we are headed towards, which is Bitcoin, the asset is used as a store of value, which we're obviously seeing now. There are people who use it for a medium of exchange, but because of the US dollar price volatility, they may want to use stable coins or something else on a more regular basis, but it is still used.

• 6:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Last year it did more transaction volume on chain than Mastercard or whatever. But what we're seeing start to develop is that layer two and potentially layer three technologies are being built on top of Bitcoin, the network. So I always have to remind folks that Bitcoin is one word, but it can have two different meanings. It can be the asset that you hold, or it can be the actual technology computing network that is being described. They're both. Named Bitcoin, which doesn't help conversation. And so in a world where people say, I want to hold Bitcoin, the asset. And then we're going to build layer twos, layer threes on top of it. In some of those situations, you may use Bitcoin for a medium of exchange, the Lightning Network, right? You send Bitcoin back and forth. But now there is a proposal from Lightning Labs where they want to build something called Taro.

• 6:51Anthony Pompliano?

  And on Taro, they believe that they'll be able to actually build stable coins and other types of assets that are tied into kind of layer one and layer two. Again, it's a proposal, it hasn't been built yet. And so we got to see if it's possible and when will it actually get built? What adoption looks like? But I think those are the three scenarios where Bitcoin ends up being a store of value, but not much more. It's like either nobody wants Bitcoin at all. It's just a store of value and ends up serving like other store of values today. Or the third thing is the asset is a store of value, but the network and the technology stack ends up being used for other purposes. Where maybe one of those is a stablecoin on top of the security of Bitcoin. And therefore people use that for medium of exchange and Bitcoin is a store of value.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  Got it. And so can I ask about, you know, the notion of the hodl meme, right? Would you say that, you know, blue sky scenario, hyper Bitcoinization happens? It's a global reserve currency. Now do people switch from hodl to spendle? And I guess the answer is, why would I ever do that if there's a fixed supply? Why, why would I ever want to spend my Bitcoin?

• 7:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so there's a, there's a whole bunch of nuance here, right? I think first of all, hodl became this amazing meme, either intentionally or not. And it's a great rallying cry for the Bitcoin community. It's also a great punching bag for the non Bitcoin community. Cause they love to be like, oh, look at these idiots right there all talk about hodl. What the hell is hodl, whatever? And so I think the level set, the conversation is hodl is no different than Warren Buffett saying, buy great assets and hold them forever. That's the exact same message. Now, of course, Warren uses a, a full sentence and says it with a suit and tie on, similar to my suit and tie right now. But the Bitcoiners say it on Twitter in four letters. And so like, that is the same message is great assets, regardless of.

• 8:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Whether it's Bitcoin, real estate, stocks, bonds, whatever, if it is actually a great asset that is going to be durable over time, you do want to hold it for a very long period of time. It's a timeless investing principle. So I think that's really what they're trying to get at. Is this, you know, Hodl ends up just being that timeless investing principle, kind of in a more modern twist. In terms of like the meme changing, what I actually think is a really interesting part of this conversation is there has been a degradation of quality around goods and services across the world, but specifically in the United States as well, where the currency is being devalued. And so you can think of it as being cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And at the same time, whether people want to make a direct correlation

• 9:25Anthony Pompliano?

  or a direct connection or not, is that the goods and services have gotten cheaper and cheaper as well in terms of quality. The idea with Bitcoin becoming truly digital sound money, people will still spend it. They still need to eat. They still need to pay their rent. They still need to buy certain goods or services. But they would only spend it on the highest quality goods or services. And so in one argument or one viewpoint of some people in the Bitcoin community is that a return to digital sound money would actually force the producers of goods and services to increase their quality because it would have to be valuable enough for people to part with their Bitcoin, which adds this deflationary structure to it. Now again, will that happen? Will it not? It's a theory.

• 10:09Anthony Pompliano?

  It's a thesis of kind of the future of the world. But I do think that I would agree with the analysis that the quality of goods and services is definitely degraded over time. And that if you were to return to some sort of sound money property, whether it's digital or not, people would naturally increase the quality of the goods and services they produce in order to get people to part with that money that would have more value in the future. Do you agree?

• 10:36Speaker 02

  I I think that's partially true. I think there are certain industries, sectors and product types where, you know, they do go cheaper. For instance, I think in consumer packaged goods, you know, getting fewer potato chips in your bag of Doritos, right? At the same time, you know, we have other things like flat screen TVs, like anyone can afford a giant flat screen TV in their home. That's better quality than a TV the richest guy like, you know, 10, 15 years ago or 20 years ago had. I'm I'm follow TVs too closely, so I don't know the timeframes on that. But the point is, I think some things get better, some things get worse. I actually think I think the most important things like education, housing and healthcare, those are getting more expensive and those are not necessarily

• 11:20Speaker 02

  getting better. And I actually care more about that than necessarily, you know, my, you know, blender being one, that's the only blender I have to buy and it works forever. So that's like more of a concern for me, at least existentially than like the fewer amount of chips in a bag of Doritos, right?

• 11:39Anthony Pompliano?

  So the whole like shrinkflation thing, put that aside for a second. I agree that that's more like macroeconomic monetary policy, fiscal policy, inflation type driven stuff. So just set that aside for for one second. What I think is interesting, use the TV as an example, because I think that probably illuminates it best. There's two ways to measure the quality of the the good, right? One is, hey, is the screen better? Does it have better resolution? Do I have a smart TV or not smart TV? Like, like the features and functionality of it has absolutely improved. If you were to take a kind of, you know, your great grandparents television with the bunny ears used to get reception compared to a a smart TV today in most people's homes, it's like you're on a different planet, right?

• 12:23Anthony Pompliano?

  So like, that definitely has improved. But that's more of a technology improvement. But to your point also, like, the television that that family had, you know, 50 years ago or whatever, it's it lasted way longer than the televisions of today. And so I think that gets at more of the quality. Now, you could argue that the quality is partially susceptible To the technology. So the bulbs in the TV go out because they're, you know, getting better resolution or whatever. But I think that's really where people are getting at it. You can also look at food, I think is a really interesting thing. So, uh, Saif Dean, who wrote, uh, the Bitcoin Standard, the Fiat Standard, uh, he talks a lot about like Fiat currencies drive Fiat food.

