#1025 Keith Rabois On The Critical Thinking Crises That’s Underway

Keith Rabois is a General Partner at Founders Fund, A member of the "Paypal Mafia" and has helped build and invest in multiple billion dollar companies. This audio podcast was pulled from my live event with Keith Rabois at Showfields in Miami, Florida. In this conversation, we talk about the frameworks around critical thinking, including how it's done, changing your mind on closely held beliefs, and the downsides to having so much conviction. We also discuss the macro economy and other current events such as Covid, gun control, Bitcoin and geopolitics. To see the full video interview of my chat with Keith, go to my Anthony Pompliano YouTube Channel. ======================== BCB Group is the leading payment services partner for the digital assets industry. BCB Group provides payment services in 30+ currencies, FX, cryptocurrency liquidity, digital asset custody and BLINC, which is BCB’s free, instant settlements network for the BCB client ecosystem. Find out more by visiting bcbgroup.com/pomp ======================= Brave Wallet is the first secure crypto wallet built natively in a web3 crypto browser. No extension required. Store, manage, and grow your portfolio, get NFT & multi-chain support, and more. Download the Brave privacy browser at brave.com/Pomp, and click the wallet icon to get started. =======================

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. Keith Raboy is a general partner at Founders Fund. He previously had a number of investments in companies that went on to become multi-billion dollar Goliaths of industry, and he served in executive roles at PayPal, LinkedIn, Slide, and Square. In this conversation, Keith and I talk about critical thinking, how to do it, what's the actual process, when you should change your mind, and what exactly is the downside to having so much conviction and being optimistic. Keith and I also talk about a number of different current events, from gun

• 0:44Anthony Pompliano?

  control, to geopolitics, to Bitcoin, and the current market downturn. I really enjoyed this conversation with Keith, and I hope that you guys enjoy it as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I quickly want to talk about our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by FTX US. FTX.us is the safe, regulated way to buy and sell Bitcoin and other digital assets. You can trade crypto with up to 85% lower fees than top competitors. There are no fixed minimum fees, no ACH transaction fees, and no withdrawal fees either. FTX.us is also the only leading exchange that supports both Ethereum and Solana NFTs. Download the FTX app today and use referral code POMP

• 1:24Anthony Pompliano?

  to earn these free crypto on every trade over $10. The more you trade, the more you earn. Go download the FTX app today and use referral code POMP. Today's episode is brought to you by Brave. Brave Wallet is the first secure crypto wallet built natively in a Web3 crypto browser. What's Web3? Web3 is freedom from big tech and Wall Street. More control and better privacy. But there's a weak point in Web3, your crypto wallet. Most wallets are browser extensions, a Web2 technology. That means the same old risks, app spoofing, phishing scams, and theft. Brave Wallet is different. Brave Wallet is the first secure wallet built natively in a Web3 crypto browser. No extension required. With Brave Wallet, you can buy, store, send, and swap assets, manage NFTs, even connect

• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Other wallets and DApps, all from the security of the best privacy browser on the market. Whether you're new to crypto or a seasoned pro, it's time to ditch those risky extensions. It's time to switch to Brave Wallet. Download Brave at brave.com/pomp and click the Wallet icon to get started. Again, go download Brave at brave.com/pomp and click the Wallet icon to get started. This episode is brought to you by BCB Group. With a dedicated focus on institutional payment services, BCB Group provides business banking, cryptocurrency and foreign exchange market liquidity for many of the world's largest crypto-engaged financial institutions. BCB business accounts allow businesses to load fiat currency and cryptocurrencies for payments, operations and trading purposes.

• 2:51Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:22Speaker 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.

• 3:45Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, what is your resting heart rate?

• 3:49Speaker 02

  It's 46 today, which is lame.

• 3:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 3:51Speaker 02

  Should be 44.

• 3:54Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a great place to understand, Keith Roy. Why is health, diet, berries, all this? Like, why do you spend so much time on it? And what has changed over the years around your health or diet in your life?

• 4:10Speaker 02

  So it's a function, I mean, truthfully, it's a function of vanity, life extension, and performance, and they're all related. Like, you can't disav- disavow these. Some things are around, like, how do you live longer, like, have more lifespan, so to speak, when you can be active. The disadvantage of getting old is you start thinking that way. Second thing is definitely aesthetics, like vanity, like anybody else, I just, like, I'm conscious about it. And the third is pure athletic, athletic performance and competing with people and competing for various things. So, for example, resting heart rate, mostly around life extension. Two-minute recovery is definitely around life extension. You know, other things are designed for other purposes. Barry's just happens to be the most efficient way to do it. Like, so, I'm generally pretty busy. In one hour, I can do everything I

• 4:55Speaker 02

  need for all three goals, and it's the only time, probably during the day, that I put my phone away, which is a pretty big accomplishment. Maybe date night. I'm usually pretty good at putting, uh, we do two day nights a week, I'm usually pretty good at putting my phone away.

• 5:08Anthony Pompliano?

  So, are you optimizing for longevity, or you're optimizing for all three of them?

• 5:12Speaker 02

  Pretty much all three. Like, for example, if you were optimizing only for lifespan, you'd probably never drink alcohol. You can debate this, whether you should have, like, a glass of red wine once in a while. But, like, I actually do drink alcohol, so obviously I'm not totally optimizing that way. But, like, generally speaking, optimizing for the middle of, how do I live longest, be as high performance as possible, like, mentally. So I optimize my sleep. We were talking about Mateo just briefly. But, like, I've been optimizing my sleep for, like, 30 years. Like, literally, eight hours' sleep, basically, every day. And then reverse engineer everything around that. So, it's a combination.

• 5:47Anthony Pompliano?

  So, we're gonna talk about a bunch of topics that, uh, some of them are very down the fairway, some of them, well, people will be scratching their heads, being like, what are these guys talking about? But, part of why I want to start off talking about fitness is, there's a mental clarity that comes with being fit, with eating healthy, etc. Is there anything that you do specifically for the mental clarity, or the ability to think better, make better decisions?

