David Perell, Founder of Write of Passage: The Downfall of Mainstream Media

David Perell is the Founder at Write of Passage, In this conversation, David and Anthony discuss the importance of writing publicly, downfall of mainstream media, what blogging did to transform the traditional journalism landscape, how the internet is enabling individuals to become a self sustaining business instead of working for large companies, why we will start seeing teenage billionaires within the next decade, and the shift in education from traditional methods to online-based eLearning courses. BLOCKFI-----BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. UNSTOPPABLE DOMAINS-----Make your crypto currency payments simple and build censorship resistant websites. Visit unstoppabledomains.com and purchase your blockchain domains today! 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.

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

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

• 0:10Anthony Pompliano?

  David Perro is the founder of Right of Passage. This was an awesome conversation and one that I'll remember for a long time. In it, we talked about the importance of writing publicly, the downfall of mainstream media, what blogging did to transform the traditional journalism landscape, how the internet is enabling individuals to become a self-sustaining business instead of working for large companies, why we will start to see teenage billionaires within the next decade. That's right, he claims that teenage billionaires are coming, and the shift in education from traditional methods to online-based e-learning courses. Again, this is an awesome episode, so highly recommend you listen. Before we get into the episode, though, I want to quickly touch on the three sponsors as well. The first is BlockFi. You know these guys are killing it. If you've

• 0:50Anthony Pompliano?

  ever had the chance to see or buy Bitcoin, Ethereum, GUSD, etc., rather than just hold it, BlockFi lets you put it to work. They'll give you a US dollar loan to get your collateral, or you can deposit it and get interest on that account. If you deposit Bitcoin right now, they'll give you 6.2% APY. If you deposit GUSD, they'll give you 8.6% APY, for example. But on top of that, they also just launched cryptocurrency trading. That's right, you can now go to BlockFi and you can buy, sell, and trade Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other assets. It's really a big deal because they're offering no-fee trading currently, so go on over and check it out. And then in 2020, you know what's coming. BlockFi is going to announce and launch a credit card

• 1:32Anthony Pompliano?

  that pays your rewards in Bitcoin. No more cash back, no more loyalty points that you don't know what to do with. If you use the credit card that BlockFi is going to launch later this year, you'll get Bitcoin as the reward. Pretty fucking cool. So BlockFi has been a longtime supporter of the Off the Chain podcast. I'm obviously a huge fan and investor, so go to blockfi.com/pomp and check them out. There may even be some discounts and surprises when you head on over to blockfi.com/pomp, wink, wink. The second sponsor is Unstoppable Domains. It's a pretty cool name, Unstoppable Domains. The name actually describes exactly what they do. If you've seen all of the crypto-related content or meta-mass getting removed from the Google Play Store, being taken down from YouTube, etc., now there's A decentralized way to keep and fight back against the censorship that's happening.

• 2:15Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a lot of companies working on this, but one of the companies is Unstoppable Domains. They've created a way for anyone, even those without technical knowledge, to launch their own decentralized website. You can literally go to unstoppabledomains.com and use their .crypto domains to build a decentralized website. That website is then controlled by you and you alone. It's done the same way you control your Bitcoin with your private key. I've got a website up on the decentralized storage and now I'm the only one who could take it down. It allows me to host this podcast, a blog, or whatever else I want on the domain without any worry of censorship. And I've also got pomp.crypto that you can use to get paid. That's right, you can buy a .crypto domain. It's a huge improvement for sending Bitcoin and everyone and every wallet should use it. You can already go to Trust Wallet, Atomic Wallet, and Coinomi right now.

• 2:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Type a .crypto domain into the send field and you can pay someone. Gone are the days of the hex addresses where your heart's thumping before you send Bitcoin because you're scared you're about to send it to the wrong address. You can now use the .crypto domain provided by Unstoppable Domains and easily send money and have confidence you know where it's going. Just like anywhere else on the internet, we know that domains are gonna happen. So go on over to unstoppabledomains.com and get your domain today. Again, that's unstoppabledomains.com and you can stop sending out the long hex addresses every time you want to pay someone. Unstoppabledomains.com Now, a third sponsor today is eToro. These guys are another longtime sponsor of Off the Chain. I'm a huge fan, I'm an investor, and they're probably the most underrated company in all of crypto.

• 3:40Anthony Pompliano?

  They got started launching in Israel and served the outside of the United States with everything from stocks, commodities, traditional currencies, and cryptocurrencies. They've got more than 10 million users, they're bigger than Robinhood internationally. Now, they've come to the US and they've launched, started with cryptocurrencies. That exchange isn't just any old exchange though. They have two pioneered products. First is copy trading and the second is social trading. With social trading, you can go to any page, let's say Bitcoin, and you can see a feed of social content. It's people writing their thoughts, comments, ideas, charts, graphs, any type of information, all about Bitcoin. As you go through that information, from the same page, you can read all of the content and understand what everyone else is saying. And then buy, sell, or trade Bitcoin right from there.

• 4:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Additionally, they have copy trading. So let's see that you find someone on the platform that you think is really impressive. You think they're a great investor or trader, you can select their profile and click and click copy trading. When you do this, eToro will automatically mirror your portfolio to theirs. They buy an asset, you buy the asset. They sell an asset, you sell the asset. So it's pretty cool that now all of a sudden, rather than having to commit all of your capital to a fund, you can simply go on and copy the trader and eToro will automatically help your portfolio mirror theirs. So head on over to etoro.com and sign up for an account. Let me know what you think about the social trading and copy trading feature. You can tweet at me, or even better, you could tweet at eToro and give them a hard time. When you hit etoro.com, let them know that Pom sent you.

