Meltem Demirors, CSO of CoinShares: Bitcoin, Central Bank Digital Currencies, and the Current Pension Crisis

Meltem Demirors is the Chief Strategy Officer at CoinShares, a digital asset management firm that provides professional-grade tools and services for investors. In this conversation, Meltem and Anthony discuss CoinShares, Tesla, central bank digital currencies, Barstool Sports, the shitcoin waterfall, politics, the average age of regulators, pensions, retirement funds, venture/macro markets & how crypto may connect them, and what the wealthy elite do to control the government. BLOCKFI-----BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. UNSTOPPABLE DOMAINS-----Make your crypto currency payments simple and build censorship resistant websites. Visit unstoppabledomains.com and purchase your blockchain domains today! -----If you enjoyed this episode and want to stay updated on everything Bitcoin, blockchain, and crypto. Check out Off the Chain newsletter by visiting offthechain.substack.com and join 35,000+ other investors currently subscribed to my daily investor letter.

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 Off the Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Meltem Demirz is the Chief Strategy Officer of CoinShares, a digital asset management firm that provides financial products and services for professional investors. In this conversation, we talked about a lot. We talked about CoinShares, Tesla, central bank digital currencies, Barstool Sports, the shitcoin waterfall, politics, who should be allowed to vote, who shouldn't be, the average age of regulators, pensions, retirement funds, the problems there, venture markets, macro markets, how crypto may connect them, and then what the wealthy elite do

• 0:44Anthony Pompliano?

  to control the government. We talked about a lot. This episode was a lot of fun to record. But before we get into it, I want to talk about our two sponsors for today. The first is BlockFi. BlockFi, everyone knows they're leading the charge when it comes to wealth management services for crypto. If Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies have any choice of becoming the next global reserve currency, we're going to need a lot of infrastructure and wealth management services built. This is exactly what BlockFi is doing. As many of you already know, I'm a big fan of the company, I even invested, and I'm a big user. So today, they offer three products. The first is giving US dollar loans against your crypto as collateral. The second is an interest-bearing account for your crypto deposits, and the third is allowing you to buy or trade cryptocurrencies. These three products are obviously important in helping people do more with their Bitcoin,

• 1:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Ethereum, GUSD, etc. If you don't want to sell your crypto, but you need US dollar liquidity, BlockFi will give you a loan. Or maybe you're a long-term holder like me, but want to earn some interest on your assets. Obviously, rates vary, but right now BlockFi is paying 6.2% APY on Bitcoin and 8.6% APY on GUSD deposits. Those are unheard of interest rates in the legacy fiat world. And as if these three products weren't enough, BlockFi also recently told their users that they will be launching a credit card in 2020 that pays rewards in Bitcoin rather than cash or loyalty points. A Bitcoin rewards credit card. Sounds awesome, will probably be even more awesome. So let's go check out BlockFi, the longtime supporter of the Off

• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

  The Chain Podcast, head on over blockFi.com/pomp. BlockFi.com/pomp. Science says if I read it three times, you'll remember it. So blockFi.com/pomp. Go check them out. The second sponsor today is Unstoppable Domains. Unstoppable Domains does exactly what you think. They build domains that are unstoppable. So many of you probably heard about YouTube taking down crypto-related content or Metamask getting removed from the Google Play Store. Well, decentralized web is going to make all of that censorship impossible. So there are a lot of companies working on it. One of the companies I'm excited about is Unstoppable Domains. They've created a way for anyone, even those without technical knowledge, to launch their

• 2:54Anthony Pompliano?

  own decentralized website. You can literally go to unstoppabledomains.com and use their .crypto domains to build a decentralized website. You can also get paid using your unstoppable domain. I've got pomp.crypto and I can use it to get paid. It's a huge improvement for sending Bitcoin and everyone and every wallet should use it. You can already go to a Trust Wallet, Atomic Wallet, or Coinomi right now, type in a .crypto domain into the send field and pay someone. In order to onboard the next billion people, we can't use these hex addresses anymore. Bitcoin will be just too hard for them. So everyone uses domain names. It's a system anyone who's been on the internet already understands.

• 3:36Anthony Pompliano?

  So Unstoppable Domains is going to help solve the problem. So head on over to unstoppabledomains.com right now, get your domain and start sending out long hex addresses every time you want someone to send you money. Remember, Unstoppable Domains did not tell me to start saying unstoppabledomains.com, but I think that it's a little hysterical for me to start making weird noises when I read these ads because then you'll remember them. So unstoppabledomains.com is the place to go to get an unstoppable domain. All right, now let's get into the episode.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pom 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 Pom 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.

• 4:38Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. We're back. Meltem's here. She was the original off the chain guest, the very first one in August of 2018. She was so bad that we've kept her off the podcast for a year and a half.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  Hey, I'm in the room, Pom.

• 4:54Anthony Pompliano?

  But she is here. And we got a whole bunch of stuff to talk about, some crypto stuff, some not.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  We basically already did the podcast.

• 5:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, we've been talking for 45 minutes. Plana's in the room making fun of me. Joe's over, he's got a new pair of headphones, he's ready to go, so.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Oh, those look nice, Joe.

• 5:11Anthony Pompliano?

  We got a whole studio set up now. Go to YouTube, I can't say it enough, go to YouTube and subscribe. All right, enough shilling.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  Never enough, this is CryptoPump.

• 5:20Anthony Pompliano?

  What, what's been up? A year and a half later, you're at CoinShares now.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  CoinShares, yep.

• 5:24Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, what do you guys do?

• 5:26Speaker 02

  That's a really good question.

• 5:28Anthony Pompliano?

  I only ask hard questions around here.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  That's a, that's a really difficult question. I don't know if I can explain what my business does. So CoinShares, a lot of people know us as an asset manager, and that's really where our roots started. We have a product line of exchange trader products in the European market under the brand XBT Provider, 700 million in assets under management, so it's a pretty sizable platform. We have four products today, a Bitcoin tracker, an Ethereum tracker, Ripple tracker, and a Litecoin tracker. Our most popular product is our Bitcoin tracker, but what a lot of people don't know about CoinShares is we do more than just ETPs and asset management. We are an institutional finance firm in the digital asset space focused on creating products and services to enable investors to access the crypto market.

• 6:16Anthony Pompliano?

  What does that mean?

• 6:16Speaker 02

  What does that mean? Great question. So here's how it breaks down. We have our exchange trader product business, which is focused on creating products and making them accessible to investors. Our products are different from some of the others in the market in that they're created and redeemed on a daily basis. There's no premium on there and they track the price of the underlying. We also have an advisory business here in the U.S. under our broker dealer. We also have active strategies where we invest in different assets. I'm particularly focused on the venture side right now. So we do that through fund structures. And then we also have a capital markets business. We internalize a lot of our trading, a lot of our flow. And now we're looking at different ways to offer that to the market. And we also have a sizable lending book. So we do a couple of different things.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  In the process of doing this over the last six years, which is a long time in crypto, we've also built out our own proprietary tech stack. And so what we're looking at right now is different ways to bring the technology we've built to manage all of the various components of our asset management business and our trading business to the market in new ways.

• 7:17Anthony Pompliano?

  And so what is the biggest part of the business that evolved that? Because you have a bunch of different products, right? But like, what is? Give us a sense of like, what's the biggest and down to the smallest or generally?

• 7:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the biggest part of the business, the way we think about it is at the top, asset management drives everything. So we are effectively a customer facing business and our customer is an investor who wants to get exposure to digital assets and digital currencies. And then the way that we monetize that throughout the business is not only on the management fees, but also internally on all of the flow that goes through our business. And what we're focused on now, the newer part of the business, is what I'm building here in the U.S., which is all of the other products and services that people want as they start delving into the proverbial Bitcoin rabbit hole. As people get down that learning curve, they start to want, you know, exposure to direct investing, exposure to more sophisticated strategies,

• 8:11Speaker 02

  more actively managed strategies. And so that's what we've been focused on over the last year or so. Takes a lot of time. We're regulated in seven jurisdictions, which is a lot to manage. And as you can probably relate to being an investor, being an asset manager, there's a lot of work that goes into building the right structure, the right legal footprint, the right regulatory footprint, and really building a robust infrastructure that can support all of that activity.

• 8:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Since we talked, you went in front of Congress, a bunch of politicians, you kind of did your rounds in that regulated world. What are the biggest lessons you learned? What are the biggest takeaways?

• 8:50Speaker 02

  I think takeaway number one, the most important takeaway. Nobody understands the difference between Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, anything else. So when I was-

• 9:04Anthony Pompliano?

  And just sorry to interrupt, but they use Bitcoin to describe everything, is in my experience. Is that accurate with yours?

• 9:09Speaker 02

  They used to.

• 9:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  So Congress, I have to give a shout out to Andy Braunberg at Coinlist. He was like, I was talking to Representative McHenry's office. They're looking for an expert witness. They called me, but I think you're going to do a really good job. So shout out to Andy for making that connection. My, so I got a call on a Friday afternoon and I had to submit my testimony like Sunday night. Right? So I had 48 hours.

• 9:37Anthony Pompliano?

  A long time.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, whatever, it was fine.

• 9:39Anthony Pompliano?

  I wrote a lot of papers in school about that timeframe. That's pretty good.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  You're like Wikipedia, copy paste. So what was actually really interesting about it and the big point, I also have to give a shout out to the team at Coin Center. I had a few phone calls with them, have known Jerry, Robin, that whole team for a while. And I think they're really great at what they do.

• 9:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Nouraj, give a shout out to the meme master himself.

• 10:00Speaker 02

  He is the meme master of crypto, unlike Barstool Sports, which we're going to talk about, which I'm pretty excited about. It was really interesting is as we were talking about how we wanted to frame the conversation, really what kept coming to my mind is we need to differentiate between Bitcoin and everything else. And we really need to make sure that walking out of that hearing, people understand Bitcoin is unique and there is no other Bitcoin. I think sometimes when people talk about digital currencies, they say, oh, Ripple, it's just like Bitcoin. It's like, no, that's not accurate. And so I think that was an important distinction that was made, but there's a lot of word soup

• 10:38Speaker 02

  that gets thrown around and there are a lot of different people in DC trying to influence how policymakers think and how they make decisions. And the way they're describing Bitcoin and other digital currencies, as well as the capabilities of blockchain technology, in a lot of cases are just not reflective of reality.

• 11:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Is it malicious?

• 11:05Speaker 02

  I mean, it's hard to ascribe intention to what other people do. I don't think it's always malicious. I think sometimes it's a matter of incentives. Ripple is actually the largest lobbyist in DC based on the amount of funding contributed, which I think is in a way not positive for the industry, right? And Ripple has the balance sheet strength to do that. But their focus is going to be very different. They're going to focus on a very different narrative than say, someone who's building an open source software product that supports Bitcoin and enables people to self custody and trade peer to peer. Two very different sets of incentives. So I don't think it's malicious, but people are ultimately motivated by incentives.

• 11:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Makes sense. As part of this, you got to tell us about the shitcoin getting into the congressional record because I think most people now know that it happened, but like, was that staged? Was that, was that preplanned?

• 12:02Speaker 02

  No. So it's so funny because Congressman Davidson was just in my office two weeks ago, and we've been laughing about that for a while now. So the way it happens when you go to testify in Congress is you have five minutes to make a statement. You submit your written testimony ahead of time. So if you go to the House Financial Services Committee website for every hearing, they'll list out who the witnesses are, they'll link the video that you can watch on YouTube, and then they'll also have the written testimony that was submitted. You actually also submit over 100 printed copies of your testimony to chambers the day before. So I ended up writing, I think, a 20-page testimony. There are a lot

• 12:45Speaker 02

  of boxes that got delivered to the halls of Congress the day before the hearing. And then you have five minutes to give a short kind of opening set of remarks. And then you have questioning from members from both sides of the aisle, and they'll typically go majority party first. So the highest ranking Democrat will have five minutes to question, then I'll go to the Republicans, so on and so forth, until nobody has questions. People can use that five minutes to ask questions to the witnesses, or they can use the five minutes to

• 13:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Say whatever.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  pontificate, right? And sometimes people stump and sort of promote their own platform. We saw that a lot in the second hearing they did with Mark Zuckerberg. So what was really interesting? So the whole time in the morning that David Marcus was testifying Congressman Davidson was sitting there and he had this like funny kind of smile smirk on his face. I was like, I don't know what's going on there, but like clearly this person's very amused. And then I'm sitting up there. I do my five minutes. Fine. I'm getting grilled some hard questions. Great handling it. And then all of a sudden, he starts down this line of questioning, right? He says, uh, so in, in the industry, uh, people talk about Bitcoin and then something

• 13:58Speaker 02

  that is colloquially referred to as shitcoin. And I'm like, oh, fuck. Uh oh. And then he asked, he goes, Mr. Mears, uh, could you explain for the members, uh, what is a shitcoin? And I was like, oh, not going to talk about that. I was like, let me talk about why Bitcoin is different from other cryptocurrencies. It was funny. Um, and I think it was, it was a nice way to inject a little bit of humor into what was actually very, uh, serious. And I think a very profound discussion because the potential implications, obviously Libra are, are massive.

• 14:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, while he was doing that, uh, Twitter was going wild, obviously. Um, and I've actually had him on the podcast and I would say him and Patrick McHenry both like, they really get it.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  They get it. Yeah.

• 14:47Anthony Pompliano?

  And, and I remember before the hearings, I think it was before the first day, uh, Patrick McHenry went on Squawk Box and Joe Kernan like threw him a, just a fastball right down the middle and basically said-

• 14:56Speaker 02

  You did a really good job on Joe, by the way. I'm going to give you credit for that one.

• 15:00Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I actually don't think I was the one who like completely turned him. I definitely, I think, uh, you know, encouraged him to keep an open mind, but I think some other people got to him.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 15:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Because I left one day, uh, after recording and he was like on the edge. And then I came back like a week later and he was all in. And I don't, I don't know who that mystery person that like pushed him.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  I think we were on together last summer. And he was all about it.

• 15:26Anthony Pompliano?

  He was already at that point.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was all in.

• 15:28Anthony Pompliano?

  My favorite part about Squawk Box is they're pretty serious. They do their, you know, regular journalism and coverage, et cetera.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  They're really funny.

• 15:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but like.

• 15:37Speaker 02

  They're all funny people.

• 15:38Anthony Pompliano?