• 6:07Speaker 02

  Well, sleep is definitely the number-one variable. If you're gonna change anything in your life, if you change your sleep, you're both gonna live longer, most likely. But you will definitely think smarter, act smarter, have a better personality. I used to remember, as an executive at Square, I'd present, you know, I'd actually run the board meetings at Square, and I had this board member, some of you will know, Mary Meeker was on my board, and she would observe after a couple of years that she could tell how much sleep I had the night before a board meeting. Because my vocabulary would suddenly shift, and I would use, like, less elegant words. And usually before a board meeting, my adrenaline would be running, so my sleep was mediocre. But the fact that she could notice this, and I actually knew the sleep differences and she was picking up on it,

• 6:48Speaker 02

  it was just evidence of how you act differently when you haven't had a perfect night's sleep. Obviously, there's great studies done by the Stanford basketball team about free throw shooting and three-point shooting that really make it clear that elite-trained athletes, the Stanford basketball team historically, have been pretty good. So if you can add 10 percentage points to free throw percentage by sleeping an extra hour, that's amazing. You could train for the rest of your life and not add 10 percentage points to your free throw percentage or similar comparable percentages to threes. So that was very eye-opening, but I was already pretty dedicated to sleep.

• 7:20Anthony Pompliano?

  So when we think about how to think, before we actually talk about specific topics, you're trained as a lawyer. I think you practiced for like maybe three days?

• 7:28Speaker 02

  No, I was dumb enough to practice for three and a half years. My friend Peter Thiel practiced for three months and four days, and he still introduces me as this is my greatest character flaw. He'll be like, "Keith's obviously incompetent because it took him three years to figure out what I figured out in three months."

• 7:46Speaker 02

  True story. Actually, he's done this several times.

• 7:47Anthony Pompliano?

  I have no doubt that's a true story. What did the legal training, though, from a how-to-think standpoint, what do you attribute that you took away from it?

• 7:56Speaker 02

  Well, there's a way of thinking that you learned as a lawyer, and some of it's very valuable across all disciplines, some of it's very narrow. The part that you do develop a hierarchy of thoughts and an organized mind. One of the ways you can tell is if you ever date somebody who goes to law school, you will see his or her mind change before you. Everybody who dates somebody through law school notices the change in how their significant other starts to think. So that's really useful. You do learn a little bit too much of what they call issue spotting. So when you get graded in law school, the primary driver of your law school exam grade is how many of the potential issues can you identify? Things that could go wrong, and then can you resolve them? Meaning, discuss how they would most likely be resolved by a court of law.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  The problem with this, so it's a very good general exercise of avoiding risks in life, but it leads to a little bit of overthinking because everywhere you go, everything you see, all you do is see is... Problems, it's like problems to the left, problems to the right, it's like that selling joker still left, you know. So you start thinking like everything that can go wrong, which really doesn't help you, certainly not as an entrepreneur or investor. Like when people pitch me with a new investment idea, it's obvious what can go wrong. The hard part is what can go right. But so that part doesn't translate as well. And then the part that also translates relatively well is, you know, I've been involved in a lot of financial services, heavily regulated areas with IP issues or like healthcare with lots of legal issues.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  And being trained as a lawyer allows you to navigate stuff for yourself rather than outsourcing it to some black box. And so I like things that have perceived legal and regulatory risk because I don't outsource the diligence to other people.

• 9:31Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you think about that pathway to becoming an investor or an entrepreneur, are there certain operational roles or certain investment styles that lend itself? If you have been trained as a lawyer, you're more likely to be better at operations or marketing or a venture investor or hedge fund investor. Like, how do you think about the overlap coming into investing in business?

• 9:51Speaker 02

  A global statement is I always believe that you should invest in things that you have an asymmetric advantage in. So the earlier in your life you figure out what your asymmetry is, the easier it is to, you know, sort of magnify that, amplify, double down on it. So if you're a lawyer, per my point, I love things with legal risk. Like maybe the most obvious example of this is when YouTube first started. Yeah, I knew the founders from PayPal, we'd worked together on PayPal. And I met them at a barbecue, or I met one of the three, ran into one of the three at a barbecue. And I asked them just casually like, hey, what are you up to? Just like you would do, like sort of introduce yourself to any friend at a barbecue. And he said, oh, I just launched this new company. And it's like, well, what's it called? And it's called youtube.com. And I said, okay, what does it do? And he basically is like sharing videos, blah, blah.

• 10:32Speaker 02

  I asked him three questions, literally as we're in line to get a drink, like literally like in line to get a drink at my friend's place. And at the end of those three questions, I was like, I need to invest. Can I invest? And he's like, don't you want to see the website? And at the time, this is like 2005 or 2006 or something, we didn't have like, you know, basically computers in our pockets. And so he goes to the host, this guy named Mike, and says, hey, can we borrow your computer? And so we go off into Mike's bedroom and for the next hour, he shows me every single video on YouTube, which was very painful, but he did allow me to invest. Now, the point of the story though is When people, when I started telling other people about the potential opportunity to invest with me, because back then I couldn't write a big enough check myself, so I needed other

• 11:14Speaker 02

  people, every single person talked to their lawyer friends, and every single fund was terrified of the legal risk. And so I just walked through my favorite funds at the time, the legal diligence myself. I just said, here's what people are going to tell you, and here's the right answer, and blah, blah, blah. And, you know, not surprisingly, we were able to convince a very good fund to go invest. But like, if I didn't understand IP law, so I happen to have been partially an IP litigator, there's no way that I would have been able to do that, A, with confidence, and you know, enough credibility to convince a very large VC fund, but B, would I have known the right answer myself? Almost surely not. Kind of funny anecdote to this is there was one part of the law that I'd forgot. So,

• 11:55Speaker 02

  I graduated law school a long, long time ago, and I quit a few years before this. There's a slight part of law around music licensing that's, that works very differently than standard law and certainly IP law, because Congress passed a statute in like 1914 or 1910 or something, where every time music plays in the background, there's a statutory fee. So it's one of the few things that doesn't, doesn't have a market price. And I sort of forgot this part, because it doesn't generally conform to normal principles of law. So when YouTube did eventually have some legal risk, it was only because of the background in music being played in the background of the videos that caused the problem. They never had IP risk around the actual videos, which is what everybody was paying attention to, but I sort of forgot that. Now, we passed the statute of limitations, so I can tell the story.

