Ask Pomp (AMA), Anthony Pompliano & Polina Marinova: Celebrating 200 Episodes of Off The Chain

Anthony Pompliano hosts a special AMA to celebrate the 200th episode of Off The Chain Featuring Polina Marinova. Listeners were asked to submit their questions on Twitter using the hashtag #AskPomp. In this conversation, Pomp answers what lead to his interest in crypto and digital assets, how to educate relatives about Bitcoin, his favorite episodes of Off The Chain, and three reasons why governments should adopt cryptocurrency and blockchain. BLOCKFI-----BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. CRYPTO. COM-----Crypto.com is a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. With the vision of "cryptocurrency in every wallet", the Crypto.com App offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well designed UX and high security. It is the best place to buy, sell and pay with crypto. COINMINE-----The Coinmine One is like an Xbox that turns your electricity into Bitcoin. You just plug it in, connect to wifi, and tap on the crypto you want. It’s so easy anyone can do it. Everything is controlled from the Coinmine mobile app and the Coinmine keeps getting better with over the air updates that add new coins, features and services to your Coinmine. Visit coinmine.com/pomp to get a Coinmine and earn crypto for powering a new world. ETORO-----This episode of Off the Chain is sponsored by eToro, the smartest crypto trading platform, and one of the largest in the world. Join 11 million other traders and create an account at etoro.com and build your crypto portfolio the smart way.

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

• 0:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Whoa. Before we get started, I want to go over the four sponsors for this episode who make all this possible. They're fantastic, so go show them some love. The first is the best URL in the industry: crypto.com. They're a crypto platform with one goal: driving mass adoption. That's why we're all here, right? To get every human on Earth a digital wallet and to get them using digital currencies. Crypto.com is helping people do that through buying, earning, lending, and a new card payment. Everything you could want is at crypto.com. They've been longtime supporters of Off the Chain and recently announced a new exchange, so go help them out, download their app from the App Store, or visit crypto.com and tell them POM sent you. There's nothing better in the world than a company helping to drive global adoption of this new technology.

• 0:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Another part of global adoption is making sure that we secure the various blockchains with computing power. CoinMine has built the best consumer experience in mining, hands down, no competition. If you want to help secure the blockchain and get started in mining, you can go to coinmine.com/pom. Order a CoinMine, it'll arrive at your door, and you simply take it out of the box, plug it in, and connect to your Wi-Fi. You'll be mining your favorite crypto in five minutes or less. It is honestly magical. I have one running right now here in the office, and it's super quiet, it's got no heat, and every person that comes in the office asks, "What is that?" Every single person asks. It's a CoinMine. The best part to me is that the CoinMine comes with a mobile app that's super slick, and the company continues to push over-the-air updates to the device that add functionality, add tokens that can be mined,

• 1:31Anthony Pompliano?

  or increase the efficiency of the device. Similar to how Tesla does car software updates over the air, CoinMine is sending these passively to thousands of CoinMines around the world on a periodic basis. Pretty damn cool. When Farbood and the team pitched me on the idea of an Xbox or PlayStation-like box that could mine cryptocurrency in your home, I was immediately sold. I invested in the business, have a device personally, and keep telling people to go to coinmine.com/pom so they can save a lot of time if they want to get started mining today. CoinMine has a partnership with our third sponsor for this episode, BlockFi. BlockFi is one of my favorite companies in crypto because they allow users to deposit their assets in a deposit account and immediately start earning interest. Think about it, if you keep your digital assets on an exchange or in cold storage,

• 2:15Anthony Pompliano?

  you aren't benefiting from any yield on the asset. With BlockFi, they allow you to deposit crypto and then get paid interest on a monthly basis in crypto. Deposit Bitcoin and want to get your interest payment in ETH? You can do it. Deposit Bitcoin and want to get your interest payment in Bitcoin? You can do it. The rates at BlockFi are currently some of the best in the industry. You can earn 6% interest on Bitcoin and you can earn up to 8.6% APY on GUSD deposits. I'm an investor in the company and think BlockFi is building really important and compelling infrastructure. So go check them out at blockfi.com/pomp. Again, that's blockfi.com/pomp. And that brings us to the last advertiser of the episode, eToro. These guys have absolutely crushed it over the years. Their founder, Yoni, was one of the original Bitcoin OGs and has been ahead of almost

• 3:00Anthony Pompliano?