• 13:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And so the whole idea here is, uh, you know, McDonald's fries, right? As like the, like the egregious example. They used to be made one way. Now they're made a different way. And how much of that is actually like you've degraded the quality of the food, even though you're still buying, you know, the same number of fries inside of a, uh,

• 13:24Speaker 02

  I think we're aligned. I think we're totally aligned on this. I think the, the big question mark that I would have is, does the continued squeeze to improve profitability and margins, um, is that a factor of capitalism? Or is that something that's more immutable and actually is dependent on the variable of the money supply being a certain size? Because I don't think we know until we run that experiment. But is it not, I mean, a business can only go so far with that as well, before consumers go, you know what, I'm not going in here anymore. So, for example, I think a good example is probably Shake Shack. We both love Shake Shack, I think. And they're

• 14:07Speaker 02

  really what McDonald's used to be. And now they're a premier brand. Now they're a lot more expensive than a McDonald's burger, but at the same time, the quality is there. So like the notion of Fiat world giving us all low quality things. I don't know that that's right. Um, one thing you said, uh, before I was on with, um, the previous guest, she was saying something about, you guys were talking about inequality a little bit. And I think like, that's probably more the crux of the issue. Because if you're really well off financially, you can afford the nice burger, you can afford the Tesla, you can afford these high quality things versus people on the lower end of the economic spectrum can't. So, I, I guess I don't know the answer that you're, you're

• 14:52Speaker 02

  confident on. Um, I'd be curious to see if there's like any Experiments have been run or any sort of modeling against how, you know, a fixed money supply would change the quality of goods because what an interesting thing to try to understand, right? Like, we all want better quality things. We all want, you know, our lives to be improved. We want services better. So, um, yeah, I, I, I think understanding more of that and how you can run such an experiment would be interesting.

• 15:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, to think about, um, you know, America has become so, uh, consumption based and, uh, so much of it is driven, uh, I think, and I think many people in the Bitcoin community would argue, uh, because ultimately, uh, you are financially incentivized to get rid of your money, right? Like, like they are quote unquote punishing you and we can argue over how big is the punishment or whatever, uh, but you're incentivized to get rid of the cash. And whether you're an investor or a consumer, that is the financial incentive. Now, I think to your point, the wealthy not only have enough money, but they also, I actually think it's more of an education gap more than anything. They understand that just because you're financially incentivized to get out of cash, doesn't mean that you have to go consume stuff, right? You actually can go

• 16:04Anthony Pompliano?

  and invest in things. And the idea of investing is that it will outperform, uh, kind of inflation and you'll end up actually getting more dollars, uh, or dollar value over time. But consumption in America, it's not just monetary policy driven, right? There's obviously a whole bunch of reasons why this has happened. Uh, but I do think a huge piece of it is we have essentially, uh, put the economy on steroids around consumption. If we were to return back to some sort of sound money system, and again, the gold bugs will yell and scream and say it's going to be analog gold, uh, the Bitcoiners yell and scream, say it'll be digital gold, right? Well, just for a second, just think of the principles of sound money. It's outside of the system and no one can go ahead and, uh, create more of it. Um, in that environment, what ends up happening is exactly

• 16:48Anthony Pompliano?

  what happened on the gold system. The money gets more valuable over time. It actually grows with, uh, kind of the cost of goods. And so you don't actually have a world where today, an average American family, take away the historic inflation we're experiencing, just in a, you know, pre pandemic, everything around them was Getting more expensive and likely they weren't actually making enough money to keep up. So it's the feeling of the rat race. They can't get ahead. All this type of stuff. If you instead were able to go to a system where now the value of the money that they had, one is they don't have to go into the financial markets and become a professional investor. Like it is insane to me that we ask firefighters, teachers, accounting managers,

• 17:31Anthony Pompliano?

  marketers, people who are consultants, et cetera, go to work every day, be as best in the world as you can at your regular day job that you probably enjoy doing. And oh, by the way, go home on nights and weekends and become a professional investor because now you cannot save dollars and reach financial security in this country. Like that's insane to me.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  Well, I would push back. I don't love, I agree with you. I don't love the fact that we are pushing everyone to become individual stock pickers and individual investors. You and I both know it's very hard. Most people are going to underperform and we want people focused on their craft, not everyone just making speculative bets and nobody making things, right? So I, I mean, you know, I, I think your, your advice to young folk is certainly, you know, you guys like to stack sats, which just means average into Bitcoin, right? But we've had that sort of mechanism through things like averaging into Vanguard, which is an index bond or, you know, a basket of safe dividend stocks.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  So, you know, there are things that you can do without being Warren Buffett or without thinking about it. You can have, you know, money invested at a regular interval. So you're not, you know, trying to time the market or get fancy. So we, we do have mechanisms for those things. I think a problem, you know, over the pandemic and in the nineties was people do get sucked up into speculative mania. So actually this, this translates into my next question for you. So, um, I don't know how much we want to talk about this, but I actually am amused right now because Pump, you were basically very early, earlier than most of these VCs to the idea of web three.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  And I remember your tokenize the world mantra. And so you were ahead of a lot of these guys. And now you've you've taken a look at things and have sort of said, you know what, actually, Bitcoin's the winner in the space and there's some fun experiments, but um, I'm curious how you got there and what your thoughts are on this, you know, like admittedly, it's it's a VC backed bubble web three. And and so there have been a lot of interesting conversations online, but like you were you were sort of ahead of it. And then you went through the process and now you're back out the other end and are like, okay, you know, Bitcoin is the answer. We don't need this whole baroque, just sprawling empire of 20,000 dog coins and whatever else is happening there.

• 20:00Anthony Pompliano?

  So, uh, man, there's a lot here. Uh, there's a couple of things. So there's probably, it's not just, uh, tokenized the world. Uh, it's with the NFTs. I mean, most people forget in, uh, 2020. I mean, I wrote a huge piece and I said, hey, this is going to absolutely explode. I think the market cap was like less than $50 million, uh, in the entire space. Uh, and I pretty much called it in terms of in that piece, I said, Phileus is going to end up being one of the best digital artists in the world, ended up selling $20 million of art over the next year or so. So like, uh, I I don't want to necessarily say that, uh, I've got like a crystal ball or anything like that, but I just spend a lot of time talking to people who are on the ground and you can kind of feel the the, uh, the world shifting sometimes, right? You can see like, oh, there's a lot of

• 20:42Anthony Pompliano?

