#869 Money Is A Made Up Thing w/ Jacob Goldstein

Jacob Goldstein is an Executive Producer at Pushkin Industries and host of the podcast "What's Your Problem?". He's also the Author of "Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing". In this conversation, we discuss the history of money through various technologies and money as a belief system. We also talk about gold, Stablecoins and inflation rates. ======================= Since 2018 Copper has been at the forefront of institutional digital asset development. From award winning custody solutions, to creating the first truly off-exchange settlement function, Copper pioneers technology, products, and services, in lock-step with a rapidly changing world. No other infrastructure provider covers as many assets, across as many exchanges, with the speed and security that Copper can offer. To learn how Copper helps the world’s largest institutional investors secure their digital assets, head over to copper.co Copper - the unfair advantage. ======================= Compass Mining is the world's first online marketplace for bitcoin mining hardware and hosting. Compass was founded with the goal of making it easy for everyone to mine bitcoin. Visit http://compassmining.io to start mining bitcoin today! ======================= Bullish is a powerful new digital asset exchange built for institutions that delivers the innovations of DeFi in a regulated environment. The Bullish Hybrid Order Book pairs the high-performance of a traditional Central Limit Order Book with automated market making. Powered by deep Bullish Liquidity Pools, backed by the multi-billion dollar Bullish Treasury. So, you can trade with certainty and at scale across variable market conditions. Learn more at Bullish.com or follow @Bullish on Twitter. Because the future belongs to the bullish. *Not investment advice. Digital assets and cryptocurrencies are high risk products. Consult your professional advisor before dealing in them. Bullish’s services are available in select locations only and not to U. S persons. Visit https://bullish.com/legal for important information and risk warnings =======================

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Jacob Goldstein is an executive producer and host at Pushkin Industry. He's also the author of a book called Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing. In this conversation, we talk about his book, we talk about stablecoins, inflation rates, the gold standard, and much more. I really enjoyed this conversation with Jacob, and I hope that you enjoy it as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by Copper. Since 2018, Copper has been at the forefront of institutional digital asset development. From award-winning custody solutions to creating the first truly off-exchange settlement function, Copper pioneers technology, products,

• 0:47Anthony Pompliano?

  and services in lockstep with a rapidly changing world. No other infrastructure provider covers as many assets across as many exchanges with the speed and security that Copper can offer. To learn how Copper helps the world's largest institutional investors secure their digital assets, head over to copper.co. Again, Copper, the unfair advantage. Check them out at copper.co today. Next up is Compass Mining. Compass Mining is the world's largest marketplace for mining hardware and hosting. With Compass, everyone can mine Bitcoin. Their team makes it easy to start mining wherever you want, at home or in one of their 23 hosting facilities around the world. Through the Compass marketplace, retail miners can access mining hardware with

• 1:30Anthony Pompliano?

  similar prices and purchase plans as the world's largest mining companies. Compass miners own their machines, they choose whatever mining pool they want, and they mine directly to their own wallets. Miners who don't want to host their machines can order ASICS directly to their doorstep. Simple and low-cost hosting agreements, coupled with best-in-class customer service, are the reasons why Compass is the simplest and most popular way to mine Bitcoin. Start mining your own Bitcoin today by visiting compassmining.io. Again, compassmining.io. Go check them out and let me know what you think. This episode is brought to you by Bullish. Bullish is a powerful new digital asset exchange For institutions that delivers the innovations of DeFi in a regulated environment.

• 2:14Anthony Pompliano?

  The bullish hybrid order book pairs the high performance of a traditional central limit order book with the automated market making. Powered by deep bullish liquidity pools backed by the multi-billion dollar bullish treasury. So you can trade with certainty and at scale across variable market conditions. You can learn more at bullish.com or follow bullish on Twitter because the future belongs to the bullish. Now, this is not investment advice. Digital assets and cryptocurrencies are high risk products. Consult your professional advisor before dealing in them. Bullish's services are available in select locations only and not to US persons. Visit bullish.com/ legal for important information and risk warnings. Go check them out at bullish.com or follow at bullish on Twitter. All right, let's get in this episode. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 2:58Speaker 01

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

• 3:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Jacob, how are you doing?