  every trend in crypto. He built eToro to help people buy, sell, and trade cryptocurrencies, but he added a few twists: social trading, copy trading, and virtual trading accounts. Social trading is a feature where every asset available on the platform has its own separate social feed where people talk about the asset, share trading ideas and analysis, and even include various charts or graphs. Virtual trading accounts is targeted at beginners. If you're just starting out and want to try trading with play money, eToro will give you a virtual account with $100,000 in it to test, learn, and get comfortable. And so, then that brings us to copy trading, which is by far the coolest feature. This allows you, as a user, to select any other user's portfolio to copy. If you see someone on the platform you like, you can set your account to mimic their trades.

• 3:43Anthony Pompliano?

  They buy Bitcoin with 5% of their portfolio? Your portfolio buys 5% Bitcoin. They sell 50% of their Ether position? Your portfolio does the same thing automatically. Copy trading is awesome, so go join the 10-plus million other traders on eToro and start trading all the most popular cryptocurrencies today. They're one of the largest companies in the space, and you can get started by going to etoro.com. Again, that is etoro.com, where the entire team is ready to get you started in just a few clicks. And don't forget, go subscribe to the Off the Chain daily newsletter. You can go to offthechain.substack.com. I write a letter of news, analysis, and opinion every morning that goes out to more than 40,000 investors. See you there.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off the Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Alright guys, bang bang. I'm sitting here with a special guest for the 200th episode of Off the Chain. We're gonna do something a little different. I shot out a tweet and said, "Use the hashtag #AskPomp to send in your questions," and I'm gonna answer as many of them as I can during the episode. In order to help me go through the questions, I've brought in the ever lovely Polina Marinova to help read them out, so she's gonna suffer through this with us.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  Yep, I'm excited to make my debut.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  Jesus. Alright, let's start with the first question.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  Okay, this one comes from @CryptoNero. "How many years did you ignore this space before being convinced? You saying you started with ETH mining was surprising." Yeah, actually, when I met you, you were not into Bitcoin.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think that I couldn't say that I ignored the industry. It was more of I just was ignorant to it. I didn't know it. I didn't know about it. I think I'd heard the word Bitcoin two or three times when I was working at Facebook, 2014, 2015. But there was a gentleman, JP Baric, who really sat me down and was like, "Hey, you should pay attention to this," but it was all around mining. And so I had a background in data centers and understood how those worked. And so when I saw Bitcoin and Ethereum mining, it was a no-brainer right

• 5:58Speaker 01

  away. But yes, we started with ETH mining with GPUs. What's the next one?

• 6:04Speaker 02

  @JTV95 wants to know, "The justice system hasn't been built for the internet. Lots of online crimes don't even get looked into. Do you think there will be a justice system built for the internet? If so, how do you think it could work?"

• 6:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a great question. I think that there's two ways to think about quote-unquote "justice." Some of it is preventative, some of it is reactionary. And so if you think about the justice system that we have, you know, in the analog world or the non-internet world, a lot of it's reactionary. So basically, what ends up happening is you do whatever you want, and when, even though you know you're about to do something that's wrong, you can still do it. And then, once you've done that, the law enforcement takes a lot of time, energy, and resources to build a case and go enforce on you. I think what we're starting to see in the internet age, especially in financial services, is more

• 7:03Speaker 01

  of a proactive approach to justice or law enforcement, where basically, the software has the rules coded into it, and it prevents you from being able to do things. Again, especially in financial services where there's heavy regulation, I think that that is, you know, a trend that's becoming more popular. Now, with that said, there's a flip side to it, which is, people should still have kind of free choice and freedom and individual liberties. So if all of a sudden, we start to prevent people from doing things because we just don't like their ideas, I think that's a slippery slope, and so there's a balance to strike there. But I do think that there's a difference between kind of proactive and reactionary approaches, and the internet definitely is empowering people to take more

• 7:48Speaker 01

  proactive approaches than before.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  This one's from Hunter Horsley.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Ah, Hunter, what up, man?

• 7:55Speaker 02

  What is part of modern life that you think in 30 years will look back on and say, "Wow, I can't believe we did that."