  energy going here. There's a lot of people, a lot of capital, uh, starting to build up in one area. And so that's more so what I try to understand is as as a market observer, where is uh, people's time, attention and capital starting to flow? And likely that will continue for some period of time. Now, to your point, if you look at something like the tokenization component, uh, my, uh, kind of loyalty, if you will, to that idea has remained completely steadfast. I fully believe that we are going to get a transition from, uh, uh, into a third kind of regime. Now, what does that mean? When I originally came up with this idea, I gave a very simple framework, which was, uh, up until the 1970s or 80s, we had a completely analog asset world that analog

• 21:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Asset world meant that there was physical stock certificates, there was physical bonds, there was physical deeds to your home, all that stuff. When we got the internet, we transitioned over time from an analog asset world to what I call electronic asset world. So the electronic Q CIP based world. Now, this means that we have centralized custodians, we have centralized clearing houses. What you actually are trading around is a Q CIP, which is a string of letters and numbers on these centralized databases. It's not analog, so it's better than that, but ultimately it's still heavily centralized. Now, my theory, which I still hold, is that we were going to transition from electronic Q CIPs to something that was more digitally native. Right? And at the time, the only thing really that was out there was, could you basically create, uh, people were calling them security tokens at the time.

• 22:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Could you create, uh, tokens that would end up actually doing this? Now, to be clear, there is zero innovation around the actual asset itself of if it's Apple stock, it still represents one Apple stock. This was more of like a back end, super nuanced, like financial plumbing, uh, analysis of like, man, I bet you these people would really love to be able to trade faster and cheaper, not have two day settlement times, be able to do it internationally, like all this stuff. So it's kind of like nerdy type things. I just probably was, uh, a little bit more, uh, adept at, uh, presenting it as an idea in like the tokenized the world, uh, um, kind of marketing message.

• 22:51Anthony Pompliano?

  But what I will say is that I have zero, uh, loyalty to like where it got built. At the time, most of the technology that is either now available, uh, or is being built and kind of been proposed on top of Bitcoin was not there. So at the time, it was like the only places that people were even experimenting with this stuff was, uh, on Ethereum and talking about some new chains and things like that. I think that these ideas that we're talking about in, uh, web three, I 100% think that they're going to get built. I heavily question whether they're going to get built with the current technology sets that people are building on and also doing it with the current, uh, uh, kind of incentive systems. So I'll give you two.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  And also adoption. I mean, Little pesky thing there.

• 23:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, well, for put adoption, I think, ends up being a function of does it work? Is it structured correctly? How do you fund it? Like, there's all these elements that go into it. And then if you can do it correctly, then the adoption ends up being kind of the result. Right. But I'll give you two examples. So, uh, stable coins is, uh, is a great example. I think it's pretty hard for people to argue that stable coins, which again are just tokenized fiat currencies. So the whole idea of tokenize the world, well, one of the things that you're tokenizing is another asset, which is a fiat currency. Stable coins. Got it. Okay. How do you do that? You back it one to one. It is a digital token that is backed by fiat currency sitting somewhere in the account. We can argue over which ones are better, who does better auditing, what, forget all that. Stable coins is back one to one.

• 24:23Anthony Pompliano?

  We have seen the world is going to use those. There's like a hundred and fifty billion dollars of market cap, or whatever it is today of stable coins. Now, the question that I think that a lot of folks probably should be spending time on is not are stable coins going to be a thing or not? Again, is it going to be a central bank digital currency? Will it be a private company? Will it be some sort of decentralized thing? Who, who cares about that part of the conversation yet? It's just where is it going to end up getting built? And I think that now what you're seeing is the Bitcoin community via the proposal for Taro, uh, through Lightning Labs is saying, well, wait a second. If we are going to have these digital assets that are going to be these tokens,

• 25:04Anthony Pompliano?

  why would you want to build it on any other foundation than the most decentralized, secure foundation? And again, I don't know how this is going to play out. But what I do know is that the idea of tokenizing a fiat currency, which we call a stablecoin, that five, 10 years ago, eight years ago, whatever it was, that may have been seen as something that may or may not happen. But what I do know is if I take a fiat currency on most crypto exchanges, not all, but most, and I wire money into the crypto exchange, I touch a stablecoin. They keep it in the stablecoin until I go ahead and I purchase whatever asset I'm going to purchase. And so in some way, we get this world where like, okay.

• 25:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, again, you can argue that real estate is not going to get tokenized or stocks won't get tokenized, whatever. But like, we already now see that there are other assets where the world is going to adopt it. And so I think that what the competition is going to come down to is not, are we going to have these assets or not? It's actually where are they going to get built? And my big question to most people building outside of the Bitcoin ecosystem is why is your system, your technology, your stack, superior to build on top of? Some people think they have good answers, some people don't. What I think is encouraging about the space is there's somewhat free market competition, and we're going to see what happens. 20 years from now, you and I will do this, and we'll be like, hey, man,

• 26:30Anthony Pompliano?

  stablecoins ended up being a thing, here's where they got built, and we'll have this whole, like, really smart analysis in hindsight as to why that is the specific place that it got built. I don't think that we know today where it's going to end up winning.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  Sure. And the stablecoin concept, you know, Pomp, I'm a digital marketer, just like you were back in the day. Like, that sort of technology to allow digital payments to be seamless and fast and not have to go through, you know, Visa or, you know, another, you know, process, although Visa is actually a pretty good company, and they're pretty fast about processing payments and with security. So I really like Visa. But, you know, the notion of a stablecoin actually makes a lot of sense. I think the concern, the concerns of stablecoins are some of the bad actors in the space that either with malintent,

• 27:18Speaker 02

  or perhaps just not thinking through some of the impact of algorithmic stablecoins, or supply or demand-side pressures, or, you know, any number of things that cause, you know, a death spiral in a stablecoin where people think their assets were stable. And look, I think most of that, all of that's happening on all the Ethereum-based stablecoins, right? So we haven't seen, you know, there's definitely a lot of controversy around Tether, for example, but it hasn't imploded yet, and so...

• 27:54Anthony Pompliano?