  There was a point last year where I started to go on and as soon as I would walk out there, Joe and Kevin O'Leary or whoever would be there, they'd all be like, pop. Like they would get excited, like, oh, we could talk about this Bitcoin, like this crazy Bitcoin thing.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  There's the Bitcoin guy.

• 15:51Anthony Pompliano?

  What I just remember, like, like it made sense because the incentives, we're going back to the whole idea of incentives. Like they knew that those clips would go viral because of crypto Twitter and they were talking about something. And it was also like such a pure industry from a, there's some people who really believe it and some people who don't believe it at all. And like, there's pretty much nobody in between, like, nobody's just like, ah, I have no opinion. Like I, there's very few people who think that about Bitcoin.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  It's kind of like Tesla.

• 16:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  As someone who's long Tesla, boom, haters.

• 16:21Anthony Pompliano?

  So.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  Tesla Twitter is like the only thing that kind of comes close to crypto Twitter.

• 16:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 16:27Speaker 02

  But not even close. Crypto Twitter is so crazy and so entertaining. It's amazing.

• 16:31Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, let's talk about Tesla real quick because there's a lot of people who were short very aggressively, were yelling and screaming, et cetera.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  Sure. Tesla Q, woof.

• 16:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's real. It's real.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:42Anthony Pompliano?

  And there's legitimate questions that they have that are unanswered. I get the whole thing. But I fundamentally always believe like you can't short one of the greatest innovators of our time, especially when.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  Tony Stark, he's Iron Man.

• 16:54Anthony Pompliano?

  When you see the car, the car is legitimately better than any other EV on the market.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  But hold on. Okay. So when people have objections to Tesla, and this is where actually the narrative about value investing versus growth investing comes in, right? And here's what's interesting. So let's start with quick facts. Okay. Month of January, right?

• 17:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 17:11Speaker 02

  January 31st, three best performing assets in January 2020. Number one, Tesla, up 53%. Number two, Beyond Meat, up 33%. And number three, Bitcoin, up 28%. Boom, boom, boom. Okay. Tesla.

• 17:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Those three are like nightmares for like half of the finance world.

• 17:29Speaker 02

  Right. But this is where, again, it goes back to, so I studied finance in university and everyone, obviously Semenel Book, Benjamin Graham, the value investor, right? So there's a large part of the world, stock pickers, what they focus on is fundamental value investing, right? So Warren Buffett does, and we can get into his investing legacy because it's like real iffy.

• 17:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Didn't beat the S and P for the last 10 years, but go ahead.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  Well, there's a lot to unpack. There's a lot to unpack there. But here's what I think's really interesting. So on the surface, if you look at Tesla's balance sheet, their cost of capital, revenues, how much they're spending, their indebtedness, on the surface, right? If you look at it through fundamentals lens, EPS, et cetera, all of the metrics people usually look at, doesn't look like a good stock. But here's the thing you have to appreciate. What Tesla represents is a fundamental innovation. Just like you said, when you go on Squawk Box and people run up to you and they're like, pump Bitcoin, people genuinely get excited about Bitcoin. It sparks something in them that is like spiritual in nature.

• 18:32Anthony Pompliano?

  It's changed their mind. It's a mental shift in how they think about money.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  Same thing with a Tesla. The first time someone gets in a Tesla, you see it in their eyes. They're like, oh, it's a life-changing experience. And what I think is interesting, nobody ever talks about automakers. Nobody gets excited about GM or Ford or Volvo or Honda. People get really excited about Tesla. Elon Musk is super interesting. He's very entertaining. But more importantly, the whole experience, the whole brand narrative has been beautifully designed and beautifully crafted, and that sells.

• 19:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 19:07Speaker 02

  It sells.

• 19:08Anthony Pompliano?

  The thing that I keep going back to is, again, you can look at all of the financials. I get that there's a bunch of issues and challenges, et cetera. But at the end of the day, if you are involved in that business and as an employee, an executive, a partner, whatever. There is something about this one individual that bends reality to make it happen.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  Okay, and this is actually really important. When I, so early-stage investing last six years, reality distortion field. Your job is to create a reality distortion field. It can't be too detached from reality. That's how you get WeWork, right? Way too detached from reality, too far out. But you have to distort people's perception of reality enough that they believe in the magic. Because your job is selling magic. It's selling something that seems impractical and infeasible. And through force of this reality distortion field, you create around idea, the idea, the product, the business, making it become real.

• 20:10Anthony Pompliano?

  But you're not wrong on anything you just said. But the one caveat is, take WeWork. Jeff Lewis from Bedrock said this on Twitter. And I thought it was just really, really kind of interesting and very kind of forward-looking. He said, "We all knew what WeWork was doing. The difference is that we thought he could pull it off." And what he was highlighting was like, the difference between them actually pulling that off and getting into the public markets and probably being okay and having the meltdown that they had was maybe the difference of four weeks.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  But I think there, what it boils down to is the reality distortion field was too strong. There were a few decisions that were made a few weeks prior to the S1 getting filed that pushed the distortion too far.

• 20:58Anthony Pompliano?

  That's what he was saying. He's like, basically, there's a four-week window that if they had gotten out four weeks before those things happened, we probably are talking about WeWork as just another public stock and nobody ever, Adam Neumann's still running the company.

• 21:09Speaker 02

  But this is why I think early-stage investing and even later-stage investing is so interesting because there is this intangible quality, right? You can look at a business, you can look at the total addressable market, you can do really quantitative analysis, right? You can look at all of the fundamentals, you can look at recurring revenue, run rates, everything. You break down margin, cost of customer acquisition, all of the things you could look at, right? You could break down the business on a spreadsheet in an infinite number of ways. And I've done a lot of Money works. I know all of the tabs you could create in that spreadsheet. But at the end of the day, there's something you can never capture on a spreadsheet. There's something you can never capture in any financial analysis. And that is this intangible, like magical quality that captures the zeitgeist of a moment.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  And Tesla captures that zeitgeist. Everyone wants Tony Stark to be real.

• 21:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Fact. But it's the same thing with Tesla or SpaceX as well, right? Like in the private markets, it's been valued much higher than any other business on a multiple basis because they can do something that no one else had ever done.

• 22:08Speaker 02

  I'm ever usable rockets brilliant, but also the branding around SpaceX. So the rocket is metallic. It looks like the rocket emoji.

• 22:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  It's pretty amazing.

• 22:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. All right, let's get back to crypto stuff because we could talk about Tesla outperforming everyone else's stocks for a long time. That's right. You all have worse performing than Tesla in January. Central bank digital currencies.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  Woof. The, the other thing though, that I think is really interesting, right? I want to talk for a second about value investing versus growth investing.

• 22:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  Just for a second. Okay, so there's this entire universe whose incentive, right? All these people in the financial world, whose entire incentive is to justify getting paid 2% or 2 and 20 to pick stocks, right? They're priding themselves in like, I have this amazing capability to analyze based on fundamentals. Right? And this is our world of value investors. Now here's the issue. If you're investing based on fundamentals, you would have missed Amazon. You would have missed Apple. You would have missed all of the companies that have delivered 98% of S and P 500 market growth over the last 20 years. You would have missed it because it wouldn't have fit into your view of the world. And I think what people forget is in the universe of stocks you can invest in over the last 20 years.

• 23:24Speaker 02

  There are only small handful of stocks, actually primarily Apple. Apple's dividends over the last 10 years. 700 billion are greater than the combined market cap of 490 companies in the S and P 500.

• 23:38Anthony Pompliano?

  It's crazy.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  So I think, again, people don't look rationally at the world of value investing because they're incentivized. That's how they get paid. That's the model that's been the predominant model in the world of asset management. And then you look at growth investing. Growth investing is a crap shoot in certain ways because how do you build a quantitative model? To understand how people capture magic and how they effectively bend reality.

• 24:03Anthony Pompliano?

  So Amazon, my favorite, and I use this usually to talk about Bitcoin's volatility, but Amazon, since it went public for 20 years, it has drawn down at least double digits every single year. The average intra-year drawdown is over 30% and I believe that it's drew down 90 plus percent twice. And so my partner Mark Usko always jokes, he's like, who's held Amazon stocks since the IPO? Like Jeff, his mom and his dad. Because that's just too much volatility for most people to wrap their heads around.

• 24:37Speaker 02

  But also, Amazon, after they IPO'd, right, they went up in price, crash happened, 95% loss, right?

• 24:47Speaker 02

  Seven years to recover. IBM, by the way, took 17 years over that same period of time. So I think what a lot of people don't appreciate, and we could talk a lot about bubbles, but what a lot of people don't appreciate is a big part of investing is timing. Right? Same thing with people who bought Bitcoin at the start of 2018. Everything in life is about timing and then it's about conviction. And I think the difference here is we're making a secular bet. I'm not making a cyclical bet. I've lived through three crypto market cycles. I'm going to live through hopefully many more, but I think the bet you have to take is a secular bet.

• 25:22Anthony Pompliano?

  The whole idea of picking something that is small before a lot of people understand it or believe it or are invested in it. And being right and it grows into something very large is as old as time. Right? People have done this with certain stocks. They've done it in the private markets. They've done it with Bitcoin. They've done it with all this kind of stuff. I think the part that people forget is

• 25:47Anthony Pompliano?

  In that from small to large, you need volatility, right? The volatility is what provides that upside, but it's not a straight line. And so it's easy to look back and say, you know, go out the 10 year or 20 year chart on Amazon.

• 25:59Speaker 02

  This is the exact chart I have on Amazon.

• 26:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, it went up so high. Look at it.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  The 20 year chart on Amazon is like almost a parabolic curve.

• 26:06Anthony Pompliano?

  It looks like startup projections.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  Exactly. And then if you zoom in on those seven years, it just looks like shit.

• 26:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, of course. And same thing, look, you can zoom in on two or three years of Bitcoin at certain times, right? Same thing.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  Here's the one thing I will say about Bitcoin though. So, so here's the interesting thing, and we can talk a little bit about investing in altcoins. Cause I know this is something you like talking about. So here's what I think is so interesting about Bitcoin is you zoom out and it looks pretty good, right? Like most people got into Bitcoin 2013, 2014. So if you're looking at average entry price of around $200, $250, we're now sitting at around $10,000. Let's say that's pretty healthy. But the thing that's interesting is Bitcoin's not a company.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  Bitcoin is three things. It's technology in the form of the protocol. It's a network and it's the entire ecosystem of value creation that gets built on top of it, which gets internalized in the form of transaction fees that flow back to the network and its participants. And so I think what's really interesting about Bitcoin is people have this limited kind of view. You see this today on Tesla Twitter, right? People are like, oh, it's at 750, it's not going to go up anymore. Time to sell. No, that's not how things like this work, right? The thing is if Bitcoin does one 10th of what you and I, I think we're aligned on this, what you and I think it will do, then the upside is massive.

• 27:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course. It's, it's the idea that humans are emotional. Humans have very strong recency bias. And so the idea that a Tesla stock was $200 and now it's at 700, how could it possibly keep going up? Well, actually the math probability is that something, you know, it's like the, was it law of motion, right? Things in motion stay in motion. Companies usually are like that. So you see a company that's executing and driving revenue and growing, et cetera. It's more likely. To stay in motion than it is to crash, right? And I think Bitcoin's a great example of this, you know, networks, all this stuff. But that's just goes against everything we know as humans because it's like, how could it possibly go up more than 5X? Right? How could it go up anymore?

• 28:09Speaker 02

  I think the other thing is people are conditioned much more by their negative experiences than their positive experiences. And I suffer from this myself, right? Like I have to force myself on a regular basis to train my own emotional state. Because there are a lot of ups and downs to navigate in this market. But I do think that people remember all the bad experiences they've had, particularly, I think a lot of people entered this market at a bad time. And the issue is, you know, they were buying maybe Ripple at $3 or maybe their friend told them about Telegram and their family office bought, you know, big allocation in the Telegram token sale. Not to say that that won't be, you know, at the end of the day, something worthwhile investing in. But it is not really a great experience right now, right? It's two years and they're like, not feeling really good.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  So I think there is this component of people being conditioned by negative experiences and forgetting that this has happened before so many times. And it's going to continue to happen again.

• 29:02Anthony Pompliano?

  So not only were people buying, right? If you remember, it was like November 2017, Coinbase was signing up 100,000 people a day, right? So a bunch of people pouring in near the top or at the top. But also a lot of funds got started in the second half of 2017. So they were out raising capital and they were actually raising like pretty material amounts of capital at that point. So either people were buying directly or going into the funds, the funds had liquid lockups, etc. Have you seen, one of the things that I was looking at was like the high watermarks and causing a lot of funds to shut down? I've seen a couple, but actually I haven't seen as many as I thought I would see. Like there's still most funds, they've either raised other capital, so that's not subject to those high watermarks. Or they've been able to do something in order to kind of stay alive. What are you seeing there?

• 29:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think for a lot of funds, just generally, right? The fund industry is predicated on 2 and 20. You live on the 2, you pray for the 20. So it's keeping funds alive is that 2% management fee. And some of them may have accelerated fees, particularly if they're subscale, sub 100 million funds. And so I think what you're seeing is a lot of People who raised at that time, maybe they have a hundred million dollar fund. Maybe it's a little bit larger in size. So they've been getting their 2% management fee. The other thing that funds have been doing is doing illiquid investments. So we saw a lot of funds that combined investing in liquid assets with investing in illiquid venture bets. And then they were side pocketing that into a separate side vehicle.

• 30:29Speaker 02

  That wasn't subject to the rules of the fund's liquidity profile, the two to three year profile. And so I think what they've done is effectively created two pools of capital. One pool of capital that can be redeemed and is subject to the normal terms of the fund. And then a second pool of capital, that's much more longer term permanent capital. And what's interesting is people have now found a way to make token investments, venture investments through these things called SAFs or Agreement for Future Tokens. And so I think, again, we're starting to see this blending where people have realized the reason people like venture funds and the people, the reason people like permanent capital is your bet on like an innovative new technology is not going to play out in two years. It's not going to play out in five years.

• 31:11Speaker 02

  It's probably not even going to play out in 10 years because the arc of time is extremely long. And what I always think about is how many miracles do I need? Or how many exogenous variables am I dependent on? Those things outside of my control and outside of my system. And there's a lot here.

• 31:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 31:27Speaker 02

  All it takes is a few things going the right way. Or conversely, right to your point about WeWork, a few things going the wrong way that make all of the difference between a zero and a hero.

• 31:36Anthony Pompliano?

  So that brings me to take Bitcoin, for example. What are the most likely reasons why it could fail?