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a great question. There's probably two pieces. One, I do believe that we're gonna look back and be like... Humans used to be really stupid because they had to count on themselves. And what I mean by that is, I think we're probably, you know, I don't know, somewhere between, let's call it 15 and 50 years away from true embeddable technology. So you can imagine the ability now for a chip to be embedded in your brain. Now you have all of the access of Google and the internet, all that information right at your fingertips, or kind of as part of the computational power in your brain. You can imagine that, once we get to that point where every human has that capability,

• 8:46Speaker 01

  I think we'll look back and be like, wow, I can't believe that they actually used their real brains without augmentation. And so I think that's something to pay attention to. A second trend that is somewhat more controversial is the idea that the meat that we eat today is natural. I think that you see things with like Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, etc. It would not surprise me at all if there's an ethical argument that ends up getting made around the inhumane treatment of animals, and therefore the lab-grown meat becomes more popular and eventually becomes kind of dominant. Now, there's a lot of questions around how is that scientifically kind of healthy, and

• 9:29Speaker 01

  what those impacts are, but I definitely think that's something to pay attention to. And I'm sure that there's other things, you know, self-driving cars, I can't believe those people actually drove around. You know, if you think of that type of technology, it's likely that the self-driving cars are, yes, going to replace some jobs, but more so they're going to unlock a lot of time for creation and creativity and production from humans. Imagine how much time people spend in cars not doing something other than driving. And so I think that's, again, that's something that people will just look back and say, wow, I can't believe they used to sit in the car. And so that'll be something to pay attention to.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  This is a good one, from Elja Boom. What is your next goal? Be clear, be as clear as possible.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Ooh, my next goal? That's a really good question. I think I've got a whole bunch of different goals. Most of my goals end up being pretty long-term stuff. For me, one that's easy, I think, for this audience to kind of wrap their head around is in 2017, I put a really big focus on figuring out Twitter and growing that audience. In 2018, I put a pretty big focus on kind of systematizing and figuring out how to grow the off-the-chain newsletter. In 2019, I spent a lot of time kind of systematizing and learning how to grow the podcast.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  And so for 2020, I think that one of the big goals for me is to figure out YouTube. And what that really looks like is can I go from the 6, 7,000 subscribers that we have today to 100,000 subscribers by the end of 2020? I think would kind of show that we've gotten the mastery of that platform, how the algorithms work, the type of content people want, kind of the distribution, but then also the systems in place on the content creation side. And so if you think about it from why is that important? Now, we basically have four platforms where if there's any sort of algorithm changes on a YouTube or a Twitter or any other platform, you kind of have multiple channels, some

• 11:39Speaker 01

  direct where you own the relationship with the end user, and then some that are more kind of mass distribution, like the Twitters and Youtubes. But that's definitely a goal that I think is short-term based and pretty measurable.

• 11:50Speaker 02

  Awesome. This is from @Greg197613. Wow, okay. When you pitched family offices, blockchain, and Bitcoin, what are their reasons for saying no, and how has this changed over the years?

• 12:04Speaker 01

  Yep. So there's every, I think, conversation is different. The largest conversations, or I'm sorry, the largest family offices, those conversations, what I've taken away from it is like... The easy answer is we're gonna do nothing. So when you're presented with a new idea, it takes some forward thinking, some courage, and it takes action to follow, even if you buy into the pitch that you're hearing. And so it's very easy, simple, and the default to do nothing. But once you actually decide, okay, this is interesting, then you've got to figure out a lot of stuff around custody. How are you gonna acquire it? What are the regulations?

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Is there any sort of documentation or requirements for the structure of the family office that you need to be cognizant of, etc.? So I think if the default is do nothing, if you can convince people, they'll take action. But then there's another group, and I think the group you're hinting at here, which is the group that hears the pitch and then decides not to do something. And that group is really doing it because they don't believe in it or they don't think it's a good investment opportunity. And usually those come down to, one, there's regulatory uncertainty in their opinion, so they're not interested. Two, they're worried about custody or volatility. A third thing is they just are fiat maximalists. They don't believe that there's any sort of currency

• 13:34Speaker 01

  that could become popular and take over. And normally what I try to explain to them is there's a qualitative and a quantitative argument. The qualitative argument is everything that Bitcoiners and the crypto community believes around the possibilities of this asset. And so that's a little bit harder, I think, for a lot of folks to wrap their heads around if they're not in this every single day. But the quantitative argument is pretty hard to refute in terms of the non-correlated asset with an asymmetric upside and the impact it can have on our portfolio, given the modern portfolio theory. And so I think that's really where we try to focus more is just using math and data to show them what an asset like this can do for their portfolio. And obviously, we've been pretty fortunate to find some like-minded individuals there,

• 14:19Speaker 01

  and we'll continue to do that.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  @JimmiumGroup asks, "Bitcoin slash digital is cool and all, but what happens when networks go down or blacked out? What's the hedge against local blackouts?"

