#1032 Zach Weinberg & Logan Bartlett Debating Pomp On Bitcoin’s Utility

Zach Weinberg & Logan Bartlett are the hosts of "Cartoon Avatars" In this conversation, we debate the bull and bear case for Bitcoin & Cryptocurrencies. Zach & Logan have recently been critics of this market, so I decided to bring them on the show to go through their thoughts on the digital currency. ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp ======================= The Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep is the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. Go to https://www.eightsleep.com/Pomp to redeem exclusive Fourth of July savings and start sleeping cool this summer through July 10th. Eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. ======================= Valour (formerly DeFi Technologies) represents what’s next in the digital economy -- providing simplified, trusted access to crypto, decentralized finance and Web 3.0 investment opportunities. Institutions and investors can gain diversified, secure, compliant, and easily tradable access to a diversified set of industry-leading equity products and protocols, through a single stock purchase on a regulated exchange. Currently listed on U. S. (OTC: DEFTF) and Canadian (NEO:DEFI) exchanges. For more information or to subscribe to receive company updates and financial information, visit our website at valour.com =======================

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. Zach Weinberg and Logan Bartlett are the co-hosts of Cartoon Avatars. They both have had super successful careers in building companies and investing as well. In this episode, we only talk about one thing. What's the bull and bear case for Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies? Zach and Logan have built a name in recent weeks for being the critics of these assets and these markets. So it was about time they sat down and we discussed it. There's a lot of jokes in here, and there's also some serious conversation as well. I really enjoyed this conversation with Zach and Logan. I hope you guys enjoy it as well. Before we get into this episode though, I first

• 0:46Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:25Anthony Pompliano?

  and they're trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp. Again, LMAXdigital.com/pomp. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep is the single best product that I have purchased over the last three years. It completely changed my life. I'm not joking, pay attention. The Pod Pro cover, which goes over your mattress by Eight Sleep, is the most advanced solution on the market for thermal regulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. You can go to eightsleep.com/pomp to check out the Pod Pro cover, and you save $150 at checkout. They currently ship within the United States, Canada, and the UK. Now I told you, it changed my life. It helps me sleep deeper, helps me sleep longer. I feel much more refreshed, and I have better energy.

• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

  You want to know how I have relentless energy every single day? Because I sleep on an 8-sleep. Seriously. Go check it out. 8sleep.com/pomp today. This episode is brought to you by Valor. Valor represents what's next in the digital economy. They provide simplified trusted access to crypto, decentralized finance and Web 3 investment opportunities. Institutions and investors can gain diversified, secure, compliant and easily tradable access to a diversified set of industry-leading equity products and protocols through a single stock purchase on a regulated exchange. They're currently listed on the OTC at DEFTF and on the Canadian NEO exchange at DEFI. For more information or to subscribe to receive company updates and financial information, you can visit their website at valour.com.

• 2:54Anthony Pompliano?

  That's V A L O U R dot com. valour.com. Go check them out today.

• 3:01Speaker 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.

• 3:24Anthony Pompliano?

  We've got Zach and Logan coming on next. How are you guys? Good, man. Awesome. You guys look super excited, very, very enthusiastic, ready to tackle all of this.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  We're happy to be here.

• 3:36Speaker 03

  Were there three of you? What just happened?

• 3:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Zach, so brothers is a concept where there's like, there's five boys in our family and we all look similar. You know, same mom, same dad, but they're leaving. So now you two are here. We could be like spiritual brothers, the three of us now.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  Pomp, I will say our only interactions in the past were me questioning when your brothers, other brothers started to go like viral and stuff. I said, how many goddamn pumps are there? And, and you responded, you were like, I forget. So I'm like snarky back and forth. I'm sure we can dig it up, but.

• 4:09Anthony Pompliano?

  The craziest part is actually that we all are about two years apart. There's five of us. And on the internet, though, that's hard to parse out. And so what ends up happening is people will start to confuse us. And so I'll be having a conversation with somebody like, oh, man, I loved your, uh, your tweet about Tiger Woods. I'm like, I don't know much other than he's a golfer.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  So are you guys all pumps? Like, is that a nickname that that shares across the board? Or are you like, do they go by other stuff now?

• 4:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Before I answer that, did you guys have high school nicknames? Like, did like coaches or anything like that give you guys nicknames?

• 4:41Speaker 02

  I had LB from a few people, but that that's kind of like, not really.

• 4:46Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, Zach, did you have a nickname?

• 4:48Speaker 03

  It was always Weinberg. It's like a Jewish thing, you know, everyone calls you by your last name because there's like, everybody's named like Zach or John or something. And it's impossible to tease us apart. So you go by the last name.

• 4:58Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So I had a similar thing where basically I think a lot of like, uh, athletic coaches and stuff, they just couldn't say our last name. So like, what do you do? If you can't say Pompliano, you just stop at the first part. And you're just like, all right, pop like that. That's the easy way to yell and scream. All right, let's get into a lot of this. First of all, I want to start off with, I've got a little joke for you guys, which is if your podcast is named Cartoon Avatars, we spent all morning trying to figure out what is the best way to kind of, uh, set up this conversation. And so I figured that there's some people who I've seen on the internet who are like Zach and Logan and Cartoon Avatars, they're geniuses. This is the most genius thing ever is to bring these people on and ask hard, tough questions. So we have you guys here as Einstein and Tesla.

• 5:42Speaker 03

  I like that.

• 5:43Anthony Pompliano?

  But then, hold on, but then there's other people on the internet who I've seen said, these guys are complete morons. They don't know what they're talking about. So we got a second meme as you guys is dumb and dumber.

• 5:54Speaker 03

  That's good.

• 5:54Anthony Pompliano?

  My read on this whole thing is that you guys are neither Einstein and Tesla or dumb and dumber. Everyone's somewhere in between, which I think is actually a, an important place to kind of start of like, is it fair to categorize both of you as like, uh, cautiously optimistic about this stuff? Healthy skepticism? Like, how would you describe, uh, your view of Bitcoin crypto web three, like this whole space?

• 6:21Speaker 02

  Zach, you go first.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  Well, I'll say first and foremost, like I'm a technology optimist. I mean, it, you know, I'm a pretty active, maybe one of the most active, like early stage angel investors in the US. So I look at it and I'm interested in. Early stage technology, probably on the front end of that curve. So in a macro sense, like I love new technology. I've built new technologies. Basically, the only thing I've ever done. So I like it from a technical perspective. I would consider myself a skeptic on the utility and not in this like, you know, religious, like, is it binary? It works or it does, you know, nothing ever is that clear, but more the amount of dollars and

• 7:06Speaker 03

  hype and investment that we're putting in relative to the output, like the productive output that we're going to get out of the broadly crypto ecosystem. And I know that's like a loaded term and we have to break it down. So consider me a skeptic specifically in crypto, but a technology enthusiast more broadly.

• 7:25Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, Logan, what about you?

• 7:26Speaker 02

  I would say that I agree with Zach on the technical aspects of this. I think it's awesome. Like, I think it's so cool. And as a job, you know, I'm a venture capitalist and it would be, nothing would be better for me, for me, if like, all of the existing financial institutions get ripped apart and we're like, and all the social media companies get ripped apart. Like, I think that would be awesome because that would give me so much opportunity to invest in stuff. I guess I have two criticisms of it in general. One is Zach's point on the utility. The rhetoric also has bothered me, just like the whole not going to make it and whatever, like all that stuff. I'm just kind of like, it doesn't lead to good discourse if you're going to be that polarizing about how you talk about

• 8:10Speaker 02

  the who's on the in club versus who's on the out club. And then the final thing is like, I guess this goes to the use cases, but it's how much money and how many brilliant people are spending their time working on this versus other things that I think have a more clear, direct impact on the world. And so that it's kind of, I'm complicated in all of that. But yeah, I've actually kind of fallen into this and I would consider myself slightly more neutral than Zach, but I had a podcast, Zach was a buddy, started coming on with other friends and then we sort of fell into like, Paddy McCormick's a friend, Mike Duda's Is a buddy, Sean McGraw, like all these people kept coming on wanting to talk about it.

• 8:51Speaker 02

  And so now I'm like the facilitator of these conversations to some extent without too strong of a view myself.

• 8:58Anthony Pompliano?

  But before you guys joined, we were talking about how genius it was that like the podcast has become so popular because you bring Zach on and Zach asks the really tough question of like, tell me a use case. And then like all hell breaks loose, it seems like based on the internet clips. Let's start maybe with this idea of like the people, the amount of people, because that's a really interesting point. It's like, are people wasting their time? Do we have all these really smart people? Is there so much capital going in and not actually getting their productivity? I've went and looked and tried to figure out how many people work in like the broad crypto ecosystem. So Bitcoin plus all the web three, whatever. And there is no like one answer, but if you do some searches on LinkedIn and like all this stuff, it seems like there's probably somewhere between 250 and 500,000 people is my estimate.

• 9:43Anthony Pompliano?

  If you search blockchain or Bitcoin or whatever on these platforms, usually you get kind of 50 to 100,000 roles. And then you can kind of extrapolate it out. Let's say that it was a million people. So just kind of like way more than than what the estimates I think probably are.