• 3:22Speaker 02

  I'm good.

• 3:23Anthony Pompliano?

  I've got a lot of questions for you. You're a legend for writing a book, literally Money, The True Story of a Made Up Thing. Let's start with the book first. Why are you interested in money? And like, why is that the perspective that you ended up with of basically saying, hey, this is just like this made up thing that society adopted?

• 3:40Speaker 02

  I mean, money, as you know from your work, right? Like, it's amazing and it's a great way to look like, not just at, you know, how do I buy the stuff I need? How do I live a comfortable life? But a great way to look at like, how society works, right? How do people decide to move stuff around, to do exchange? So like, it's just this incredible story you can see for long periods of time. And then when you study the history, you get a new sort of perspective on what's happening now. I mean, one of the things I'm curious to get your views on is stable coins. Cause I have all these like historical references from my, from my writing. And I'm like thinking, well, are stable coins like these weird dollar bills we had in the 1800s? Are they like money market mutual funds? I think they kind of are. So yeah, it's great. There's a ton of stuff there.

• 4:22Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you think about, let's talk about money and we'll talk about stablecoins here in a second. But when you, when you think about money, how much of the money today is this like belief system, right? You and I agree that this piece of paper or this electronic Q-SIP has value and therefore we're willing to exchange it back and forth. But that's a new thing. And actually, the money of 50 plus years ago didn't have a belief system tied to it. It was more so commodity based. Like, do you make a difference between whether it's the gold standard or some other kind of form of commodity based money elsewhere in history to fiat? Or has it always just been a belief system? It's just whether there was a physical good or not, but it's still a belief system.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, you know, it doesn't have to be as binary, I think, as you're framing it, right? Like, it definitely is striking how recent the fiat world is, right? Money is thousands of years old. And with really a few exceptions, it was always, almost always commodity based for thousands of years until essentially the depression, right? When even that commodity sort of underpinning got, got taken away when, when the world went off the gold standard. So on one level, it's even more belief based now. But on another level, like gold is not inherently useful, right? Like, it's not like it was like a wheat based standard. It was like, okay, I know I can eat if I trade in my dollar bills for wheat, right?

• 5:41Speaker 02

  So gold itself, the, the idea that commodity based money is somehow real is not quite true either, right? The value of gold is, is made up, right? It just comes from this sort of abstract desire.

• 5:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And so when you think about that, how do you evaluate Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, right? What, just as like an industry, is it something where it should replicate what's already been going on in history? Do you look at it as something that, no, actually kind of diverging or creating like a bifurcated offering is, is where the value lies? Because money isn't working right now. Like, what's the lens or the, the framework you use to evaluate kind of the current industry in, in the current state?

• 6:19Speaker 02

  I mean, at the sort of broadest level, the, you know, what the historical context tells me is like, is this, whatever the monetary regime is at some given moment, right? Whether it's like the gold standard or fiat or whatever, most people at most times just think whatever money is, is like a fact in the world, right? They don't think it's like this made up set of rules, which is what it always is. They think, oh, it's just like nature, right? It's just like water flows downhill. We have governments creating fiat currency, whatever. People assume it's real, right? And the key insight for me, I think, is, no, no, it's always made up and you can always have a new regime, right? So at the broadest level, like crypto is a plausible new regime. Like, I don't know that it's gonna become money, that it's

• 7:03Speaker 02

  gonna displace the current regime we have, but it definitely could. And eventually, something will, right? And so to me, the big insight is like, there is, you know, the way money works now is not natural. It's always made up and something will always come along and be the new made up thing.

• 7:18Anthony Pompliano?