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we saw this actually in Venezuela. Their entire grid went down. And there was a couple of things that people did. So the first thing to remember is if the grid goes down, the legacy banking system goes down. But with Bitcoin, basically, you don't need the entire grid to be up. You yourself just need to be able to get access to the Internet. And so when that happens, I think that you need to be able to, one, have some sort of electricity generation. So you can think of just having a generator, you know, solar, something like that. Two is that you've got to be able to get an Internet connection established. And some people, I think, in Venezuela were showing that they could literally get it via

• 15:15Speaker 01

  satellite and kind of get out. And so the beauty of kind of the grid going down for something like Bitcoin is that as long as you yourself can get Internet and electricity, then you can connect to that network because it's always running. And so you're not dependent on the entire, like, national grid or banking system to be up and running.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  This is from @CoinDorado. What were your hobbies/interests during your time in the Army?

• 15:44Speaker 01

  I mean, no surprise, working out, shooting guns, and then actually read a lot. So I, for whatever reason, I was young. I was, especially when I was deployed, I was 20, 21 years old, and pretty much spent most of my day working out. And then, obviously, the weapons proficiency was important, given what we were doing on a day-to-day basis. So I spent a lot of time on that. And then, as I've talked about a ton, I specifically read a lot of books, but there were three specific ones that were quite foundational to my life.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  I read Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, The Richest Man in Babylon, and Think and Grow Rich. And those three books I read kind of back-to-back-to-back. I was 20 years old, and they really changed the way that I thought about money and work and wealth and kind of what I wanted to spend my life doing. And so that was a big focus, along with that kind of physical activity and the weapons proficiency.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  This one is from at Walsh SRCM. Why wouldn't a deflationary currency be bad? Theoretically, people would spend almost solely on necessities and save the rest to increase their wealth. This would obviously crush economic growth and therefore is my biggest concern about BTC.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think that there's a very important conversation around consumption versus savings. And we live in a world that has been driven by consumption. Fiat currency, the inflationary aspect of it incentivizes you to spend money. So either to take your fiat currency and buy goods and services, or to take your fiat currency and put it into assets, real assets, things like real estate stocks, you know, whatever it ends up being. And so the reason why it's important conversation is obviously Bitcoin has a very different approach. It is a deflationary structure with a disinflationary monetary schedule, and so you're actually incentivized to save.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  Now, the reason why this is important is if you go back for thousands of years, things like gold were money. And those have very similar structures to what Bitcoin is today. And so I think that what we have to remember here is that the fiat experiment is actually quite short. It's only been around since about 1971. And so we've got, you know, give or take 50 years of this experiment. And yes, there has been incredible economic growth, but also there's been incredible economic issues as well. And so there's a strong belief, I think, among a lot of people that that inflationary experiment, what we're starting to see here is kind of the kicking of the can down the road. Now, first it was interest rate manipulation, right, and movement.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  Now we're starting to see the QE over the last decade. And so that's kind of become a constant necessity from central banks to keep the economy going. But once they don't have the ability to impact the economy with interest rates and with QE anymore because we're addicted to it or we're kind of used to it, all of a sudden they have to Go to something else. And I think this is where you see things like monetary theory, MMT, come into etc. And so I think that there's this general belief that over time, there's a bet that that system or that experiment ends up not working out in the long run. And something like Bitcoin is really a return back to what served as money for thousands

• 19:22Speaker 01

  of years. And so I don't think that people should be worried about it as much as they should just have the historical context of what money has been for a really long time.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  Two questions. One from at Matt We Day. How can I educate my relatives about Bitcoin? And then someone at Joey Clark V. Also Crypto UGA. Shout out GoDogs. He said, yeah, what's your elevator pitch for YBTC for the average Joe to that?