• 9:59Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you evaluate whether they're wasting their time? Like a million people, like Amazon employs more than a million people as just one company, right? And so like, is that a big number? Is it a small number? How do you kind of think through uh, uh, coming to a conclusion as to like, what is the answer to that question?

• 10:13Speaker 03

  Well, I don't think the number of people is the right heuristic, right? Like you had eight people build Instagram and clearly that was a, you know, massive theoretical benefit to society in terms of, you know, the, at least the dollar value it created. So I wouldn't look at the people, I would look at the dollars. I would look at, you know, like how many venture dollars, which means LP dollars, which at the end of the day means usually like an endowment or a pension fund, or you know, someone's 401k in some way, shape or form, getting into this ecosystem, whether they, they know it or not. I would look at the dollars in and then the equity value created out, right? And what's the multiple here that we're creating based on the dollars in? So I don't know how many people are, I've never looked and it's not something I would, I would check.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  But I looked at the, I think it was Logan, what 2021 crypto specific venture fundraise was like 31 billion.

• 11:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, Morgan Stanley says, says 30 billion or so was invested in crypto companies.

• 11:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, and that's a single year. So I assume. I mean, I'm gonna just like hand wave this for a second, but it's probably over 100 billion across the life cycle and growing. And so the question is like, how many more uses could we have had productive uses for that 100 billion? Because what comes with the money are people, right? Like, the money leads to hiring, the money leads to teams, things like that. So I always think money is like the best way to to track it. So

• 11:38Speaker 02

  But also, these aren't, these aren't like run of your mill, you know, these are like very talented computer science type people, right? Like Olympic math, I mean, Vitalik, probably one of the smartest like math people in the world. And so I guess maybe to Zach's point, the dollars go in and then the people follow because inevitably, we sort of have the lizard brain of chasing opportunities to go make money. And so I think that is kind of the leading indicator of this stuff. And it's not comparing it to the average Amazon person or whatever. Like, these are, for the most part, pretty talented computer scientists that are spending potentially some part of their life's work on this when I feel like there might be better uses. But I don't know, I don't have the super strong opinion on that.

• 12:19Anthony Pompliano?

  So if we if we kind of continue on this path, let's take a Vitalik or somebody like that, right? There's plenty of people who are like, hey, these people are really smart. They're choosing to go work here. They obviously are choosing to go work here as a stated reason because they think they can create, you know, quote unquote, good in the world. It feels like everyone says good in the world, whatever that means at this point in kind of public discourse. But how much should people be able to evaluate? Like, is good being produced in the world externally versus kind of more traditional venture capital style of like, let's just go find great people and then they'll tell us where they want to go spend their time and effort? Like, how do you think about, oh, smart people are working on things that aren't actually productive versus, no, the smart people will eventually figure out where the most productive uses of their time are. And so we should just like trust them?

• 13:05Speaker 03

  Well, I don't think it's, I don't think those are the two choices, right? Like, I think in general, you can look at the productivity of the dollars you're deploying by seeing ultimately what comes out of them in terms of companies, right? Like, what is the out, what is the output? What's the equity value of the companies that we're creating? And that's a good proxy for like, are we spending? Our time on interesting things because interesting things tend to be worth a lot of money. Right. Like, that's just kind of how this it's like capitalism 101, I guess. So I would look at, you know, what's the amount of money that we're actually seeing come out of this from an equity value standpoint, based on the dollars that we've put in. And if you think of like the venture lifecycle of what like a typical venture fund,

• 13:49Speaker 03

  you'd expect to see like some early indications, seven years in, 10 years, something like that. So, you know, I can't believe I'm about to say this, but yeah, we are a little early in the in the evaluation of the companies. I can't believe I said it's early.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  That's the clip, by the way. That's, yeah.

• 14:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Zach Weinberg said it's early.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 14:10Speaker 03

  However, you'd want to see like long term, real recurring, non speculative trading revenue. Right. Like you have to decouple like, what is speculative trading revenue from what isn't? And my fear right now is like, most of the revenue that we're seeing in the ecosystem, whether it's in the exchanges, which are definitely the best business model out there. Right. Whether it's like FTX or Coinbase or any of these other groups, or whether it's in the like NFT trading platforms like OpenSea and whatnot. Another good business, because marketplaces are underlying good businesses from an economic standpoint, that most of the activity that's happening on those ecosystems is purely speculative in nature and not actually like a long term recurring business.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  That's the, to me, like even the numbers that we show of like revenue, real revenue, not like coin revenue in the system, is not actually real long term revenue. Like, it looks like revenue and it kind of like smells like revenue. But when you dig underneath the hood, you're like, ooh, this is really just speculation that we're taxing.

• 15:09Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you balance? So I've managed funds in the space. I'm an LP in other funds. I know the returns of a bunch of these funds. The best venture funds in history have been in this space over the last five years, six years, whatever the time period is. And many of the funds of these vintages have drastically outperformed traditional venture funds. Now, there's a whole bunch to unpack there. We don't need to get into all the details of like how to calculate returns and all this stuff. But like, how do you think about productivity or value of that capital being deployed? Is it a measurement of just like LPs gave me a dollar and then that fund gave back $10? And so like, that's better than if they gave a different VC a dollar and they got $3 back there?

• 15:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Or is there some other way to think about like the return on VC invested capital?

• 15:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I mean, I would say two things on that. The first one is that certainly in the internet bubble, like similarly, the returns were absolutely astronomical, like the best funds that that came out of that were 99, 2000 people that were able to get liquid after a company started. And six months later, it went public and they dumped all their shares, right? And so I don't know necessarily. And sure, you could say, oh, Amazon came out of that period as well. And so all it takes is one Amazon to justify everything else. And, you know, we can go down that rabbit hole if we want. But, but then the second thing is to what end are they making these dollars? And I think if you look at, for the most part, where a lot of these returns

• 16:37Speaker 02

  have been generated, it's come at the expense of one, returns that are no longer there, which you could also say is true of, you know, software businesses or whatever, right? The market's obviously down across the board. But two, wondering about the sustainability of of all of this, right? To Zach's point on the business model, and then also like, who's left holding the bag in all of this? And so if you go and unpack where all these returns came from, a lot of them, I have to imagine, came from tokens, right? And the tokens, inevitably, you got in on this pre-sale, and then it went public, then it got available to everyone else. And then there was retail, and then everything sort of traded down, and retail's been left holding the bag in large part here, right? And so I think those are kind of the two points. Yes, the returns have been astronomical. And I think that's

• 17:21Speaker 02

  why you're seeing Andreessen and Paradigm and all these people able to raise bigger and bigger funds is because the returns have been absolutely amazing. But to what end? And how long will that actually persist? And I would say, I don't know, and probably not very long.

• 17:35Anthony Pompliano?

  An important question, though.

• 17:36Speaker 03

  Papa, I want to give you like two, two scenarios and like have you tell me the difference between them. And this is not, this is not poking at you, to be very clear. This is poking at the the industry. First scenario, I start a new company. I ICO my coin to fundraise. So basically what I do is I create a coin. I haven't raised any dollars myself, right? So I have no equity dollars in the business. I issue a coin. I sell it out in like an auction process or whatever it may be to the market to essentially everybody, right? To retail, to accredited investors, non accredited investors. I mean, that's the whole point of the crypto piece of this, right? It's like, it's technically anyone can come in and buy it. And we did those. We did those ICOs for a while.

• 18:21Speaker 03

  And then we basically said as an industry, and I guess the SEC as well, kind of said, nah, that's a security issuance. That's illegal. Like no mas. And we shut it down. Now, what we do, this is like version two, is we say, okay, we're not actually going to sell the token to the public yet. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to raise a bunch of equity capital, good old classic equity capital from a third party set of third parties, typically venture capital, not to pick on VCs, but it could be anybody, right? Like from some third party, that third party is going to give me money. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm also going to give them the coins. I'm not necessarily charging them for the coins. I'm going to put the coin at a really low value. I'm going to give it to them. I'm going to give them a first look.

• 19:06Speaker 03

  And then I'm going to let them sell it to the public markets. Once this thing, you know, launches and gets liquid. So I've kind of put this like middleman, funny enough, in the middle of this thing and saying, no, no, no, I'm not raising money directly from the public. I'm raising money from venture. Ventures then taking these coins and selling them to the public. That's not an ICO. And I kind of look at those things and I go, is that not the same thing? Just like twisted around, you know, like is it potato potato type of situation?

• 19:34Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that those are like very, very similar. I would actually put a third scenario in there, which I've seen people start trying to do, which is like, we're going to raise money from venture capitalists because at the end of the day, they're trying to build some sort of organization and they need capital to start it, right? So like it's got to come from somewhere, whether you sell a coin, you sell equity, you get a loan, you know, whatever it is. So they get capital. And then they actually don't even give the coin to the In some cases, I see people trying to explicitly solve the problem of how do we have a coin and not be a security? And so what they do in that pursuit is then like, how can we put the coins into people's hands as our users? But not have them buy them. So there's like, oh, if you participate in the system, like somehow you earn them or you get them or whatever.