• 31:42Speaker 02

  Bitcoin? I think honestly, the biggest systemic risk to Bitcoin right now is the centralization of Bitcoin and taking Bitcoin and shoving it into the existing banking system. And what I've always been concerned about, and I think what we're starting to see with the rhetoric around Edon and Bitcoin kind of growing, Venezuelan Bitcoin growing, is the segregation of the Bitcoin network into two separate networks. One of sort of white listed tokens that are fungible and one of blacklisted tokens that have touched a sanctioned address or an address that's tied to terrorist organization or some other sort of axis of evil type of entity. And that creates kind of a secondary, sort of creates a split in the market.

• 32:23Speaker 02

  So to me, the biggest issue is number one around privacy and data forensics. But I think we're making progress there, sort of second layer privacy tools, Tumblr's mixers, and different ways of obfuscating transaction data and wallet level data. And then I think the second existential risk is really the risk of custody, right? So right now, the predominant model for custody is what we've done with all assets since the dawn of time. You build a giant fort, right? If I'm Julius Caesar and I have all my gold coins, I make my treasury, I take all the coins, I put them in the treasury, and then I have armed guards, you know, guard the treasury. And that's the model we've had for every asset. That's what we do now, except instead of having an armed fort, we have server racks and secure locations. You know all about this, used to run data centers, right?

• 33:07Speaker 02

  You know all about how people do this. And I think the big issue here is when you have Bitcoin, that's it's an essentialized entity, and people start internalizing trades. We're seeing BitGo doing this, Anchorage assets doing this. What people are trading, they're no longer settling on-chain. They're moving zeros and ones between accounts, right? You're no longer trading Bitcoin. What you're trading is a Bitcoin depository receipt, and you're removing the very properties that made Bitcoin valuable in the first place.

• 33:33Anthony Pompliano?

  But can it go from the completely decentralized model into those centralized entities and then over time be decentralized again?

• 33:40Speaker 02

  But here's the issue, right? Maybe, like theoretically, it can, but here's the issue. Once the government has financial oversight of it, and once they have oversight of Bitcoin, and they realize, oh, wait, 50% of Bitcoin is in custody by entities controlled by NYDFS and the Fed, basically, what's their incentive to ever do that? There's zero, it's just go back to incentives, there's no incentive. And so I think what people don't realize, everyone's like, oh, yeah, you're like, I'll just put it in Coinbase custody and, or like fidelity custody, and then like, when I want it back, I'll just take it out. I'm like, okay, but you're gonna realize, five years from now, the requirements for taking your Bitcoin out of custody are gonna be really onerous.

• 34:19Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think those will be?

• 34:21Speaker 02

  Who knows? But I think the point of attack, like if I wanted to kill Bitcoin and eliminate, basically, stop people from using it in any sort of meaningful way, other than a speculative asset, which you can do through synthetic Bitcoin, what I would do is exactly this, right? I would say, hey, if you wanna go and claim your Bitcoin, you have to submit a DNA sample, you have to submit all sorts of personal data, you have to wear this location trackers that we know where you are at all times, you get put on a special list so that when you cross borders, we search you for any hardware wallets. You're going to be subject to all sorts of rules and regulations. You're going to get put on an IRS list. You're probably going to get put on some sort of tracking list by the FBI. I just think that, again, a lot of people are doxing themselves right now and they're tying all their personal financial data and their social security number

• 35:06Speaker 02

  to their ownership of Bitcoin on these regulated platforms. And I just think that that's like, yes, it's convenient, but those who sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither.

• 35:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Very libertarian.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  Sorry, very libertarian.

• 35:23Anthony Pompliano?

  So that brings us to the intersection of cryptocurrencies, we'll call them digital currencies because they're not really cryptocurrencies, and government, which is the central bank, digital currencies. What the hell is going on there? It seems like everyone, that's the new thing, right? It was like, hey, everyone, let's do enterprise blockchain. Now it's like, hey, everyone, let's do central bank digital currencies.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, but all the enterprise blockchain companies are now doing central bank digital currency because they're like, we need a use case, like we need to raise our Series B. Somebody, please give us a use case. Okay, so my view on this is you started with Bitcoin, which had a small addressable market and it was sort of a fringe group of people who are interested in it. Then you got Ethereum, which brought in a lot of the VCs and brought in a lot of the developer crowd. Then you got the next wave of ICOs, which brought in the speculative traders, but also the sort of the rest of the investing crowd, right? The retail speculative crowd. And then you got stable coins, which brought in a whole new crowd, like Wall Street types who are like, oh, I'm going to build the leading platform for digital tokenized whatever, whatever.

• 36:22Speaker 02

  And then now we're at this final kind of big boss stage, which is government saying, hey, we're going to use all of the narratives of all these people before us and we're going to make this thing innovation technology. But really, it's not fundamentally that different from the way currencies manage today.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  And so I think central bank digital currencies are part of a long sort of story arc around cryptocurrencies to digital assets. And it's completely on the other side of the spectrum from Bitcoin. Like the two could not be further apart. So they're polar opposites.

• 36:54Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And so my whole issue here has been, it makes sense for the incentives of a government. To want to create a digital currency, it's really about access more than anything, right? So right now I go to like the worst case scenario. So I'm a Venezuelan, my currency is being devalued away. I actually want dollars because I trust the US government. I know it's going to be more stable than pretty much anything else. I can't get access because I don't have a bank account. If I get dollars into my bank account, it could get seized, taken, taxed, etc. And the black market is actually pretty dangerous in terms of me getting dollars.

• 37:25Speaker 02

  And it's also expensive. Your black market dollars are like six times market rate.

• 37:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so like I could get dollars in some cases, but it's expensive or it's dangerous. And so now all of a sudden, there's this idea of if I have an internet connection and I don't need a bank account, I can get access to a quote-unquote digital currency. Right now, those digital currencies are all what we think of cryptocurrencies that are listed on like, you know, CoinMarketCap or something. But if let's say China is able to go ahead and digitize their currency before the US, now all of a sudden I can actually get exposure to the Chinese currency before the US's currency. And it's literally just because the US dollar is not digitized versus the Chinese currency.

• 37:59Speaker 02

  Okay, but hold on, hold on. This is where I actually disagree with you.

• 38:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, why?

• 38:03Speaker 02

  The medium doesn't change the message. Nobody wants to hold renminbi. Why is the US dollar the world currency?

• 38:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, it's because it's trusted. People trust it.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  Okay, so here's where I think with central bank issued digital currencies, what central banks suppose is that if they create this digital currency, and the more important component is actually the payment system and coupling identity to digital wallet. That's actually the big push here in most nations that are implementing this.

• 38:32Anthony Pompliano?

  For surveillance.

• 38:33Speaker 02

  Surveillance, right? But also being able to actually implement monetary and fiscal policy more effectively, right? Because you no longer have the shadow economy. But at the end of the day, when we think about the reason the dollar is so prevalent in usage around the world, it's because the medium does not matter as much as the message. So even if I had access to digital renminbi or digital reals or digital, you know, euros, what I really want is US dollars because what has liquidity and what has trust and what it can exchange with anyone for anything is a US dollar.

• 39:07Anthony Pompliano?

  So I don't disagree with you that that's what people want, but if they don't- Have access, then they will start to use these other currencies. And if the US is far enough behind, because remember the GUSD, USDC, like all of these regulated dollar-backed stablecoins, they're not going to go screw around with the sanctioned countries, right? They're built in a way where they won't go into the sanctioned countries. And so.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  But no, no, no, that doesn't work. It doesn't work that way.

• 39:31Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you mean?

• 39:32Speaker 02

  The way it works is if you have dollars, or let's say I have a million dollars, and I go to Circle and I want to create CUSD, right? I give them my million dollars and they give me a million dollars worth of CUSD tokens. That transaction right there is KYC, AML, OFAC rule compliant. But once I have my CUSD, there is nothing that prevents me from interacting with anyone who has a compatible wallet to trade CUSD with them.

• 39:57Anthony Pompliano?

  So I don't know about Circles, but I think GUSD, Gemini's, they can freeze. I think that they can freeze. And I wish that we could break some of it to all the details, but they have some ability which people got all worked up about.

• 40:11Speaker 02

  Tether, right? Tether is the perfect example. Tether is built on the Omni Relay Protocol, so it leverages the security of the Bitcoin network. And now they have it on Ether and Tron, basically every blockchain network. So again, the only point at which you can really effectively apply regulation is at the entry point and at the exit point. And at the end of the day, what we saw, right? Everyone's concerned about the underlying collateralization of Tether and whether the dollars are actually there. Turns out, nobody cares. Like, people on crypto Twitter care and it's sensational and like, oh, whatever. But when it comes to people who are functionally using Tether to fulfill this very purpose, nobody cares. Because at the end of the day, Tether is a Tether, is a US dollar. And so people are willing to accept it as tender. So when we go to central bank digital currencies, though, I think there's three things we have to focus on. I just wrote a blog post on this today.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  The first is, for most countries, introducing a central bank digital currency is about reducing dollar dependence and reducing the economy's dependence on US policy. So take, for example, a country like Cambodia, right? Which is the case study I used here. Cambodia's economy is based on the dollar. Eighty-four percent of transactions in Cambodia, eighty-four percent are done in dollars.

• 41:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 41:18Speaker 02

  Nobody really uses the real. Where I'm from, fifty-four percent of bank deposits are held in US dollars, not

• 41:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Fifty-four percent are held in

• 41:26Speaker 02

  Bank deposits.

• 41:27Anthony Pompliano?

  US dollars, okay.

• 41:27Speaker 02

  Are held in US dollars. So again, what that means is all of a sudden, the economy becomes highly susceptible to US monetary policy. So what's interesting is most of the central bank issued digital currencies, in my view, are an attempt to minimize dependence on the dollar. The second component that really matters is current account balances. So one of the important metrics for an economy to track is its current account, right? And the current account is trade, the balance of trade. So exports minus imports, income from abroad and transfers abroad. So if your net account, your current account, pardon, is negative, you're a net borrower from the world. And if it's positive, you're a creditor, you're a lender to the world.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  And so what I think is really interesting here is a lot of countries who want to create a digital currency have a large net negative account balances that are a large percentage of their GDP. And the idea here is, is that you can start to actually impact trade policies, which are driven by managing your exchange rate through this new tool you have. And you can also start to control payments, right? So typically it starts internal to the country, then you open up your flows external to the country. And so now that you have a way to manage flows in and out through this blockchain-based payment system, which you control, all of a sudden, you have much more ability to control that balance. And then the last thing, which I think is the most important, it's data gathering and controls, right? And we've seen this without blockchains as well.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  The last thing I'll add here is one of the interesting trends we've had over the last fifty years, really since Bretton Woods, almost seventy years, oh my god. The US has been a hegemon politically, economically, and also from military perspective, right? The US's power has been unparalleled. We're now living in an age where the world's looking a little different. We're finally in a prolonged trade war with China, which has been a long time coming. Russia has also started to play. Russia has aligned itself with Idon and other countries who are energy exporters. Russia recently announced- Rosneft, which is the largest oil company in Russia, announced that it's no longer going to be denominating any of its contracts in dollars, which I think is an important trend.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  As we look at the balance of power in the world, I think another thing central banks have started to realize is that a great way to reduce US influence and the ability for the US to be a hegemon is to challenge US economic power through the introduction of this new tool.

• 43:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and part of it, so Russia is a great example because there's a conference last year, Vladimir Putin was on stage and obviously speaking Russian, but it gets translated, but he literally out publicly said, "The US dollar system is super expensive and we are actively trying to figure out a different system."

• 44:08Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 44:08Anthony Pompliano?

  And he wasn't talking about Bitcoin or crypto or any of this stuff, right? But I think a lot of the stuff with China and kind of bilateral trade.

• 44:14Speaker 02

  By the way, the euro is also expensive because when you have net negative rates, it's like, no, I'm not sure I want to hold that asset.

• 44:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 44:23Speaker 02

  It's a real challenge.

• 44:24Anthony Pompliano?

  And the whole thing just comes down to the idea that there's a country that has great ambition, but understands that there's somebody else out there who holds a lot of power over them.

• 44:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:34Anthony Pompliano?

  And so one of the ways to weaken that power is to move off of the US dollar system. And I also think that their identification of this, like it's something they've always known, but the US has actually been like a, kind of like a good parent, right? To some degree of like, they didn't really like go spank the kids. And so it was always like the threat of like, "Hey, I could put you in timeout or I will spank you." But then all of a sudden, we started to really weaponize the dollar. And the second that we like actually started spanking the kids or putting them in timeout, now like, whoa, hold on, it's like, I'm not playing this game anymore. And so they see other countries that are, you know, whether it's North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, et cetera, like they see these countries being crippled by the power that the US has. And they say, "Look, it's just a matter of time before they come for me." Right? And so all of a sudden, it's like, "Hey, let me break off of this system."

• 45:17Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's almost like the US's power, and maybe not the abuse of our power, but the enforcement of the power has accelerated the desires of others to get out of the system.

• 45:28Speaker 02

  And I, I think what's interesting here, I want to make two points. One is, as you start playing out this chess game in your mind, it doesn't take much to see where the game is. Headed, right? We have all of these countries who are going to digitize their currency and try to use these these digital payment rails and digital wallets to expand their reach, to gather data on people and to get more granularity and more access to actually implementing policy at the wallet level, the account level.

• 46:01Speaker 02

  So this is a really, really scary trend. And at the end of the day, when you have all of these countries competing with one another to be the dominant currency, you now have companies who are entering that race because I think social networks are now more powerful than most governments. I mean,

• 46:20Anthony Pompliano?

  More users, more influence.

• 46:21Speaker 02

  Facebook, three billion users, WeChat, 1.4 billion users, right? Digital, uh, social networks are becoming payment networks. Social networks, uh, social media companies, technology companies are going to be the banks of the future. We just don't.

• 46:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I mean, look, Apple, like there are surveys that show that people trust Apple, Google, Facebook way more than they trust their bank.

• 46:40Speaker 02

  Totally. And then, so what's going to happen is you have central banks issuing digital currencies, companies issuing digital currencies, people, right? How long is it until the next Jim Jones emergence and issues his own digital currency? Or we have, you know, the next sort of cult leader? Who knows? And so in this world where there are all of these different competing currencies, what we're actually highlighting is why Bitcoin is so important.

• 47:05Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm laughing because there's already some of those cult leaders out there, some would argue, who have issued their own digital currencies, but we won't go there.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  So the second trend, right? So all of this, in my view, like all this central bank, digital currency stuff, all it's doing is speeding up the adoption curve for Bitcoin.