• 12:39Anthony Pompliano?

  What were the three questions that you asked?

• 12:42Speaker 02

  Is it coded in Flash? Was the number one one. There's a reason for that. I'd been waiting for three years to find a company founded on Flash. So my friend Max Lev-

• 12:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 12:52Speaker 02

  Well, so, after we left PayPal, I went to work sort of part-time with my friend Peter Thiel. And Peter said, go down to Mountain View and figure out the future. And what he meant is go talk to Max, Max Levchin. And so it's like, okay. So I call back, so I'm like, Peter's dispatched me down to Mountain View to meet with you to figure out the future of technology. And Max is like, okay, whatever. So we sit down, and he's- Starts, you know, he's like, I can't really predict the future, but blah, blah, blah. He's like, one thing that is kind of cool is this thing called Flash. And I had no idea, I'd heard of it, but no idea why. So he explained to me all the magical properties in 2003 that Flash had and that someone would take advantage of it, particularly around commerce, but like, here's what it could do that other people weren't realizing.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  So I'd been looking around, scouring the universe to find some way to invest in Flash. And then I realized he's talking about videos, that Flash was actually a pretty good application to that. Second question was around whether it was long tail videos or he was targeting like professional videos. And he said, long tail videos, which led to some of the legal analysis, but made me more interested. I always am interested in long tail stuff. Still am interested in long tail stuff, is the guy from Open Store here. No. And then third, the question was, we had a, well, we had a PayPal product that internally we called X-click for the web. What that really was, was an HTML button you can embed in your eBay listing. And that's what led to the viral adoption of PayPal back in the day.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  And so I said, are you going to be able to do something like X-click for the web? And he's like, yeah, that's the whole plan. So fully embedded Flash video that could be embedded anywhere and it would lead to ideally the same adoption as PayPal. And it actually turned out to be the case.

• 14:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Pull it back to the website. You mentioned PayPal. How much of it is like nurture versus nature? Do you got the right people into that business versus you guys had some magic potion and got everyone to be really smart and go on to be super successful afterwards?

• 14:44Speaker 02

  I think it was mostly that Peter and Max deserve a lot of credit for hiring people. So Peter hired most of the non-technical people, Max basically hired all the technical people. And they assembled a critical density of talent and then that became self-fulfilling, meaning the derivative people that were hired were probably comparable. And, you know, you get a critical density of talent, all of a sudden things that are unsolvable become solvable. I don't think, I mean, there was definitely lessons I learned that I specifically abstracted from those days and those people, but fundamentally it came down to their hiring skills.

• 15:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Last question I have about kind of history. PayPal obviously is now not only very well-known that story, but everyone went on to do such great things that I think a lot of-

• 15:24Speaker 02

  Well, not everyone. There's 254 people there, you know probably about 20 names.

• 15:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Twenty people went on to do great things. But I think a lot of young founders look at that and they're like, wow, that was just like amazing business. On a scale of like, you guys had your shit together to it was a complete shit show internally, where were you on that scale?

• 15:42Speaker 02

  It was a complete shit show internally. Like, well, one easy example of that is we had three CEOs in four months. So, usually you don't have three CEOs in four months unless things are going pretty catastrophically wrong. You know, the other empirical data point is in August 2000, we had a burn rate of $10 million a month and $30 million in the bank in the middle of the complete internet bubble collapse. That's a real problem. But it was always kind of a mess. It was a kind of a fun chaotic mess. It was intentionally chaotic, though. Once things started working, Peter came back as interim CEO after we fired Elon Musk, September 25th, 2000.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  And within a couple of months, it was clear that the, you know, first derivative and second derivative were good or better. And then, you know, things did work, but it was always a mess. There'd be like, all these random things that you thought everything was okay, and then boom, you know, get slapped in the face with some very pleasant surprise.

• 16:41Anthony Pompliano?

  So in November, I was mindlessly scrolling on Twitter and I saw somebody chirp at you and say, "Are you calling the top?" And you responded with-

• 16:50Speaker 02

  It was October 18th, by the way.

• 16:51Anthony Pompliano?

  And you said, "Yes." And I said to myself, "They better hope to God he's wrong, because he'll never let them forget."

• 16:58Speaker 02

  So, by the way, it wasn't a random person. This is, it was Ari Levy of CNBC. So he was a pretty well-known journalist.

• 17:04Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think it was the day of the top?

• 17:06Speaker 02

  It was exactly the day. It was off by a couple of hours.

• 17:11Anthony Pompliano?

  So, they have not forgotten because they keep bringing it up. Describe why you thought it was that. And a lot of it, I think, came from the 2000 kind of bubble bursting and kind of what the historical overlay was.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  So yeah, I mean, in 2000, a lot of people had this view, including a lot of my colleagues at Founders Fund that I've been, let's say, cracking a whip on recently, that things just go up and to the right. And it's only a question of time. Like, every company will be worth more money or more value over time, whether it takes one year, two years, three years, or five years, so that you could pay any price for an investment, let's say, because eventually you'll grow into that. And that's logic. Over the last 18 months, Peter and I particularly internally were like, this market is going to collapse. Here's why, blah, blah, blah. So internally, we'd been debating this pretty consistently with incredible clarity. Both Peter and I argued this at an offsite last summer, and then strongly argued it,

• 18:06Speaker 02

  like, about a week before. So one of the reasons why when Ari asked, we had done, we had conducted an offsite in San Francisco about a week or two before, and I'd made the strong case internally that we should stop investing, period. Like, there is nothing that's priced appropriately. So my brain had been chewing on this. It wasn't kind of a random response. That said, the lesson of 2000 was, you know, things that go this way also go this way. And the specific reason things collapsed in 2000 was, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates six times from mid-1999 to early 2000. And what that did was, it caused technology stocks to collapse, collapsed by 90%. So it's like, well, guess what? If the Fed raises interest rates six times, technology stocks are going to collapse