• 5:03Anthony Pompliano?

  They really hate getting the customer service ticket saying that you heard about eToro through the Off the Chain podcast and that you love their social trading and copy trading. So head on over to etoro.com. And remember, Off the Chain is not only a podcast, I also write a daily newsletter. You can go to offthechain.substack.com. You'll get the email every single morning in your inbox of me analyzing the news and events of the day. Offthechain.substack.com. All right, let's get into this episode with David. I hope you guys love this one.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pom or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pom as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 5:58Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I have a very, very special treat here. I've got David with me. We've got a whole bunch of stuff to talk about. And I think that this episode is much less crypto-specific and much more, I'm going to extract as much information out of David's brain as I can, because I think that he sees the world very differently than most of you or I, which is both dangerous, but also valuable. So let's see what we can get out of this. Thanks so much for coming to do this.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  Dangerous but valuable. That's my new tagline. I like it. That's the top of my Twitter bio, man.

• 6:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. So, all right. I met David three or four years ago.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 6:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, and, uh, I was telling him earlier that he is one of the few people who I have met, who we had a conversation about what potential paths he could choose in life. Uh, he pretty much already knew what he wanted to do, but he was just, he needed some people just to say, hey, go with your gut. Um, and then he went and actually did what he said he was gonna do. And like, that's a very rare thing in life, because I think a lot of people have kind of dreams and, and goals and things like that, but they don't actually pursue it. Uh, and today, you've got a whole bunch of stuff going on that's pretty cool. So, uh, maybe kind of walk us through childhood and, and kind of where you get to today, and then we'll get into the fun stuff.

• 7:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, we met at a Starbucks that I walk by all the time. I think it's on Third and something like 48th and Third.

• 7:22Anthony Pompliano?

  28th.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  28th and Third in, in New York. And at the time, I was thinking about starting a podcast. I was living in New York at the time, and this would have been 2016. And I would intern in New York back when I was in college, and I would reach out to people and I'd say, hey, wanna get together? And it cold emails, whatever, and people would say, no, get out of here, college kid. And then I would ask other people for an interview, and they would say, here is an entire block of my time. There was one guy, he was the social media manager at Golf Digest. I'm a big passionate golfer. And we ended up doing an interview. I'm in college, and we did it at the old Conde Nast headquarters, looking over Times Square.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Me, 20-year-old kid, was just blown away. And the interview went well. Two weeks later, he invited me out for a trip in San Diego. And it was one of those moments in life where you say, wow, the world can be bigger and grander, and you can actually create opportunities and access for yourself. And then when I moved to New York full-time, I said, hey, I'm gonna start a podcast. And I came to you, trying to say, Bob, wha- what should I be focused on here? How do I think about this? And we had a great conversation.

• 8:35Anthony Pompliano?

  We did. And, uh, You were one of a few that I went through a period of my life where I realized, I don't know, but you know. And so like, do, do what you already know to do, but you're either scared to do, you need to figure out some of the execution details, right? But, but in most of those cases, people already know what they want to do, right? And it's, uh, it's more of what's holding them back from doing it rather than actually, um, you know, hey, I have zero idea of what I want to do, right? Um, and so maybe give us an idea of kind of from that start a podcast, right? You've got rite of passage, um, kind of what was the thought process behind building a lot of the content and the various platforms around writing?

• 9:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the first job that I had out of college, I actually got by skipping class on a Tuesday morning in college, one of those rainy days where it's raining so hard that the water is hitting the ground, jumping up and going back into your shoe. And I said, you know what? I'm not going to go to class. And I wrote a Twitter thread about the future of media. And I really wanted to work for a company called Laundry Service. It was a social media ad agency. They represented companies like Apple, Beats by Dre, Twitter, some of the really cool American brands. And I wrote this thread, CEO reached out to me through Twitter DM and he said, hey, want to work for us? And so I moved up here. This was my first job after college,

• 10:01Speaker 02

  moved up when I was 21 years old. And this was 2016 and one of the taglines for the organization was people are becoming media companies. And the organization was owned by a company called Wasserman Media Group. And this, the CEO was a guy named Casey Wasserman, grandson of Lou Wasserman, one of the big Hollywood names. And so basically what we had was we had an ad agency called Laundry Service, a media company called Cycle, and then we had a talent agency at the top. And our whole pitch to brands, this was actually very futuristic at the time, almost too futuristic, was that you could run an ad buy not through a traditional

• 10:43Speaker 02

  media company, New York Times, Fortune. What you would do is you would run it through- An actual person and you know, an athlete, a celebrity, something like that. And then you could use their reach as distribution. And when I was there, I began to realize it wasn't that people are media companies. It was that people are companies. And it was getting a lot easier to convert that reach into money. And all and then to be able to use your reach to actually build a company. And so I always had this sense and still do that. Reach is absolutely underrated, not necessarily the celebrity kind of reach. But I'm talking more about influence, access to people who are thinking on your wavelength.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  Because it is getting easier and easier to take that audience and build a business around it.