  So I want to use two examples. One is a historical example and one is kind of a modern example. The rise of coins in ancient Greece. I know you talk about that in, in the book. And I think a lot of people, for whatever reason, I would call it nostalgia, except for none of us were alive then. They just think it's interesting. Yeah, they just think it's interesting, right? Walk us through kind of like, what are the important things that people should take away from that time period in terms of what money was and how that's informed our relationship with money today?

• 7:48Speaker 02

  I like that. Yeah, that's a deep cut. So that's like, oh, what, about 600 years B.C. So we're thousands of years ago now, right? And, and it's really, the first thing we today would recognize as money was these coins. So they emerge in the Eastern Mediterranean, actually, this, this kingdom in Turkey that gets wiped out, but, but the Greeks go really crazy for coins. And coins are great for the Greeks for this reason. Before the Greeks came along, there wasn't really like a fully monetized society, right? So you had a couple different ways of, of sort of, you know, doing trade, right? You had these big kingdoms that were very top down, right? Where there would be like a priest or a king, and it would be like a command and control economy today, right? Priest or the king would basically be like, okay, I'm gonna take this stuff from this farmer

• 8:32Speaker 02

  and I'm gonna give it to this guy over here, right? There wasn't a market economy, really. On the other hand, you had like really small sort of tribal type societies where everybody knew each other and they had like kind of rules for, you know, I'm gonna lend this to you, you're gonna lend that to me, exchange worked that way. So the Greeks, you know, as we know, right, they're like the cradle of democracy. And they were too big to do the like tribal, oh, kumbaya, we're all gonna lend stuff to each other, but they were also too sort of free to have a top down, like the king's gonna say who gets what, right? So what they needed was money, right? They needed a way to do exchange in a big complicated society where nobody controls everything. And coins come along and they're like the perfect thing for Greece. So that's a nice place to kind of start the money story and think about what it does

• 9:17Speaker 02

  for us.

• 9:18Anthony Pompliano?

  It's so funny how like the physical coin is the thing that we still think about today.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  Amazing, right? Amazing.

• 9:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, there's literally people born today who won't touch a coin for a decade, right?

• 9:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, why would you, right? Like, why would you? It's more trouble than it's worth.

• 9:37Anthony Pompliano?

  So I think that's a huge piece of it. And I also find it hilarious that, some people may remember, I think it was Kyle Bass is one person, there was a couple of others, Kyle Bass is a macro investor, he bought like a million dollars worth of nickels because he thought that the nickel in the nickel would actually be worth more over time.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, the arb, well, that's happening again right now, right? The price of nickel is going through the roof. And so a nickel is definitely worth more than a nickel. If you can, you know, you gotta get the nickel out of it is the hard part.

• 10:05Anthony Pompliano?

  And for anyone who thinks that they should run and go buy a bunch of nickels, it is illegal to destroy the nickel. So please be careful.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  So you didn't hear it here, not investment advice.

• 10:13Anthony Pompliano?

  But, but it is interesting to think about this idea of the commodity itself could be worth more than what the actual coin itself is expected.

• 10:20Speaker 02

  That was actually a problem for like hundreds of years, you know, in the whatever, 17th century-ish, when countries were on the gold standard and the silver standard and they would, you know, the government would try and set an exchange rate between gold and silver, but there was always a market price, right? And they were always getting the market price wrong. So people would be like getting silver in England and taking it over to Europe and melting it down and selling it like, it's quite hard to do sort of top-down monetary stuff.

• 10:46Anthony Pompliano?

  I completely agree. The modern example I want to talk about is this idea of shadow banking. I think a lot of people have heard that term or that phrase. They have no clue what that means. What is it? And like, why is it important for people to understand shadow banking in today's day and age?