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think that the key piece here, there's two things. One is there's tons of resources online. You know, the things that I've seen people use that's been quite effective. So Murad and I recorded a podcast episode. This is going on probably over a year ago now. That was kind of the bull case for Bitcoin. I know a lot of people have had their relatives listen to that. And that's really kind of changed the way that they thought about it. Obviously, the Bitcoin Standard by Safe Dean is a great book that I think a lot of people kind of enjoy reading and understanding, again, the historical context, the more macro components of this. And then things like Jamison Lop has a great

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Bitcoin resource. I think it's lop.net slash Bitcoin that has pretty much, you know, every talk that you could imagine, every book, every article, etc. That would be helpful in this conversation. So I would say those three resources are pretty strong. In terms of like, what's the pitch? Pitch is pretty easy. I usually tell them, look, there's a financial system that you've grown up in. It's an inflationary US dollar denominated system that's built on fractional reserve banking. There's a new system that's being built. It's an alternative. It doesn't necessarily have to be a replacement. But that system has very different structural components to it. If you have 100% 100% confidence that the current system is going to persist forever. You should keep 100% of your assets in that dollar-denominated ecosystem.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  But if you even think that there is 1% possibility that this other system has a chance of being successful, you should quote-unquote "get off zero" and you should move some of your dollar-denominated assets into that new alternative financial system. And so that is where we get into sizing the risk correctly, etc. Most people we see doing this are doing it in kind of 100 basis point-type allocations to begin with. But obviously, being able to get them off zero, now they've got some skin in the game, they're paying attention, and we tend to find that they go down the rabbit hole once they're off zero.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  Awesome. @KineticCrypto wants to know, how do you think we can get merchants to start accepting Bitcoin and crypto more regularly?

• 22:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is a great question. So I think that there's two components to this. One, there's an education piece of it. People have just got to be more educated on what is Bitcoin? Why should they accept it? How is it beneficial? And also, kind of a 1A component of this is having customers go in and say, "Hey, do you accept Bitcoin? I'd like to pay you in Bitcoin." That tends to move merchants pretty easily. The second thing is also an economic argument. So something as simple as, there's a lot of businesses now that will actually give you a discount on the purchase of goods if you use Bitcoin because they don't have to worry about the chargebacks and the credit card fees and all of the legacy issues that merchants have.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  And so I think that explaining that to folks around, here is why this could be beneficial to you and your business, I think is an economic argument and then also an education component to it. And there's a lot of people who are working hard to do this. There's a lot of companies that have built technology to help facilitate this. So I think we're on our way, but it takes time and the more people we have out there, the better.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  @CanadianHoddle, what if first-world governments choose to ban Bitcoin to retain financial control, similar to the gold ban? Is this plausible?

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Look, anything's possible. It's definitely a world where I think more and more people are paying attention in kind of the government ranks. The good news is that I think every government that, at least I've seen talk about it, there are some proponents of Bitcoin and kind of what the industry stands for. Again, that doesn't necessarily mean that they couldn't ban ownership. I think the important thing is they couldn't shut it down, right? So they couldn't shut down the network. What they could do is they could ban ownership and basically say, you know, turn over your Bitcoin, all that kind of stuff. It's plausible, but I don't think that we're near that happening anytime soon.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  And so, you know, I think it's Matt Odell, who's one of these guys who puts it well. He goes, "Look, prepare for the worst and kind of plan accordingly, but also understand that, you know, we're still very early in the stages of this." And you see the central banks trying to wrap their heads around, you know, "What is this stuff? Should we be participating in it?" And so I don't think that's something to worry about kind of in the short term.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  At AlexCrypto09, what will happen after the last Bitcoin is mined? If incentive for miners is transaction fees, would this be sufficient?

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's a general belief right now, is that the transaction fees for miners would end up being the incentive. With all the information we have now, I do think that it would be enough to keep those miners on. Again, it's hard to kind of predict what happens 120 years out in the future, but I think structurally that's directionally correct. And so as, you know, we get more information, I'm sure people will kind of reevaluate and morph their opinions, but I think that's the generally held belief right now.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  At Chaka321, what's the most important movie you have ever seen?