• 11:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's um, I think I've heard you say before, taking your social currency and turning it into financial currency. Right, that's the barrier to that or the friction has drastically been reduced. And we've seen this, obviously, on a number of cases. But there is a difference, and I think what you're highlighting here is the difference between influence and celebrity. Right, and so.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  How would you think about the difference between those two?

• 11:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, they, you know, we were talking about Alex Rodriguez earlier, right? So Alex Rodriguez had celebrity because he was a professional athlete. And the influence that he had as a major league baseball player was he was in a commercial. Right, but Alex didn't have an ability to talk directly to fans, right? He grew up in an era where social media wasn't very popular. It was much more about, I have a PR person, that PR person kind of is the interface with either media companies or any sort of positive or negative press. And so, once he stopped playing, it's very obvious online that he's put a lot of time, effort and thoughtfulness into building those social audiences. Now, he starts with celebrity, but as he builds the social audiences, he's building influence, right? And now he's doing exactly what you're talking about.

• 12:38Anthony Pompliano?

  He's created, you know, baseball bats and shoes and all this thing to then sell through that using his audience. I don't think that you could do that with just celebrity, right? If you don't have the influence, celebrities like awareness, influence is driving action. And I think that that difference is, it sounds somewhat nuanced. But when you go to actually monetize celebrity versus influence, it's way easier and much more profitable to monetize the influence than the celebrity.

• 13:06Speaker 02

  Mm hmm, absolutely. One of the things that I also think people are underestimating is how.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  How much action you can actually drive with a relatively small number of people, as long as those people think that you are unique and differentiated, and they have a similar way of seeing the world, a certain kind of belief structure. And if you can actually attract those people, you know, if you look at the way that the internet is structured, if you go look at any kind of metric, the one metric that we over-index on is page views. So I always think of, okay, what is everybody looking at? And then what is the big, kind of dark, energy in the world that people are actually missing and not able to measure? And the big one, because we look at page views,

• 13:56Speaker 02

  the flip side to that is that we're not able to really measure in precise ways what influence looks like and how strong these shared bonds and connections can be online. I remember back when I was in college, I used to, as my nighttime ritual, watch the Casey Neistat video. Casey Neistat was a YouTuber, had 500,000 YouTube subscribers, and then on his 35th birthday one year, he said, "I am going to make a video every single day." And he did it for something like 550 days in a row.

• 14:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  One of the single biggest sources of inspiration for me. And I had a relationship with Casey that was so deep that I remember sometimes hanging out with people and saying, "How is it that I can see you every single day? We can be in the same kinds of social groups, and yet I know more about what's happening in Casey Neistat's life? I feel a stronger emotional attachment to him, and I moved to New York because I wanted to be like Casey." And that was one of the first moments in my life that I realized that what's called these parasocial relationships could be so strong and so powerful.

• 15:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and I think part of it also is the content that you consume from both of those relationships, right? So if you almost kind of think of one as a virtual relationship, and it's kind of one-directional, right? Like, he's sending you content and your content... Consuming that content, whereas if you and I get together for a coffee or something, it's a bidirectional relationship. We're both sending and receiving information. Well, in that bidirectional relationship, one, you're getting feedback on the content you're sending me, but you're at the same time simultaneously having to consume the content that I'm sending you, right? So it's a little bit more noise in that content consumption. Uh, in the, obviously in the one direction, obviously you're just consuming. But his is also heavily edited, right?

• 15:52Anthony Pompliano?

  So there's a, a bench, there's the ability to tell a story, there's an emotional kind of channel uh, um, and direction that that content is. And so although you might only spend five or 10 minutes with Casey Nesta or, or somebody else today, would do the content they post online, it's very much focused on a specific um, kind of uh, end goal, right, or optimized for something. Versus if you and I get together for coffee, it's unlikely that one, I'm going to be able to kind of live edit the conversation. And two, uh, you don't have as much, uh, kind of, uh, you know, input, output. Um, that, that's a little bit distracting. And so I think that that plays into it a little bit. But also you're choosing to consume Casey's content day after day after day after day.

• 16:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Because obviously you see something that is value there, right? And then I think it's a big, big piece of it.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  It moved me. I mean, to watch somebody who was obviously doing what they wanted to be doing. What Casey Nesta is just a really hits my soul when I talk about him. Because you're looking at somebody who had his first kid when he was in high school. He ran away from home as a high schooler, didn't go to college, was working in New York as a dishwasher. And if you look at some of the work that he was doing in 2004, 2005, some of the stuff that he was doing, even a little bit later, when the first iPhone came out, he was making these videos where rather than pointing the camera outwards as had basically been the entire history of film.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  He had turned and rotated the camera 180 degrees and focused it on himself. And he ended up actually telling these stories about his own life. Long before vlogging was a thing. And the biggest thing I learned about Casey Neistat. And I wonder if this is something that you feel with crypto. Is that you can know that something is the future long before the world actually accepts that it is. And there's a kind of dogged persistence that I really admire from people who have a belief. A definite vision about what the world is going to look like and they show up day after day after day. Even though they get beaten down by the world, told that they can't do it. Even when strife comes and misfortune happens in your life and they keep showing up.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  And I really admire the success that he's had because of that.

• 18:11Anthony Pompliano?