• 10:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, shadow banking is super interesting. So if you think of like, the most simple basic thing a bank does, right, is basically you go and put your money there for safekeeping, and then the bank turns around and lends out your money to somebody else and collects interest, right? That is like banking, you know, 1.0. The simplest thing banks do, they still do it. So, um, regulated banks do it. They're just banks. But what keeps happening, again, this is another thing you keep seeing through history, right? Banks get regulated for some set of reasons, basically because banks have this unique ability to sort of create money and blow up the economy and people like, why is this bank screwing me over? So they get regulated. And then what happens is other institutions come along. So if you go back to, say, the 1970s, right? Uh, out of the depression, since the depression,

• 11:44Speaker 02

  there had been caps on how much interest banks could pay. Uh, and so these basically two guys, just these two finance guys were like, well, what if we start something where we take people's money and we give them a little more interest and we take their money and we lend it out for really safe things? You know, we'll, we'll buy treasury bonds or even like jumbo CDs in a bank. And so they called that a money market mutual fund, right? Lots of people have money in money market funds today. Not technically a bank, not regulated like a bank, but doing the basic banking thing, right? It's kind of a regulatory arbitrage. So this gets bigger and bigger in the like, end of the 20th century, basically, grows into this multi-trillion dollar business, shadow banking, this like

• 12:27Speaker 02

  doing what banks do, borrowing and lending, taking deposits, lending it out. And it ends up driving the rise of finance in the like, early aughts, right? The housing bubble and Wall Street getting giant. And then when we have the, the financial crisis in 2008, there's a run on the shadow banking system. Everybody's like, I want to take my money out of the money market mutual fund and all these other weird, financing things that are bank-like. And of course, these institutions didn't have deposit insurance. And, you know, when there's a run, when everybody comes and says, I Want my money right now, the money market mutual fund and all the other shadow banks say what banks always say in a run, we don't have your money. We lend it out. We loaned it out. And then they're trying to sell and it's a fire sale. And that was a huge part, and I think an undercover part of the economic collapse of 2008.

• 13:12Anthony Pompliano?

  And so in that moment, is it fair to say that like the belief system or the made up part gets exposed or like people lose confidence? And so when you lose the confidence game, then all of a sudden that's where you increase the odds of these bank runs or the runs on the money market funds.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I mean, bank runs and like the weird thing is if you think like, even if I trust my bank, if I think everybody else is going to go and try and get their money out of the bank. It's rational for me to be like, oh shit, I better get there before all the money is gone. Right? Sorry, I curse. And, and I'll say, and I don't know if this is what you're walking up to, but like the Bitcoin white paper came out and what Halloween 2008, right? Like one month after Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, like that's not a coincidence. And when you read the stuff Satoshi is writing at that time, it's all like, hey, we don't trust the banks. Let's try and find out something new. And even the, the genesis block, right? That comes out in early 2009, still right in the teeth of the crisis.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  As you probably know, in the genesis block, which is just code, right? You look at it. It's just code, code, code. But off to the side, there's this headline from a British paper, I think the Times of London about a bank bailout, right? So like, I don't know if you were walking up to that, but it's right there.

• 14:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it, it's, it reminds me a lot of when you talk about the bank runs during the pandemic. If you went to the grocery store and you were like, oh, there's no milk, there's no bread, there's no masks, like shit, I need toilet paper. I need bread. I need milk. Like, like you just get this feeling of like, what does everybody else know that I don't know? And similar thing with, with money on the bank runs. And then to your point, Bitcoin was built or at least launched during the global financial crisis. And, you know, I, you'd be hard pressed to convince me that it didn't have anything to do with the global financial crisis happening at the same time.

• 14:54Speaker 02

  I mean, certainly, I mean, the technology, people had been working toward that for like 20 years by that point, right? Like there's a great backstory about the cipher punks and people trying to figure out this really hard tech. Technical problem, right? How do you make digital money on the internet that people can't just copy and paste and where you know everything? And like you see them solving like problem after problem. They hadn't quite solved them all until the Bitcoin white paper, but it is like for marketing purposes, amazing timing for Bitcoin.

• 15:21Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. What about stable coins? Like, I know that you've spent a lot of time kind of thinking about this. There's this idea that like, oh, it's just a currency, right? Just like the dollar or anything else. Then there's an idea of like, oh, wait, maybe these are like new versions of money market funds. Like, how do you evaluate what stable coins are and their role in the global financial markets?