• 18:48Speaker 02

  by 90%. This is like a law of physics. We had actually used this slide, a version of this slide, which I've actually tweeted recently, in our LP presentation at Founders Fund the last two years. So we'd been internally talking to our LPs, saying, eventually, interest rates have to go up. When interest rates go up, technology stocks will go down. We can talk about why that is, but it is actually inevitable. And so, when the, the reason why that specific timing came to be is, for a long time, many people, myself included, had been talking about publicly, Jack Dorsey, et cetera, that we'd been going through inflation in the United States. I started tweeting about inflation in January 2022.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  And, oh, sorry, maybe actually 21. But, yeah, 21, sorry, getting the years confused. But everybody was, the government, the current administration and their sort of supporters were in denial about that we're inflation and that we're suffering inflation. And there's all these excuses. It's like transitory, blah, blah, blah. You should see the reaction to my tweet about we're in real inflation. And everybody's like, it's transitory. I'm like, no, it's not transitory. That's the stupidest thing ever. But basically, all the excuses were starting to decay over the last year. And by October, even the transitory people like ran out of logic to argue that it was transitory. So I was like, basically, what's going to happen is eventually, when the excuses go away, the Fed and everybody else is going to realize we have actual inflation.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  When they have actual inflation, the technology stocks will start going down. And so that's basically what happened. So when, there was one press conference, I think the White House Press Secretary, basically gave up on the transitory line. I was like, okay, all hell's going to break loose. And that was right around then. And that's why I was like, okay, well, you don't have to discount the probability that people figure this out anymore.

• 20:31Anthony Pompliano?

  So I don't want to spend too much time on macro, but they say inflation's 8.6% now. The Fed, when it was 7% back in December, was still conducting quantitative easing. They hadn't raised interest rates. Just what's your general take in terms of maybe incompetence, ignorance? How do we get here? And then how much confidence do you put in their ability to navigate a, I think they call it a soft landing now?

• 20:55Speaker 02

  Soft landing, euphemistic for recession, like moderate recession, moderate unemployment, moderate recession. No, there's an old paper from Milton Friedman in 1972 that you all should read. Basically, Milton Friedman argued, among many things, but this probably is number one Nobel Prize winning contribution, is that a federal central decision maker, whether the Federal Reserve or some other institution, will always get this wrong. They will always raise rates when they should be lowering them and lower rates when they should be raising them. Basically, the lag is too great, so that leads to consistent oversteering, because you're basically amplifying the problem by the time you act, but then it makes the problem worse. So the best thing to do is to do nothing, in his view, and it's a very well argued paper. So this is a classic illustration of that. But right now...

• 21:42Speaker 02

  I don't know. All I can do is go shopping. So this is what I've told several, several people here before. Just go to the grocery store and if the price of your groceries is going up every week, we have inflation. If they start settling and being stable, then you know, we're fine. And then when they start going down again, we'll have deflation, which is not necessarily a good thing. But in any event, groceries are still going up as far as I can tell.

• 22:02Anthony Pompliano?

  The craziest thing to me is, uh, I don't know why I did this, but one day I went deep down the rabbit hole of how they calculate inflation.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, that's absurd.

• 22:10Anthony Pompliano?

  There's 466 people who are employed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and they go into the grocery store and they're giving a printout and they make sure they find the exact Campbell soup, tomato with no salt. And it's like an 11-page document to make sure they have the right one. And then they punch it into a, uh, a device.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  So yeah, so when we, when we were starting Square before we launched, we wanted to build a true inflation tracker. So because we had all these goods and services, obviously, you have sales in real time, price adjustments basically in real time. And so when Jack started tweeting about inflation, hyperinflation, I was like, he's looking at real data. He's not making this stuff up. He's not a macro, he's not being a macro thinker. He's actually seeing the data. And so it's so obvious from the Square data that we had real inflation in early 2021.

• 22:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, it's not just the price and point of sale stuff. There's also payroll data. Like, like he kind of has a full 360 view of the economy to some degree. And I think that it does beg the question. So we have, I don't know, we can call it like an analog version of price, uh, um, collection versus even if you look at apartment.com or Zillow, open door, like all of these real-time data points and sometimes 100 million data.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  Well, they don't use real-time data. So here's the funny, there's just a Twitter thread about this this morning. So you talk about leasing, um, the methodology really matters. So if you say, what is the rate of inflation on rental prices? You can calculate it two different ways and you can, you'll immediately see the difference. One is across all leases in the United States. The other is leases signed in the last three months. Guess what? One is up like 41% and one is up 6%. Guess which one actually tells you where you are?

• 23:44Anthony Pompliano?

  I can only imagine. When you start to think of the geopolitical landscape, there's a lot of blaming of inflation on the Putin price hike and other excuses that have been invented recently.

• 23:59Anthony Pompliano?

  But I don't know if you saw, I think Putin yesterday or today gave a speech and in it, he basically said, hey, this is exactly what's happening. He talked about the monetary expansion. He talked about the US's sanctions and how that drastically reduces people's trust in keeping their foreign currencies and reserves with the US system. How much do you think about things outside of the tech industry or the business industry when it comes to geopolitics, inflation, or other things that could be like macro or external shocks to the system?

• 24:29Speaker 02

  Well, I don't think this is a macro shock. This is pretty simple. There's a, let's see, there's two, only two variables that lead to inflation. You have a fairly finite amount of goods produced and over time, it's not finite, but at one point in time, a fixed point in time today, this week, maybe next month, there's only a certain amount of variance in how many goods there are. That's all the goods that can be bought by everybody in the world or everybody in the country. And when the government prints more money, there's only one thing that can happen. There's more money chasing the same number of goods. Guess what? The price has to go up. Like this is so basic. It's like, basically, so where you're going with this, by the way, I actually think all life kind of works this way, that there's a couple of fundamental principles and once you understand them, the world just makes common sense.

• 25:12Speaker 02

  It's like, you know, Newtonian physics and stuff like that.

• 25:15Anthony Pompliano?

  What's another example? Like another example of how this applies to rest of life?

• 25:19Speaker 02

  Well, I, let's see, this was another one, a good one.

• 25:22Anthony Pompliano?

  I stumped Keith Urban, boy, everyone.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  No, it's just like, I have so many of these. Like, it's like simple, it's basic, simple rules. Like, I did tweet once, it was actually pretty popular, surprisingly popular tweet, that like, the easiest way to be successful is just forget all this stupid stuff in the world. If you didn't know anything, you'd probably be more successful.