  What I think what you're talking about here is conviction and persistence, right? So the conviction component of it, I don't know Casey's exact story, but I'm sure that Casey didn't feel like he was the only person who saw this. He actually probably was able to find a small group of friends who also believed that, hey, you know, flipping that camera around, vlogging all stuff was going to be a thing. But two is it's not how many people believe it, it's how deep the conviction is, is what I found. Right? So let's say that, you know, 1% of the world's population believes something. Well, if they really, really believe it, I think that that makes it much easier to see, well, eventually everyone else will believe. But if 1% of the world kind of sort of believes it, but you know, tomorrow we may all wake up and go somewhere else and do something else.

• 18:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Eh, a little bit harder to get, uh, you know, kind of your head around like, I'm going to go do this full time and be persistent with it. So I think the level of conviction is really important regardless of the size of the audience. But then that leads to persistence. So if you really, really believe something, then it's much easier to show up day after day after day. And Marty Bent is the name he goes by, but, uh, but Marty said to me, he used to work at Barstool Sports. And I said to him one day, I said, you know, what's the one thing that you learnt? While watching kind of Barstool get built into, at the time they were about a hundred million dollar company. And he said, uh, showing up every day. Right? He's like, look, you know, you're not going to have your best day every day, but just showing up. And, and so many people along the way say, eh, I'm going to go do something else, right? I did this for 20 days, 30 days, I'm going to go do something else.

• 19:38Anthony Pompliano?

  But it's that, that constant persistence, I think that's really valuable. And I think that is something that you're doing, one, kind of on all the content you're creating, but also two. You're now teaching people about writing, right? And, and the writing, the part to me that's so interesting is you've really got this conviction that writing is one of the biggest leveraged things that a human can do in today's world. Like, explain kind of where that came from and why you believe that.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I believe that writing is the biggest source of leverage that is also open to everybody. Anyone with an internet connection who has access to ideas and the time to sit down and put their fingers on glass can actually publish something and reach the world with it. Now, there's a lot more to that. There's strategy and there's tactics. But what I've realized is I have seven months of corporate experience. I have no credentials to my name. I was a B and C student. I graduated from college with a 2.8, from high school with a 2.7. And my whole life has been about...

• 20:44Speaker 02

  I grew up just feeling like I was stupid, like I wasn't gonna go anywhere. And it was because all of the traditional system just didn't work for me. Like, I would go to class, they would tell me to do things, and I can't memorize things. I am not very... extremely stubborn in things that I want to be doing, but I'm not very good at sort of following directions and stuff. And I have some kind of just weird mind where sometimes things like go a little bit too fast and I'm not detail-oriented. And then at other times, like in certain math classes, I was like, "This is going way too fast. I can't do this." And I felt this desperate yearning for the first two decades of my life, of this feeling of perpetual inadequacy.

• 21:28Speaker 02

  And it was through writing that I finally felt like some of the things that had always felt like strengths that I... or weaknesses that I wanted to run away from actually became strengths that I could embrace. And I felt like through this kind of creative outlet, I could publish something and actually think through ideas at a deeper level because words on a page just have infinite patience. What you can actually do is by writing things, you actually become smarter because...

• 21:59Speaker 02

  A lot of the storage that you would almost, the storage of ideas that you would have to hold in your head, you can kind of outsource them to the page and then begin to soak deeper into the ideas that you're thinking about. And so to go back to my writing journey, what was wild to me was to have not had, you know, I was in college in North Carolina and I always felt like I couldn't meet people who I could talk about ideas with. I love ideas. I just, I'm desperate. I have this yearning hunger and thirst for new ideas, new ways of looking at the world. But until I started writing, I wasn't able to meet people who I could share that with.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  And all of a sudden, I would, after years, really, about two years, things began to change a little bit. The first instances of positive feedback was through Twitter, when I would direct message people in New York and I would say, "Oh my goodness, I can meet people that are also interested in ideas." And then as I kept on writing, I had interesting people actually reaching out to me. I've been doing this for three years and I am now able to meet people and work on different projects with people that I never thought I'd be doing this in my life and I'm doing it here at 25.

• 23:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Who's the most interesting person you think you've met?

• 23:17Speaker 02

  Patrick Collison at Stripe.

• 23:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 23:19Speaker 02

  Patrick Collison is an amazing person. He grew up in the Western Ireland and he grew up without a lot of internet connection and he came to America, started a company, I think sold it for four or five million dollars. And then him and his brother, I think he was either at MIT or Harvard, they dropped out again and they started Stripe. And there's a couple of things that I really admire about Stripe. One of the first things that Patrick has done is I think of him almost as an idea archivist. You know, so often we're looking for the next new thing and what I've learned from Patrick is that there's actually a lot of virtue into going back in time and looking at the

• 24:04Speaker 02

  ideas that have been forgotten. One of the ideas that I'm obsessed with- is if you take the difference between the year eighteen twenty and two thousand and twenty. What has happened is we've shifted from a space bias to a time bias. So let me explain what this means. In eighteen twenty, if you wanted to go find a new way of living, a new idea, what would you do? You would try to hop on some kind of boat and you would sail to a faraway place. And you would know that when you got off the ship, you would see a way of living, hear a language, eat foods that you never even imagined. Now, if you try to go travel the world, I always say a lot of travel now is seeing things with our own eyes