• 15:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I mean, you know, this is one where you almost certainly know more about the sort of day to day of it than I do. But when I look at it from this like historical perspective, it does look to me like, like a kind of shadow banking, right? Like, if you think about what a stable coin is, it's like, I give them a dollar and they say to me, okay, you can have your dollar back anytime you want. And then they take my dollar and they, in many cases, lend it out, right? They'll, they'll maybe, you know, buy commercial paper. They'll lend it out to a, to a corporation for a short term, for a month or something. But still, if everybody comes and wants their dollar back at the same time, the stable coin issuer is not going to have it, right? And so that is a, like a fundamentally precarious thing, it seems to me. But I'm curious, I mean, do you think that's right?

• 16:22Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, I think it's a version of it for sure. What you ultimately have to look at is like, what are they doing? And in some way, you could describe it as shadow banking. Another way you could talk about it is just like, it's upgrading the technology of the assets, right? So I think a lot about, let's say that you have physical dollars and you go and you give them to the bank and the bank literally then gives you electronic QCIP based dollars. In some like very elementary or barbaric analysis, they just gave you a technology upgrade. It's the same asset. It's supposed to still represent one dollar, has the same purchasing powers, still subject to the same monetary policy. It's just they upgraded your technology from analog to electronic QCIP.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:03Anthony Pompliano?

  In some way, now you can take that electronic QCIP and go and upgrade it to the digital form, which is, are these stable coins? And there's variations between each one of them and different levels of trust. And regulation and auditing and whatever, but like the physical payment rail sucks, right? Like, like right now, if you're like, hey, give me a dollar, like it will take me a while to get you a physical dollar.

• 17:27Speaker 02

  Like it takes days, right? It's amazing. And like, I did a story about this eight years ago or something. And they're like, no, we're gonna fix it. We're gonna fix it. And like, still it sucks.

• 17:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So it's like physical sucks. Then you get to like the electronic Q cips, wires, ACHs, all that, that sucks. And stable coins are, in my opinion, the single best way to move dollars around the world today. It's cheaper, it's faster, it's more internationally accessible, et cetera. And so you've just gotten a technology upgrade over time. Now, the question is, is that a technology upgrade exclusively? Does it empower a continuation or evolution of shadow banking? Like, like, what are the implications? And frankly, I don't know if we have those answers yet. Like, there's still a lot of work here and we're just watching it play out.

• 18:07Speaker 02

  I mean, it's clearly runnable, right? Like they're engaging in maturity transformation, right? They're taking, they're, they're taking my dollar and saying, I can have my dollar at a moment's notice. And then they're lending it out to people who aren't going to pay it back for a month or something, right? Not all of them, but some of them are doing that. And like, and you know, there's a universe where it's like, just a few people are doing that and whatever caveat emptor. You know, if those people can't get their money back, I don't care. They took a risk. It's not my problem. But I do feel like there's some size, right? At some point, stable coins will be big enough where there will be a crisis and there will be a run on them. And, and they'll be big enough that they can do damage to the broader economy, right? That they can sort of hurt innocent bystanders. And so when you get to that point,

• 18:51Speaker 02

  it does seem worth thinking, like in the same way that we have, you know, deposit insurance and lots of rules about money market mutual funds, which like, aren't great rules, by the way, in many ways. But it does seem worth thinking about like, okay, what are the risks to people who aren't involved and how do we mitigate those risks, right? Like, I mean, a simple move is like, if a stable coin beyond a certain size, market cap, whatever, had to keep the money in, you know, in a reserve account at the Fed, or even in like short-term treasuries, which, which are super liquid, right? Like, that would be way safer. So I don't know, it'll be interesting. Interesting to see how it shakes out. It does seem like a new technology on like a super old move, right? It's like the most ancient banking move in the world strapped

• 19:35Speaker 02

  on to this 21st techno 21st century technology.