• 25:37Anthony Pompliano?

  I was gonna ask you at the end, but I'll ask you now. Are you gonna put your kids through traditional school? Or how do you think about educating them so that they don't have to unlearn things later?

• 25:46Speaker 02

  Good question. They're 11 months old, so starting to think about it. They're not ready for homeschooling yet, although we are interviewing educators to start like indoctrinating them. I've taught, I've actually taught the little baby boy, like my favorite expression, which is no, no, no.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  But really good at it.

• 26:01Anthony Pompliano?

  I guess, how do you think about the legacy education system? And is it net positive, net negative? Like, do you see specific things that should be changed or fixed there that would have a drastic impact?

• 26:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, homeschooling has been the greatest success of policy in the last 40 years anywhere on the planet. So 40 years ago, there's about 78,000, I think, kids that went, that were homeschooled. Last year, there was 5 million. That's where the world's going. And the reason why is, some of it's ideological, like, people that are opposed, parents are opposed to what they're being, their kids are being taught. Zoom sort of unlocked a lot of that exposure because suddenly you could, like, watch what your kids are being taught. A lot of parents are, like, barfing, like, "Oh, my God, I didn't realize they were doing that all day." Second, though, is one-size-fits-all education makes no sense. If you want your kids to be successful, you need to allow them to grow at their own pace and challenge them to grow at faster and faster paces. And, you know, a school, a traditional schoolroom just is not organized that way.

• 26:56Anthony Pompliano?

  So Keith has no clue that I'm gonna ask him this. I want to do an example of how you critically think about topics. And I figured I'd find something that was complex enough, but also not leave you completely out to dry.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  Just like live magic tricks?

• 27:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Basically. Gun control has...

• 27:15Speaker 02

  Start with the easy stuff and then build from there. Cool.

• 27:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, the reason why I think it's an interesting one to kind of talk through is there's an emotional element to it, right? There's obviously people who get hurt, die, and that emotional component can make people mad, can make people sad, all this stuff. There's also kind of a constitutional element to it and people's rights. Then there's also a federal level, a state level. There's like this individual responsibility versus dependence on the government. You know, pretty simple problem here. So how do you think through, not necessarily what is the answer, but like, how do you think through coming to a conclusion as to where you would stand on an issue like that?

• 27:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's a good example. So, one thing I would do is I tend to like to contrast things either before or after, or in multi-states. Like, so, like to take data from point A and compare it to point B, and you kind of, this did this with COVID, which is a popular thing to do. The reason, one of the reasons why we moved to Miami was all the policies of San Francisco made no sense to us. Like, everything San Francisco and to some extent California was doing were completely irrational. We're just like, we just woke up and said, "We're not wasting our lives this way, and we're moving," you know, etc. So, the good news was Miami and Florida were an open laboratory where you could compare different policies around masks and vaccination and indoor/outdoor weather, all this stuff. And so, basically, just take that experiment, there's, you know, the framers of the Constitution, sort of

• 28:37Speaker 02

  framers of the country, basically had this clever phrase, turn of phrase, called laboratories of democracy, and that the whole point of having 50 states was that you could have 50 different policies and see what worked and what didn't work. And without that, actually, you have one unified policy that you're running one experiment at a time, which isn't a great way to learn. So, I always start that way. And there's great places, good books to read. Like, I also like books. I have a, I actually built maybe the first library in Miami, custom-built library. I was like, "None of the homes here seem to have built-in libraries. I need a built-in library." So, it took me six months, but I have one. But, so, I go back to, like, books, interesting books.

• 29:12Anthony Pompliano?

  What's one that you suggest?

• 29:14Speaker 02

  So, John Lott, on gun control, John Lott, who's a, I think still a professor at University of Chicago, wrote a series of books about gun control. You know, there's critics and debate, debates about the quality, you know, the research, but it's a pretty good start. And then you can read all the critics of different studies and different chapters if you want to, but it'll give you a good introduction. And then, the other thing to do is actually, there's a lot of data that, you know, sometimes, the world is getting a lot better than people realize. There's a couple, there's two really good books about this, about how the world's better than people realize. And one thing about gun violence particularly is when I was growing up, the gun violence was, like, probably an order magnitude worse than it is today in the United States. Like, your chance of being murdered with a gun was, like, about 10x. Depends where you live in the, but like, New York City, for example, where

• 29:57Speaker 02

  I was growing up, it was at least, like, basically 10x more likely that you'd be murdered with a gun than to So to some extent, you also have this like comparison set of like what problems are you trying to solve? What risks are real? What risks are very real? We had this a little bit with COVID too. Like if you really cared about the risks of COVID, are you changing everything else in your life? Like your chance at certain ages of dying by drowning was significantly greater than your chance of dying by COVID. Your chance of dying in an auto accident at certain ages was significantly greater than the chance of dying by COVID. But people didn't stop driving.

• 30:28Anthony Pompliano?

  The joke, I think, is always there are states that want to leave the United States. Or if you go to those states, they may talk about it. California, at one point, somebody proposed to break it up. Texas, I saw an article recently that there's people who are always talking about it. Florida, it just happens to be kind of, you know, on the edge and people think it could go underwater or float away. How do you think about the state experiment today? Is that what we need to put more emphasis on? Or do you think that there's actually a healthy balance between kind of federal government and state experiment?

• 30:58Speaker 02

  I think the experimentation at state level is great. In education, you're also seeing that where there's some ideas here that are going to become popular. There's you're seeing starting seeing competition now around policy, like city, city by city policy. Like, why are we all moving to Miami? Because the city here has different policies than other places. And, you know, I saw a lot of people tweeting, you know, after the news this morning that Citadel is moving here. A lot of people were tweeting like, oh, well, all these cities are going to have to really start competing. I mean, the framework around city competition is we're now all, you know, customers. And cities have to compete for our business, states have to compete for our business. We're not, you know, basically locked down into some monopolistic, you know, tyranny. And so that's going to change everything.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  Now, at the city level, where everybody tries to attract business, attract entrepreneurs, attract high performing people in different industries.

• 31:49Anthony Pompliano?

  When's the last time you changed your mind?