• 25:16Speaker 01

  Ooh, the most important movie I've ever seen. It's a really good question. I don't know if I've got the most important movie, but there's a bunch of movies that I really like. For those that don't know, I'm a big movie buff. Pauline is laughing right now because whenever I get on an airline, I can immediately tell whether the movie library is good or not because I fly way too much. But I would say good movies that just kind of jump to mind. Huge Lion King fan, which is something that I think is probably not expected. I really, really like The Greatest Showman,

• 25:59Speaker 01

  which is actually a musical, but I like that story and kind of the family components to it, etc. I like Cinderella Man. I think that's a good one. Four Brothers is another one. And then I am notorious for probably having watched every war movie known to mankind. But all of those I think are up there. And then one other one that I think people probably wouldn't expect, and I'm gonna get the name incorrect, so I probably should figure it out and put it in the show notes, is The Life of Mitt, I think it's called. But it's basically the story of a guy who's stuck. He's a photographer at a magazine, and he's stuck in his job, and he's just locked into corporate America, can't escape.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  And he somehow gets thrown on this wild journey where he realizes, like, you only get one life to live, and go have adventure and enjoy it. And basically, you can imagine that the movie pretty much is like him throwing the middle finger up to his corporate job and saying, like, "I'm gonna go live my life." But I think that that's a pretty powerful movie for those that feel like they're locked into into the little monkey cage in the cubicle.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  Tell them how you make me watch movie trailers and I hate it.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  So I'm regretting already having plane to come help me with this. But there's a joke that we saw online, which perfectly emulated this, which was if you ever want to go watch a movie and you don't know what you want to watch, well, the best way to figure out what the movie to watch is, is to watch all the movie trailers. Well, if you watch four, five, six, 10, 12 different movie trailers in a row, then now you're not watching a movie, you're just sitting there watching movie trailers.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  And it's super annoying.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  And so I enjoy doing that because it's, you know, kind of try before you buy. But what you end up seeing is it's movie tapas. It's basically the ability to watch as much as you can and kind of try a bunch of different things all at the same table.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  So this is from at Jason Benick. Which US bank do you believe will be the first to break tradition and embrace Bitcoin deposits, transfers and transactions?

• 28:04Speaker 01

  It's a great question. I think the first one to buy a crypto company that has done that. I don't think any of the major banks are going to kind of jump in the water headfirst and just do it themselves. I think what ends up happening is they're going to do it via acquisition. They're going to see a crypto native business that's super profitable and growing really fast. And when they see that, they're going to realize the economic benefit to them and they'll go and they'll just buy it rather than build it, incorporate it internally and then kind of scale it out using their resources and their scale.

• 28:38Speaker 02

  At the state of Crip one, on 200 podcasts, rank the top 10 interviews you have had or the ones you believe were most impactful.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  Oh, man. Okay, short answer, I can't do that. But maybe what I can do is I can throw out a couple that were really fun for me. Murad and I, I don't think I'll ever top the episode we recorded. He came in and it was the right time. It was the perfect message. He articulated it so kind of eloquently that it just.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  It got a lot of attention for all the right reasons. And so I think that's probably the number one episode I remember recording. Other ones that stick out in my mind, I remember the one I did with Caitlin Long. She was one of the first three that I did. I really, really liked when I kind of got to sit down and pick her brain and really understand how she saw the world. That one was good. The, what I'll call the celebrity club. Kyle Bass, Anthony Scaramucci and Spencer Dinwiddie. Those three guys all, for various reasons, were kind of memorable, just that their world is not Bitcoin. But they all had various levels of interest in it for different things.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  And then I would also say that some of the conversations I've had that weren't so Bitcoin native also are quite interesting. And so anytime that I can talk to somebody who's really smart and has a lot of, has kind of a lot of ideas and can articulate them well, I love to sit down with them and talk.

• 30:24Anthony Pompliano?

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• 32:15Speaker 02

  Um, at Y J Fang 22.

• 32:18Anthony Pompliano?

  You guys got to get better Twitter names.

• 32:21Speaker 02

  What are the three biggest developments that we should pay attention to in the crypto space over the next one to two years?