• 19:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Some people argue that's the value. Some people argue that's the danger, right? It's kind of it's both ways.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  Could be both. Like a lot of technologies like super useful and then maybe could blow up.

• 19:48Anthony Pompliano?

  I've got two of my brothers here with me. I think they've got questions for you as well. Joe, what you got?

• 19:52Speaker 03

  Jacob, thanks for coming on. I think most Bitcoiners would agree, obviously, that money only exists and has value because we believe in it, right? But there are a lot of people in the world who are not Bitcoiners and do not have any idea about this. How do you explain to them the concept that money is just made up? Kind of in short, two to three or four sentences?

• 20:09Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, Fiat makes it pretty obvious, right? Like, a dollar is literally just a piece of paper. You could start with that, right? And then you could say most dollars aren't even a piece of paper. Like, today, we might think of a coin, like you were saying, but we might think of a piece of paper. But like, the vast majority of money is literally just an entry on a bank computer. Like, that's it. There's nothing there. There's nothing beneath it, right? I mean, the one other way to think of it that is interesting is, I do feel like, you know, because money today is so attached to the nation state, right? Like, really, the US dollar is a bet on the United States economy as a going concern, right? So that's another way to think of it. Although, I think I've gone beyond the boundaries of your question. I don't know if I just convinced the person.

• 20:53Speaker 03

  You might have hit 10 questions, 10 sentences, but that works for me.

• 20:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Joe, what do you got?

• 20:59Speaker 04

  Jacob, we talked a lot about the history of money. Can you talk about what do you think the future of money is? And like, what does it look like? Is it Bitcoin? Is it not? Like, what are your thoughts there?

• 21:08Speaker 02

  I mean, I gotta say, you know, so I started covering Bitcoin in, I don't know, 2011, early enough that like, I was shocked in the middle of the story that it went from $10 a Bitcoin to $20 a Bitcoin. I was like, wait, am I reading that wrong? It can't be $20 a Bitcoin. And, and, you know, at that time, it felt more likely that Bitcoin was going to be money, like actually what people use to buy stuff, weirdly than it does today, right? Like, I feel like there's some way in which the rise in the price of Bitcoin makes it less like money, right? It's more like a, like an asset. So it doesn't seem to me in the short term like Bitcoin itself is going to be money. But I don't know. I mean, the big lesson for for me from studying history is to be is to be humble,

• 21:51Speaker 02

  right, is to say like, I don't know what's going to happen, but I'm not going to get cocky and say, oh, well, surely what we have today as money is going to be money forever. I do think the nation states really going to hold on tight, right? Like, I don't think countries are going to want to give up their their power over money. So it'll be interesting to see that tension, right, between the sort of private stateless Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies versus states. And, you know, we're seeing that sort of negotiation happen. And that's really going to be interesting to watch that play out.

• 22:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Well said. Jacob, I know that you've got a new podcast coming out. It's not just about money. You basically are talking to engineers, innovators, entrepreneurs, et cetera. How do you select who comes on? I don't know if I'm allowed to say what the first two or three episodes are, but it's like-

• 22:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, and say the name. It's called What's Your Problem? It launches tomorrow, launches on Thursday, March 17.

• 22:42Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a guy who knows how to promote a podcast right there. He said, say the name, boy. So, so-

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Not boy, boy is your word. Sir, say the name, please, sir. What's your problem?

• 22:53Anthony Pompliano?

  So when we look at episode one, it says, building a drone delivery business. Episode two, the guy who made $30 million selling dog ramps. And then episode three is teaching cars to drive themselves is hard. That's a very, very different collection of of people to talk to. Like, how do you come up with what you want? Is it just your personal interest or something else?

• 23:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the guy selling ramps to wiener dogs is kind of a little bit out of the mainstream of the show. The basic idea of the show is like, you know, we're in this moment of incredible technological progress, as you as you guys know. And a lot of that technological progress is coming coming from entrepreneurs, right? Coming out of the private sector. There are all these businesses that are like out at the frontier, trying to figure out, you know, how do you do drone delivery? How do you get cars to drive themselves? How do you teach people a new language for free on an app, whatever? And like, these are big, exciting questions. And so I'm trying to find people who are actually working on those things out at the frontier.