• 24:48Speaker 02

  that we've already seen on Instagram. So where do we find the new ideas? Well, social media creates this idea that I call a never ending now. I was in a limo or a kind of a SUV that one of my friends had called. And we were going to some comedy club on Seventeenth and Third in New York. And we were leaving from Tribeca. And the entire car ride, I was watching what was on the phones of the six people in front of me. And every single person consumed either a text message or a story from Instagram or Snapchat. And what I realized was, say, we had twenty people or twenty minutes in that car, six people. So we had about a hundred twenty minutes worth of human attention that was only spent on things that were produced in the last twenty four hours.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  If you had gone back to eighteen twenty to a library, the vast majority of those ideas would have been produced at least a decade before or hundreds of years ago. And now what social media is doing is it is having us much more consuming things that are made in the present. I call this the never ending now. So now the way to find good ideas is to go back in time. You go back and to get back to Patrick Carlson, he's studying the Apollo program. What were they doing differently? He's looking at some of the Silicon Valley movements like Xerox PARC. And he's trying to study, what were the organizational dynamics of this place that actually led to some incredible inventions? And then he's bringing those ideas into the present moment at Stripe.

• 26:17Speaker 02

  And it's one of the reasons that Stripe, you walk in there, it's a special place filled with energy. And I don't know if there's a company in the world that more of my friends want to work for than Stripe.

• 26:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 26:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:30Anthony Pompliano?

  And do you feel like that's because it's the culture, the leadership, accommodation? Like, why do so many people want to work there?

• 26:36Speaker 02

  I think it's the culture. They have an amazing, both writing-heavy and intellectual culture. They have a, yes, they are a payments company, but their grand ambition is to increase what they call the GDP of the internet. And one of the things that you see with Stripe is that it's a very kind place. And I think that that comes from Patrick's Irish background. I was talking, I was going to Ireland a couple of months, and I was talking to a friend, and he said, "You're going to see a level of kindness here in Ireland, a jolly love that is sort of in the ether there." And I actually feel the same thing at Stripe. It's a very Irish place.

• 27:14Anthony Pompliano?

  That's pretty cool. Let's talk about Write a Passage.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 27:17Anthony Pompliano?

  So you created a course that teaches people how to write. And at the top level, or kind of high level, when you hear that, I think a lot of people say, like, "What does that mean?" Right? I took writing in school. I took English class, etc. I want you, before you explain exactly how the course works and kind of what you guys have been able to accomplish so far, tell the origin story, because I think it's pretty cool how this came together.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I was doing some just different consulting projects in New York, and there is a major business opportunity that will exist for the next very many years, which is productized consulting. So let me explain that. So what most consulting has been traditionally is you get hired, you're on retainer or something, and you have some kind of problem that you're very good at solving. You go to the office of that person, and you give the same answer over and over and over again. I was with a friend, he works for one of the big four consulting firms. We were together last week, and I said, "Hey, what do you do for a living?" Like,

• 28:20Speaker 02

  really, what do you do? He said, "Well, I fly to a different city every single week, and I have people answer the same 20 questions about security, and then we have a playbook of things that we do." And so what I was doing was I was helping different people, mostly financial writers, try to build their online websites. And I would say the same things over and over. And I have this obsession with new ideas. So doing the same things over and over again drives me crazy. So I said, you know what? I'm gonna make a course. I had taken a course called Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte, sort of a note-taking app or note-taking system. And that actually changed my life. Phenomenal course.

• 29:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Why change your life?

• 29:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll tell you why. Because the best way to improve your writing is not, this is what everybody does. And this is why people are like Sisyphus, climbing up a hill when it comes to writing. Two steps up, one step back. Is what most people try to do is they look for writing books written by Stephen King and stuff like that. We're gonna go read on writing and then I'm gonna write the next great American novel. And the, the, it doesn't work because really what writing, what at least nonfiction writing is at its deepest atomic level is it is having interesting ideas and actually communicating them in ways that are both insightful and entertaining. You do an amazing job of this, right?

• 29:50Speaker 02

  You have your ideas and you're able to explain them to bigger audiences than most people who are in the crypto world that you run in. And so, once I had all of these notes in my pocket, all of my writer's block disappeared. I was able to actually not have the limitations of my brain be a problem anymore. All of a sudden, I could actually think with the computer and use that to kind of come up with interesting ideas.

• 30:18Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, once you go through that course, did you know that, hey, I wanna create a course? Or was it through other conversations? Like, like, how do you get from, wow, this course was really powerful and really valuable to me to, oh, I have ideas that I wanna create a course for and help others?

• 30:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there, there's one thing that really stuck out. So I was saying the same things to people over and over again. And I sent out a tweet. I said that my goal in 2019 at the time was to help a thousand people start writing. And there was this tsunami of responses. People were direct messaging me. I got hundreds of replies from people saying, I want to do that. And I took a step back and I said, "Well, how do I actually do this in a way that could be somewhat scalable?" Because what's great about scalability is it allows you to invest more in the thing that you can scale.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  So I called Tiago, who's class I had taken. I said, "Hey, let's make this course." Flew down to Mexico in the last week of February 2019. We flew down a film crew from Hollywood and we spent 10 days coming up, designing an entire curriculum for a course, putting it together. And then we have now done a couple of different versions and each one just gets better and better and better because we have a lot of built-in feedback loops and a phenomenal community of people who are some of the most intellectually curious people in the world.

• 31:54Anthony Pompliano?