• 47:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 47:20Speaker 02

  Because it's the only neutral player here.

• 47:22Anthony Pompliano?

  This was my whole argument behind, uh, I think it was, uh, Q3 last year. I went on CNBC and I'd spent two days in, uh, Washington. I went met with, you know, congressional stuff. And I walked away and I, uh, and we'll get to kind of your thoughts as to some of these things, but I, I walked away and I was just like, this is such a different culture and way of doing business than, uh, both the Wall Street world in, you know, New York and also the tech world in San Francisco. But it was like, pretty, uh, uh, disheartening, but also at the same time, like, um, just, it just shook me. Like, I was like, whoa, this is way different.

• 47:56Speaker 02

  Well, they'll, okay, so DC, New York's about money. San Francisco is about, um,

• 48:02Speaker 02

  Social currency and like controlling the narrative. And DC is about power. If you're into power, you eventually end up in DC. And DC is about, what I think's interesting is there's this view in certain members of our government who believe that if they want, they can snap their fingers and will turn off Bitcoin. They have no idea how technology, like zero concept of how technology works. And what I think's really interesting, I think I mentioned this to you, is the average age of a US congressman or woman is, I think, around 70, right? I think it's maybe 72.

• 48:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Very representative of the American population.

• 48:42Speaker 02

  Okay, but, but, hold on.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  Okay. No, nobody is going to go to Washington in the future and ask for permission.

• 48:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 48:52Speaker 02

  And what's interesting is the government assumes, like, the US government takes for granted its unchecked power and it assumes that it will always be relevant to the conversation. And I think for the first time, they now have to compete for that right.

• 49:06Anthony Pompliano?

  But.

• 49:07Speaker 02

  That's my goal, at least.

• 49:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Part of the, yeah, part of this, though, is we've done this to ourselves, right? So what I mean, what I mean by that is there's no term limits, right? So that's kind of strike one. Strike two is things like, I've always thought, if you get elected to an office, we should go look at who your largest donor was and you're not allowed to regulate that industry. So if Big Pharma puts you in, you can't make laws and regulations around Big Pharma, right? You know, if.

• 49:33Speaker 02

  By the way, it goes that way. It's like, I can't make political campaign contributions to someone and then get business for, I'm barred from doing business with them for the two years.

• 49:42Anthony Pompliano?

  For whatever. Yep, I completely agree.

• 49:44Speaker 02

  So should go the other way.

• 49:45Anthony Pompliano?

  And then, you know, also things like you shouldn't be able to make a law and then go get a job that help people navigate that law, etc.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  I wonder if you're referring to someone specific there.

• 49:55Anthony Pompliano?

  You guys can pontificate all you want. So like, there's all these issues, right? But ultimately, what it comes down to, though, is like, the rules are in place and we continue to elect these people.

• 50:05Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 50:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And I actually didn't believe this before, but now I'm starting to understand. It's not because they are good at what they do, it's because they understand the game. It's like, if you're a startup entrepreneur and you've never worked in a big corporation, there's corporate politics game that you never understand. You'll get eaten alive because you don't understand the game. Same thing in the politics world where somebody said to me.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  Crypto bias, by the way, has its own game also.

• 50:28Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. But, but it's just. The people are actually better at the process than they are getting results, right? And some of it is they don't want to get results in certain situations because that keeps them in office.

• 50:39Speaker 02

  Oh, look, I I think it's what I think's interesting, right? Is we're in an election year right now.

• 50:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Who's gonna win?

• 50:51Speaker 02

  It doesn't matter. Okay.

• 50:52Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a cop out answer.

• 50:53Speaker 02

  No, no, no. And here's why. They're all the same.

• 50:56Anthony Pompliano?

  That's true. Okay.

• 50:57Speaker 02

  It's same, same, but different. Okay. Democrat, Republican, don't care who you are, what you say.

• 51:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, Donald Trump used to be a Democrat and now ran as a Republican. And Mike Bloomberg used to be a Republican, I believe, and now is running a Democrat.

• 51:10Speaker 02

  But look, in the US, right? People like to believe that there are differences between the two political parties. There aren't. They're one in the same. What I always go back to, like, the world we're living in now, what I think is so terrifying. Everyone who's into crypto, I presume, loves Ayn Rand. So Ayn Rand in the fountain had this great speech called Francesco's Money Speech, where this character, Francesco, talks about, you know, the way that man escaped the jungle is through capitalism, through the promise of enterprise, like lifting yourself up out of the cycle of poverty through enterprise and making money. And we celebrate money in our society and we celebrate people accruing money because it's a sign of, like, it encourages people to innovate.

• 51:52Speaker 02

  It's what drives people to do and accomplish and achieve. And when you get to a point where people who do nothing

• 52:02Speaker 02

  start to demand that they have the right to take money from people who have amassed it, that's when the system starts to break down. And you look at the rhetoric in DC right now, both sides of the aisle, that's the rhetoric. Everyone wants a bigger share of what's being produced. And what we get for it is nothing because the amount of grift and insider dealing that goes on is preposterous. The only two areas in our economy where there's inflation is education and healthcare.

• 52:31Speaker 02

  It's only two areas.

• 52:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but it shouldn't be surprising to us, right? So two things that I tweeted recently that I fundamentally believe. One was around Bezos just hit 120 billion in net worth. Everyone was freaking out about it. And I said, look, by the way.

• 52:44Speaker 02

  My favorite is that Bezos made a Ray Dalio in 15 minutes.

• 52:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Amazing, amazing. If you confiscate all 120 billion dollars from Bezos, right? However, you do that, whether it's through taxes or legit, like just give us your money. We have guns, right? That doesn't solve any of our problems because it's not a money problem in many cases. It's a systematic issue. And so like confiscating money isn't going to solve it because what you'd be doing in that case is you'd be taking money from one of the greatest capital allocators in history and giving it to one of the most inefficient capital allocators in history.

• 53:16Speaker 02

  It's not about doing anything with the money. This is about, again, like DC is about power.

• 53:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, agreed.

• 53:22Speaker 02

  It's about the fact that I can go to you and threaten this and that you respond to that. Right? It's about control. And again, I think a lot of the problems we have are really complicated, complex problems that have their roots in a lot of different issues. Bitcoin is not a panacea. Blockchains are not a panacea. There is no magic bullet that solves these problems, right? All we can do is try to understand the causes of these problems. Look at the facts of the situation and try to use both public policy and by the way, competition in private markets to try to improve how we handle these issues. That's it.

• 53:59Anthony Pompliano?

  My other favorite is I've never seen a politician pledge to give away 99% of their wealth. There's quite a few rich people who have done that in the giving pledge. I've never seen a politician say, I'll give away majority of my wealth. Instead, what they say is I'll give away a majority of yours.

• 54:15Speaker 02

  Exactly. And that's easy to do.

• 54:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 54:18Speaker 02

  And that's easy to do when all you're responding to is trying to get a byline into Fox News. But look, I think at the end of the day. What I'm excited about, for the first time, right? We have more women in Congress than ever, right? We have more age diversity in Congress than ever. We have more diversity just across the spectrum in Congress than ever before.

• 54:40Anthony Pompliano?

  It has gotten better, would you say?

• 54:42Speaker 02

  It has gotten, definitely it's gotten better.

• 54:44Anthony Pompliano?

  In terms of, we're on the right trajectory in terms of diversity, et cetera? Or you disagree with that?

• 54:49Speaker 02

  But I think when people talk about diversity, right? It's diversity of perspective and diversity of skill set. It used to be only wealthy people were in the ruling class, right? For eons and eons, that's how society was governed, was wealthy elites who controlled the money, controlled the power, also made the rules. And that worked, right? Then, well, it didn't work. It worked for those people, right? And they had the money and the guns and all the fun things. Then we started to get into the era of career politicians and political dynasties. And again, it was still, you came from the money class. And like, if you came from a wealthy, well-to-do family, you were a member of parliament in the UK. And then in the US, though, we did that as people from wealthy, established families ran for office and they became senators and so on and so forth.

• 55:31Speaker 02

  Now, what we're seeing for the first time is the democratization of politics. And what I think is so interesting, Donald Trump's a divisive person, obviously, in a lot of ways. One thing that Donald Trump has proven to me, I don't, I think it's very unlikely that we will have a career politician as president ever again.

• 55:52Anthony Pompliano?

  You know who I think is gonna win president one day? And people get real mad at me?

• 55:55Speaker 02

  Who?

• 55:56Anthony Pompliano?

  The Rock.

• 55:56Speaker 02

  Oh, Dwayne The Rock Johnson is my number one pick for president.

• 56:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Pauline is in the room, she's laughing because she tells everyone that I think The Rock's gonna be president one day. And here's my logic. Incredibly charismatic.

• 56:08Speaker 02

  So likeable.

• 56:09Anthony Pompliano?

  The most recognized actor globally.

• 56:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:12Anthony Pompliano?

  He, there's a bunch of studies that show, uh, physical size has a lot to do with who wins. So when you put him on debate stages, et cetera, and-

• 56:20Speaker 02

  The man is broad.

• 56:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, he's huge. He's massive, right?

• 56:23Speaker 02

  He's like as wide as the store, I think.

• 56:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, yeah. And, and, and here's the best part, is- Trump won, like Scott Adams has dissected this to the point of like, the dude's just an expert at it at this point.

• 56:35Speaker 02

  And Scott's great.

• 56:36Anthony Pompliano?

  But he basically says he's got this weapons-grade persuasion. And what Trump was able to do was every time you backed him into a corner, he was able to use humor or attacks to finagle his way out, make people kind of chuckle and move on, right?

• 56:47Speaker 02

  The other thing Trump did is he was upfront about the fact that he was an asshole.

• 56:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, of course. If you just own it, there's a bunch of other people who say, you know what, I'd be 1-2 if I was a billionaire, right? Like, that whole mentality. But imagine Trump and The Rock onstage in a debate, and Trump says something to Dwayne Johnson, like a jab at him, and Dwayne Johnson just goes, "Haha, shut your candy ass up." And you could just see the, like, it's over. Like, it's just done, because he's more physically intimidating, he's actually probably more reasonable, he's a very rational person.

• 57:20Speaker 02

  He's very likable also. I think he's a very likable person. Look, I don't disagree with you there. I am, like, somewhat excited and somewhat intimidated by that era. I think the other big shift that needs to happen, and this is a shift that needs to happen broadly, would be interesting to see how it gets navigated, is a lot of people don't realize the roots of Silicon Valley stem in needs of government, right? So a lot of, pardon?

• 57:46Anthony Pompliano?

  I said, of course. Dark and all stuff.

• 57:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Right? MIT, we're onto grad school, biggest donors, funders of research at MIT, DARPA and DOE, right? And so there's a really strong tie between our government and innovation. Amazon's about to become the largest contractor to the US government, right? For cloud compute services. Look at that. And so in my view...

• 58:06Anthony Pompliano?

  No wonder they want to take all of his money.

• 58:10Speaker 02

  Impossible. By the way, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and Mark Zuckerberg, between the three of them, have more wealth than 50% of Americans. It's like, an interesting statistic, right? But I think...

• 58:21Anthony Pompliano?

  You also, wait, hold on a second. You don't believe that anyone over the age of 55 should vote? What's up with that?

• 58:25Speaker 02

  Okay. I said this in the pre-show podcast...

• 58:28Anthony Pompliano?

  And you thought that, you hope that I forgot?

• 58:30Speaker 02

  The pre-podcast podcast. Okay, here's my view, right? Okay. So, here we are. We are living right now in the year 2020, and about 30%... Of the labor force is set to retire in the next 10 years. Pensions are underfunded by an average of 25%, meaning they only have 75% of the liabilities they need to meet. And then

• 58:50Anthony Pompliano?

  And they're underperforming what they need to keep growing.

• 58:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, because their their growth rate was 7%, which is like, OK, that sounds unfeasible. Thanks. Very, very good. And the way they invest, by the way, which is super low risk, doesn't work. Preservation of principles not going to save you. And so what I think is really interesting, right? We have all these people retiring. And what's what's concerning to me is people who have time and money in this country are people who are retired. Right? So they turn up disproportionately to vote, to drive the vote. And also, all of the people who are in office are of that older generation of that mindset.

• 59:25Anthony Pompliano?

  On average.

• 59:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And I think mindset's the really important component here. Like, they share the same mental model. They share the same influences that shaped their thinking, right? And how they view the world. And so you have these people who are the large donors with all the money because they have all the assets, right? And then you have all these people who are in office who are of that same generation, of that same mindset. And they're making rules and policies. I'm in my mid 30s, right? I'm going to have to spend the next 30 years of my life working and paying taxes to cover the healthcare shortfall, the social security shortfall, the pension shortfall, all of these things that this population is going to need. I should get to decide who makes decisions for me. Did you I should get to decide because I'm going to be liable for those decisions.

• 1:00:11Speaker 02

  Not these people who are retired and who are going to be enjoying the last 20, 30 years of years. I should get to decide because I'm going to be the person who's liable for producing the assets to make up that shortfall. My money is the money that gets devalued. My future is being sold to finance the present for a generation of people who have already benefited a lot from this system.

• 1:00:34Anthony Pompliano?

  So what you're talking about was very well highlighted. I saw a chart recently that showed the average age of Fortune 500 CEOs. And basically, for the last 15 years, it has continued to increase. And immediately, people said, that's not Because all of a sudden, we started like moving up the age is because the same people have been running the Fortune 500 companies for the last 15 years. And so they started when they were 45, then when they were 50, 55, 60, etc. And it's just, they all just kept moving around in between the different companies. But there was one kind of cohort of people who have continued to run the largest corporations in America. The same exact thing in politics.

• 1:01:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Chuck Schumer is a great example. He's been in politics for, I don't know how long, but it's not two years.

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  Same, same, but different. And by the way, the way that politicians make their money was like, look, everyone has to make a living. And I don't knock people for this. It's knowing the game, but the game for politicians like Bernie Sanders, right? He didn't make his money by having a job.

• 1:01:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Multi, multimillionaire. He's multimillionaire.

• 1:01:32Speaker 02

  He made his money through consulting contracts, through speaking arrange like, again, same, same, same, but different. There is very little difference between politicians, people who run corporations and people who run large investment firms. It's like the same set of incentives, the same set of goals, and it's the same group of people.

• 1:01:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Do, I don't care what you personally, who you think should win in terms of like your politics, but looking at it from a rational seat, who do you think gets the Democratic nomination?