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Three biggest developments? I think that there's going to be an acceleration of every stock, bond, currency and commodity getting digitized. I think that there's going to be even greater levels of human trusting algorithms and software over other humans. I think that we're going to see a large financial banks start to incentivize their users to use stable coins or digital dollars. So whether higher levels of interest, better rewards on a credit card, that type of stuff. And then the fourth thing is I think that Bitcoin is going to start to take even more of a material share of global transactions. Like I think that Bitcoin is a really quiet beast. When you look at the hash rate and the transactions and all the things that are happening there. I think people are drastically underestimating what it can do.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  And so paying attention to that's going to be important as well.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  Great. Um, at, okay, this is Abhinav Agarwal 94. Give us three reasons why the government should adopt Bitcoin slash cryptocurrency.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a good question. I don't know if I've got three reasons kind of clearly articulated, but the things that kind of jumped to the top of my head are, one, anytime you're doing bilateral trade between nations, as the President of the United States has been highlighting, there's tons of manipulations of currencies and economies. Something like Bitcoin is a non-sovereign-backed currency, meaning that if you're two countries, you know that the other counterparty to the transaction is not manipulating their currency. They can trust that you're not manipulating yours because you guys are using something that is outside of the control of both of you, and it's fully transparent and verifiable.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  So I think that's kind of one. Two is, the fiat experiment probably doesn't work over a really long period of time. And so I think that's going to end up being something that's important to pay attention to. And so just like individuals should have kind of that chaos hedge or smuck insurance, I think that government's doing that as well makes a lot of sense. And then the third thing, and one of the things that I think goes on, talked about a lot, is the ability to turn excess power into capital, right, and one of the most scarce resources in the world. All these countries have lots and lots of excess power, a lot of it's renewable power, and what they're trying to figure out is what do they do with it? And so there's not much thing, there are not many things that are better than

• 34:53Speaker 01

  simply, let's go build mining facilities, let's set those up, and let's start securing this computing network that is already the most powerful computer in the world, the most secure computer in the world. So I think that that's a third reason and an economic argument as to what they should be doing with it.

• 35:08Speaker 02

  At Irritated WASP, in your opinion, what gives billionaires reason to be pessimistic about BTC? What would or could produce optimism for them? And does this matter?

• 35:19Speaker 01

  What got them here is not what we're talking about. If you're a billionaire and especially if you're quote-unquote self-made or you didn't inherit the money, the dollar-denominated inflationary fractional reserve system worked pretty damn well for you. You kind of won the game, if you will. And so, the idea that people are saying, "We should switch the rules of the game," or "We should go play a different game," probably aren't super attractive to you because it's an exact contrast to what built the system, you know, built the wealth you have. And so, I think that it's no surprise. It's just them talking their book, frankly. So, I think that's one piece. What brings them into it is, there's actually a lot of, I think billionaires or wealthy

• 36:02Speaker 01

  folks who realize, "Just because what got me here doesn't mean it's going to get me there," right? And so, the world's changing. And when the world changes, I need to reevaluate from a first-principle standpoint what the future looks like. And so, those folks are hard at work trying to understand that.

• 36:18Speaker 02

  At Clint Beastwood1, what are the most important three books you have ever read and what's on your reading list currently?

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the three most important books, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Think and Grow Rich, and The Richest Man in Babylon. And really, I think of the most important book is always what the book was, who you were at the time, and the timing of when you read the book. So, those three all read together, like I previously said. In terms of books that I've read recently, I really liked Sam Zell's book. I read Steve Schwartzman's new book. Let's see, what else have I read? I read Edward Snowden's Permanent Record. I'm currently reading a book called The Telomere Effect, which is all about kind of our DNA and how it relates to aging. Basically, the DNA strand at the end of your DNA has something that is overgeneralized

• 37:11Speaker 01

  in a simplistic way, similar to like the plastic caps on the end of your shoelaces that kind of close off the DNA strand. And as you have a more stressful life, you sleep less, you eat worse, you don't exercise, etc., those plastic caps... ... or those telomeres end up shortening and as they shorten you age faster. And so if you've ever seen somebody who's, you know, 25 years old, but they look 40, it's probably because they have short telomeres. And so this book basically goes into the science behind it and some of the things that you can do to kind of stop the shortening of the telomeres or even reverse it and help to elongate them.

• 37:51Speaker 02

  At Chuck's knee twerks. What are these names? All right. If a robot takes your job, is it entitled to support you for the rest of your life?