• 20:19Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I actually think that all three of those things are like very similar in their end state, which is like the average person ends up holding them. And you can argue whether there's like a reason for doing it or whatever. But I do worry, and I think where we probably, all three of us agree in like this web three world is whenever I see a founder like pitching an idea. And I asked them like, why are you doing that thing? Like some aspect of it. And their answer is like, to avoid being caught up in the regulatory scrutiny or something like that. What it tells me is that like, they're not actually worried about solving the problem for the customer. They're like trying to make business decisions to like, address other things that are just a distraction from like, solving the problem for the customer.

• 21:01Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think to your point, like, there's a ton of mental energy that has been going on. And frankly, lawyers have been making an absolute bag in this industry. Helping to like, structure all these like really unique things. Like, there are jurisdictions that I know about now. That I never would have even known the name of if it hadn't been for people like running around the world, trying to figure out like, who's the friendliest to the coins? Right? And I think like that, there's a lot of that going on as well, to your point. But I also think that that's the argument from, you know, whether it's the Bitcoin community, or even the critics of just this whole industry. Unlike, maybe the ideas are right, but the execution is wrong, or the like, distraction from trying not to be a security. Like, is there a big difference between if you just treated it like a security or if you didn't?

• 21:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And it's case by case.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  You know what I think's amazing? And this kind of touches on the return aspect of it. Like, why is venture a great asset class historically at the top? And why it's been able to deliver great returns is, you know, if you look at it, most asset classes have a linear distribution, right? And like, to be the 25th is not that different than to be the 23rd, right? But venture has this stair step. And the reason for that is there's compound. Advantages that come from having a brand essentially, right? You have a brand, you get access to better companies because you get access to better companies. You invest in better companies because you're an investor. Better people join those companies, right? Because you're an investor, other investors want to follow and invest in it. But at the end of the day, like if you're making something, then you have to go out and sell it to the customer.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  Right? And if it's an enterprise software company, like you can have all those compounding flywheels that are advantageous. But at the end of the day, there's another customer out there that will determine whether or not the product's a good one. Right? The weird thing about crypto and the reason I think the returns have been so high is all of that happens. And then you get to use your hype in your brand and you get to drop it on the average retail investor. And so there's this whole self perpetuating compounding loop. And instead of going to a discrete customer and saying, hey, does this bring you value? You go to a speculative investor and say, hey, I'm involved here. This is going to the moon, diamond hands, whole hodel, whatever, right? And then the retail investor says, oh, it's amazing. Andreessen Horowitz is involved in this. We have to get involved, right?

• 23:16Speaker 02

  And so it's actually like, the reason the returns I think are so good is because it self perpetuates itself to actually generate the returns. Right? And so it doesn't surprise me.

• 23:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Doesn't that happen in the public markets as well of like, whether it's good or bad? There's a bunch of investors, usually retail, not the kind of professional Wall Street investors, who they look at like, who else has invested? That's like smart money and then they go and buy some of these stocks. Like, is that like a human, like, greed thing?

• 23:44Speaker 02

  And I think that's what's crazy about, I think that's what's crazy about GameStop and AMC and, you know, Tesla and all this is because they're, they're disconnected from valuations, right? And so I agree, like fundamental valuation. But for the most part, we've seen over a long enough period of time, like things type tend to revert back to cash flows and unit economics and, you know, whatever, earnings per share and all of that stuff. And this doesn't have that, right? Sorry, Zach.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  No, no, I mean, look, I agree with everything you said. I would also say that like, when we try and do this comparison of like a coin drop to a public equity, it's not, it's a false comparison. Right? Because public companies have tremendous regulatory scrutiny and requirements and like a regulatory body overseeing it and audited financials and liability risk and you know, all these things. And by the way, like there are still scams. That's the crazy part. Like with all of those rules and all of the history of like people, you know, with the pink sheets screwing over retail and like brokers calling grandmas and saying, you should buy this. You know, this is what used to happen, right?

• 24:47Speaker 03

  We we had, there's a movie about it called Boiler Room. Even with all the scrutiny and regulation, we still have scams. And here we have none of the scrutiny, or now we're getting a little and definitely none of the regulation. And we're seeing, you know, scam central, left and right, because we're just like reliving the history of finance over the last 50 years. The thing that's like really fascinating to me about the coin is I think it acts as a false proxy for product market fit and utility.

• 25:16Anthony Pompliano?

  It dilutes the signal.

• 25:19Speaker 03

  It's really negative signal or no sig. I don't even know what it is because it's not signal, right? Like typically when you are building a software product, you're looking for early signal about usage, right? I want to know, like, is there a product market fit? And if it's an enterprise thing, you want like paying customers and long-term contracts. And if it's a consumer thing, you want users, but you want retention on those users. You want to look at cohorts. It's always like normal little metrics. And so what I think has happened here, and I said this on another podcast the other day, is like, most of these companies are built by engineers who don't have a background in like financialization and speculation. And it's not critiquing them. It's just not what they do. And so you issue this coin and in your head, as a technical person, you're like, it's just a feature of the software.

• 26:02Speaker 03

  It's just a coin. It's just a, it's like another piece of code I wrote, because it is actually just like another piece of code I wrote. I made this token. It's distributed. Off you go. And then you see like a whole bunch of people buy it and you're like, whoa. I must have product market fit because there's a lot of people buying my token. Just like you would think classically, like there's a bunch of users using my software. I've got a bunch of customers and in your head, they're all the same thing. And they are not the same thing because the reason they're buying the token and mostly like not actually customers or users. It's speculators is because they want to try and, you know, quick flip it to the market. They look at it as an asset class. Like we talk about these things like an asset class. We talk about it as a thing I'm investing in, not a thing on a customer of. We, we use the terms of finance.

• 26:46Speaker 03

  We don't use the terms of software. And I think that's the giant red flag to me, which is we talk about this stuff as if it's, it's technology. But then when we talk about why people buy it and use it, we talk about it like an asset. And it's not both. It's like, can we pick one of these two things? And that's what I think people are getting confused in here is they look at this stuff. They look at like usage metrics as a proxy for product market fit. And it's not usage, it's speculation.

• 27:09Anthony Pompliano?

  So I've always talked about this as like mercenaries and missionaries and yield farming. I think was like the original one where it became very obvious to me of people would basically say, hey, I created a, a whole bank full of tokens that I invented. Come here, we'll give you a thousand percent APY or whatever the crazy number was in the beginning. And then as more and more people started to join because they wanted a thousand percent APY, that got commoditized down. And then those users immediately jump ship to the next chain or, or opportunity where they were offered a thousand percent APY. And so I've always thought about it as like, oh, those are just like mercenary users. And so I didn't so much as like the signal of the product market fit as much as just like you are not going to have any retention because you can't keep paying a thousand percent APY. And that's the type of user that you're attracting and they're literally just going to leave.

• 27:55Anthony Pompliano?

  And so it ends up being this very weird thing.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  It's a reverse network effect, by the way. Most of these companies have network effects that more people join. It's actually advantageous to the platform. This one, because it's speculation, the more people join, they miss out on the opportunity. And so they're, they're like, oh shit, I need to go somewhere else. Right. It's like a very perverse incentive.

• 28:12Speaker 03

  That is Logan and I have talked about this too. I think that applies to the, the pay to play or whatever they call it, pay to earn, sorry, gaming.

• 28:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, explain.

• 28:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  Like the Axie infinities and all that. Yeah.

• 28:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, we've, Lo and I have talked about this as well, which is like that same like anti-network effect happens in the pay to earn gaming business model, right? Which is, and it's kind of, it's kind of like the gravity of a coin broadly. And I'm not, by the way, I'm not including Bitcoins. I agree and believe that is a totally separate thing from what we're talking about here. And we, we can have that convo because I'm excited to chat about it. But in the like gaming use case, right? And most of these coins, the people who get in early have the most to win, right? Because you see the speculative run up. And at a certain point, what happens is your major holders and the people who have had the most gains, their future gains start to look significantly

• 29:05Speaker 03

  smaller than the paper gains they've already got, right? Like I've gone from a dollar to $10 and like now I can get from 10 to 12, just to use a stupid, simple analogy here. And all of a sudden, you're like, well, I've made all the money I can in this game. I should hop to the next one. And there will always be a next one, always will be a next one, because the friction to start them is relatively low. And now what you've got essentially is like your largest insider holders selling, because they should sell, because it is actually like economically beneficial for them to get out of the game or the coin or whatever it is and move to the next one. Exactly pump to your point, right? Like they're mercenaries, they're not missionaries. And you're going to see this like rise up, insiders realize we're at the peak, sell it out, drop back down, move to

• 29:49Speaker 03

  the next one. There's no retention. Like it's inherently going to do this. It is like almost by design, a highly volatile asset because of the ability to flip to the next game or the next thing.

• 30:00Anthony Pompliano?

  I actually agree wholeheartedly on this. And I think it's why we've seen the ideas are probably right. Like there will be somebody who cracks it. We'll come back to this in a second about kind of play to earn or whatever. And I'll get your guys thoughts on, on some of the newer versions that I'm seeing. But let's talk about Bitcoin real quick. Where do both of you stand on Bitcoin specifically? You like it, you hold it, you don't like it, you think there's concerns? Like just kind of lay out where you guys are on it at the moment?