• 31:50Speaker 02

  Oh, all the time. This is underrated. I mean, I used to be a Silicon Valley elitist. I was like the worst offender ever, like up until like two ish years ago, maybe three. I remember internally even, Peter would want to move Founders Fund outside the Bay Area. And he moved outside the Bay Area, 2015, I think. And he was always on this crusade that we needed to get Founders Fund outside the Bay Area. And I used to think he was like crazy. I'd be like, you know, like this thinking, he's making these arguments.

• 32:18Anthony Pompliano?

  That's what made you think he was crazy? That's what made you think he was crazy?

• 32:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I agreed with most of the other stuff.

• 32:26Speaker 02

  But like

• 32:27Anthony Pompliano?

  That's what we call a softball.

• 32:28Speaker 02

  I would only invest in like companies in Silicon Valley. You know, I had maybe left sub 10% of my portfolio of investments was outside Silicon Valley until 2019. But then obviously I changed pretty radically. And the epiphany, COVID obviously magnified the epiphany, but the epiphany was not from COVID. It was in February 2020. I met this founder from Germany, from Berlin. Um, showed up in my office and I didn't even want to take the meeting. Honestly, like, uh, my colleague Matthias, who you know, was constantly trying to force me to take this damn meeting. I kept trying to cancel it and he's like, no, you gotta take the meeting, you gotta take the meeting. I'm like, cancel. And he's like, take the meeting too. Anyway, I show up finally, I sit down, three minutes into the presentation. I was like, oh my God, we need to invest.

• 33:11Speaker 02

  And so I was just like, try to, well, hold on, I'll come down. So I was just like, oh my God, oh my God, need to invest. And so I was basically selling the founder on like working with us the whole time. So I walk out of the meeting and Matthias like taps me on the shoulder. At the time we had, we'd only worked together for like about a year. We didn't know each other as well. Uh, so he taps me on the shoulder and he's like, what happened to you? It's like, what happened? Like, you know, like you barely wanted to take the meeting. And I was like, you just found the greatest founder in the history of Europe. And like, we're investing. Um, and so, but that epiphany of like the single, I, I sometimes call him the Michael Jordan, but this, if, if Michael Jordan is sitting in Berlin, then the epiphany was the, why the hell do I need to be just sitting in Silicon Valley? And why are all the entrepreneurs sitting in Silicon Valley?

• 33:54Speaker 02

  Because this guy had never been to Silicon Valley before this fundraising trip. He had no connection to Silicon Valley. There was no side channel of information. The new bank example is a little different because they went to Stanford Business School, one worked at Sequoia. So yes, they build a great and very impressive company in Brazil, but they had a lot of infusion of Silicon Valley thinking and people and networks. Uh, Christian at Trade Republic had zero. He'd learned it all sort of online and through osmosis. And I was like, great, well, Michael Jordan's sitting in Berlin, then the days of Silicon Valley are over.

• 34:25Anthony Pompliano?

  I asked for questions online. Now I'm taking one of them because it was so good. When's the last time you were wrong?

• 34:31Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, I saw that one. But, well, I'm wrong. I mean, the funny thing about being a VC is you're wrong all the time. I'm, you know, like, for example, if I do my job really well, I'll probably write forty percent of the time. That means sixty percent of the time I'm wrong.

• 34:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes, but you have told me, uh, what is the percentage of founders that you've met? Just tell, you just tell the, I don't want to ruin it.

• 34:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this is mostly true. It's mostly true because every day, like, is an experiment, you could screw it up. But, uh, I've basically maybe met one founder in person that I should have invested in that I didn't in like twenty years. Now that said, I've turned down a significant number of meetings.

• 35:22Anthony Pompliano?

  But out of the ones that you met in person.

• 35:23Speaker 02

  That turned into good companies.

• 35:24Anthony Pompliano?

  So Keith basically says to me one time, he said, uh, out of all of the times that I've met a founder in person, I basically have never missed. And then, actually, I'm surprised that now maybe there's one.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  Well, there's one, the one's a complicated story. I actually wound up becoming an investor later, but I missed on the seed, so it cost me a hundred X.

• 35:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Small thing.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  But I fixed it. I realized I made a mistake.

• 35:45Anthony Pompliano?

  That's fair.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  This is, we need to fix this.

• 35:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Actually, that's interesting. So what made you fix it? And why were you not emotionally tied to like, I missed it, I'll just go find the next early-stage company?

• 35:56Speaker 02

  Well, without giving away the company, but maybe it's fine to give away the company. My mom actually convinced me I was wrong. True story. This is very true. She's like, why'd you pass on the company X? And I'm like, blah, blah, blah. And she's like, no, it's amazing. And I'm like, so yeah, like, that's actually the story I tell publicly, like, when we announced the financing, because some people knew I had passed earlier.

• 36:18Anthony Pompliano?

  That's true.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  It's true. Totally true. Unfortunately, she's coming to visit this weekend. I'm sure she's gonna remind me.

• 36:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Has mom ever commented on other investments?

• 36:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, you want to make her on your, put her to your investment committee?

• 36:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Maybe.

• 36:32Speaker 02

  She's got a lot of free time right now. Sitting in Charlottesville, Virginia, she's got plenty of time. But, uh, no, she, she, she's usually more conservative. Well, that's what was so astounding was like, I remember when I joined LinkedIn, she's like, nobody will ever use that and put their resumes online. Yelp, like, nobody near us in New Jersey, you know, will ever use that, blah, blah, blah. So she's nothing wrong, but she, she did, this was Stripe, actually.

• 36:54Anthony Pompliano?

  So you were counter-trading mom?

• 36:55Speaker 02

  She did call Stripe correctly.

• 36:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, you're a counter-trading mom until Stripe, okay.

• 36:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, now I listen to her much better.

• 37:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Last thing I want to talk about, I'm just going to call it, uh, kind of woke-ism. Seems to have infiltrated everywhere. And it's not a thing, right? It, it is a state of mind, it's a set of ideas, but everything from, uh, the way we work, the way that we operate on a daily basis, the things we're allowed to talk about, not allowed to talk about. Just so many things in life. How do you think through that problem, right? And is it a problem?

• 37:28Speaker 02

  That's actually easy.