  This is a really important point, right? And I think that there's no simple way to say it, so I'm going to just say it kind of as raw. And bluntly, as I think will resonate with people, both sides of the debate have reached levels of insanity. It's kind of like politics, right? Where like the Republicans pulled so far one way and the Democrats pulled so far another way. There's a bunch of people who show up and they're like, you both are insane, right? And they're just like, this is crazy town. And so I think that if you bring that to kind of the Bitcoin, the pro Bitcoin audience, and let's say the anti Bitcoin audience, it has now been pulled and pulled

• 28:36Anthony Pompliano?

  and pulled and pulled to the extremes, where you have a subset of the Bitcoin community, who literally, I mean, yesterday, we're going after people who have probably defended Bitcoin publicly, more than all of them combined, right? And trying to like, take their heads off and be like, you're not a real Bitcoin. Okay, fine. Then you have the like, anti Bitcoin, anti tether, you know, whatever crowd, who like, they've been yelling and screaming about stable coins for how long now? Three, four, five, six years? And they literally were so caught up on like, tethers a fraud, tethers this, tethers this, that they missed the one that actually blew up. Like, if you actually weren't so like, be, you know, being insane and religious about it, and you had just constantly reevaluated the market,

• 29:20Anthony Pompliano?

  actually, they probably would have got it right. It's just that by the point that the one that blew up, they were still yelling about the other one, which is backed one to one, according to the documentation that we have today. So my point in this ends up being, humans are humans. They're doing this in politics, they're doing this in finance, they're doing this across society. And a huge piece of it is social media and kind of mainstream media, all the things that people can talk about. But what I do think is really important is, if you're going to look at this entire space, you have to ask yourself, are you looking at it from one of three angles? Short term, long term, price,

• 30:02Anthony Pompliano?

  or I'm sorry, short or long term, price or fundamentals, and then what I'll call Western world gamification, or rest of

• 30:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Of world, human impact. And so, short or long term is pretty clear. Like, either you're looking at like, what happened yesterday, what happened today? Oh, it went down, you know, I'm a critic, I'm right. Oh, it went up, I'm a bull, I'm right. Okay, that's fine. I think most people who end up being pro this technology are very long-term thinking. The second thing is price or fundamentals. It's fun to look at price. I'm just as susceptible to anybody else. It goes up a lot, it's exciting. It goes down a lot, like, you're like, fuck, this sucks, right? But at the end of the day, if you can keep refocusing on the fundamentals, I think that there are very specific technologies, and Bitcoin is the best example, where it continues to gain adoption, it continues to get stronger from a computer network standpoint, security, all that.

• 30:53Anthony Pompliano?

  But the third one, I think, is actually the important conversation, because it eliminates all the bullshit. Which is, when you evaluate this, are you looking at it through the Western developed market, like, financial market gamification lens? That's where you see people on Twitter yelling and screaming, is it an inflation edge? Is it not? Is it this? Is it this? Is it like, at the end of the day, that conversation almost doesn't matter. I think that what ends up being the lens that's very difficult for people in the developed world to look through is the human impact component of it. And so, when you look at that, that, to me, is the story. But guess what? There's no metric that moves up and down on a day-to-day basis that measures, like, is it getting adopted more?

• 31:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Is it having impact or more? Like, that's a 10, 20, 30-year story that, over time, I think, will become clearer and clearer. And the places that where we're seeing the early signs of this happening are the exact places that critics can point to and be like, that's not real. You know, El Salvador only has 6 million people, 6 and a half million people in their population. Oh, I heard that the politician's a bad guy. And it's like, look. Does that just the canary in the coal mine and now eventually a bigger country will go to it? Or are they the only example? Time will tell.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  And to be clear, I actually, I don't hate at all the idea if I thought of it, I thought of this before sort of Bitcoin in a sense, being a little bit of QE for, you know, inquisitive technology geeks around the world who decided to buy into it. And it's probably entrepreneurial people, it's probably people who, you know, have taken their gains and are doing interesting things. So like, that was actually always a cool thing to me because you saw a lot of very wealthy people like, you know, Jack Dorsey, et cetera. You know, even like giving Bitcoin grants away in South Africa, like that, how cool is that? I mean, that's, that's something I think no one should, should, no one's going to get upset about that part.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  Back to your point about, you know, Wall Street arguing narratives, anything with a char, there's going to be narratives around that humans wrap their mind around. Um, for me, I, I think that Bitcoin is most interesting as a CS project and also as a marketer. The whole notion of, you know, getting this global community to come together and rally around open source is like fairly nerdy and cool. Like if you stripped away all the, you know, fiat versus Bitcoin versus Ethereum, Dogecoin drama. Like if you were to just look at the actual organization without organizations, um, I think that that's super interesting.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  And I guess to that question, I'll just ask one more on the tether thing because so Bitcoins is beautiful decentralized.

• 33:39Speaker 02

  You know, network and then tether is fairly centralized, right? So I think a lot of the tether FUD will go away at some point when, at some point they're big enough and Bitcoin, Bitcoin even being decentralized is big enough that it has to play with all of the rest of the world, right? And that's like a good thing. That's like something that I know you've been talking about for a while where hey Bitcoin's going to be on everyone's balance sheets. You know, institutions will adopt it. Um, I think for that to happen, like the level of transparency in this space is going to probably need to meet certain standards and. So with that said, it's probably net positive if if Tether ended up being a massive fraud, like having that happen and be out in the open and having Bitcoin reprice Discover,

• 34:22Speaker 02

  like that would show that Bitcoin's anti-fragile. I think you'd get a lot of net new buyers on that dip. Like, I actually don't think Tether going down would be the worst thing in the world if it happened. So, or a lot of people are like, oh, if Tether blows up, it will die. I'm like, probably not. Like, what if it could be a cleansing for the system? So I'm spinning you a bullish thesis on if Tether does turn out to implode and...

• 34:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so I don't have any more information on Tether other than what everyone else has, right? Uh, I think that going after, um, the stable coins where there's one-to-one backing, right? And again, I don't have the data in front of me. I could look it up. But, uh, if you look at Tether and you look at USDC, everyone's yelling and screaming about, uh, Tether. Okay, well, USDC is growing in popularity. So let's say that if in six months, again, I'm not claiming this is gonna happen, but let's say in six months that USDC, uh, surpasses Tether in market cap and Tether's importance in the world goes down using the market cap as a proxy. Again, if that was to happen, would all of a sudden the Tether truthers all turn around and be like, "USDC is not back"? Like, like, it's like a stupid argument.

• 35:27Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think that what we're watching is that there is a high, high degree of overlap between the anti-Bitcoin, anti-Tether, and anti-Tesla crowd. And what ends up happening is those three things are breaking people's brains from the legacy financial system because they all have aspects that they hate.

• 35:50Speaker 02

  The the anti-Tesla crowd is, and the pro-Tesla crowd are especially crazy. I actually think they're crazier, like, more at the extremes than than the crypto people.