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  Um, oh, that's a really good question. I think Bernie probably will.

• 1:02:08Anthony Pompliano?

  You think so? You think this is the time he gets it?

• 1:02:10Speaker 02

  I don't know, but I feel like a lot of people right now, like rising wealth inequality, growth of 1089 gig worker miss like that whole economy. I think there is enough anger around wealth inequality that someone like Bernie will get the nomination.

• 1:02:28Anthony Pompliano?

  I think he's got a better shot than he's ever had.

• 1:02:31Speaker 02

  Who do you think's gonna get it?

• 1:02:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh.

• 1:02:35Speaker 02

  It also doesn't matter because Trump's gonna win, I think.

• 1:02:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't even think it's gonna be close. Uh, I, I thought for like two seconds that it would be interesting to see Mike Bloomberg versus Trump. And then Trump absolutely like, so here's my whole thing with, uh, with politics today. And this isn't a Trump thing. It's just in general, and, uh, I'll pick somebody from each side of the aisle that's very good at it. So Trump on the Republican side, AOC on the Democratic side. She's fantastic at this as well.

• 1:02:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:59Anthony Pompliano?

  They understand that it's not about the message. It's all about the delivery.

• 1:03:04Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:03:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And so, uh, Trump beat Bloomberg the second he tweeted out, "Mini Mike." It was over.

• 1:03:10Speaker 02

  Which also, by the way, goes back to what we were just talking about, career politicians, done. This is about, and by the way. Tying it all back to Bitcoin, this is Bitcoin's strength. Bitcoin isn't just an asset, right? How many people actually wake up every morning and are excited about a stock? Or a bond?

• 1:03:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Nope.

• 1:03:27Speaker 02

  Or the FX they trade? Or the commodity they trade? Like, literally, nobody, right?

• 1:03:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Except for Tesla.

• 1:03:34Speaker 02

  And even that, I think, is just...

• 1:03:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:37Speaker 02

  Money's free, and so when you have free money, you have to dump it into something. So like, fake meat, great. Like Tesla, great. There are stocks that...

• 1:03:45Anthony Pompliano?

  But Bitcoin, what you're getting at is the idea of Bitcoin is the separation of state and money.

• 1:03:48Speaker 02

  No. Where I want to go is it's a social movement. Bitcoin, more than anything else, is a social movement. It is a set of ideals, it's an identity. Same thing with politics. The people who are going to win political elections are people who move and inspire and create emotion. Right? And the way you create emotion in the world we live in is by having a really strong message that resonates with people.

• 1:04:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:04:10Speaker 02

  Trump's message resonates with people. I don't agree with all of it, but it definitely resonates with a large percentage of the population in this country. Same thing with Bitcoin. Bitcoin's message resonates with millennials.

• 1:04:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, we're saying the same thing. I always just throw it in the bucket of separation of state and money because that social movement, that's basically like the end result, right? But what you're saying is the movement there, like, almost the process is really, really important. Before we go deep, deep down the rabbit hole of politics, I have other questions.

• 1:04:40Speaker 02

  And by the way, my views on politics are not that informed. I just think it's very interesting that in America, people believe there are two different political parties. I'm like, they're saying the same.

• 1:04:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah. And the reason why Plinno is... Actually, she didn't even laugh. She gets mad at me for talking about politics all the time, but...

• 1:04:59Speaker 02

  Well, you're not from America, too, right? Yeah.

• 1:05:01Anthony Pompliano?

  No, Plinno's from Bulgaria.

• 1:05:02Speaker 02

  So you're Bulgarian, I'm Turkish, raised in Europe.

• 1:05:05Anthony Pompliano?

  All of Europe is corrupt, just like America. News flash, every government is corrupt. But my point in saying all this is I look at the political stuff through the lens of like, the marketing and the messaging, and it's fascinating to me to see... And again, I go like, Trump and AOC literally are the same person in that they understand how to deliver a message through certain...

• 1:05:25Speaker 02

  And their primary channel is Twitter.

• 1:05:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 1:05:28Speaker 02

  Which I think is really interesting.

• 1:05:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Because, though, they get to speak directly to people. They completely have cut out the middlemen of the journalistic mainstream media who they know were twisting their words to fit a narrative. Now, if they can talk directly to the people, you get what happened last night. We're recording this the day after the Super Bowl. Trump tweeted after the Super Bowl and said, "Congratulations to the people of Kansas," even though Kansas City is in Missouri. So like, you get mistakes, but you also get him to talk directly to the people.

• 1:06:00Speaker 02

  But here's what's the best about that, is Donald Trump literally doesn't care.

• 1:06:04Anthony Pompliano?

  No, he deleted the tweet and literally kept going.

• 1:06:07Speaker 02

  It's on brand for him. It's so on brand.

• 1:06:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course, of course. He'll just say, "The haters are just trying to bring me down," and he'll keep going. That's the whole thing, is the idea of having the tough skin, right? Is it's something that I think people who grew up in a certain time period where social media was very prevalent, right, these younger people, they're used to having to have tough skin because you're having the conversation out in public. And so like, my father couldn't imagine getting attacked on every day like people on crypto Twitter get attacked. He can't fathom that world.

• 1:06:45Speaker 02

  But by the way, this is what's so fun about the crypto community, is people judge things on the merit of your ideas in most cases, right? There's like a lot of people out there that are a little cray cray. But most times, you judge on the merit of your ideas. Like, I get called out all the time, and then people get to change my mind, and I'm like, "Oh yeah, you're right. Like, I was wrong about that." And I think that's the beauty of it. That's the beauty of having social media, is you get to have conversations on the internet with strangers.

• 1:07:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, Twitter is the WWE. I've talked about this a million times. It's like, there's the villain, the hero, the tag team partners, whatever. It's a whole thing. Another WWE-type entity is Barstool Sports where...

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  By the way, shout out to my partner who works at Barstool Sports. It's his birthday today, so shout out to him. A little love on the podcast, if I can pump. If I can co-op your podcast to make a...

• 1:07:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Can we dox him?

• 1:07:35Speaker 02

  No, we cannot.

• 1:07:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, we can't say his name?

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  No, no, no.

• 1:07:37Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, that's fine.

• 1:07:38Speaker 02

  He literally, he said to me, he said to me, "Meltem..." Don't ever, don't ever tell crypto people who I am. Like, people in the industry know him.

• 1:07:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:45Speaker 02

  But he's like, I don't want to go to crypto things. I don't want to talk to the crypto people. And by the way, I feel the same way about the Barstool people. So we both belong to cults.

• 1:07:53Anthony Pompliano?

  They're all coming together. They're all, listen, in 2021, Barstool and crypto are all going to come together. It's gonna happen.

• 1:07:59Speaker 02

  Sure. Well, Barstool's now a gambling company, which is pretty exciting. But, look, you and I were talking about this in our pre-podcast, the exclusive pre-podcast that only Kalina got access to.

• 1:08:09Anthony Pompliano?

  We should record the pre-pre-podcast and then just release it. Go ahead.

• 1:08:13Speaker 02

  The pre-pre-podcast?

• 1:08:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:15Speaker 02

  And then we can do pre-pre-podcast?

• 1:08:17Anthony Pompliano?

  No, no, no, no.

• 1:08:18Speaker 02

  And then we can-

• 1:08:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Now you're sounding like Justin Sun in Toronto. All right. All right. So what about Barstool Sports?

• 1:08:23Speaker 02

  Okay. So we're talking about the way that ideas spread. And I think I joke with my partner all the time. I tell him, you sell memes on the internet.

• 1:08:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Fact.

• 1:08:32Speaker 02

  And then you corrected me and you said, they make memes first and then they sell the memes. Right? And so I think there's this interesting thing where we're living in this age where

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  the, the, the cultural zeitgeist is really important. Like, look at the rise of TikTok. Look at the rise of memes. Look at these things that go viral. There's like this ephemeral kind of quality to the way we interact and the way we participate. And what I think's so interesting about Barstool, by the way, one of the biggest, most popular media companies in the world, they're like outranking ESPN. And they're a bunch of jabronis and like misfits from Boston.

• 1:09:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:09:13Speaker 02

  Who talk about all sorts of weird stuff. If you've ever watched any of their content, like it's very weird. It's very off-color.

• 1:09:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, for those that don't know, I should have done this at the beginning. For those that don't know, Barstool Sports is a media company. Started out in Boston, 2003. The founder, Dave Portnoy, literally was making the free newspapers that you would hand out. And he would sell advertising in them. He discovered the internet, decided, well, I'm tired of making the newspaper, standing outside, handing it out. Why don't I make a blog? Then all of a sudden it became this Skype video thing.

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, they were doing Skype video calls, which, by the way, on my fourth date, I was forced to watch one. And I was like, I don't understand why we're doing this. What are you?

• 1:09:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, Dave Portnoy is now worth over $100 million because he- Recently, so first he sold half the business to churn in, then he took some more investment. And then the big news was recently they have sold a third of the business to Penn National, which is a publicly traded, very large gambling company, kind of infrastructure company.

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  They own casinos.

• 1:10:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, casinos, etc.

• 1:10:09Speaker 02

  And Barstool is basically going to be the sports book in these casinos. And if you think about it, what's really crazy about Barstool, so one of the things you and I were talking about is they decided, so they cover sports and then they decided to create their own sport. It's called Rough and Rowdy. I have the privilege of watching Rough and Rowdy because my partner manages a lot of the streaming platform and the subscriptions. 25,000 people buy this coverage, right? It's like 15 to 25 pop, I think, and the numbers go anywhere from 25 to 50,000. They've done like seven or eight of them.

• 1:10:39Anthony Pompliano?

  It is literally amateur boxing.

• 1:10:42Speaker 02

  It's amateur boxing, but it's, it's so politically incorrect. It's, you know, they had one of their team members who is publicly out as being gay, fight someone in Florida, like box against this person, someone who went to jail for like homophobia and like crimes against a gay person, right? So like they pit these people against each other and it's just, it's so off color.

• 1:11:06Anthony Pompliano?

  It's like taking the sport of boxing and overlaying it with like what Vince McMahon did with WWF, right?

• 1:11:12Speaker 02

  And then you add in bum fights. I don't know if anyone ever had Comedy Central, like bum fights, but then also adding-

• 1:11:18Anthony Pompliano?

  That is a throwback.

• 1:11:19Speaker 02

  Oh, I liked comedies. I was all, all in on the weirdness.

• 1:11:24Anthony Pompliano?

  But like, but what they've done, and they've done a very good job of it.

• 1:11:26Speaker 02

  And they added in the man show. If you remember Adam Carolla as the man show, they have the girls and the, yeah.

• 1:11:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So the one thing that Barstool does, I'm going to draw a line here between a number of different things in society that people don't think are connected, but are highly connected. Barstool Sports, Kylie Jenner, The Rock, and TikTok Stars.

• 1:11:45Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:11:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And those four are all connected because they do the same exact thing. They build massive loyal rabid fanbases for whatever their thing is.

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:11:54Anthony Pompliano?

  And then they turn around and they start advertising where either they are the advertisement or they advertise a product. And then all of a sudden they realize, why am I advertising somebody else's product?

• 1:12:03Speaker 02

  I'm going to sell my own.

• 1:12:04Anthony Pompliano?

  I should just sell my own.

• 1:12:05Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:12:05Anthony Pompliano?

  And so Barstool's done that very well. Kylie Jenner obviously has done that very well. The Rock is coming out with his tequila.

• 1:12:12Speaker 02

  I also think I'm sitting with someone who has done that well.

• 1:12:16Anthony Pompliano?

  I

• 1:12:17Speaker 02

  Pop, what's the product?

• 1:12:18Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm a huge believer in this model. We will see. To be completely honest, I don't know.

• 1:12:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, because it's hard to sell financial products.

• 1:12:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, one is financial products, but I actually am not even interested in doing that as much as like, I think that there's a lot of other things that are much more interesting. And so to me, like, the financial products are, there's a slippery slope between like legit financial products and then like the latest financial guru type, you know, whatever nonsense.

• 1:12:47Speaker 02

  I mean, we all saw ICOs and the best of the best got pulled into that.

• 1:12:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And it's just like, like, that's just, I don't know, that's a world like I don't really like and don't want to go there, etc. Instead, it's, I think a lot about, in finance, there's a lot of things that haven't been done, that have been done in almost every single other industry. So everything from physical products to merchandise to, you know, books, events.

• 1:13:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, because finance celebrities have historically been, no offense, like crusty white dudes.

• 1:13:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And they all sell the same thing. What are they selling? They're selling their advice. Every single time they sell advice.

• 1:13:19Speaker 02

  But also, I think.

• 1:13:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Or their fund.

• 1:13:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. But the world of finance, I think, FinnTwit's really fun. Major shout out to, I think, downtown Josh Brown and Michael Batnick, who are both Brits. They do a great job in sort of blending viral social media. Howard Lindzen built StockTwit.

• 1:13:34Anthony Pompliano?

  No, we can't, no, we can't give Howard Lindzen any credit.

• 1:13:37Speaker 02

  Why?

• 1:13:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Because he's going to listen to this and then his ego is going to get even bigger.

• 1:13:41Speaker 02

  I love you, Howard.

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  Okay, Howard, you have to buy me a drink next time you're in New York. But not, don't buy Pop a drink.

• 1:13:50Anthony Pompliano?

  He's done a fantastic job as well. Yeah.

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

  But I think there are people who've started to eat away at this. But I think this is what's really exciting. This is where it comes back full circle. So we've seen a lot of innovation. The internet drove a massive amount of innovation. And the way it drove innovation is it made creating, distributing products really easy, right? So the cost of bringing your product to market, whether it's an app or some sort of service, went down drastically as we started to see things like infrastructure as a service, right? Through cloud, we started to see software as a service. So you could now have access to MongoDB and then you had marketing as a service. With things like Mailchimp, then you had APIs that connected all of these different things to social media and all of these other services. And all of a sudden, the cost of building an audience is virtually zero, right?

• 1:14:35Speaker 02

  You built an audience basically with zero investment.

• 1:14:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Just time.

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, time, exactly. And so what we've seen in that arena, we're starting to see now, in my view, like what blockchains are doing, what the Bitcoin network is going to do, is enable this to happen in finance.

• 1:14:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely.

• 1:14:52Speaker 02

  And I think finance is this area of their life that like everyone has such a weird relationship with money. And this is something that's really interesting to me is when you talk to people about money, how much money you make, what you spend your money on, your budget, how you invest. It's a topic that no one likes to talk about.