  And so the part to me that's so interesting about this course, right, is if somebody comes in and says, "Hey, I want to learn how to write," it doesn't matter if they're already writing or they know nothing about writing. You guys have a combination of pre-recorded videos and kind of live classes or support and community. Why add those two components together? Because when I think of online courses, I think of the Coursera's, you know, of the world where somebody went in a room, whether it was one day or it took them, you know, a year. They recorded a bunch of videos, they sequentially put them together. I buy my course, I watch the first video, second video, third video, and by the time I'm done, I've consumed the content that they created.

• 32:37Anthony Pompliano?

  There's no community, there's kind of no live components, there's no ability to ask questions. It's just, again, one-way content consumption. You do it the other way. Why?

• 32:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I want to sort of add one thing to this before I answer that question. And I say that it's an online writing course because it's easy to communicate, but you have an audience that's really going to understand this. What we're really teaching people to do, and writing is the mechanism through which we're doing this, is we're teaching people how to become citizens of the internet. So what does that mean? I believe that the internet is a fundamentally new way of being. It is a new way of thinking about how to connect with people, ideas, and opportunities. And what we don't just do is, we don't just teach people how to write. We teach them how to actually think about what we call a personal monopoly. What are you going to be known for?

• 33:27Speaker 02

  What is the unique combination of skills, personality traits, and stuff that you're going to be known for? How are you going to actually use the internet to actually reach out, connect with anybody as one of our modules? And then, how do you actually build what we call an online home? And the serendipity vehicles for yourself? And use the internet to really advance your career? But now, to answer your question. The big thing that platforms like Skillshare and MasterClass and Coursera get miss is that education and learning is extremely difficult. And when you add in both learning to write and the actual act of writing.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  I mean, if you just think of all this mythology around writing, it's extremely difficult. And when you add in a kind of social community. It's one of the things that traditional education gets absolutely right. When you are with peers, you work harder, you're able to actually push through things more. And the analogy that I've been using is that it's the difference between a self-paced courses of everything is pre-recorded is like a cantilever bridge. I grew up in San Francisco, and during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the Bay Bridge actually collapsed.

• 34:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 34:44Speaker 02

  And that was screwed in with nuts and bolts and stuff like that. And the Golden Gate Bridge, which was a suspension bridge, it could kind of swing. And it would swing whenever the, you know, when the earth was shaking, but it was able to stand up pretty well. And that community is that suspension bridge. Everyone can kind of support each other. And when times get difficult and stuff, the whole community comes together. And so, not only are we teaching people how to write together, but we are producing friendships that would never be created with these self-paced courses.

• 35:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain the personal monopoly thing, because that's a really interesting way to think about kind of expertise or branding, it sounds like, to some degree. What does that mean?

• 35:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, so...

• 35:30Speaker 02

  Peter Thiel, in his book Zero to One, has this very contrarian idea that all successful businesses are based on a monopoly. And I wrote a very long essay where I dove into basically the metaphysics of Thiel's thinking. And one of the things that you see time and again with Thiel is that you want to avoid competition, always. So you want to differentiate yourself. And it's the same thing with what your career is. When I was in college, I remember my senior year of college, I walked into our college job fair. This is one of those big turning points for me. Friday afternoon, and it was a hot day, just wanted to be out, partying, having a good

• 36:15Speaker 02

  time. And I put on a suit, walked into this job fair. And there were all these companies, and you had all of these people walking around with their blue pencils, their red pens, their black notebooks, and then the same tired looks on all their faces. And there were all these companies, but they were basically from the same couple industries, right? There were these management consulting firms, investment banking, all this sort of stuff. You know, we're told, like, the entire top of the pyramid for undergraduate education. You know, in 2007, half of Harvard graduates went into either investment banking or management consulting. So what we have is everyone's sort of going for the same thing.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  And what I say with the personal monopoly is, stop doing that. Go find your own thing, your own unique combination of different personality traits. Say that you're super funny, or say that you really like Star Wars, and then you also really like crypto. Then you kind of combine crypto, Star Wars, and being funny, and you're sort of the one person who has that unique combination of traits. Because once you be into overlap skills, then you're competing with fewer people. But this is where things get really interesting. And this is actually what you, without knowing it, did an exceptional job with. And I've looked at people like you to sort of build out this theory. There's a three-step process.

• 37:37Anthony Pompliano?

  I didn't know I was getting psychoanalyzed today.

• 37:39Speaker 02

  But, but, but, basically, I mean, it's...

• 37:43Speaker 02

  People in crypto have done this over and over again. But what you want to do is you want to pick a small but growing market that is underestimated. So you go pick a market that like crypto, that would be a very small market, but we know it's growing. And all of a sudden, actually not knowing things flips from a disadvantage to an advantage. You have a fresh perspective that the people that you're competing against don't. Then you go, you go learn obsessively about that industry. You read everything you can, you talk to every single person, you watch all the videos. And then you learn all that stuff and you share as much as you can. And over time, you actually begin to attract people based on your own kind of learning.

• 38:23Speaker 02

  And the big thing there, the big flip for people is people wrongly think that you need to be an expert to write about something. No, writing is the way that you learn about the thing that then you become an expert in.

• 38:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, to me, one of the things I enjoy about writing, and I think a lot of others, and I see that you do this as well, is that when you write something and put it out into the world, what you're actually doing is you're eliciting feedback. Right? You're eliciting critiques, you're eliciting agreement, right? It's very much, hey, I wrote this thing. This is what I believe based on the information and facts that I have today, combined with my analysis, opinions, etc. The best part about writing, I write every single morning, is the people who respond.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 39:13Anthony Pompliano?