• 35:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, we gotta get you, we gotta get you more on on Twitter. Uh, listen, the Tesla people are crazy, but there's not, there's nowhere crazier than, uh, than the Bitcoin crypto Twitter, the whole thing. But but here's what, the reason why I say that is like the high overlap between anti-Bitcoin, anti-Tether, and anti-Tesla is because these things stand for so much of what they've been trained to not like. Right? And so this whole idea of a open source project that shows up and grew at one point was over a trillion dollars in market cap. That is insane to these people. They're like, this is, this is crazy. But what, go ahead.

• 36:42Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, so, you know, one thought I had while you were talking is, so, it doesn't seem like if, and a lot of the Bitcoin maximalists talk about this, that Bitcoin is, you know, a discovered, it's like gold, it's a commodity. We discovered it. It's a discovery. It's not, you know, something that we made. It's not a company. There's no head. So, like, the notion of regulating Bitcoin itself obviously doesn't make sense, but it probably does make sense to have regulations around the stablecoin ecosystem. I think it's like, if you're gonna put your money into something that is stable, you know, there should be guide rails. And the reason is, when those implode, they can have effects that spill over into other aspects

• 37:25Speaker 02

  of the financial system. And, you know, the, someone who was told to put, you know, their life savings in this thing that was gonna generate 14% a month or whatever, now loses, you know, the $100,000 they had, and they can't get FDIC from that. Like, that's like heartbreaking, right? So, so maybe, maybe it's the decentralized aspects, you know, you wouldn't, you wouldn't want government to screw with, and they couldn't anyway, right? But the centralized aspects and the sort of people who wanna build products on top, like, regulation there actually might make more sense. Is that, do you agree with that?

• 38:02Anthony Pompliano?

  So, I think there's two separate components. There's decentralized and centralized. Where you and I, I think, will see directly eye to eye is that most of the people claiming to be decentralized are, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say they're confused, but probably it ends up being more of a marketing term than anything. When you think of Bitcoin itself, I always remind folks, the US dollar is not regulated. Like, there is no regulation on the US dollar. You cannot put the dollar in jail. You cannot financially find the inanimate, physical piece of paper. It is a unregulated piece of paper, right? Because it's an inanimate object. Now, what is regulated is the people and companies that transact in it, hold it, use it, etc.

• 38:46Anthony Pompliano?

  And the same thing is true in the Bitcoin community. Bitcoin is the equivalent, it's like a digital inanimate object, right? In the sense of, you can't put Bitcoin in jail, you can't find Bitcoin. But what you can do is you can regulate the companies and individuals that transact in it, hold it, all this stuff. And so at a very, very high level, all of the old rules apply. Like, if you commit a crime using Bitcoin or dollars, you get in trouble if you get caught. Right? If you don't pay your taxes, you get in trouble. If you do nefarious things or bad things, if you commit fraud, whatever, like, you're gonna get in trouble. The question becomes, where is there a difference? And so something like commodities versus security, right? It seems pretty clear Bitcoin's gonna be labeled as a commodity. Regulators are openly saying that publicly now. But if it had been labeled a security, that would change the way that the people and companies

• 39:31Anthony Pompliano?

  that transact in Bitcoin would be regulated. So I think that's an important part of, like, the Bitcoin regulation story. Now, the point you brought up about stable coins, I think, is, again, kind of a signal of what's to come. And we saw Gary Ginsler on CNBC earlier this week, talking about the idea of disclosures. He was saying, "Listen, your bank deposits, they have to have disclosures. What are they doing with it? The money market fund, they have to have disclosures. What are they doing with it? And it's so that people can underwrite the risk that they're taking." And so, at a minimum, whether people like it or not, and I'm not here to comment on whether I think it's good or bad, I do think that we are going to see a significant increase in the amount of disclosures that have to happen from certain corners of the industry. Now, stable coins is the obvious one.

• 40:16Speaker 02

  People are making crazy, crazy promises to retail investors. All right, how much more time do we have left?

• 40:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Keep going, I got time, keep going.

• 40:23Speaker 02

  Awesome, awesome. Okay, I have more questions. So, all right, explain to, so imagine, take, like, your average family in America, and, you know, they...

• 40:34Speaker 02

  Go to, you know, church every Sunday. They go to the park. They go to their vacation home. You know, they live their life. They've, they've just heard about Bitcoin. They're, they're learning about the notion of decentralized currencies and, you know, they kind of got gold and they, they get the internet, they use Facebook, whatnot, et cetera, et cetera. Um, can you, can you explain Bitcoin mining to someone like that? Pretend they know nothing about Bitcoin, like the absolute least amount. Can you do it in like 20 seconds or 30 seconds? I'm, I'm just curious because that has always been something that when I talk to, you know, friends and family about like, they can't quite grok.

• 41:15Anthony Pompliano?

  In terms of why it's important or how it works?

• 41:18Speaker 02

  Um, well, maybe like short, short version of the mechanism and also how it works.

• 41:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. So, so the best way to think about currencies is that the country that has the best military has the global reserve currency. And it's always been about offensive power. If you had the best offense in the military, you then got the global reserve currency, hence America US dollar. In a digital world or in a cyber world, it's all about who has the best defense. And therefore whoever has the best defense will end up being able to put forward the global reserve currency. Now, what's unique about Bitcoin is that Bitcoin is the strongest computer network in the world, measured by the computing power that is running it, right? That, that's underlying it. And so therefore this thing that is really

• 42:08Anthony Pompliano?

  an open source project, it is not a country, it is not a company, it is not an individual, is the strongest computer network in the world, which means it has the best defense. Therefore Bitcoin ends up, uh, in many people's eyes, rising to global reserve status, whether it's the only one or one of global reserve status, uh, in the world over time. Now, how does it get the strongest computer network in the world? Well, you can take one of two paths. You can take a centralized path, similar to Amazon. Jeff Bezos sits in a conference room and he says, "We are going to invest $1 billion. We're going to build a data center. We're going to put, buy computers, put them in there and then we're going to run them and them to do whatever computational work we want them to do. That was the top-down centralized view of building out computing power. Bitcoin instead says, you know what we're gonna do?

• 42:52Anthony Pompliano?

  We're going to issue an economic bounty or a reward. Anyone in the world who plugs in a computer and starts to run our software. We are going to give out this reward approximately every 10 minutes. And so it started out, it used to be 50 Bitcoin every 10 minutes. It then got cut in half, went to 25 Bitcoin every 10 minutes, then 12 and a half. Eventually 6.25 Bitcoin every 10 minutes. And so the whole idea of mining is simply that there is a economic reward. It's like a carrot that's stuck out there every 10 minutes. And people around the world say, I am going to buy a special type of computer. I'm gonna plug it in the wall. I'm gonna take my electricity. I'm gonna convert it to computing power and I'm going to essentially rent it.