• 1:15:07Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm pulling up a tweet right now, keep going.

• 1:15:09Speaker 02

  But this is the most important thing in our lives, like money and the decisions we make around money and the education we have around money is the, one of the most important things in our lives. And we don't teach it to people, which I think is a huge mistake. But there is such a fundamental like component of money and finance that people need to understand. So we need to, number one, drastically reduce the cost of bringing financial products and services to market. Make them look and feel seamless, deliver them through, by the way, this amazing supercomputer that's in our pocket. And then more importantly, we need to make it interesting and fun and socially acceptable for people to talk about money. I don't understand why people aren't talking about it.

• 1:15:49Anthony Pompliano?

  So the tweet that I'm trying to pull up.

• 1:15:51Speaker 02

  Bitcoin makes it okay for you to talk about money, by the way, which is like pretty amazing.

• 1:15:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course, look, the, the tweet that I'm trying to pull up right now, which hopefully I can find quickly is, uh, I tweeted,

• 1:16:02Anthony Pompliano?

  the secrets that the rich people don't want you to know. And it was literally.

• 1:16:05Speaker 02

  What are the secrets?

• 1:16:06Anthony Pompliano?

  I use that very specifically because what I wanted to do was I wanted to highlight the fact that nobody likes to talk about money. Everyone is super nervous of, uh, talking about it. And these are like really simple.

• 1:16:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Like financial advice things. Hold on, let me see if I can find it real quick. Joe, you might have to edit something out for the first time. All this time has taken me to find this damn tweet.

• 1:16:30Speaker 02

  Okay, so I'll just talk while you browse. Okay, I'm just gonna riff.

• 1:16:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Go ahead.

• 1:16:35Speaker 02

  Okay, but I think what's what's exciting here, and it actually ties back to Bitcoin, right? And it's actually also ties back to politics because all of these things fit together in such a beautiful way. What's really interesting is as financial innovation starts to creep into different parts of the stack, as people look at new distribution models that are focused on leveraging the strengths of social media and these other platforms where people are congregating, what starts to happen, like we're already seeing this with Bitcoin, how do you regulate an asset that has no real physical jurisdiction? And so what's going to start to happen is historically finance has been one of the most regulated industries and for good reason. What we're going to start to see is an evolution of how finance gets regulated,

• 1:17:15Speaker 02

  because it's going to be impossible to manage the proliferation of all of the ways in which people are delivering financial services and products. Already we see this.

• 1:17:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 1:17:23Speaker 02

  Already we see this. And so my hope is, is that as this trend continues and accelerates, right? That it'll lead to significant reform, both structural, market structure reform, banking reform, but also financial regulation reform. Because there is so much that we need to do better. Like, let's be very clear, people talk all the time about having a registered offering, or people are like, oh, you know, our ICO is like a reg deregulated offering. Our ICO is like a rega- like, by the way, that doesn't mean shit. Having expensive lawyers file paperwork for you does not confer quality.

• 1:18:00Anthony Pompliano?

  The lawyers won in the ICO craze. The lawyers, the people who made the most money in all of crypto, on average, is lawyers.

• 1:18:06Speaker 02

  And by the way, STOs not interesting to me.

• 1:18:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 1:18:09Speaker 02

  Because there's negative selection bias. People are using STOs to raise money, typically raising money in that manner because they can't raise it in another way. And by the way,

• 1:18:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Historically, that's true.

• 1:18:19Speaker 02

  Just because, and again, it goes back to investing, most stocks. Do not perform well, do not perform at all. Being publicly listed doesn't confer quality on a company, right? There's a small handful of companies that deliver all of stock market return. And so a lot of people are like, oh, if we make the capital structure more innovative and flexible and allow anyone to buy securities, particularly high-risk, early-stage securities, it's going to have this amazing boom effect. And it's like, no, most of those investments are still not going to perform well because they're high-risk investments. Doesn't mean people shouldn't make them, but I think people confuse the cause and the effect. And so I do think it's important that, you know, the regulation component doesn't actually do anything other than increase the barrier to entry.

• 1:19:03Speaker 02

  That is literally the only impact of regulation is increasing the barrier to entry.

• 1:19:07Anthony Pompliano?

  So my whole thing with, a lot of people call them STOs. I think of it more as automated finance, right? And the reason-

• 1:19:13Speaker 02

  I say digital securities.

• 1:19:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, the reason why I use automation, automated finance is you need the asset itself to be digitized, but-

• 1:19:21Speaker 02

  It can be programmable?

• 1:19:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Kind of. So let me throw something at you and see what you think about this. I don't think I've ever said this publicly. My whole fascination with what's going on outside of Bitcoin is one simple idea. Pre 1400s, there was a single-entry accounting. And that single-entry accounting was basically very narrative-driven. So it would say, you know, Meltem gave me six chickens. I owe her eggs every day for a year, right? And you'd have to literally read the words to understand. It was all Roman numerals were used as well. So it was really hard to do addition, subtraction, et cetera.

• 1:19:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, Egyptians used strings of knots tied in them, which is equally confusing.

• 1:19:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, all kinds of stuff. And so in the 1400s, right before the 1400s, basically two things happened that were really important. One, printing press was invented. And two, we went from Roman numerals to more of Arabic numbers. And those became more popularized. But in the 1400s, there's this guy, Paciolo or something like that, P-A-C-I-O-L-I, I think, if I get it right. He's known as the father of accounting. And what he realized, he was writing a book on mathematics. And when he's writing this book, it was about all kinds of different mathematics, including how art was related to math, all this kind of stuff. And he included a section on something called double-entry accounting. And he learned this from some Italian merchants. What the merchants wanted to do was they couldn't figure out what they owed people and who owed them what. So they created two entries, debits and credits.

• 1:20:40Speaker 02

  And by the way, this was the start of Venetian merchant banking.

• 1:20:43Anthony Pompliano?

  So he saw it, put it in the book. One of the first people to read the book, Leonardo da Vinci, because Leonardo da Vinci was reading while he was painting the Sistine Chapel about the art and math. Also happened to read the double entry system. He was well known at the time. He began telling people about it. One of the people he told it, Medici Bank, the Medici's that owned the bank. All of a sudden, they start getting everyone to use it and bam, here you go. You're off to the races. So this guy becomes now known as father of accounting, but at the time, you know, nobody knew it was all Leonardo da Vinci. Well, that one thing in the 1400s, today is the foundation for every single transaction that anyone does. Right? And so it was, if you think of it as a technology, accounting as technology, it's probably one of the most important technology inventions in a very, very long time.

• 1:21:25Speaker 02

  It allowed for the, um, the rapid proliferation of lending.

• 1:21:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely.

• 1:21:31Speaker 02

  And capital as a service.

• 1:21:32Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the largest explosions was in the United States with the rise of corporations as businesses investing, all this kind of stuff. So you know that, right? In 1989, there's a Japanese researcher who came up with triple entry accounting.

• 1:21:42Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:21:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Nobody cared. 2005, a cryptographer said, what about that triple entry accounting and digital receipts? Nobody cared. 2009, first real world application of this triple entry accounting system. All of a sudden, 150, 160 billion dollar asset with Bitcoin.

• 1:21:58Anthony Pompliano?

  If my theory is correct, triple entry accounting will be the most important invention technology wise in our lifetime and no one's talking about it.

• 1:22:06Speaker 02

  I think people are talking about it. They just don't use that language.

• 1:22:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, they, they talk about it as STOs or blockchains or all this other stuff.

• 1:22:12Speaker 02

  To me, so the way I describe it is the flattening of the finance stack.

• 1:22:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. What does that mean?

• 1:22:17Speaker 02

  Okay. So basically what that means.

• 1:22:18Anthony Pompliano?

  That's something that somebody that went to MIT would say. So what does that mean?

• 1:22:21Speaker 02

  I think it also is like somebody who has booked a trade, right? So typically, okay. So typically the way it works, right? There's three layers to how transactions work. There's the execution, which is you and I agree to something, we shake hands and we're like, okay, that's the trade. Then there's clearing, which is you and I providing instructions and then our respective compliance departments confirming it, doing KYC AML. And then there's settlement, which is the actual funds swapping, right? So what's really innovative about blockchains in my view and Bitcoin network is. We've collapsed all of that into one single ledger. So instead of those things happening in three different layers and in three different places, a lot of extra work, you can now do these things more efficiently on a single sediment network,

• 1:23:04Speaker 02

  which is why, by the way, what makes stable coins so interesting is for the first time, instead of having different interoperating networks that don't connect to one another, having to reconcile and do double entry counting to track what's flowing where and manage it all. You can have all of this stuff happen programmatically on one ledger.

• 1:23:21Anthony Pompliano?

  So I don't disagree with you at all. The other framework that I use that I go after the technology folks who don't understand the finance world is, if you look at humans, we're all network or we're all nodes in a network, right? And we used to be very siloed and fragmented. So I couldn't talk to you, you couldn't talk to me unless we wrote a letter to each other that was slow or we were in physical proximity.

• 1:23:39Speaker 02

  I'm more of a carrier pigeon girl, but I'm gonna let you finish.

• 1:23:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Flynn actually wrote me a love letter one time. Her eyes just lit up like, do not tell that, but I'll tell that story another time.

• 1:23:47Speaker 02

  I don't think eyes lit up was the, I think she was more like, what?

• 1:23:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Listen, I can share a little bit of fake news on the podcast. She, she, she has, she has no.

• 1:23:56Speaker 02

  Posted on the fridge. That's really romantic. Did you ever do the, the words on the fridge where you could spell out?

• 1:24:02Anthony Pompliano?

  No, no, no, no, no, no, she like, like left me. It wasn't a love note, it was instructions. But going back to my story is this idea that humans are all nodes in a network.

• 1:24:14Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:24:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Super fragmented. And all of a sudden, we added in connectivity by giving internet, mobile phones, et cetera. When you connected all of those humans in a network, productivity exploded, right? Okay, now go to the finance world, everyone's balance sheet is siloed.

• 1:24:28Speaker 02

  Creativity exploded.

• 1:24:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, of course, but then you go to the finance world, all of our balance sheets are siloed. So I have a balance sheet, I can settle that with debts and credits, you can settle yours, but they don't talk to each other. The second that you add triple entry accounting, right, or blockchains, et cetera into it, now all of a sudden you're connecting balance sheets all around the world through this centralized ledger or third party ledger. I believe that that will lead to a massive explosion in productivity. What we don't know yet is what are the first applications other than Bitcoin that kind of take off with that?

• 1:24:54Speaker 02

  I think the biggest issue there though is again, it goes back to incentives. One of the big challenges is right now, your average bank or financial institution, 30 to 40% of the people there. Working in compliance and working legal. So they're the people who are doing the clearing and the settling, or what we call mid and back office, right? And so I think the hard part is, and this is by the way, like, I'm working on a big series around fintech and the five areas where I think we'll see disintermediation first, which I think will be fun to talk about. But I think where we're, where we're gonna see it is in places where there's a lot of resistance to removing those functions. There's a lot of what I call tribal organizational knowledge. Because a lot of times when you go into financial institution, God knows, I've been around my fair share. Anytime you try to change a process,

• 1:25:38Speaker 02

  people first use policy, then use regulation, then use compliance. And then it's, this is the way we've always done things. And because this is finance, we're not going to change it. So I think this is where the path dependence thing becomes really interesting. So you made a comment earlier about needing a lot of force to change the trajectory of something, right? And so right now, we're on this course where the world of finance is on a certain path, right? And I believe in path determinism, that once something is already on a path and it's in motion, it has velocity, it has acceleration potentially, because the mass keeps growing and growing. And by the way, after the 2008 financial crisis, all of the policy changes that were made made that mass continue to grow, right? It's picking up speed because it's getting bigger and clunkier and heavier and uglier and messier. Four banks in the United States

• 1:26:21Speaker 02

  control over 50% of consumer deposits. Right? Consolidation's the only thing that's happened. So this is getting bigger and faster speeding up. So to kick this thing out of its trajectory, which is eventual, like, massive implosion, you need something with a tremendous amount of force. And the thing that has a tremendous amount of force is something that is so disruptive that it changes everything. And it has to do it kind of in like a one-shot moment. So I think there's all this gradual stuff that will happen, that will start to seep into and start building competence within large financial institutions. But like, have you ever watched a bank try to build a website?

• 1:26:58Anthony Pompliano?

  No, but I can't imagine that it's very effective or efficient.

• 1:27:00Speaker 02

  It looks like AOL in 1996, right? And so I think what's going to happen, and this is where I think the urgency is going to come from, is tech companies are going to come, become financial institutions. And in a very rapid span of time, banks are going to see all of their market power eroded, all of it. And so they're going to have to be, they're going to be forced to do something really drastic, right? It's kind of like what's happening with the central bank narrative. Something's going to happen there that's going to kick off this massive sort of wave. Don't know when it is, but a broken clock only has to be right twice a day.

• 1:27:35Anthony Pompliano?

  That's right. All right. Before we switch topics, the tweet, I found it. What rich people don't want you to know. Number one, you won't get rich off a salary alone. Two, inflation steals your wealth, so invest. Three, buy assets, not liabilities. Four, never spend more than you make. Five, pay yourself first always. Six, compound interest works wonders. Now, none of those things are groundbreaking ideas. They're very well understood in people who understand finance, et cetera. The thing about this tweet that shocked me, one, it went viral. And two, the number of people that reached out to me and said, I want to change my situation.

• 1:28:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And what shocked me was how few people talk about money.

• 1:28:14Speaker 02

  But here's what's

• 1:28:15Anthony Pompliano?

  It blew me away.

• 1:28:16Speaker 02

  But here's what's really interesting, even when people do talk about money. Go to a bank website, go to an asset manager's website. It's not fun. It's not engaging, right?

• 1:28:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:26Speaker 02

  It's boring. It's really boring.

• 1:28:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course, because that's all they know. And they've been scared out of their minds by regulators and

• 1:28:33Speaker 02

  Compliance. Oh, I have this conversation with my compliance team every day. It's like, don't tell me no, tell me how I can do what I want to do. But I do think like there are all of these forces that are coming together to shape what I think will be a really exciting time. I think the last decade was all about SaaS, software as a service. I think this next decade is all about delivering financial services, financial products through digital first experiences and tech companies becoming financial institutions.

• 1:29:04Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a great segue. Last topic, but there are actually two that are related. Zero Hedge and Coronavirus.