• 30:28Speaker 02

  So I have a tiny bit of Bitcoin and it's mostly, I would characterize it as schmuck insurance that I, I just don't, I actually don't totally believe in like the long-term value and the price and all of it, but it seems that it's really reached a zeitgeist point that it's common enough in use case on, on ticker tape, on institutions buying in, that I just don't want to live in a world in which everyone makes so much money and I miss out on all of that. And so I have a tiny bit of exposure to it. I am not a long-term believer. I'm not a zealot in it. I think it's the most probably interesting of all the stuff that we can talk about here because it's the most mainstream, but that, that's my stance. Zach?

• 31:13Anthony Pompliano?

  That was code for Logan is a Dgen Bitcoin holder who's never selling. Okay. All right. Got it. Zach, what about you?

• 31:22Speaker 03

  I was thinking about how I was going to answer this question before I came on. I was really struggling with it. It's like, what, like, do you believe in God? You know, it's like, oh, man, this is going to be a tough answer.

• 31:33Anthony Pompliano?

  In Satoshi we trust Zach, come on.

• 31:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is this, I might go on for a while here. I guess let me try and sell Bitcoin to you, which is kind of a fascinating exercise here, right? Like, why is Bitcoin cool? So to me, like Bitcoin has one property and you could argue the decentralized piece, but let's just assume that like all of these things are decentralized for a second because we're talking about, you know, crypto broadly. It is one property that makes it interesting, which is that it's a fixed supply, right? Like, we're not going to make definitionally in the code ever more Bitcoins than whatever is like author. I, you probably, I don't know, what's the actual number upon you?

• 32:16Anthony Pompliano?

  21 million.

• 32:17Speaker 03

  21 million. Okay. So there is a literal fixed supply. It's not some company telling you it's a fixed supply. It's not a government telling you it's a fixed supply. It's not like, oh, maybe we found some gold in a cave somewhere and the supply increased, right? Like actual fixed supply. And that makes it interesting in the sense that like as the world gets richer

• 32:38Speaker 03

  Have more money, period, then that money is chasing a fixed supply. So like theoretically, if people want to own it, and that's the giant if, right? Like if it makes sense in people's brains to own this thing, that the price should rise because you've got a fixed supply and an increasing demand. Does that sound right to you? It's kind of like the bull case, if you will, of like why you'd hold something with the fix, like a digital version of a fixed supply type of thing. That to me is the bull case.

• 33:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I think there's two arguments. That is definitely one of them is if you're looking at it as like, will this be more or less valuable in the future? I think that that's a pretty good summary in terms of like the, the market structure compared to the legacy world.

• 33:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. So that's the, that's the first. And then the question is like, okay, so why would you buy it? And that's the part, besides like, other people are buying it. And I'm not suggesting, by the way, that because other people buying it is actually a bad reason. That's actually like a pretty good reason. I mean, clearly it's worked over the last seven years to be like, I'm buying it because other people are buying it in the same way that like buying Beanie Babies early in the cycle was like a really damn good idea because other people were buying them. It's true of any sort of like new speculative asset. The question is like, in the long run, why do people buy it? And this is where I start to struggle with it because it feels to me like the story keeps changing. First, we said it was a payment network. Then we said it was like the new internet. Then

• 34:00Speaker 03

  we said they're going to, people are going to build these giant companies on top of it. Then we said it's like decentralized, no government, not exactly sure why that's a valuable because you need fiat in most places. The kind of the story kept shifting. And then we heard the latest, maybe this is like two years ago or so, which was, well, it's an inflation hedge, right? It's digital gold. And gold in itself, by the way, is a weird asset that people own. It's very odd, right? It makes almost no sense. It's kind of like the history of gold is why people, they own gold because they own gold, because they've done it for a really long time, not because it has any like productive, like, there's no productive use of gold besides jewelry. And that's clearly not why people own it. So the question is like, all right, is it an inflation hedge? And what, what

• 34:41Speaker 03

  kind of inflation are we talking about here? And I think this is, we have to like tease out this inflation hedge statement because I think people mean two different things. And you've started to tease this out to your credit. One is, It's a hedge against what I would think of as like CPI inflation, like consumer, like the actual physical price of products, right? Like detergent and toilet paper, which is only two things I buy. So house full of detergent, right? And some bananas. And that one does not seem to be true. Right? Like, we're watching it live right now. It's inversely correlated with CPI. Now, part of the reason for that, I think, is because it's actually correlated with money

• 35:24Speaker 03

  supply growth. Right? And what we're doing right now is we're seeing inflation peak, go up, if you will, CPI inflation, and the Fed is tightening, both in terms of rising rates. It's also unwinding its balance sheet, right? So like, we're actually seeing the money supply out there tighten a bit. And that's why Bitcoin, I believe, and other risk assets are coming down, right? Because like, the money supply is shrinking, which actually would be the argument that like, this is the exact time to sell Bitcoin. Like, you should not own it in this environment. And I think that that's that is a distinct use case. Sorry, I conflated. I mixed the two. But one is like, it's a CPI hedge, which I don't think is true. The other one is that it's basically like levered

• 36:07Speaker 03

  beta, right? Like, it's money supply grows, so beta grows, and like Bitcoin is kind of like on the front end of the spectrum of beta, because it's highly speculative, and it basically correlates with like, what other things that grow when the money supply grows, which is like risk assets and growth assets, like QQQ. And I think that's really what people mean or think when they say it's an inflation hedge. They view it as like, it's just a hedge when the money supply grows, the price of Bitcoin probably goes up because of the fixed supply. Right? We go all the way back to that original like hypothesis, which is like, when there's more money in the system, and you have a fixed supply of something that theoretically people want to buy, the price will go up. It's not more complicated than that, in my opinion. The question is just like, do that, does that

• 36:50Speaker 03

  story hold? Like, because once you lose, this is what I was gonna ask you, like, once you lose the other stories, the payments, the CPI inflation index, the like, non-government story, whatever, like, all the other things we've told ourselves over the last seven years about why this thing is gonna change the world, does the one piece of it about it is a fixed supply, and it seems like people want to buy it in some way, is that enough? Is that enough to hold its value? And to me, that's the question, if I'm an investor, I'm asking, which is like, what's the bear case? What's the bull case? That's where I struggle because to me, that's not enough.

• 37:23Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's go to what you just said first that we could talk about kind of in the future. But I think what you're teasing out, and this is something that Bitcoin is very unique in that like there's so many different types of people who pay attention to it, either because they're a bull or a bear. But you get like the Wall Street crowd, you get the technology crowd, you get like human rights crowd, you get like that anon on Twitter who's like yelling and screaming about whatever. And all these people come together and they all have like really bad ideas for the most part. And then like, there's a couple of people who like say something once in a while and you're like, oh, wow, that was really smart and it makes sense.

• 37:53Speaker 02

  It's like a political party.

• 37:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Literally, we were just recently talking about the fact that like, just as Republicans and Democrats have gotten more extreme, like the bulls and bears in Bitcoin and in crypto have like gotten more extreme. And then there's like, as in political parties, a lot of people are like, ah, I just want to kind of like hang out like in the middle, like, you know, like just like be rational. And I think that there's going to be a return of like the rational people or the centrist. But there's this guy Brent Donnelly, who we recently had on, and what he talked about was Bitcoin is not an inflation hedge, as Zach was talking about in terms of like CPI stuff. It's more a hedge against loose monetary policy. And I think that's your whole thing about like the expanding money supply and stuff.

• 38:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, loose monetary policy essentially translates to more money being printed in the system.

• 38:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Correct. And so like, yes, I think that that is the nuance. And of course, like, you know, 240 characters on Twitter, like, nobody says it. It's way easier to say it's an inflation hedge. So I think that that story will become more popular and kind of you'll get the fragmentation of like, it's not a CPI hedge, it's loose monetary policy hedge. But with that said, if you go back to 2020, I think it was Q3 when Paul Tudor Jones and Stanley Drucker-Miller and all these guys started to be like, hey, we're buying Bitcoin because we think inflation is coming and we want to, you know, be best positioned. And Paul said, it'll be the fastest horse. Like, that was like the famous quote. And what has made me think a lot about is like, the markets are forward looking. And so when you think of it from that perspective, like buying Bitcoin before the inflation came was actually really smart, like waiting till the inflation was here and then going and buying it actually would have been like really bad, right? Because you would have

• 39:23Anthony Pompliano?

  been buying it and now you're down. And so it does beg the question of like, how do any assets, forget Bitcoin for a second, like, Any asset relate to inflation. So if you think inflation is coming, you probably move your assets beforehand to prepare for it. But does it also work on the back end? Like if you think the Fed is going to be successful and they're going to bring inflation down. Do you sell certain assets? Like, do you move in advance to try to go and prepare yourself? I don't know. Like, I don't think we've lived through this. And so like, that's one of my big questions. Is like, on the other side of the inflation, it's very obvious in the beginning, people will move assets to try to benefit from incoming inflation, whether it's a narrative thing or it's actually true.

• 40:04Anthony Pompliano?

  But on the back end, will we see investors move assets because they're trying to prepare for like the fall of inflation?