• 43:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Or I'm going to give it to this network. And based on doing that, I will get a piece of the economic reward over time. Now, there's a bunch of nuance in there. But now, all of a sudden, rather than have that centralized viewpoint that required a CEO with a vision and capital and all the things to go and build the Amazon data center. Instead, you have this fully decentralized system around the world where I don't know the name of 99.9.99999% of miners. I have no clue who they are, where they are, or anything. But guess what? They are working to protect Bitcoin's network. And so when that occurs, what you get is a very unique system

• 44:17Anthony Pompliano?

  where miners, all they're doing is they're just pointing computing power at the same place. And then, because there is such a high degree of defense, which means it's very hard to hack or attack. Now, all of a sudden, you continue to get Bitcoin doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is just simply producing these blocks of transactions approximately every 10 minutes. And that idea ends up being what makes Bitcoin so valuable.

• 44:45Speaker 02

  I love it. So, you know, you explain that very in a way that's easy to understand for someone who gets computers. My, one of my, one of my thoughts with basically the, like, the notion of explaining all this, and I guess you have to explain all of it with the Fed and existing money systems, is it is a little, you know, complex and baroque for, you know, the average person to understand. And I guess maybe to a point, they don't even need to understand, you know, how the mining itself works. They just need to see that they have Cash App on their phone and they can, you know, send money to someone else for, for a contractor work on their house or whatnot.

• 45:27Anthony Pompliano?

  But you know who, you know who understands inflation? People in America don't understand how inflation works. You go to Argentina, there ain't a person in Argentina that don't understand inflation.

• 45:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess they're forced to, huh?

• 45:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Because, because it's a, it's a everyday reminder, right? And so like, you know, this is

• 45:44Speaker 02

  We have that right now. We have that right now with gas prices. Everyone sees it, you know, every day, right?

• 45:48Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, people, people forget, all of a sudden, gas prices go, and now, by the way, they may not actually know the true answer. It may just be talking points that were fed to them or whatever. But how many people in America, if you just walk down the street in any American city, five or 10 years ago, and you ask them about inflation, could even tell you what that meant? Like, what is inflation? Now, there's a way higher percentage of people because it's a problem that they have to deal with. And so, we had an 11-year-old kid come on the show one day. He just happened to be here in the office. He's a family member, somebody who, who works here. And I said to him something about inflation. And he immediately started talking about it. Like, I was like, this kid's smarter than most economists.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  Parents wouldn't buy him a toy.

• 46:31Anthony Pompliano?

  It's just like, he, he just, and he probably, again, it's somewhat of an anecdote, right? Because obviously, his brother talks about it a lot, like all this type of stuff. But like, that's what ends up happening in these other economies. Argentina, I don't know what the latest inflation numbers are, but at one point, I think six months ago, it was like 50% annual inflation levels. You know what inflation is if you live in that environment and every day you go to the grocery store and the prices are different.

• 46:55Speaker 02

  Yep, and so we fully agree and I think that no, no one can make the argument that a poorly run government and poorly run state that's been fiscally irresponsible, um, you know, should get to, you know, we shouldn't look to them for guidance on what we're doing, you know, and but there are other countries, obviously, like us in the UK that at least to date have, you know, managed growth via fiat currency, uh, pretty well to get to this point. Um, so I also think, you know, one other thought that I had, I was having a conversation with Jack Dorsey, um, last summer about this. I own a Bitcoin because

• 47:35Speaker 02

  of a conversation with Jack. Um, I figured I couldn't, you know, have intelligent thoughts with others about this without having skinned the game and, you know, going through the process and, and learning all about it. And so, um, I actually think it's a positive thing to run multiple economic experiments at once because we don't know what we don't know, right? So like Jay Powell said today, hey, you know, we didn't realize that inflation wasn't going to just be transitory. He literally said this out loud. So they actually did think that inflation would be transitory. So for better or for worse, um, I think that

• 48:14Speaker 02

  we have to have this conversation that maybe our leadership is not so competent. Um, maybe Bitcoin's an answer, maybe something else is, maybe how we're, um, you know, like you like to talk about these forever wars. I think those all need to be stopped. Transitioning to energy independence also would help it. I guess there's like a myriad of things happening at the macro level at the same time right now that are all being done poorly that just one thing that I'll say is I don't, I don't know that simply switching to a fixed money supply would solve everything. I think it would be an interesting thing to try some more. And so I think we should pay attention to these, uh, nations that are adopting Bitcoin.

• 48:59Speaker 02

  That's looking like for them. Um, I guess it's too new of a thing to say how it's worked out. Obviously, since you know, there's still price discovery happening with Bitcoin and it's not, you know, at the stable state where I think, you know, it could make a lot more sense for areas to try out. So.

• 49:19Anthony Pompliano?

  So here's what, here's what I would say, right? Is that um, you can't solve the sins of decades, if not centuries in a couple of weeks. And I think that people forget the central bankers can't do it, the politicians can't do it, and the technologists can't do it. And so what you have to do is you have to approach all of these problems from a first principle standpoint. And so if I said to you, hey, let's go, uh, try to create a digital sound money in the mid 2000s. There are very few people who would have been like, that's going to improve food quality. They'd been like, dude, you sound like Alex Jones, right? Like that's, that sounds insane.

• 50:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, what happened is that somebody went to go create digital currency. And they, over 40 years of research and development that went into digital currencies, all of uh, kind of the cipher punk uh, ethos, all of the things around proof of work, even the creation of TCP IP, all that stuff. Eventually someone cracked the code and we got Bitcoin. Then the rest of the world started to study it. And we're only 13 years or so into this whole exercise. And what I think people are starting to realize is, oh my God, this is the first principle solution to a lot of problems in the world.