• 37:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  Just ignore it. Like, I mean, if something's on the wrong side of history and just wrong, the best thing you can do is like refute, either ignore it or refute it, or definitely don't let it affect you.

• 37:40Anthony Pompliano?

  So like, use an example, you've invested in a company. Do you, and you start to see that there is a change in the company and by your reaction, I know you've dealt with this. How do you talk with the founder? Is it immediate, identify it and stomp this out? Is it a, let's coach? How do you just deal with it?

• 37:57Speaker 02

  No, I mean, my role as a board member and ambassador is, is really to be a consigliere, which is like, if the founder wants to talk about it, the founder identifies that this is a frustrating or challenging issue, then we can talk about it at length. And I can, you know, point them in different directions, people to talk about who've dealt with this before. Here's like the pros and cons of different approaches, but like, it's not my job to kind of fix it, like ever. I have one, well, I do have one job, uh, two jobs I have to fix. Like, if I don't like the founder's funds investing, I'm going to have to fix that. And I've actually been a little slacking on that. And then obviously it opens doors, like ultimately my responsibility.

• 38:32Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, we're gonna take questions in one second. You, Peter, Max, we can go down the line, there's a bunch of them. If you had to sum up one thing when it comes to critical thinking or independent thought that you all share, what is that thing? Is it something you guys read? Is it a way of thinking? Is it something that you can tie it all back to and say, "This is something we did that a lot of other people don't"?

• 38:55Speaker 02

  No, I think there's just, because all those people are very different. All the PayPal people that you named and the ones you didn't name that are very successful, they all have different asymmetric advantages in life and they figure out how to leverage them. The common denominator is that they do think for themselves, they have their own views on the world. So, two examples, there's a kind of a funny witty paragraph in Zero to One that Peter leads the book with, which actually originally was gonna lead the book if he ever wrote a PayPal book, but enough time was going by, he basically gave it up and put it in Zero to One, that four of the six co-founders of PayPal built bombs in high school. So, I didn't build a bomb in high school, I was way too normal for that, but maybe now I would, but like back then I was way too normal.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  But that shows a certain kind of thinking. Now, three of the four, before you get too nervous, actually grew up in communist countries, so building a bomb was probably a pretty good idea. But like, only one of them was an American. But in any event, that kind of hiring philosophy led to people who are kind of iconoclastic. And iconoclastic people do have the tendency to think for themselves, and then they figure out what areas are they strongest in, what dimensions. So, Max thinks about things differently than Peter does, than Reed does, than Elon does, than Jeremy Stolman or Chad, or whoever. But they all have figured out how to be different. You can see Chad on Twitter, you can see some of his iconoclastic thinking. Sometimes he likes to make fun of Miami.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  He's eventually moving here, whether he knows it or not.

• 40:27Anthony Pompliano?

  South Beach Hurley. All right, what questions do you guys have? Just raise your hand and we'll call on folks. Nobody has, oh, right here. Just yell it out.

• 40:37Speaker 03

  So I wanted to ask you, Keith, about two sort of movements in ten. Which you kind of seem to keep that maybe are some frank and conviction to each other and see if you see the tension and resolve it. One is sort of the rise of people more really working on hard tech, basically Varda, Andoril. Very picture that kind of wraps up the flag in terms of rising China. That's kind of one side. The other side you have kind of Web three, crypto, which is trending in a lot of places, especially with Miami and the Miami movement, Europe, like Lutero. I think sometimes people think that in the latter is sort of like, they're kind of like, America's over, right? Like, it's too loaded, it's too much attention. We're really kind of betting on the dollar fail, so if it's going to go off. And again, we're like really concerned about, you know, preserving the West, building the country. Do you see tensions in most of the movements? And if so, have you resolved that?

• 41:21Anthony Pompliano?

  So the question, just in case anyone didn't hear, is basically, is there tension between like hard tech, Varda, Andoril, etc. And then more of like, the US is screwed, let's build a different, like a skate boat, basically, with crypto, Web three, Bitcoin, etc.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  So two answers. Personally, in a founder's fund, we don't back trends. We don't invest in trends, we invest in people. So founder, you know, if you read the technology manifesto that Founder's Fund published, probably in 2014. We basically have N O one founders. So the right founder, we find the right founder for the right problem and we'll give them money. So we funded Varda, Andoril, funded, there's crypto companies we funded, we bought Bitcoin directly when that was appropriate. So fundamentally, we just want to find the right founder tackling the right problem, not try to, you know, sort of predict the future. But is there tension? I mean, ultimately, there's people probably better suited to solve different types of problems too. I'm not sure I'd be the best biotech founder, but I could probably learn parts of it.

• 42:22Speaker 02

  Like, for example, there is a heavy biz dev component and distribution component that I can learn. There's some legal and like FDA. So I could learn parts and contribute, but I probably am not designing molecules very well. And please don't adjust these molecules if I design them. Secondly, I also I think the best thing about technology is you get to write the future. So you can believe that America is in decline and say, you know what? I'm gonna wake up and do something about it. Like think Farda and Delian is actually like, America's in decline. We need to do something about it. And like, America's vulnerable. We're gonna do something about it. So like, technology is kind of this magic wand that you get to shape the future. You pick it up. It's like, learning to code is kind of this magic wand. You wanna rearrange the world and you kind of walk through the world and you kind of wave your wand.

• 43:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's do two or three more. Who else got a question?

• 43:08Speaker 04

  My question is, why does anybody over 35 years old believe in Web3?

• 43:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Why does anyone over the age of 35 believe in Web3?

• 43:17Speaker 04

  And at least don't use the word decentralization, community, or building.

• 43:21Anthony Pompliano?

  I planted him.

• 43:24Speaker 02

  I don't know. I guess Chris Dixon's over 35, so we should probably ask him. He's way over 35, actually. So, I don't know. I'm not one of the Web3 proponents. I would invest in a Web3 company if I believe the founder was tackling a specific problem that he or she had insight into. And I have funded, I guess, two companies that arguably could be Web3-ish, but they don't brand themselves. Well, one definitely doesn't brand itself. It's Royal. It's reinventing the music industry. Just happens to use some components. But it's really reinventing the music industry for the future, not reinventing crypto. The other one is a more Web3O company, but it was the specific founder had insights into a very unique problem.