• 1:29:10Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 1:29:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's talk first about Coronavirus, then we'll get into the Zero Hedge nonsense. Um, or controversy.

• 1:29:16Speaker 02

  What is left to say about Coronavirus?

• 1:29:19Anthony Pompliano?

  What I want to know is, uh, what is your view on the response that certain entities and organizations have had? So I'll give you three of them.

• 1:29:29Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:29:29Anthony Pompliano?

  One is the Chinese government appears to be taking it very seriously. I've seen a lot of videos where everything from, uh, today I saw a drone that was going floor by floor in an apartment building outside and uh, taking the temperature of people so that a human didn't have to get close. Uh, yesterday I saw a photo of, uh, police had surrounded a building where somebody had been found with Coronavirus. Keep people out. Um, and, uh, then they've constructed the thousand-bed hospital in like five days or whatever, right? So like, pretty aggressive response. Then you've got US, uh, public or private companies like the airlines who are saying, we're cancelling all flights, all this kind of stuff. And then, uh, the US government, uh, today, or yesterday, I think, um, they announced that they're going to actually prevent any Chinese nationals from traveling to the United States.

• 1:30:14Speaker 02

  Oh, I didn't know that happened today. I was expecting that to happen sooner. I'm shocked it took so long.

• 1:30:18Anthony Pompliano?

  I thi- I think so. Alright, so what do you think about those? And I'll confirm that that's true.

• 1:30:22Speaker 02

  Global contagion of every kind is a boon for people who want, um, less cross-pollination immigration. So I think, um, one of the biggest observations around Coronavirus is the amount of racist rhetoric that has entered the conversation, which I think is not surprising, given the day and age we live in, but I find it deeply disturbing. Um, I think one of the other pieces to understand here is, um,

• 1:30:48Speaker 02

  the, the stark sort of differences in how the US treats things, how China treats things, and just different perspectives around the world. Um, seeing the, the speed of the response in China and seeing how seriously they're taking this and how willing they are to go to those lengths, I think is very, um, eye-opening because in the US, like, we can't do anything effectively. I think you and I in our pre-podcast, um, which next time, we will-

• 1:31:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Joe. We should secretly record them when people come in. Oh, Plana just killed that idea. That's how decisions get made around here. I come up with wild ideas and Joe and Joe looks at me like, ah, that's a great idea. And then Plana kills it.

• 1:31:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31:26Anthony Pompliano?

  That happens at least five times a day. All right, keep going.

• 1:31:29Speaker 02

  Okay, but I think what's really interesting, right, is looking at, for example, that video of how quickly the hospital in Wuhan was built. Some of the examples you just highlighted, I think what's really interesting is the way that the Chinese government is using technology to really, really speed up efficiency. And the way they're reacting to this in the US, if we tried to build a hospital, it would take like a year just to decide that we were going to build the hospital. If the if the CDC were going to issue any sort of statement, it would take like six months to even agree as to what's a statement would say. And so I think, again, like there are pros and cons to the situation, but I think in an epidemic situation like this, it's really interesting to see how totalitarian control and the idea of empire and single unified voice that all responds to direct leadership from the top is sometimes

• 1:32:13Speaker 02

  more effective than our bipartisan system where like literally a politician would use this as a way to stomp for some campaign issue, right? Like, well, people are dying. So I think that's just an interesting thing to note. The last thing I saw about coronavirus is all like all of crypto Twitter and crazy. They're like, oh, coronavirus drives Bitcoin. And no, no, no, you know what drove Bitcoin is a bunch of central bankers getting together in Davos, talking about digital currencies. Literally every hedge fund manager in the world was there, picked up their phones, called people and they were like, I need Bitcoin.

• 1:32:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Did you see the picture of the ECB governors when they got together at dinner? This, this is, and this goes to your point about the regulator's age, right? And all this stuff. There's a photo that Christine Lagarde, I think, shared online and she's like, me and all the ECB governors, and it's literally 24 people who all easily have to be over the age of 60 years old. They're all

• 1:33:01Speaker 02

  I've had dinner with some of them.

• 1:33:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Old, white, you know, etc. And when you look at it.

• 1:33:05Speaker 02

  I call it MPS.

• 1:33:07Anthony Pompliano?

  What's that?

• 1:33:07Speaker 02

  Male pale still. Maybe that's a little bit offensive, but like the MPS quotient in those conversations tends to be so high.

• 1:33:14Anthony Pompliano?

  So, under these directives, non-US citizens who have been in China within 14 days of their planned travel will not be permitted to fly to the United States. That's what it is. So it's not Chinese nationals. It's any non-US citizen who has been in China within 14 days.

• 1:33:27Speaker 02

  Okay, that, that I think is different. Okay. So initially, like, I was like, oh, this is pretty racist. That, that actually makes sense to me. So I think the biggest issue here is like stopping contagion. We had the first case of human to human transmission of coronavirus on US soil, I think on Thursday. Someone in my office was sick on Thursday. I was like, do not, he was like, I'll come in in the afternoon. I was like, stay home. Marty Stenson, if you are feeling unwell, go home. Stay home.

• 1:33:51Anthony Pompliano?

  11 of the 19,700 cases of the new coronavirus are in the US. Alright, so that brings me to zero hedge.

• 1:33:58Speaker 02

  Coronavirus, like, interesting. We'll see how it unfolds. Health pandemics are always scary.

• 1:34:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep. And we are definitely not equipped to deal with these.

• 1:34:08Speaker 02

  No, but I think this is a new world we live in, right? Which goes back to like hegemony and power. I think the next great frontier is going to be the digital realm, right? Like, the biggest area of spend for governments in the future will be cybersecurity. You think about the impact coronavirus has had on mobility. Think for a minute if systems went down.

• 1:34:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. The first 195 Americans that were evacuated from Wuhan, which is the epicenter of the outbreak, are under federal quarantine and will remain at a military base in Southern California until mid-February. The government hasn't issued such a quarantine order in more than 50 years, according to CBS News.

• 1:34:43Speaker 02

  Not surprising though. I mean, look, global pandemic, terrifying.

• 1:34:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, so that gets to zero hedge, which I will caveat this entire conversation with, I don't want you and I to get into, is zero hedge good or bad? Or should they have done what they've done? I think that there's a much larger conversation around.

• 1:34:59Speaker 02

  But also, it's irrelevant.

• 1:35:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, fair point, right?

• 1:35:01Speaker 02

  Our perspectives on Zero Hedge are irrelevant.

• 1:35:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, there's a bigger conversation around censorship and deplatforming, right? And so what Zero Hedge essentially did, for those that don't know, it's a, they are described as a financial markets blog. Some people would argue that they're more of a highly radical conservative outlet that is sharing everything from like real news to kind of extreme ideas to conspiracy theories, etc.

• 1:35:27Speaker 02

  I would, I would describe Zero Hedge as a post-apocalyptic finance website.

• 1:35:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 1:35:35Speaker 02

  It's like a dystopian, post-apocalyptic take on all things finance. Interspersed with like really weird scammy financial advisors writing articles about really esoteric, really thinly traded stocks.

• 1:35:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely.

• 1:35:47Speaker 02

  Is that a good?

• 1:35:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so they wrote this article and the headline was essentially, is this the Chinese scientist who's responsible for coronavirus?

• 1:35:56Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:35:57Anthony Pompliano?

  And what they said in it, they strung together a whole bunch of what are confirmed facts, but they strung it together in a very controversial way. And what they said is, look, in Wuhan, there's this university, that university has a Wuhan Institute of Virology, and there's this professor, that professor has been studying SARS and coronavirus and how they're carried in bats and other animals and transmitted, etc. And they pulled up his profile, the university's description of that work, their past publications, open job applications, etc. And then at the end of the article, they said, oh, by the way, if we want to know about the coronavirus, maybe we should go find out from this guy. Here's his email and here's his phone number.

• 1:36:41Anthony Pompliano?

  So that happened last Wednesday.

• 1:36:43Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:36:44Anthony Pompliano?

  BuzzFeed said, there's that guy Ryan Broderick, who said, nah, that's not cool. He wrote an article that said, meet the pro-Trump, you know, alt-right or whatever blog that has doxed the Chinese scientist who is inaccurately accused of releasing the coronavirus as like a bioweapon. Well.

• 1:37:03Speaker 02

  The blue checkmark brigade, as I like to call it.

• 1:37:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. So, long story short, Zero Hedge gets banned from Twitter, permanently banned for a According to Twitter, violating their manipulation policy.

• 1:37:14Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:37:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Whatever that ends up being. And so the internet goes to work and the internet is undefeated in these situations. They with literally within an hour, I saw people tweeting about the reporter, his tweets from 2012 and 2013. And I'm not going to go into the details of them, but they fall into two categories. One, there was some comments in and around pedophilia, which obviously immediately, you know, people get very uncomfortable about and complain about. And then two, and rightfully so. And then two is he also participated in the doxing of a business owner in 2013. Basically shared information where people were doxing somebody.

• 1:37:53Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:37:54Anthony Pompliano?

  And so as you get into this, it all comes down to Twitter. You know, I wrote this morning that they deplatformed somebody for quote unquote doxing a Chinese scientist, but they only really gave publicly available information in the blog.

• 1:38:09Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:38:09Anthony Pompliano?

  But that was reported by a BuzzFeed reporter who previously had doxed somebody else. And some are allowed to say, some are not allowed to say.

• 1:38:15Speaker 02

  But you're using facts and facts don't matter.

• 1:38:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, explain.

• 1:38:18Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:38:19Anthony Pompliano?

  That's very Trumpian.

• 1:38:20Speaker 02

  No, no, no, I'm just being very realistic.

• 1:38:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:23Speaker 02

  The facts have never mattered, by the way. A great book to read for people who are interested in this is a book by Bernays. It's called propaganda, written in the 1930s. Bernays advised the tobacco industry on how to effectively create propaganda. He also, in a less sort of, you know, how do I say, less sort of politically acceptable turn of events. He also advised the Nazi party on how to effectively implement their propaganda campaign. But it's really interesting because what it's really about is facts are objective and subjective, right? There's also a great book on how statistics can help you be totally wrong about everything, which is basically how you can manipulate data to basically tell any story you want.

• 1:39:06Speaker 02

  But what I think is interesting here is like, what you're talking about is facts of the situation, right?

• 1:39:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:39:10Speaker 02

  At the end of the day, a platform like Twitter, what they're responding to, the what is the goal of the Twitter corporation? What is their only function in life as a corporation? To maximize shareholder value.

• 1:39:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:20Speaker 02

  Okay. So their obligations to their shareholders. Any sort of negative media event, any sort of negative press event, any event that casts them in a negative light has to be handled and dealt with. Right? And this is where deplatforming comes in. And what I think is so interesting, and this is again, like, we live in a country, fortunately, where we have freedom of speech. And that's a right that's protected by Bill of Rights. And that is a right that, when it's infringed upon, gets taken to the highest court in this country, the Supreme Court, to be deliberated upon. And then these precedents that establish people's right to free speech. Right? This is why code is considered free speech, by the way, which is an amazing thing. What I think is really interesting here is Twitter theoretically is a privately owned corporation.

• 1:40:04Speaker 02

  Your access to Twitter is bound by terms of service that are on Twitter's website. Right? They're at the bottom of the site, like, the stuff no one reads. In Twitter's Terms of Service, they basically get to dictate when and how and where they can remove you from the platform. And the real question here is, does Twitter have any obligation to maintain free speech?

• 1:40:24Anthony Pompliano?

  What's your answer?

• 1:40:26Speaker 02

  Well, as someone who invests in companies, right? And as someone who understands how corporations work, my response is Twitter is a privately owned company, and its only obligation is to its management and its shareholders. That's it. That's really it.

• 1:40:41Anthony Pompliano?

  So, one correction. I get what you're saying. Publicly traded company, but privately, in the sense of, it's not a public utility owned by the government, etc.

• 1:40:50Speaker 02

  Exactly. Right? And there's a difference between a public utility.

• 1:40:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:53Speaker 02

  And there's a difference between privately owned corporation. Twitter, at the end of the day, is privately owned corporation, privately run corporation. And the only people who get to decide what happens to privately run business in a privately owned business is the people who own it. And in this instance, there are majority shareholders who happen to be, you know, some of the executives of the business. And then there are a bunch of other smaller shareholders who really have no voice, who happen to be the stockholders. Right? Unless there's an activist investor who's accrued a large share. But at the end of the day, the only obligation of Twitter management is to shareholders. And their only responsibility is maximizing shareholder value. That's historically how firms have worked. Right? Now, the other side of this conversation, though, is a more important question, which is, what is the function of Twitter as a platform?

• 1:41:35Speaker 02

  Is it a utility that anyone who follows the First Amendment should have access to?

• 1:41:41Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think?

• 1:41:44Speaker 02

  I'm split on the debate. I spent a lot of time talking to Andrew Torba, the CEO and founder of Gab. In fact, we had a great conversation about deplatforming at Crypto Springs in September with Jim Patterson, the CEO of Ease, the marijuana delivery company, and Cindy Gallup, who runs a social media sex platform called Make Love Not Porn, where people upload user-generated porn, basically. And we talked a lot about deplatforming. Andrew's response, he's built a platform that basically enforces the First Amendment, right? So it protects people's right to free speech, and the terms of service are, if you do anything that violates the Constitution, then we will remove you from the platform, but otherwise, we're going to protect free speech.

• 1:42:28Speaker 02

  And he's been deplatformed from every service as a result, because a lot of the people that gravitate towards the platform are people who've been deplatformed on both sides of the aisle. So he implemented Mastodon to decentralize the network and its infrastructure so that he doesn't run all of the servers. Anyone can run a server in the network, so if his servers go down because his infrastructure provider stopped servicing him, which happens to people all the time, network won't go down. He's used Bitcoin for the payment side of things, to allow people to pay for their memberships. He's built his own mailing infrastructure. So I think there's that approach, but the hard part is Twitter is where the volume is, right? If this were a market, Twitter is where the liquidity is, where the clicks are, it's where the likes are. So I think the big question here is, it's the same question we have with Facebook, right?

• 1:43:11Speaker 02

  3 billion users on the Facebook platform. It's the biggest social media utility in the world. Does Facebook have an obligation to anyone other than its shareholders?

• 1:43:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, basically, it's the same argument of like, could the telephone company refuse giving you telephone service if it doesn't like what you're talking about on the phone?