• 38:02Speaker 01

  No. I think, you know, if you've ever seen the saying, or Lamar Jackson of the Baltimore Ravens, after these NFL games, he's been wearing a shirt that says, "Nobody cares, work harder." And so I don't think that it's in kind of the automated world that nobody cares. I think actually a lot of people are talking about this, so a lot of people care. But the idea of working harder, that works in sports. I don't think working harder is going to solve the problem here. I think what people need to do is they need to be very intelligent about optimizing for skills that computers and machines aren't going to be able to do. And so, you know, one of these ideas that I have is that creativity is mispriced, meaning

• 38:44Speaker 01

  that, you know, the machines are going to be really good at doing monotonous, kind of repetitive work, but the ideas of creativity, of kind of the human ingenuity, etc., that's going to be really hard to replicate with machines and computers. And so if you can figure out how to start to get into a world where that's your advantage, I think you'll be in a good position. And then in terms of, should the machine actually support you? Fuck no. I think that the idea is, you know, most people are monetizing their physical labor or their intellectual labor, right? And that's how they're getting paid. But one of the things that we all do is we create a lot of data. I've talked that, you know, pretty extensively about the idea that all of that data eventually

• 39:27Speaker 01

  you're going to own, you'll hold it in a wallet, and as people want to buy it from you, they basically, you can permission them in or out. So something as simple as how many steps you took today, what your heart rate is, what your blood pressure is. What you ate, kind of your insulin levels, you know, all that kind of data that something like an Apple Watch and a couple of very easy tests could figure out. There's going to be a lot of healthcare companies that want to buy for either research or marketing purposes or whatever, and so they'll buy it in anonymous and kind of aggregated format, and you'll have to permission them in to do that. And in exchange for you giving up your data to be included in the data set, then you'll get paid something. And so I think that we can get to a world where kind of the basic needs of a human

• 40:10Speaker 01

  are met by simply allowing them to monetize that data. It's not going to happen overnight. It's going to take some while to get there, but I definitely think that that's going to be a much kind of more capitalistic approach to solving the problem, rather than kind of, you know, kind of a more socialist, hey, either the machine or the government should take care of you.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  At BeanSim84, how many people in percentage of Bitcoin buyers actually pay something with it and don't use it for speculation?

• 40:36Speaker 01

  It's a great question. I don't think we know the answer, which is also part of the advantage of Bitcoin is we don't know what people are using it for. So when we look at like on-chain transaction volume, it's really hard to tell what people are doing with it. And so I think that that's, you know, one, part of the strength of Bitcoin. Two, it makes it really hard to answer this question. Obviously, it is not as many people as we would, you know, think it is. But at the same time, one of the things I've started to talk a lot about with institutional investors is, you know, they'll ask questions like, well, you can't buy coffee with it, or people don't buy coffee with it. And what I explain to them is, you probably don't buy coffee with dollars, right?

• 41:20Speaker 01

  What you're likely doing is when you go into that coffee shop, you're swiping, using credit, and then you're paying off the credit card at the end of the month. And so when that happens, yes, you're using a dollar-denominated system, but you're not actually using dollars, you're using credit. And so I think that Bitcoin's very similar here in that people are using other aspects of it, or they're using it for other things than buying coffee. But over time, as the second, third, and fourth layers get built on top of it, we'll get more scalability, it'll be much easier from a consumer experience, user interface, et cetera. And so that kind of more P2P transactions or merchant-based transactions will accelerate. But again, we're 11 years into this thing, and so I think we've just got to be patient and understand that time's on the side of Bitcoin.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  At Illinois Block C1, how will crypto change political fundraising?

• 42:13Speaker 01

  I don't think it'll change really that much. I definitely think that kind of the ethos, if there's a campaign or a candidate that really buys into kind of what Bitcoin is and how it works, probably the most, the closest candidate today is somebody like an Andrew Yang around all the automation and Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and blockchain, etc. But I don't think that whether a candidate accepts US dollars or Bitcoin is really going to matter. It really just comes down to are people willing to donate to support somebody's ideas? And thankfully, in the United States, we've got a democratic process or as close

• 42:55Speaker 01

  to it. And those campaigns have to kind of work to get the support of people. And so I don't think that Bitcoin will end up changing it.

• 43:05Speaker 02

  That's all I got for you.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  That's it? All right, guys. Thanks so much. I appreciate it. Go follow Polina on the internet. She loves when everyone from the crypto world tweets at her. I'm joking because she has a, in the notifications of her Twitter is incredibly peaceful and calm and kind. And everyone is so loving towards each other. And then she will see all of us in the crypto community and she's like, "Oh, my God, I can't believe that you guys talk to each other that way."

• 43:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, be nicer.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  So, thanks so much for listening. Polina, thanks for helping me do this. And we'll see you guys next time.

• 43:42Speaker 02

  Bye.

• 43:44Anthony Pompliano?

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