• 44:04Speaker 04

  Okay. And my question is...

• 44:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Go ahead.

• 44:07Speaker 04

  So, NFTs are a big bet on the Ethereum chain being... But the issue is that teaches us that IPFS and the Ethereum chain, it's a pretty slim chance that it's really gonna be around in 20 years. So, I just wanna...

• 44:24Anthony Pompliano?

  So, the question's about NFTs being built on top of Ethereum, being highly dependent on Ethereum. And a lot of the internet history would suggest that it might not be around 20 years.

• 44:32Speaker 02

  Well, I think the macro point behind an NFT makes sense, which is people are going to have concentric circles of people professionally and socially that they care about in their lives that are more virtual or more digital than real world, like i.e. people are going to manage relationships in the real world differently than they manage relationships. So like when I go out, I care about what sneakers I wear, what brand shirt I'm wearing, you know, do I have an Apple Watch versus like a traditional watch? People are going to encounter more and more people online and NFTs of different types are a way of self-expression. Self-expression is incredibly important and is there, are there going to be unique ways to express yourself online? Absolutely. And so what do you purchase online to express yourself?

• 45:17Speaker 02

  That's the open question for entrepreneurs and that, but it's not, that's not going away. That's a human emotion back to Shakespeare.

• 45:22Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think the other piece of this is just the underlying technology almost doesn't matter, right? If I ask you guys, what is the tech stack of Google? If you're not an engineer who worked at Google, most of you don't know, right? And so I think at some point it's just like, can people buy what they want? And if it works, then it works.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  Well, can you transition it to, right? I mean, like most, almost every successful company I've ever invested in or been involved in has recoded itself almost from scratch, at scra, you know, from scratch at some point. If you have enough traction, you'll reinvent. Like Square started, believe it or not, I hate to give this away, but like on Ruby on Rails, another very famous site started in PHP. Like you really don't want to worry about that stuff too much.

• 46:14Speaker 02

  Well, you'll just have a different generation of like,

• 46:19Speaker 02

  that's, oh, that's definitely true. But like, do people, but like, do people still collect the same baseball cards that they used to? To some extent, Mickey Mantle is still valuable, but like the values of different people change over time too.

• 46:33Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, we're gonna take one more question, but quickly, what are your thoughts on Bitcoin, specifically not the other stuff? Have you changed your mind at all?

• 46:42Speaker 02

  So I had two concepts around Bitcoin, and they're kinda directionally correct, but not perfectly correct. I don't know that anybody's been perfectly correct to Bitcoin now. For a while, there was people claiming to be perfectly correct with their Bitcoin predictions. There's actually, I'm not sure anybody's really got it right. So I had two concepts.

• 46:57Anthony Pompliano?

  It's hard when things go up hundreds of percent and down 80%.

• 47:02Speaker 02

  Try calling both of those, two today.

• 47:09Speaker 02

  But in any event, I had two concepts around Bitcoin. So, you know, in some ways, I was enthusiastic when it first started because the original t-shirts of PayPal, those of you reading the PayPal book will know this, you know, our t-shirts, I still have some at home, the world, you know, the world currency, whatever. So the vision of PayPal originally was to try to do this. And one of the reasons I was somewhat dubious about Bitcoin is I remember how damn hard many pieces of that were building the new world currency were. But the first thing that occurred to me in 2013, when I started to think about this like professionally, because I didn't become a VC until 2013, was Bitcoin adoption should be inversely correlated with the rule of law. So in countries that have a predictable rule of law, there should be less adoption on a per capita basis

• 47:53Speaker 02

  or whatever, or per GDP or something, some metric, than in countries that have a predictable rule. And you can even argue that kinda happened in the United States, like according to some people, after Trump got elected, we had less rule of law here, and you do see Bitcoin actually appreciating after the election of Trump. But the number two point that's probably more live and relevant is, I believed that Bitcoin was a speculative asset, in that eventually, if you could stitch, people like to speculate. People speculate on stocks, obviously. People will speculate on NFL games. Like speculation is a really big business in the United States. If you could get everybody to adopt a platform on a speculative basis, could someone build an application layer

• 48:36Speaker 02

  on top of the network or the nodes that were built on speculation empower some fundamental? Something that was not speculation, absolutely. So I started saying this as early as 2015 publicly. Then, you know, basically, no one's really built that application layer on top. But there's a lot of nodes that were built in this speculative era. Now with prices going down in other, let's say in equities going down, unless people have less dollars available for speculation, you may have to build on top of the nodes that are already, you know, sort of plugged in, but that's like 80 million folks.

• 49:06Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, this is, if you read, what is it, Power Law, I think they talk about a lot of speculation, a lot of capital goes in, you basically build the infrastructure and then eventually do it. Last question, no pressure.

• 49:17Speaker 05

  I believe that science is a very political thing. And scientists are extremely ambitious individuals and they feel like they have, they go beyond borders and nations like they do. There are physicists in China that would like to work with physicists in Germany. So how do you protect a critical thinking that scientists need in the US when it seems like it's becoming really, after the pandemic, it really became a monopoly of thought and a great stare.

• 49:52Anthony Pompliano?

  The question is, science started to become very political, but a huge piece of science is collaboration, especially sometimes across borders. But if it gets politicized, how does a scientist in America and a scientist in China work together if there's this political divide?

• 50:06Speaker 02

  I think that was a choice that scientists, scientists in quotes made. Most scientists in history that you remember the names of were incredibly controversial in their own times. And so I think there's a certain character to the scientists who come up with the most important ideas and then eventually bring the world with them. It's not the other way around. Like, how do I dumb down my ideas to be approachable to everybody?

• 50:30Anthony Pompliano?

  That's it. All right, everyone. I hope that you guys enjoyed this. Thank you so much for your time. Real quick, Konstantin, thank you very much.

• 50:39Anthony Pompliano?

  I think we have this place for like another hour or so, hour and a half. So enjoy. There's drinks upstairs, there's drinks downstairs. If you need a lawyer, Konstantin's right there. Go harass the shit out of him at Reed Smith.

• 50:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, one lawyer for the whole room. All right. Thank you, guys.

• 50:59Anthony Pompliano?

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