• 1:43:29Speaker 02

  Well, with the repealing of net neutrality, the answer is yes. But this has always been the question, right? Is what is the line between private enterprise and public utility? And this is part of the challenge when you have such a large percentage of the population on networks that are owned by private companies, right? Same thing with, let's talk about Jeff Bezos, right? Amazon. We all use Amazon every day, right?

• 1:43:53Speaker 02

  What if Amazon decides it doesn't like you and says, Pom, you can't use Amazon?

• 1:43:58Speaker 02

  You have no recourse. Same thing with Uber. Same thing with Google, right? So I think, again, there's a really fundamental question about what happens to these platforms that become so large that they become the utility.

• 1:44:10Anthony Pompliano?

  But do you think that there's a difference between quote, quote, deplatforming somebody from services versus from the conversation, from like speech related stuff?

• 1:44:19Speaker 02

  They're the same thing.

• 1:44:20Anthony Pompliano?

  You think so?

• 1:44:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, Twitter is a service.

• 1:44:22Anthony Pompliano?

  No, no, what I mean by service is like, if Jeff Bezos says, hey, you can't get your packages delivered through Prime anymore because I don't like you, like you're kicked out of Prime, to me is different than Twitter saying you can no longer be part of the conversation.

• 1:44:35Speaker 02

  How's that different?

• 1:44:35Anthony Pompliano?

  You have no speech. Because one's speech related and one is not.

• 1:44:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, but there are plenty of social media platforms that you can go to instead of Twitter. Twitter doesn't owe you anything.

• 1:44:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course. My whole, by the way, I don't actually think that Twitter should be, so two things. One is, I don't think that Twitter wants to be in this situation. Like, Jack has been pretty clear, like, he doesn't like being in this position. He doesn't want to be in this position. That's why they're working on Blue Sky and decentralization, etc.

• 1:45:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, but this is the age we live in. We live in the age of outrage, right?

• 1:45:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 1:45:03Speaker 02

  Okay, so if you look at Polypius, so Polypius was a philosopher who lived in the time of Aristotle. And Polypius observed an interesting pattern in how humans organize themselves, right? And this has been the issue since the dawn of time. Typically, the way we start is there is a monarch, right? Like, a strong character who unifies everyone under him, or her, but mostly him, unfortunately, throughout history. Maybe we'll change that, Polina. Let's start our own monarchy. Sorry, Pom.

• 1:45:33Anthony Pompliano?

  That's fine.

• 1:45:33Speaker 02

  Are you on board? Okay, so you get the monarch.

• 1:45:35Anthony Pompliano?

  I literally have a fucking pillow on my couch right now that says benevolent dictator, and it isn't talking about me.

• 1:45:41Speaker 02

  I love that. I love that.

• 1:45:43Anthony Pompliano?

  It was a gift, and somehow the gift has persisted.

• 1:45:45Speaker 02

  So you have, you have someone who unifies everyone, then leadership passes on to their children, their children's children, and over time, like, the strength of that leadership and that lineage fades. And then all of the wealthy merchants start getting angry, right? And they're like, wait a minute, why is this person, why is this family taking advantage of the situation? We're the people who actually run the Countries, so then they put themselves in power, overthrow the monarchy, and then they pass leadership to their children. It becomes an oligarchy, right? And then people get upset about that. The next layer down, overthrow them. They're like, wait a minute, we're the people. We should have the right to representation. Then you have democracy. And then the phase that comes after democracy is something called oclocracy, which is why I think the world we live in now, it's rule by mob. So it's whoever shouts the loudest is who gets heard. And by

• 1:46:28Speaker 02

  the way, Trump and AOC and like, everything we've talked about is basically oclocracy. And then all of a sudden, like, the mobs get so loud, the yelling gets so loud, everyone's fighting with everyone, balkanization on all fronts, everything splinters, and you end up with total anarchy. And then you just repeat the cycle.

• 1:46:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think we get to the total anarchy in our lifetime?

• 1:46:47Speaker 02

  I think so. I mean, look, I think that we are at a point, if you look at what's happening around the world, Yellow Vest in France, Hong Kong, Venezuela, if you look at what's happening in Iran, like, we assassinated a world leader.

• 1:47:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Who?

• 1:47:01Speaker 02

  The US. Like, this is pretty crazy.

• 1:47:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Who did we assassinate?

• 1:47:05Speaker 02

  An Iranian general, right?

• 1:47:06Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, hold on, we gotta go here. So here's my whole thing on this situation.

• 1:47:10Speaker 02

  Wait, hold on, let me finish this.

• 1:47:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, go ahead.

• 1:47:12Speaker 02

  Okay, so if we look around the world at what's happening, right, even the election of Trump, right? I think increasingly, what we're seeing is people no longer respond to logic or fact, they respond to how they feel. Social media and the way we consume information, Russian, Russian factions spent $100,000 on Facebook ads, best ROI per dollar spent ever, because they shaped the narrative of a nation for the next four years and probably another four years. And so what we're seeing, like, the great war that's being fought is the war for our minds. And it's how we feel, and it's how we, what we believe and what we think, and not based in facts. People are attacking and hijacking our own psychology and using our own brain psychology against us. So in my view, like, anarchy is inevitable, because

• 1:47:57Speaker 02

  when there are enough factions competing for control over your mind, the ultimate result is chaos.

• 1:48:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think that...

• 1:48:04Speaker 02

  Sorry, I sound like a crazy person.

• 1:48:06Anthony Pompliano?

  No, you don't. I, I think that...

• 1:48:08Speaker 02

  Sometimes I look at myself, I'm like, who are you? You used to wear a suit and go to corporate finance sessions and do budgets and...

• 1:48:17Anthony Pompliano?

  So I want to, I want to talk about Soleimani real quick, because I think this is a perfect example. So Soleimani is an Iranian general, he's basically the second most powerful person in Iran for, for most intensive purposes. And we killed him.

• 1:48:31Speaker 02

  When you say we, let's be very specific, the United States Armed Services killed him.

• 1:48:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 1:48:36Speaker 02

  Yes, the executive, the executive branch made the decision.

• 1:48:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes, and when the United States killed him, I saw a whole bunch of narratives online, but the two most powerful ones.

• 1:48:47Speaker 02

  And facts don't matter.

• 1:48:48Anthony Pompliano?

  That took hold were, one, hey, we just created World War III and we just killed like the Vice President of Iran essentially, and game on, this is going to be really bad. The other narrative was, we just killed a terrorist, right? And those two, what's crazy, they're both rooted in fact.

• 1:49:10Speaker 02

  Okay, but hold on, but here's the question, right? What provocation was made that resulted in that action?

• 1:49:18Anthony Pompliano?

  So I have the caveat with, I spent time in Iraq for a year.

• 1:49:23Speaker 02

  And thank you for your service.

• 1:49:25Anthony Pompliano?

  And no, not in that sense, but in the sense of the information that was fed to Americans was, came from two sources, those that supported the decision and those that didn't. Those that didn't came very harsh in the, we just killed this, this is really bad, I can't believe we made that decision, etc.

• 1:49:45Anthony Pompliano?

  It is undeniable, this was a bad dude, right? Bad dude in the sense of.

• 1:49:50Speaker 02

  I think it's ironic because we made such a big deal out of the MBS Jamal Khashoggi thing, and even though the situation is very different, I think it just feels similar in some ways. And I think it goes back to, again, you know, is the function of the US, like what my tax dollars are being spent on? While I do believe that protecting human rights and sort of helping maintain peace is an important function, that function really belongs to the United Nations, not the United States exclusively. And what I take concern with is we are living in a world where like the millennial population is massively indebted, we can't meet retirement obligations, right?

• 1:50:34Speaker 02

  There's a retirement debt crisis that's coming. And what we're investing in is starting wars we can't ever possibly win, that actually where winning doesn't mean anything, right? Like if you look at Iraq, what would winning mean?

• 1:50:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, we should have left

• 1:50:48Speaker 02

  But winning didn't

• 1:50:49Anthony Pompliano?

  10 years ago, 20 years ago.

• 1:50:50Speaker 02

  But winning didn't have a meaning, right?

• 1:50:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, it, no, but here's the thing is that we got very, so two things. One, it's very well understood now that the American people were lied to, without a doubt, undeniable, etc. And then two is, I mean, literally on the ground. There was days where we're just looking around like, what the fuck are we doing here? Right? And part of that was, there were certain things that occurred that, looking back, were very positive in the sense of Saddam Hussein being removed, you know, all this kind of stuff. But past a certain point, it went from, we are taking out a bad dude to, we are now going to rebuild a country. And I don't think that you can fundamentally rebuild a country to begin with, but also that's not the job of the United States.

• 1:51:36Speaker 02

  And this is where it goes back to like, okay.

• 1:51:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Makes for a great economy, though.

• 1:51:40Speaker 02

  Right. Well, the military industrial complex and the petrodollar, very strong, my friend. But I think the hard part is this, right? We have decisions being made by people about going to war. They're being made by people who have never served in the armed services, whose children have never served in the armed services. And so what I take issue with is, we have a country that is running on a massive budget deficit. We are spending trillions of dollars of capital on wars that are really ideological wars more than anything else. Right?

• 1:52:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, because budgets don't matter. Because we just print more.

• 1:52:14Speaker 02

  Okay, MMT, it's, I know that's the like, topic du jour. But when we stop being able to export our inflation through our monetary policy, that's going to change.

• 1:52:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, I don't, by the way, I don't think it's good, but that's just the world we live in, right? Where we're literally, the debt doesn't matter. Like, it's just, just keep increasing the ceiling, just keep printing more money, whatever. And it's just accelerating the world that I think you and I both agree we're headed towards.

• 1:52:39Speaker 02

  So the last thing I'll end on, I actually think Epsilon Theory, AKA Ben Hunt, captured this really well in a blog he wrote about like, there are only really a handful of outcomes here. And based on what a thing happens, it's going to mean very different things for what you should be investing in. He describes three kind of outcomes. One is the zombification of everything, which is basically like a Japan-like situation where everything gets gutted out, like no inflation ever again, no growth ever again, like zombies.

• 1:53:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:53:08Speaker 02

  Then there's the great jihad, which is where the world like just goes haywire. We have that anarchy situation I talked about, chaos, and then it's guns and Bitcoin and gold. We're like going to chip off little flakes of gold to buy coffee.

• 1:53:20Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm from North Carolina. I know a lot of people who've been prepping for that one for a while.

• 1:53:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, look, I'm not endorsing any of these views, by the way. I just, I think it's an interesting way to view the world. And then the last one is we just continue accelerating as is, and there's some sort of great debt snowfall, and then everything gets wiped clean. We start over. I don't know which of these are likely, but I do think one of the things we have to recognize at some point is like, is this sustainable? And I think the answer is fundamentally, this is not sustainable. It's not. And so the question is, is like, is it going to happen in my lifetime? I don't know. I think probably because my lifetime is going to be much longer than the lifetime of the generation before me, right? I think longevity is another area we're very interesting to think about in the context of retirement and sort of assets as well. But I think we are on the

• 1:54:06Speaker 02

  precipice, like all of these different challenges in our world are compounding into really dangerous mix. And all of a sudden, we're giving people weapons of mass destruction in the form of social media and tools that literally manipulate your mind.

• 1:54:18Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm going to end with something that I think a lot about, which is, what's the saying? The pen is mightier than the sword?

• 1:54:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:54:27Anthony Pompliano?

  What we are starting to realize is that a tweet can change the course of history. And I, we, we pretty much saw that with the Soleimani stuff. We dropped a bomb, right? Or many bombs, and we killed a lot of people, and there was military action. But at the end of the day, Trump's tweets both accelerated the situation in a negative manner, right? Causing more conflict. But at the same time, I believe that he probably actually got the Iranians to back off a little bit when he came over the top, kind of like this mob mentality of like, if you do something, then we are going to do something so much worse. And

• 1:55:12Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know what that means for the world, but it's something we've never seen before.

• 1:55:16Speaker 02

  Well, wars of mutually assured destruction have been fought before. I mean, this is the whole conflict of the Cold War. It's essentially a massive game of chicken, which is, by the way, the game we're playing with China. By the way, also the game we're playing with Bitcoin, right? At the end of the day, you have to know what game am I, am I playing? And what's the end goal? What's the out and outcome? And then how do the rules of the game change as I play the game? And do we create new games?

• 1:55:39Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a great tweet. The central banks will blink, the central banks will blink first.

• 1:55:43Speaker 02

  100%. That's my belief.

• 1:55:45Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Where can people find you on the internet? We've, we've talked for almost two hours.

• 1:55:49Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:55:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Where do they find you on the internet?

• 1:55:51Speaker 02

  Uh, Twitter primarily.

• 1:55:52Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. What's your handle?

• 1:55:53Speaker 02

  Um, at melt underscore dem.

• 1:55:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. What about CoinShares?

• 1:55:57Speaker 02

  Uh, CoinShares Co.

• 1:55:59Anthony Pompliano?

  CoinShares.co?

• 1:56:00Speaker 02

  CoinShares CO is our Twitter handle and then CoinShares.co is our website. We have a lot of great research on it.

• 1:56:06Anthony Pompliano?

  CoinShares.com?

• 1:56:07Speaker 02

  Don't want to talk about it.

• 1:56:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh.

• 1:56:09Speaker 02

  Um, but we have a lot of great content.

• 1:56:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Whoever has it, I'll buy it from you so I can mark it up. Go ahead.

• 1:56:16Speaker 02

  Uh, that's happened a lot of times. A lot of businesses, not going to work. By the way, um, handshake to launch today. So I'm going to own the CoinShares.co HNS domain. So, you know, pretty soon we're going to have immutable domain names.

• 1:56:27Anthony Pompliano?

  What about, uh, unstoppable domains?

• 1:56:30Speaker 02

  I've looked at unstoppable domains. I think there are.

• 1:56:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Have you bought a domain yet?

• 1:56:32Speaker 02

  I have.

• 1:56:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, all right. This episode's launching on a Monday. They're the sponsors. So that was a great point for them.

• 1:56:37Speaker 02

  All right. Unstoppable domains. We love you. And I think the, the last thing I'll end on is, um, please read our research and give us feedback on what you want to see. And, um, let me know what content's interesting. We're always putting out interesting research, interesting analysis. I'm the person who likes to make the charts. So give me a shout. Let's make some charts.

• 1:56:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Long CoinShares, long Bitcoin, long Barstool Sports, long everything that we like here. All right, guys. Thanks so much for listening. Hey, everyone. Pop here. If you liked this episode of Off the Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the apple, Spotify and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off the Chain.