  And they agree or disagree, right? And to me, the disagreements are the valuable ones because what they do is they say, hey, I saw you said A, B, and C. A and B makes sense to me, C doesn't make sense. Here's three other data points that I would consider. And rather than say C, I would say, you know, X, Y, and Z. And you're like, you know what? Actually, like, maybe I don't fully jump to, you know, your perspective on the world, but you can move me closer to that direction. But you only have one brain, right? I only have one brain. And so when you only have one brain thinking about something, it's much more difficult and it's much less likely you're going to get kind of the right answer than if you have a bunch of people, right? It's, uh, what is the book, Super Forecasters?

• 39:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Where it's basically like the crowd is much better at eliciting kind of the, the correct answer than just one person. And writing, although you're, it's usually one person creating the content, what you're doing is you're throwing it out there for analysis, right? And feedback to a very, very large audience if, if, uh, people are paying attention.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. So one of the things that we have in, it's funny that you say that because I agree so strongly that I think that at, in Rite of Passage, we're at the frontier of thinking about how to elicit feedback. So we have this acronym called CRIBS. C-R-I-B-S. And whenever you are looking into the world, trying to get feedback on your ideas, you evaluate with C-R-I-B-S, CRIBS. You look for things that are confusing, repeated, insightful, boring, or surprising. Those are the five things that basically encompass everything that you say. If something is confusing, you rewrite it. If something is repeated, you delete it. If something is insightful, you talk about it more.

• 40:55Speaker 02

  If something is boring, you delete it or you rewrite it. And if something is surprising, all good writing has a twist, a kind of moment in the middle where something begins to change. And just like a horror movie, you build up that suspense and then you flip it. And that kind of feedback is something that people with online audiences really understand, that you're putting signals out into the world that you earnestly think are accurate. But then at the same time, you are humbled by the fact that the actual wisdom of all the people who read your stuff is, is more intelligent than you are, but you become more intelligent as a result of their responses.

• 41:36Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And I guess one of the things that you're doing, right, is you're giving people a skill, but you're also giving them confidence, right? And What that does is if you believe that every person becomes a media company or a company, it's almost like entrepreneurship training to some degree, right? Because if everyone's gonna be a media company, well, you need the skill. And as you do that, why is that important to society? Right? To me, it's, I think we both agree that, you know, quote-unquote, "media is broken", meaning more of the mainstream media, and we can get into why that is. But why is it important to society that individuals have that voice and have that ability to write and share ideas, etc.?

• 42:14Speaker 02

  Because there are, and I've met a lot of them, a lot of them are my friends, there are some people who are unbelievably intelligent, who just don't share anything. And one of the great tragedies of the last five years is that many of the world's smartest people are no longer sharing their ideas in public.

• 42:34Anthony Pompliano?

  What would be some examples?

• 42:35Speaker 02

  Like Marc Andreessen.

• 42:36Anthony Pompliano?

  That's the first one that came to my mind, too.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  You had Marc Andreessen, tragically, so Marc Andreessen was the guy who got me interested in ideas. Junior year of college, I was following Marc Andreessen. On Twitter. On Twitter, and I had this moment, like, I could either go to my class or I could read Marc Andreessen's thoughts in my pocket. Like, to somebody in rural North Carolina, there, that was magical. I mean, it felt like straight out of a Disney movie. And now, the guy doesn't tweet anything, except for quotes after somebody dies. And it's tragic, but you know that he's in Telegram groups, you know that he's in other groups, speaking privately.

• 43:22Speaker 02

  And I believe that, like, I have a lot of students who worry that it's arrogant if they go start writing. Who am I to start sharing my ideas? Why should people think, or why should people listen to me? And it's kind of this imposter syndrome, this kind of fear, lack of confidence. See it all the time with my students. And what I tell them time and again is it's arrogant for you to do the hard work of learning things and not share it with the world. This world progresses when people share ideas. Look around you. Everything was built by people who came before you and every single thing was somebody's obsession. From the way that the buildings were constructed to the letters on the building in front of

• 44:07Speaker 02

  us, to the actual construction of the glass on the iPhone case. Johnny Ive lived for that. And if you didn't have Johnny Ive, the lead designer at Apple, actually going out and putting in with his own two fingers to actually construct something for the world to behold, it's the same thing with information. It is arrogant to have ideas in your brain that could move the world forward and to not codify them so that the world can benefit.

• 44:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and part of this, I think, is there's a lot of people who think they don't have ideas, right? There's a lot of people who are scared to share the ideas that they do have. And then there's a lot of people who are scared of having ideas, sharing the ideas, and getting negative feedback, right? And none of those three things are, to me at least, are a big enough obstacle to not share the ideas, right? So they're all kind of short-sighted. Why do you think the regular media is somewhat broken? Like what's changed over the last, I don't know, 10, 15 years, right? Where we went from the mainstream media was the say all, be all, kind of the law of the land, if you will, when it came to content, to today, there's a lot of people who would

• 45:17Anthony Pompliano?

  just say, hey, I trust somebody else other than the mainstream media.

• 45:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've thought a lot about this.

• 45:24Anthony Pompliano?

  You've probably thought about it more than anyone I know, so I want to hear your answer.

• 45:27Speaker 02

  I'm obsessed with this question. And I think that a lot of the narrative around media is that the media has given us truth. And I don't think that the media has ever given us truth.