• 23:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And when you start to think about this, like, what is the goal? So somebody goes ahead and listens to this, is it to be educated, entertained, both? Is it for them to be inspired to go and start their own company or build their own product? Like, how do you measure what the the success looks like here?

• 24:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the first two things you said were were like right on it. Educated and entertained, right? Like, I always wanted to be like a little bit funny or just like not too taking itself seriously. But I also want to like really get into it, right? I feel like you hear a lot of interviews with people and they're like, oh, everything's fine. It's gonna be great. But the thing I really want to get at is like, what is the actual hard problem? Like, what are you actually trying to solve? Because I feel like if you can really get a sense of that, and it's for a general audience, right? It's not like I'm not like some technical person. But I think if you can get a sense of that, you really get a sense of like, where are we right now? And what is the frontier and what's coming next? So it's, you know, understanding the world, in particular through the lens of business in a way that's like somewhat light.

• 24:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Last thing I want to talk to you before we let you go is we can't talk about money without talking about inflation. 7.9% in the United States allegedly, now 5.7% allegedly in Canada. What's your take on all this? Like, how off are the official verse, like, maybe the the real experience of people, whether it's in America, Canada, or elsewhere? And then what can they do? Like, does the Fed just have to hike rates to the moon before they can get this under control? Or how do you evaluate it?

• 25:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you know, one of the things, just like, it was amazing how low inflation was for how long, right? Like, you know, this whole sort of decade, last decade, as I was covering the economy, you know, it would be like, okay, unemployment went down some more. Oh, and deficits are still high. Like, surely we're gonna have inflation now, right? Nope, still 1.8%. So like, kind of amazing how long it took to get here. I mean, in terms of what happens next, historically, it's a little bit grim, right? Traditionally, what happens when inflation gets this high and persists is the Fed raises interest rates until there is a recession and inflation comes back down. So I don't know what's gonna happen, but certainly if it's like what's happened before,

• 26:03Speaker 02

  it's the federal raise interest rates, there'll be a recession, unemployment will go up, and inflation will come down.

• 26:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it um, it just feels like the world is full of uncertainty, chaos. It's falling apart, but it's also the safest, most prosperous time in human history. Like, there's just so much cognitive dissonance, I think, going on that people ultimately just throw their hands up and say, "I don't know," right? I really, really don't know.

• 26:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's weird, right?

• 26:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Weird, that's actually a very, very good term. It's weird.

• 26:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then you didn't even mention the pandemic, right? Like, all this and like technological breakthroughs and like weirdly, you know, household savings is way up, unemployment is down, but like the pandemic still isn't quite over, so it's super weird.

• 26:49Anthony Pompliano?

  I completely agree. Where can we send people to find you on the internet? If people want to learn more about other things you're doing or follow along as you release more podcast episodes, where can we send them?

• 26:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm on Twitter, just @JacobGoldstein, just my name.

• 27:01Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, that's pretty good.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  Listen to "What's Your Problem."

• 27:04Anthony Pompliano?

  What's your problem? Is there a website?

• 27:08Speaker 02

  Oh, just Google it. I mean, pushkin.fm is, Pushkin is the, is the company that makes it. But Jacob Goldstein, what's your problem?

• 27:15Anthony Pompliano?

  What's your problem? That could go two ways. What's your problem? Like, what problem are you trying to solve? Or when I see my brothers in the street and I say, "Hey, bro, what's your problem?"

• 27:22Speaker 02

  Hey, hey, I'm walking.

• 27:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Money, the true story of a made up thing. Jacob, thank you so much for joining us and hopefully we'll bring you back in the future. You got a lot of great ideas and I'm super excited for the podcast launch tomorrow.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  Hey, thanks so much. It was great to talk with you guys.

• 27:37Anthony Pompliano?

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