• 50:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Because now I can trace back and say those problems were actually rooted in the corruption of money. And I'll give you one other example that I know that uh, I think, or I think will resonate with you. Facebook and Google have tried for a decade to bring internet to people around the world. They've tried drones, they've tried hot air balloons, they've tried driving trucks on the streets, they've tried everything possible from mesh networks to literally trying to become aviation companies. None of it has worked at scale sustainably. Elon Musk, Elon Musk is now creating a satellite network around Earth that will beam the internet

• 51:29Anthony Pompliano?

  down to people. And so in a way SpaceX, which started out with no ambition whatsoever to bring internet to the world, they simply wanted to be able to launch a rocket and re-land it to bring the cost of rocketry down, has backed into a first principle solution to how do we bring internet to everyone around the world in an affordable way. And so I think that's very similar to what happened with Bitcoin is Bitcoin, the true innovation of Bitcoin around the creation of a blockchain that would allow for a asset in the digital world to not be double spent, is backing into creating all these other solutions or all these other kind of tertiary impact. And that I think is what gets people really

• 52:13Anthony Pompliano?

  excited about it is like Bitcoin solves this? It's a great meme. Directly, no. But indirectly, I think that it has impact on all these different areas where people are like, damn, like, yeah, that does make a lot more sense than maybe it initially did when I first found out about Bitcoin.

• 52:29Speaker 02

  It would be cool if the whole Starlink or SpaceX Starlink network was powered by Doge somehow. I would love to see them figure that out. Um, no, you're right. And actually, I will, something that I've, I've actually said in the past about Bitcoin in particular, and I'll, I'll admit I was wrong in this. I, I think, um, listening to Sailor on Lex's, Lex Friedman's podcast was really interesting. Um, so you said it yourself, right? Like, we're only 13 years into Bitcoin adoption. So people have compared things like, you know, how Quickly it took Uber to get from, you know, no one knowing it to ever inhaling a cab of the phone instead of, you know,

• 53:13Speaker 02

  side of the road with their hand in the air. And actually, i- if you were to zoom out and you were to take like the most macro of macro perspectives, and look at how long it takes currency regimes regimes to change, then actually, even though the internet is an accelerant, um, I think something as serious and ingrained as money, like you actually could make the, you know, twenty, fifty, hundred year argument. And I know it's, it might be one that doesn't come true in your lifetime. Like it's one of those, like, maybe it's like this longer evolutionary argument that you're not going to live to see come to fruition,

• 53:52Speaker 02

  but then does come to fruition. Um, I, I think like there's probably cases to be made there with digital disruption of things that previously weren't digital that are super ingrained. Another example is religion. So if you look at data, there's now the low, the fewest amount of people believe in organized religion um, in America at any point in history, we're at like an all time low. And I wrote a Substack post on this and why? And it's basically due to what um, is known as the spotlight effect in psychology. So, imagine you're looking at a stage and there's a spotlight on a tree and all you see is that tree. But there's a whole, you know, big scene happening behind it. And if you turn the lights on, you can see everything.

• 54:34Speaker 02

  And so the internet has done that for people's, you know, faith in God and them being able to see all these other religions, see, you know, how science says we do things. But even with all of that, like, that disruption is like, like a very slow trend line. Um, and I just, it's like an easy prediction to call. I said, I said it would happen uh, ten years ago and I've got some blog posts where I'm like, it's gonna be here. And it's like, it's like this really simple to see linear thing. But it's still, you know, religion could be with us, you know, another hundred years, two hundred, three hundred years. For some people, it might be forever, at least at the ID, at the idea stage. So, um, I'm just saying with money, you know, I, I do think people get it wrong when they compare it to a mobile app.

• 55:17Speaker 02

  Because installing a mobile app is such a, it, it, it's not the same thing as running an economy via, you know, via a certain, you know, methodology and certain plumbing and certain ecosystem, right?

• 55:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, what, what's interesting to me about, uh, um,

• 55:35Anthony Pompliano?

  The difference, maybe, of timelines, like, there's a timeline or a duration mismatch going on, which is, you see it in the conversation. Both the pro Bitcoin and the anti Bitcoin crowd are literally talking about what happened in the last eight months, right? Like, like, like, that's

• 55:57Speaker 02

  We're all conditioned to, from Wall Street.

• 55:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 56:00Speaker 02

  Like, that's what we're conditioned to.

• 56:01Anthony Pompliano?

  The financial markets, absolutely. But also, we're just human. Like, what's gonna happen in 10 years? I can't imagine that. Well, guess what? I couldn't imagine that 10 years ago, right? And now here we are. And so I think that the people I admire the most in thinking about a lot of these technology cycles and in thinking of investing, they have the longest time horizons. The longest time horizons sound, in today's age, like, can I think five years? Like, I was talking to somebody literally the other day, and they were like, yeah, we're a long-term holder. We hold for three years or more. And I was like, I was like, man, okay, sure. But I think actually what we're watching is probably

• 56:41Anthony Pompliano?

  a 50-plus-year evolution of a thing that has never happened in the world before. There's never been a currency that has been adopted globally where there was not a country behind it.

• 56:52Speaker 02

  Right. If governments are gonna be toppled, it's gonna be like a multi-decade-long thing. It's not gonna be

• 56:57Anthony Pompliano?

  It either had a country behind it, or it was a physical asset, right? Like gold. But outside of those two things, we've never seen this before. And so I think that is ultimately where we are going to have to be patient. But it's a long-term patience coupled with short-term urgency. Every single day, people around the world get up and they say, I gotta make sure I'm mining. I gotta make sure that I'm using self-custody. I gotta make sure that I'm building my piece of infrastructure around the network, or whatever, whatever your contribution to it is. Short-term urgency, but if you couple that with long-term patience, like Bitcoin 13 years ago gets started to today.

• 57:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Go talk to people who were on the forums in 2010, 2011. We're winning, right? Would be their approach.

• 57:49Speaker 02

  I like the video of that very well spoken fellow in the room to no one explaining Bitcoin. And he was actually like really thoughtful. I remember seeing that one years ago. Don't know his name.

• 58:00Anthony Pompliano?

  It is, uh, I think what you're talking about is Andreas Antonopoulos. I think it's the person who's, uh, who's giving the presentation and there's like four people sitting in the stands, right?

• 58:10Speaker 02

  So let's talk about this, uh, cause he's.

• 58:12Anthony Pompliano?

  One last question. So ask your best one and then wait, then I gotta go.

• 58:15Speaker 02

  All right, great. Um, so Bitcoin at a billion dollars is a small fun internet project with some nerds. Okay. Bitcoin at a trillion dollars is an industry. And so I guess my question is, do you think it's time for some of the personalities in the space? You just said we won. I actually think that personally flipping from the toxic maxi mindset to like a, hey, this is gonna help things and have like sort of flip from, um, I like when Elon said the other day, look, level, you know, heal the world. He said something positive like that. Um, do you think it's time now that it's grown up?