• 40:11Speaker 03

  Well, I guess the best way to look at it, and part of why I don't, I don't believe that story, and I think some people do, is look at the asset classes that historically are inflation hedges, or like pseudo act like inflation hedges, right? Like, nothing is, let's be fair, start with some facts, right? Like, nothing is a perfect CPI inflation hedge, right? Nothing historically has done perfectly well. There are a few asset classes that tend to do better in a high inflation period. Gold is one of those for, honestly, mostly cultural reasons. And gold is not a perfect CPI inflation hedge. If you look at the price of gold, you know, over the last few, it was kind of like, flat-ish.

• 40:52Speaker 03

  Now, that's a lot better, to be clear, than like, most of the assets that people owned. And so in a way, it's actually like a decent inflation hedge relative to the fact that like, literally everything else has gotten crushed. The other thing that seems to generally do well during like, high, classic inflationary periods, like again, CPI inflation type stuff, are commodities, right? Like cyclical style business, like commodity prices tend to rise. So as a result, owning like commodity producers is a pretty good idea. That's done pretty well, like it's held up pretty well. And you don't see those asset classes, the classic like inflation hedges. You don't see them trading ahead, right? You're not seeing those prices like massively dip because people are expecting inflation to come down.

• 41:37Speaker 03

  And so if we thought the market was so smart about what was going to happen in the future and it thought inflation was coming down and people are trading ahead of it. You'd see those historical asset classes start to trade down and they're not. So I just don't buy the story because it's not a different, it's the same investors. It's like, you know, I've got a pie of stuff and like, I'm going to kind of move my money around in that pie. And it's not like there's just the Bitcoin people and there's just the commodity people and there's just the like gold people. It's just not how it works. And so that's why I don't buy the story because none of the other asset classes tell the same story. Like the data doesn't show it. I actually think what happens is basically people look at their money. It's not just people, it's like LPs and you know, portfolio managers as a pie. And they look at this pie and they go, I've got a hundred dollars.

• 42:21Speaker 03

  And I've got like 40 in equities and I've got like 30 in corporate debt and whatever. I've got like, you know, 3% in gold. And someone comes along with a story, like a technology story and says, we've got this new thing that's going to change the world and it's a fixed supply. It's called Bitcoin. And it's pretty cool and a lot of smart people are talking about it. A lot of tech luminaries are talking about it as the next big thing. Like seems pretty cool. I don't really know anything about it. Price is going up. Yeah, I could trim my gold from three to two. Uh, and I could go from my Bitcoin ownership from zero to like, sure, why not? You know, it's not, and actually like most people I talk to and I ask them like, what percentage of your net worth is in Bitcoin? Not the crazy ones, but like the rational sane people is usually like 1%. It's like the schmuck insurance Logan mentioned, right?

• 43:06Speaker 03

  And you're kind of like, and it's sitting there in people's portfolio because it's such a tiny percentage of everyone's portfolio. That's basically what's going on. And I don't think anyone is like really thinking this through about, is it truly an inflation hedge or not? And we're about to see this shake out. Because many of the stories are collapsing. That to me is the most, I'm not long or short, I don't own any Bitcoin, I don't short it, I don't do any of this stuff. I think what's really fascinating about what's going on right now is most of the stories are being put to the test. Right?

• 43:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, agreed.

• 43:34Speaker 03

  The gold, the CPI thing, the like inverse correlation with the money supply, or sorry, correlation with the money supply. You know, this like payment network, which is clearly never going to happen, at least on Bitcoin. It's all of those stories that are collapsing. We'll see what happens. Is this idea that like, yeah, everybody just owns like half a point or a point of their portfolio in Bitcoin? Because someone said that's a smart idea. Yeah, maybe. I mean, like people are lemmings, they tend to follow what other people do. I don't think there's like a ton of truly rational thinkers out there. The big guys, you know, the Buffets and whatnot, now, most of these people were like anti-gold in the first place, too. Are saying like, it's not a productive asset, it doesn't make sense to own, yada, yada, yada. And yes, I agree, like if you didn't buy gold, you're definitely not buying Bitcoin.

• 44:17Speaker 03

  Uh, it's a very fair statement, and I think that that's true. So, anyway, I, it's not an argument for or against, I just think it's like. I don't see the upside case when the money supply is shrinking.

• 44:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:31Speaker 03

  When the money supply is growing.

• 44:32Speaker 02

  That was where I was gonna go, Pop. Actually, is I read that article that the, that you posted on your, your blog, and the returns were all super interesting. Wouldn't that mean that now is the time with the money supply shrinking to sell Bitcoin?

• 44:44Anthony Pompliano?

  So, I think that there's two ways that people look at this, right? And this gets a little bit at what Zach's saying, Logan, which is, um, if you're going to trade assets, and you take directional positions, then like, I think there's a lot of people who probably already sold, right? And they sold it along with, they're selling their tech stocks and all that type of stuff.

• 45:01Speaker 02

  Numbers would indicate as much, right?

• 45:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And so like, if you were going to sell, yeah, then you basically said, hey, the Fed's in control, this is all one trade. Uh, if they're going to tighten, a lot of things, many things will all go down, like just sell, go to cash, the dollar strengthened 20-year high, and then we'll wait till they basically pivot and go back to loose monetary policy. So I, I definitely think there's a, a very large portion of people who like, that's what they do, whether they're institutions or individuals. I think now what you have, though, what's unique about Bitcoin, uh, to some degree, is, and you can look at like the on-chain metrics, is like, A very large portion, over 50%, sometimes a size 65, 66%, just they don't sell. And some of it's like the meme of like, you know, Hoddle, like all this stuff. I think it was Stanley Drucke Miller, actually, was the one who said that like, that's how he got convinced to buy Bitcoin was that during the 2018 crash,

• 45:46Anthony Pompliano?

  like 85% of people didn't sell. So he was like, well, these people are fucking crazy. So like, I'm gonna go buy some too.

• 45:52Speaker 03

  You know what I think is going on there? Cause I, I actually, I think this is like such a good point. And I was, this is, I was like thinking of my pro Bitcoin argument. And I want to touch on this one, cause I think it's fascinating of like, there, you are right. There is a contingent of people, we don't know who they are, who don't sell in like any, at least they have it. I guess the better way of saying they haven't. Here's who I think they are. I'm gonna make a gross overgeneralization here and I have absolutely no data to back this up. I'm gonna just like, start with that. This is just like in my head.

• 46:22Speaker 02

  A good way to make an argument.

• 46:23Speaker 03

  Clip, right. Let me give you the best justification for this idea I just came up with last week.

• 46:30Speaker 03

  Which is, you've got a bunch of countries, China, Russia, Iraq, whatever. A bunch of like autocratic style countries that have wealth, right? China in particular, Russia clearly has a bunch of wealth from oil and gas and, you know, anything to do with like essentially energy. And when you've got five to 10 billion dollars, one to five billion dollars in your local currency, and you're not really subject, like you don't have rights in the classic sense, right? Like people can come and put you in jail or take your money at any point. Now, they don't always do that. And in Russia, sometimes they show up and you happen to kill yourself.

• 47:11Speaker 03

  But like, in general, it wouldn't be a bad idea to take like 10% of your money and just stick it in Bitcoin. I actually think that's like, part of this is like, they're not holding it because they think it's a good investment. It is a true insurance policy because it cannot be grabbed.

• 47:30Anthony Pompliano?

  It's the Ukraine, it's the Ukraine argument, right? Like, a bunch of people pointed to Ukraine and like, oh my God, if you got uprooted from your home and you had to leave, you can't take your buildings, you can't take your business, you can't, whatever, like, you can leave with your Bitcoin. Which like, yes, technically is true. How many people were doing that up for debate?

• 47:45Speaker 02

  How do you get it into Bitcoin, right?

• 47:47Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure.

• 47:48Speaker 03

  Well, and just do the math for a second, like, what's the current market cap of Bitcoin? Was it like 500 billion now or something like that?

• 47:53Anthony Pompliano?

  It might be 400, but yeah, somewhere in that ballpark.

• 47:55Speaker 03

  So 400 billion, alright, so we've got how many billionaires in just China alone? There's probably like a few hundred, let's just, I'm gonna make this up. Let's say there's a thousand billionaires in China and like, on average, they're like median assets or something like three to five billion dollars each, we'll choose five because I can do the math in my head. Each one of them puts like 10% of their money in Bitcoin because you're like, I don't know, I might have to run and I don't, I need to get something out of here. So you've got on average 500 million dollars, give or take of any of these people in Bitcoin. You've got a thousand of them, plus you've got like a few other countries and it's like, okay, there's like a few hundred billion dollar Bitcoin market cap right there.

• 48:36Speaker 03

  Like, there's the math, you can do it bottoms up in terms of like basically super rich billionaires in these autocratic nations, holding Bitcoin as an insurance policy. To me, that's probably where the price floor sits, it's that. Now, how you figure that out, ah, it's beyond me. But that's actually what I think is going on. I think those are the people who aren't selling, plus the crazy like super religious holders or whatever.

• 48:58Anthony Pompliano?