• 58:55Speaker 02

  Um, are they never gonna get off that hill of telling people to have fun staying poor? Um, what happens there?

• 59:02Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that there is, uh, a couple of different factions of, uh, of the world when it comes to Bitcoin. There are some people, you know, maybe you put up Paul Tudor Jones, Stanley Druckenmiller, they're investors. They say, hey, I put Bitcoin into my portfolio. I'll take it out. I'll put it in. I'll take it out. I'm just an investor. It's just one of many, uh, tools that I can put in the portfolio. There are, uh, folks that I will put into, uh, the builder exclusive category. I don't give a shit. You probably don't even see them on Twitter. They're not like, they're just building, right? Whether they're open source developers, whether they're miners, whatever, like they could care less about the, uh, kind of the, the nonsense online and they're just building.

• 59:42Anthony Pompliano?

  There is a world of pro Bitcoin people who end up talking about it a lot online, who end up kind of sharing their ideas. Sometimes they're right, sometimes they're wrong, but they're willing to put themselves out there and talk about it. But they tend to be fairly reasonable, rational, kind, they want to learn, all that type of stuff. And then there's a subset of people who are just assholes. Like, there's no other way to put it around it, right? And I've said for a really long time that claiming that you are only focused on one thing is perfectly fine. Like, focus is an amazing quality to have. It's actually a superpower, and many people don't

• 1:00:26Anthony Pompliano?

  have it in this world. So like, I'm all on board. But when you then use that as an excuse to just be an asshole to people, what ends up happening is that a bunch of people just tune you out. And so we saw this happen. There was a lot of people who don't share their information or their thoughts anywhere near the way that they probably should. And when they did that, they were yelling and screaming about projects or companies that failed in the space, and no one listened to them. And the reason is because they actually weren't communicating. And this is not something that's unique to Bitcoin. This is true across all industries and all points in time. You can have

• 1:01:08Anthony Pompliano?

  the greatest ideas in the world. If you can't communicate them effectively, then it doesn't matter. You have to be able to communicate effectively. And so I always point, I don't want to name names of folks who I think are doing it right, because people will say, oh, you didn't say this other person, whatever. But there are a number of people who, from the outside most, would say, oh, those are leaders in the Bitcoin community. You'll never hear them go after anybody. You'll never hear them be derogatory towards people. You'll never see them attack folks. Like, they are positioning or discussing these ideas from a position of

• 1:01:48Anthony Pompliano?

  maturity, of effective communication, all these things. They may, behind closed doors, be like, that's the biggest scam in the world, talking about something, right? Like, in their head, that's what they're thinking. But they understand that the effectiveness of your message is just as important as what the message itself is.

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  We should give a shout to Niraj. I think he's one of the most balanced voices in the space. And look, he could be doing comms at any Fortune 500 company and he's chosen, you know, crypto to be the adult in the room. I think, I think he's my favorite balanced voice. He's just such a great guy, too.

• 1:02:26Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that that is, uh, he's a great one. There's a number of others that are really great of, um, they're trying to do the right thing. And I think this is another key piece across this entire industry is that most people, many, almost all of them, good intention, trying to do the right thing. But there's a couple of folks who, whether they're intentionally trying to just cause chaos, all this stuff or whatever, or there's this like online mob mentality that just jump in with everyone else and they're going kind of crazy or whatever, or they literally don't know what they're talking about. I

• 1:03:09Anthony Pompliano?

  don't know what the reason is, but they act and talk in a way where you're just kind of like, man, that is not very helpful to the long-term kind of efforts of what millions of people now, there's millions of people working together to push something forward.

• 1:03:26Speaker 02

  As someone who worked on, you know, you worked at social media companies early, isn't this fascinating? Isn't this like really interesting to watch all the specific tribes play out?

• 1:03:36Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't think that Bitcoin or crypto is unique in this way. I think that this is just how human nature has always worked. Sports, you can take somebody and you can literally be in a business meeting with them. Normal, right? Whatever normal is today, right? Like, like, all good. You literally take them to the bleachers in Yankee Stadium, and they're ready to like, beat up somebody. And you're like, what happened? Right? And it's, you know, you get all sorts of emotions involved. You get mob mentality, like, all these different things. And by the way, in that analogy, I didn't tell you whether they were a Yankee fan or they were cheering for the opposing team, right? Like, it doesn't matter. It's just like, that's how humans are.

• 1:04:21Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I think that there is this element of, uh, human nature plays out on social media. It is what it is. Uh, I do, though, believe, uh, if you look at the people who've been around for a long period of time, and they've kind of survived market cycles, it tends to be the people who are here for the right reasons. And the free market kind of does its thing. And that's okay. It's not for me to judge or anyone else to judge what one person says, does, what, just, hey, let the free market play out and we'll see what happens.

• 1:04:51Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 1:04:51Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Where can we, where can we send people to find you on the internet?

• 1:04:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, I have a Substack at, um, Hot Takes, as well as, um, you can find me on Twitter at Adam Singer. I'm always available to respond. And, yeah, I'm pretty easy to Google. I think, just like yourself, Pom, you know, I've got every social profile and pretty findable.

• 1:05:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome, man. Listen, I appreciate you, uh, you, you always have, uh, um, I'm gonna, I'm gonna describe it as, uh, maybe cautiously optimistic of you, where you, you have a healthy level of skepticism, but I think that you also understand that, like, the trajectory of technology is headed in one direction.

• 1:05:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally. And, um, I, I think, you know, I, I don't think it's good to have enemies on the bullish or bearish side of a sports team or a stock. And so I've, I'm trying to be ever, you know, nicer and more amicable. But what I actually like about you, Pom, is we've disagreed in the past online, and it got heated. And you know what? After that, we shared a DM and said, hey, actually, it was probably a little intense. And we both let it go. And imagine if everyone in the country could do that. I mean, how much better would things be?

• 1:06:05Anthony Pompliano?

  That is, uh, that's a very important part of all of this is, uh, being able to have conversations with people, whether you agree or disagree with them, and then move on with your day. Uh, I, I think that is, uh, uh, super important, actually. Uh, so I appreciate you coming on. Uh, hopefully this was valuable to everyone else and we'll definitely do it again in the future.

• 1:06:25Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:06:26Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, later, buddy. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you guys enjoyed this one. Make sure you subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to pompscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry. It's a three-week intensive training program with over 50 events packed into that three-week time period. Go to pompscryptocourse.com to learn more and I'll meet you guys for the next episode.