  What's fascinating about this is if you take this argument and flip it, not the billionaires, but actually the like, uh, in the Bitcoin community, they call them the plebs or like that the individual person. I think that you're right. It's just not the billionaires. There are billionaires who hold Bitcoin for sure, like all that type of stuff. But I don't think that many of the billionaires are like putting 10%, right? I think it's more of like the, oh, I'm just going to trim some of my gold position and put like a little bit in there. And if you're a billionaire in China or elsewhere, I think that you're probably sophisticated enough to like make sure that your assets are out of there. Right? Like if you look at like all the Russian oligarchs that are getting sanctioned, like somehow none of their assets are in Russia, which is like, oh, okay, like they figured it out, right? And I think when you look on the on-chain data,

• 49:42Anthony Pompliano?

  which again, does not show all of the exchange data and all that, but at least gives us some directional signal. What we've seen over the last couple of years is all the large holders, their percentage of ownership has been going down. And it's actually the small holders, the people with, you know, $300 or $3,000 of Bitcoin in their wallet address, those have been going up in there and right now hitting all time highs. And so in like some crazy way, you have like the large holders who large

• 50:07Speaker 03

  Isn't that a bear case for you? Is that a bear case? That would be a bear case for me.

• 50:10Anthony Pompliano?

  No, it's a bull case.

• 50:12Speaker 03

  There's more money, there's more money in the richest people combined than there are in like the bottom 70%. And you add up like everybody else, like top 1% has gotten probably what like half the nation, 70% of the world's wealth or something. So I would argue that's a bear case. I mean, I don't know the stats, by the way, of who's selling what, but if the big guys are selling, that would scare me.

• 50:32Anthony Pompliano?

  So this is, and this I think ultimately gets at the crux of the debate between like the Bitcoin community and many of the critics, which is like, if you look at this as a pure financial speculation tool, you would want every rich person to go put all of their money in immediately and the price would explode and you'd be, you know, wealthy beyond your water streams. I think that what ends up happening is that the Bitcoin community, although take away all this stuff on Twitter and Reddit and, you know, all the craziness. There's this thought process that like this is the asset that will change the fiat distribution of 1% own 90% of the assets or 70% of the assets, whatever. And it's this idea that uh these individuals are treating it like a reserve asset.

• 51:15Anthony Pompliano?

  So what you end up finding is that like a lot of these smaller wallets, they just never sell. They're not trading.

• 51:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're treating it like a piece of their savings.

• 51:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Savings account, right? And they're just saying, hey, look, rather than saving dollars, I'm going to save in Bitcoin. It can't be debased and like whether it goes up, down, sideways, whatever, I'm just going to hold it for a long period of time.

• 51:32Speaker 03

  The problem with that argument is that, and by the way, I think that's a fair statement of like, all right, I'm going to save in Bitcoin versus my local currency versus dollars is maybe I don't have access to dollars or euros or you know, won or whatever. Like, okay, I'm going to put a little bit of my savings and just hold it and kind of not look at it. It's almost eerily similar to like the, I'll just put like half a percent or something kind of thesis here. I think that's reasonable, but it doesn't change the income profile of those people one bit, right? They still don't have a lot of money. They're just, they're poor, right? Like they are just poor and it's not the fault of you know, any one person here. It's just the fact that like, it doesn't change this idea that actually most of the wealth is concentrated. I'm not suggesting good or bad, it just is.

• 52:17Speaker 03

  And like, that's probably the source of what props this price up. Because if you add up 5%, 4% savings of people in third world countries who probably don't have a lot of savings, who are generally poor, don't have a ton of income, it's actually not that big of a number. You'd be better off having the 10% of the Chinese billionaires if you want to prop the price up. Now, I have not done that math, I just want to be clear.

• 52:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 52:40Speaker 03

  Someone probably has, and I would bet if you did the like bottoms up 5% of savings of people not in major countries that have access to dollars and euros, it's not that big of a number.

• 52:50Speaker 02

  So can we actually find this out by Anjun's? I mean, well, we know 5% of it's Satoshi, right? And that doesn't change. I don't know, has there been any activity in his or her wallet? Yeah.

• 53:02Speaker 03

  He is, he is dead.

• 53:06Anthony Pompliano?

  The other, the other thing.

• 53:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's got to be dead at this point, right? Who else? No sane human being would be holding all of their money through this and this and this. I'm sorry, nobody has diamond hands like that. It is impossible. Like their stuff would have been sold. That that person is either dead, probably, or likely lost the key.

• 53:26Anthony Pompliano?

  My, my wife thinks that it's proof that Satoshi's a woman because she says no man in their right mind could have created Bitcoin and not told somebody.

• 53:35Speaker 03

  That is one of the smartest things I have ever heard somebody say. She's exactly right.

• 53:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Right.

• 53:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's 100%. You would have told your buddies.

• 53:43Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, it's pretty incredible.

• 53:45Speaker 03

  Isn't that Satoshi guy pretty cool? They'd be like, yeah, I wonder who it is. And like three drinks in, you'd be like, okay, it's me.

• 53:51Anthony Pompliano?

  So let me ask this. I, I, I want to throw an idea out there for you guys. And I didn't prepare you for this because I just want to kind of have you guys think through it with me. It's a business that I invested in, but the logic behind why I think it's interesting will ultimately get at the difference between Bitcoin and crypto, in my opinion. So in crypto, you mentioned play to earn. And this whole idea of like, I'm gonna go play the video game. I'm gonna earn something. There's now a walk to earn and a bunch of these different things like do an action, get paid for it. But in each one of these, what they've done is they've basically said, I'm gonna create, you know, Zach coin, right? Or whatever it is.

• 54:24Speaker 03

  Sounds terrible.

• 54:26Anthony Pompliano?

  And if you go and you do whatever this action is, we're gonna pay you in Zach coin. And it sounds amazing to the people who, again, to your point, are in there early. They get a bunch of the coins and then the coins go up in value because more and more people want them. And like that ends up having some shelf life and eventually like somebody along the way is like, wow, I have a lot of money in Zach coin. What is Zach coin? I'm gonna turn Zach coin into dollars and like move on with my life. That was awesome. But like, I'm over this. And then it kind of all falls apart. One of the businesses that I'm fascinated with right now is a company called Fountain. It's a podcast app player. And if you think of the podcast space, you have iTunes, which wins because they got pre-installed on all the devices.

• 55:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Spotify is gonna go sink, you know, billions of dollars into like IP and kind of exclusive content. And so like, how can you go and actually win in the podcast space? Their idea is why don't you actually create the ability to listen to earn?

• 55:24Anthony Pompliano?

  But do not create another coin. Instead, just use the payment rails of Bitcoin. So the whole idea is RSS feeds are the podcast feed, right? You guys have one for cartoon avatars. And when somebody goes to listen to cartoon avatars, which they were gonna do anyways, on Spotify or Apple or wherever, now they will get Satoshi's streamed to them as they listen. The first question everyone comes up with is, where's the Bitcoin come from?

• 55:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Who's money? Who's money's paying them?

• 55:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So what, again, as you kind of start thinking through this, they're like, okay, well, they raised some capital, they'll put a little bit off their balance sheet to kind of help jumpstart it. But really where the bulk of it, majority of the money today is coming from, is either advertisers that say, I would love to advertise against cartoon avatars, but what ends up happening is I don't actually know if people are listening to the ads or not. These guys can say, if you don't listen to minute two to minute, you know, 2:45 in the podcast episode, you don't get the money. So they can actually ensure that you listen.

• 56:25Speaker 03

  Are you, you're, you're like, what, in your 30s, 40s?

• 56:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Early 30s.

• 56:30Speaker 03

  Early 30s, okay. Do you remember, this is like right around when the internet was getting created, I wasn't, this is not an age thing, I just wanna see if you remember this. Do you remember the pay to earn browser extensions?

• 56:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Pay to earn, no, but pay to search. Somebody recently, and I went down this whole rabbit hole of like, paid to literally like do search queries, was the one that I went and looked at.

• 56:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, so like back in the day, this is like AOL-ish timeframe or whatever, people were like, wait a minute, I get paid X dollars to show people ads, and I can pay them X minus something in theory to watch said ads, and like, there's the arb, right? Like, that's essentially the arb. And then what happened is basically people built these like little browser extensions, you would run them

• 57:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 57:11Speaker 03

  on your computer while you browsed, and that's the key here, like, you browsed is never you actually browsing, it was like, somebody put like, a little, like their cat would move the mouse, like literally, this is what people did, right? You would like fake mouse movements, and you would fake typing, and you'd fake searching, and then people built like, the computer program that would pretend that it was browsing the internet, and you'd get paid. And basically what happened in this whole thing, which is eerily similar to what you're describing, is people scam the system. Because people are clever and they're smart, and when someone says, here's money to do something, you're like, how can I get that money without doing that thing? Because that seems like a good idea. And what you will have, I would bet my, all my money,

• 57:53Speaker 03

  is if somebody was like, I'm going to pay you to listen to a podcast. You know what I'm going to figure out? How to trick you that I'm not actually listening to this podcast. I will figure that out and then you will pay me. And then eventually, what will happen is the advertisers will be like, can you show me actually the data on the people who are listening to this? Do you know who they are? Did they log in? Who are they? Can I survey them? Can I talk to them? And somebody in the analytics department of the ad agency is going to go, are these real people? Or are they bots? And they're going to be bots. And that's how the story will play out. I would bet everything on it because we've watched it happen in the beginning of display ads in the early 90s and early 2000s is the exact same thing.

• 58:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so fully understand the history of that. The other component of this is it's not just advertisers. It's also podcasters themselves. So let's say that you guys were making a bunch of money on advertising on your podcast. And then you basically take it and you are sharing it with your audience. You're saying, hey, the bigger the podcast gets, the more money that we're going to make. We're going to send some percentage of it to you.

• 58:53Speaker 03

  Rev share with my customers or users or something.

• 58:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Correct. Now, the thing that becomes super interesting about this is because it's using the Bitcoin payment rails, which is just the ability across the Lightning Network to send it instantaneous and for free, right? So it just reduces frictions of payments on a global stage.

• 59:10Anthony Pompliano?

  You, as the audience, can now send money back to the podcaster. So to your point, the only way that you can really start to see are these people real or not, is you're earning in the podcast. What they've done is they've basically created the ability for the audience to also almost like tip the podcaster. And so you get the Bitcoin and it stays within the ecosystem. Hey, you listen to earn, but then also you can turn around and you're like, hey, I really like this episode. And your ability to comment or to engage with the podcaster, you have to basically send some sats back. And now, by the way, we're talking about a penny, two pennies, three pennies, like super, super small amounts. But what it does is it tries to get at this problem. Now, already there's people trying to scam it, right? Like, it's like, that's going to happen. It's an economic incentive.

• 59:50Speaker 03

  Really? Really? You offer somebody free money and then they try to scam the system? I'm like so surprised about that. That makes no sense.

• 59:59Anthony Pompliano?

  In crypto, everything was solved, right? So I think like, what I'm trying to get at here, though, is like, there's two components that are interesting to me. One is, you can do some of these use cases or like ideas without having to create your own coin. And I think that's ultimately where a lot of this is going to end up is like, people are going to realize like, oh, we're actually not trying to be like some super decentralized thing that's highly inefficient and like, brings up, you know, I don't know, governance in these things are like hilarious, right? You've got like a thousand people in a Discord channel all trying to make a decision, like, good luck, right? And instead, they say, no, we can just do this with, whether it's Bitcoin or stablecoins or whatever. But the second thing also is, uh, this idea that if you have payment rails,

• 1:00:38Anthony Pompliano?

  where you bring the cost down to zero, I'm not a believer that like you and I are going to go try to read an article and pay a penny. Like, that just feels to me like that's probably not where the world is headed.

• 1:00:50Anthony Pompliano?

  But it does feel like if you can stream me money as I'm doing actions, you can divert my attention to do different things, similar to the mercenary versus missionary thing. And if I'm going to listen to the podcast anyways, then maybe I actually will come listen to it on your app versus iTunes because I'm going to make $2. And it feels like, you know, I'm winning, even though it's only $2 and it's capped so that I can't abuse the system. Thoughts?

• 1:01:14Speaker 03

  You're gonna, you're gonna abuse the system.

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  I also think, listen, I think podcasting as players is due to the whole ecosystem's broken. I'm sure you can speak to that. So I'm happy about the people taking bets and I respect everything that Spotify is doing and Anchor. I think all these incentive things that are out of the course of normal behavior, like you look at Honey, which has been, you know, I think the most successful or at least largest outcome of something that like incentivized behavior in some way, it was passive, right? Totally passive and you were able to just do it in your normal course and speed. And I think that, you know, if you look at, uh, I think you know the Ramp guys a little bit and like what their last business, Paribus,

• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  did in the savings side was they was like totally passive, email capture, all of that stuff, right? I think when you need to change people's behavior. Behavior to Zach's point and like deport away from an existing aggregator. I just think the incentives of like small microtransactions, you may be able to do it because you have a loyal following presumably that's going to follow you over there. And maybe a handful of people are going to do the friction to go do that. But the TAM that exists of your loyal followers and to get the incremental market share, it just doesn't seem worth it from like a user standpoint. As well as a podcaster standpoint, because inherently you might have your very loyal fans that are going to come with you to this pod.

• 1:02:38Speaker 02

  And maybe you get a whole ecosystem to do that, but then you're constrained to instead of all of Spotify or all of RSS or all of whatever it is. It's some finite number of loyal users. And so I don't know, I like innovation that's happening in this ecosystem because it does suck. But I guess I'm, I would never, I can't imagine, we're not monetizing what we do, but I think it would be really hard to, to get anyone but your most loyal fans to come with you to a new platform.

• 1:03:04Speaker 03

  I mean, you, you actually prefer as a content producer, subscription revenue, right? It's predictable. You can price it higher. I mean, this is why most of the large newspaper publications kind of don't like micro payments for content. Because they think it cannibalizes the subscription revenue because some subset of those micro payments, because they don't add up to the same, the subscription dollar is bigger than the micro payment and consistent. They think they cannibalizes their business, which is why most of them basically refuse to do it, or they only do it in these like really edge case things. So, but I just think it's like, it's not even the, will people do it or not? And I agree with everything Logan said, like, most won't.

• 1:03:48Speaker 03

  The bigger issue is just like, when you give free money to people, they will abuse the system, always. Human beings will abuse the system when you give them easy ways to make money. And by the way, they're not even just going to be like listeners, they're going to be, you know, people in other countries with a lot of time on their hands and low incomes going, wait a minute, like.

• 1:04:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Cell phone phones.

• 1:04:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. User farms, cellphone farms, like bot farms. I mean, you know what they're probably gonna do, man? They're gonna take all of those crypto mining rigs that they can't run anymore in China because they're banned, and they're gonna build the world's best fake podcast audience listening system and get paid all the money back for the hardware they spent. That's the kind of shit people do because they're clever. And like, this is why this whole like, oh, I'm gonna give like, micro payments and little coins to people. It doesn't work because the incentive is really to like, ride the coin up and get out and to abuse the system. If you want people to be aligned from an incentive standpoint, and this is true not just of users, it's also true of like, you know, your employees and your investors,

• 1:04:55Speaker 03

  you give them equity. And equity is the chance that future, we have systems to do this, right? It's called invest in the company and give equity grants. And we've done this for like a hundred years, and it's regulated and we have rules around it to protect people from taking equity in companies that don't actually exist and paying money for it. Like, the whole system actually kind of already exists, and there are problems, but most of those problems are not technology problems. They're like IRS problems and legal problems and like 83B election problems. Like, it's that kind of stuff. And so all of crypto's trying to do is say like, ah, man, this equity stuff is like really annoying because there's a lot of rules. There's a reason there are rules, but there's a lot of rules. So like, instead of doing this equity thing, which has all these rules and regulations, I'm gonna do this coin thing, which has no rules and regulations.

• 1:05:40Speaker 03

  And like, that's how I'm gonna get people the money. And we're just reinventing all the stuff people used to do, and we're gonna get all the same scams, and then we're gonna get all the same rules. You know, there's this window in time where like, it's a pretty good business. I was talking to somebody and they're like, well, the reason I own Bitcoin is because other people are buying it and there's momentum. And I'm kind of like, that's the best reason I've ever heard to own Bitcoin. That is the best reason to own it. It's going up because other people are buying it. And like, yeah, that's true.

• 1:06:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Why don't you own it?

• 1:06:08Speaker 03

  Right now.

• 1:06:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Will you buy some?

• 1:06:11Speaker 03

  Because I'm stupid, man, and I try and think about like, what is the long-term value cash flow of this thing? And I like actually try and reason through it. And what I actually should be is like, yeah, my uncle who barely knows how to use a computer is buying Bitcoin. I should probably buy Bitcoin too. And then when he tells me he sold it, I should probably sell it. Like, that's actually what I should do. And I don't because I can't get it out of my head of like, why do I own this? Why do I own this? Why do I own this? And the same thing is true of gold. Like, I don't own gold because I don't like what, what am I going to do with the gold? Am I going to like stick it in my apartment somewhere and like, show it to my kids? Like, there's no utility. So I don't own either of these things. It doesn't mean I'm right. Although I was, you called me out on Twitter and you were right. Like, I was wrong for a while, and now I look a little bit more right. But to me, it's almost irrelevant. It's almost irrelevant,

• 1:06:55Speaker 03

  which is like, I don't, it's not about the money I'm making or losing. It's a lot more of like, what is going to happen in the future? And like, is my uncle selling his Bitcoin? And did he should he have owned it in the first place? So that's why I don't own it more than, you know, any sort of like

• 1:07:09Anthony Pompliano?

  You should just go, you should, uh, let me give you a Twitter tip, which I've seen a bunch of the Bitcoin critics do lately, is they go and they literally might buy $5 of Bitcoin, $100. I don't know what it is, some small amount, maybe even they buy one Bitcoin. And then every time that somebody like yells at them on Twitter for any opinion that they have, they're like, I own some. And it's the like, uh, like, I'm now in the club. So like, you can't attack me as a critic, because I can be a critic, but I own some.

• 1:07:37Speaker 03

  One of my favorite questions, I don't know if we have time to do it, but one of my favorite questions to ask people is like, when would you, what would get you to change your mind?

• 1:07:46Anthony Pompliano?

  About Bitcoin?

• 1:07:47Speaker 03

  When would you sell? Yeah. Like, when would you sell? What would have to happen for you to sell?

• 1:07:51Speaker 02

  I'll go first while Pomp thinks, if they stop showing it on the ticker screen that I have up here of CNBC, if they take it down, then I'm out, right? Until that point, it's still like in the zeitgeist enough, and it's still being talked about enough, and that it's worth holding whatever the, the 25% I have, then if it, if it goes away from that, I'm out. You know, one of the things that I saw happen recently, which there was an article about, is all the people that own Board Ape Yacht Club have now changed their profile picture. Jimmy Fallon has, Paris Hilton has, you go through all the lists, they've all changed their profile picture. I am out on all the apes. Like, that is such, it's like, shit, this is a falling knife, get out.

• 1:08:31Anthony Pompliano?

  That was always a dumb thing, though. That was always a dumb thing. Why would you change your like, the whole idea of like, these people who are like, oh, I have like, an image, a marketing thing, whatever, and like, we're all gonna change our profile pictures to the same thing. Like, of course, they were at some point, we're gonna go back to wanting to have their unique identity that their whole, like, business was built around, right?

• 1:08:48Speaker 03

  Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. I shouldn't buy a digital picture of a monkey for $100,000? You're sure? What about the future earnings of that digital monkey?

• 1:09:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think, do you think more people, this is a serious question, do you think more people made money on whether CryptoPunks or Bored Apes, or some of the tech stocks from 2020 till today? Like, where do you think people made more money? I don't know. I don't know if we could get the answer.

• 1:09:14Speaker 03

  Probably in the monkeys.

• 1:09:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, but like, it's kinda crazy.

• 1:09:18Speaker 02

  Right. From a literal more people standpoint, like, more people made money in tech stocks, right? Maybe a better return might have been the stupid monkeys, but...

• 1:09:27Speaker 03

  Can I give you my NFT, my NFT case?

• 1:09:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:30Speaker 03

  I just, I don't, do we have, do we have time?

• 1:09:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, go ahead.

• 1:09:32Speaker 03

  All right, all right, cool. Uh, cuz I was talking to somebody in the space of like, what is this NFT thing? And here we are. So I might as well talk about it. Uh, like, why is art valuable? We're gonna start philosophically here for a second. Like, what, what gives art, if we assume, now I'm not talking about the like, you know, I'm NFT as a ticket, or whatever, like, just the, the, the collectible part of this for a second. Why is art valuable? Well, it's kind of valuable for like, two big reasons. This is a bit of a hand-wavy exercise. One is that, like, the person who made it, or the thing it's about, is important.

• 1:10:12Speaker 03

  It's just culturally important. It's kind of like, why is Picasso important? Because Picasso was an important person, right? Like, why are Monet's important? Because like, he was an important person as well. And like, that's what part of it is like, one, this is like, an important thing. Why is the LeBron James sports card worth more than, you know, Derrick Rose? Well, like LeBron's better at basketball, unfortunately. So then the question is like, okay, so it's, it has to be an important thing, an important person. And then two, it has to be scarce, right? There's not a lot of that. And so as a result, I can kind of like, show off of like, I got one of these and you don't, right? And that's why art is valuable, because there's like scarcity to it. And that's why sports cards are valuable, because there's like definitionally scarcity to it, because the license is limited and they can only make so many of the cards.

• 1:10:58Speaker 03

  And like, those two things tend to be true. And then there's a third, which is that they like, trade somewhat infrequently. So they don't have to be never, but like, the more scarce they are, they tend to be more valuable. And then it's like, whoa, this, this art piece, whatever it may be, is like, finally available for sale. It hasn't been available in the past. So the price goes up because it's an auction and it's not really a market, right? It's like, market doesn't actually maximize price. Auction maximizes price, because it's a one-time-only biz. You better get your maximum out there. Whereas the market, you can kind of trade. And that's kind of true of like, most art. And yes, I'm sure there's exceptions. NFTs, like, almost definitionally, have almost none of those things, right? Like, they're not important in culture.

• 1:11:39Speaker 03

  Maybe you could make the argument that like, the bored ape thing has like, slowly crept into the zeitgeist of culture, kind of. I mean, we're talking about it on this podcast. People put like, stupid monkey photos on a bunch. Uh, uh, maybe, maybe, right? Like, that kind of makes sense to me. They're not that rare, because there's like, a lot of people who are doing this. And so it's just like, it doesn't really solve that one. Most NFTs are inherently not rare, right? Like, the friction to create is effectively zero. And then three, they're widely available and traded, right? There, it's like anti-sarcity. That's the whole point of the NFT, is you can like, move it around all the time. So the whole thing makes no sense to me as like holding any long-term value because it

• 1:12:22Speaker 03

  doesn't have any of the properties that typically exist in collectibles in art and I'm not a collectibles person or an art person, but like at least that's kind of the fundamentals of it. And that's why I don't believe in the open seas and whatever as businesses. It's not that I think every NFT is going to go to zero, right? There will be some small, tiny little percentage of the market that exists that does well. And the same way that like, there's a tiny little percentage of artists ever that like hold value, but all of these platforms, open sea, whatever, they all make their money on transaction fees.

• 1:12:58Anthony Pompliano?

  So I, I think that, um, and Logan, I know you got to go here in a second, um, is that's true, the art market too, right? It's like, I agree with you of like, if you think of all the art everywhere in the world that's created, like 99.9% of it, like we've never heard of, we don't care, no, it has no value outside of like what the, you know, material that it's painted on or printed on or whatever.

• 1:13:18Speaker 03

  And so like Do you know the Sotheby's, do you know the Sotheby's market cap?

• 1:13:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, if I had to guess, it's sub a hundred billion, like five billion, 10 billion, 15, I don't know.

• 1:13:28Speaker 03

  Three.

• 1:13:28Speaker 02

  I'm on mute. I guess two, yeah.

• 1:13:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah, small.

• 1:13:32Speaker 03

  So what we're saying is in the most mature market in the world, right? With like super high priced items and Russians buying them and Chinese buying them and Americans buying them, the like real world open sea, which is basically Sotheby's.

• 1:13:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Real world open sea.

• 1:13:46Speaker 03

  Giant vig, by the way, I think like a Sotheby's vig on this stuff is like 10 to 20%. It's a big number, $3 billion market cap.

• 1:13:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Crazy.

• 1:13:55Speaker 03

  All right. Doesn't that scare you?

• 1:13:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Listen, I, uh, I wish everyone the best. We'll see how this all plays out.

• 1:14:01Speaker 02

  Happy for, thanks for having us on.

• 1:14:03Anthony Pompliano?

  The last thing I want to leave you guys both with is, uh, if you had to pick one thing that you believe that you're like, all right, for sure, other people definitely disagree when it comes to Bitcoin, crypto, et cetera, positive or negative, what's the one thing that you guys feel pretty strongly about that you think other people are, uh, either missing or, or don't, uh, don't pay attention to?

• 1:14:24Anthony Pompliano?

  I have officially stumped the cartoon avatars.

• 1:14:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I don't know where like your listener group. I mean, I think almost all the coins are going to zero. I don't know if people are going to agree with that, but I think there might be, I don't know, one, two, three, four that can exist and persist in some way, shape or form. And, uh, and everything else is going to zero. I think there's 280 that are currently traded on FTX. And so I guess, uh, you know, whatever 98%.

• 1:14:52Anthony Pompliano?

  20,000 total, 20,000 total.

• 1:14:55Speaker 02

  I, I think those are all zeros. So get out now would be my advice, but I, I don't know if that's controversial. Probably is.

• 1:15:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, very controversial. Yes. Uh, Zach, what about you?

• 1:15:06Speaker 03

  That's what I was gonna say. It's all going like, most of the stuff goes to zero. I mean, I, I, I think,

• 1:15:13Speaker 03

  I think what happens is the returns. I don't know if this is like controversial, but I think the returns in these next wave of funds are going to get destroyed. I think like the jig is up on like, so you know, most of the return, you remember you were talking about like all these like funds that did exceptionally well. I think a lot of that was just like flipping the tokens, not the equity value, because the only big equity value companies that exist right now are like FTX, which you never raised money for. And then Coinbase, which has been around for a very long, you know, it's like not a lot of like big equity values that aren't just like paper equity values. I think once that like little coin scam gets, uh, looked at and people aren't allowed to like flip the coin to, to retail really quickly, the equity returns are going to get crushed. And I think the funds will get crushed. Then the LPs will be like, eh, this is not for me.

• 1:15:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that's fair. Where can we send people to listen to cartoon avatars?

• 1:15:59Speaker 02

  Wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:16:02Speaker 03

  We actually pay you.

• 1:16:04Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, all right, all right.

• 1:16:08Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys, listen, I appreciate you guys coming on. This was a lot of fun. Uh, thank you. And we'll definitely do it again in the future.

• 1:16:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. Thanks for having us on. See you guys.

• 1:16:15Speaker 03

  See you, man.

• 1:16:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Later. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you guys enjoyed this one. Make sure you subscribed 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.