• 45:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, why?

• 45:45Speaker 02

  The media has given us consensus. They're very different things. The best analogy for this is rowers in a boat. So if you look at a boat... And you, say you're in a canoe and you have two or three rowers. Well, everyone can sort of row at their own pace and the boat can kind of move forward. But then there's a kind of critical mass, a speed that you need to go at where all of a sudden, if you look at a boat with 10 people in it, you need a coxswain. You need somebody who says, "Stroke, stroke, stroke." And the media was the coxswain. And so, the goal wasn't, what's more important is for everybody to be aligned than to move at the exact perfect speed, right?

• 46:30Speaker 02

  One sort of oar that gets stuck in the water actually hurts the boat more than not moving at the ultimate edge of the speed. And so, what has now happened is rather than everybody looking up to the pulpit of the New York Times, what we have much more of now is something where, yes, some platforms are higher than others, but you have individuals, people with millions of followers like PewDiePie, who have more reach on YouTube than any brand or corporation. So now what you have is nobody really knows where to look, there's nobody at the front, and it seems like we have this cacophony of noise.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  And as a result, we don't have the same kind of consensus that we had for the majority of the post-World War II era.

• 47:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, this is one of the most fascinating things. So we went and, Joe who's sitting here in the room, and I went and looked at, we compared many of the most popular television shows to the Joe Rogan, just the YouTube channel, right? So not audio. Joe Rogan gets, on average, a million or more views per YouTube video, right? In terms of, if you kind of eyeball, we didn't do, you know, exact math, but if you kind of look.

• 47:49Anthony Pompliano?

  There are very few, if any, TV shows in America that consistently do a million views. Right? And so you look at it and you say, is that also similar to PewDiePie who has, you know, millions of subscribers, millions of views, et cetera? Is that because people are choosing to subscribe because they believe and trust those individuals over the mainstream media? Is it because actually people don't want to pay for the, you know, cable or whatever it is? And so these are on different platforms, so it's a platform advantage? Or is it actually that those individuals are willing to talk about things, going to your idea of consensus? They're willing to talk about ideas that the mainstream media is not willing to talk about, right?

• 48:33Anthony Pompliano?

  You see this with kind of the meme around Epstein didn't kill himself and all this kind of stuff, right? That's not a conversation in the mainstream media for the most part. Is it one of those three? Or is it kind of not one thing and you get a blending of there's a whole bunch of factors and trends coming together and that's why we're seeing the, the kind of degradation of the, you know, media institution or the content that comes out of those institutions?

• 49:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the, what, what you're seeing is there's been a big convergence of tactics that a lot of the mainstream media, there, there's just a ruthless competition for eyeballs. And it's, I understand why journalists who have to get eyeballs have done this, but they have, what they've done is they've adopted a lot of the blogger tactics. The original blogger sphere, sort of to exaggerate this, is something like Gawker. There were sensationalized stories and they were, according to the US government rule on the teal. case, they were invading people's privacy.

• 49:45Speaker 02

  And what you had was a lot of what that was, was now that anyone could share, there was a competition for trying to come up with the most sensational stories. But this has been happening for hundreds of years, going back to yellow journalism in the late 19th century. But we have seen time and again that many of the most sensational stories went out, and it was the bloggers who were first to take advantage. And what you've seen is this kind of convergence. And unfortunately, it has polluted a lot of, a lot of the comments. But I think that there's some other things going on here where if you look and you actually talk to journalists,

• 50:30Speaker 02

  many are scared because they're seeing their friends being laid off. When I, so I was a journalism major in college. So my full intent was to actually go become a journalist. I wanted to go become a television anchor. And I would talk to my friends who would do it. They were getting paid like $28,000 to move to these small markets. And you know what's weird about journalists? Often, at least the ones I knew, they're, they're mostly not paid very well, but they are so smart. Like in college, the journalism majors who I knew were some of the smartest people in my entire class.

• 51:09Speaker 02

  And I, they grew very frustrated by the difference between what they were getting paid and how talented they were. And I don't blame them. A lot of them are resentful. But I worry that that resentment has now filtered into many of the mainstream publications. And I think we're feeling it in our public discourse.

• 51:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so I absolutely agree that, and I'd take a step further, like, part of the failure of the mainstream media has been that journalists who were trained on ethics, process, right, language, all the things that a traditional journalist goes through.

• 51:47Anthony Pompliano?

  They all started masquerading as bloggers, right? Which meant that if you look at what the content they create on Twitter, if you look at the language they use, if you look at the lack of kind of rigid process, right? Even some ethical components we've seen, right? Whether it's Gawker or others, that they get compromised. And part of it is because the incentives drove them there.

• 52:08Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 52:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And I'm talking about more of the financial incentives. So we need to drive clicks. How do we drive clicks? Well, maybe we don't hold exactly to this very rigid process we have. You know, we can kind of skip some, cut corners, etc. But also some of it's the social capital associated with it, right? If you're somebody who has spent four years in college studying journalism, you went to that small market, then you went to a little bit bigger market, a little bit big. And then all of a sudden, you spent 25 years as a journalist and nobody knows who you are. No one reads your stuff compared to the guy who sets up WordPress and just starts firing off, you know, hot takes. And next thing you know, he's got a million people reading everything he writes, right? Or the woman who jumps on, you know, Twitter or Instagram and just starts creating content. And next thing you know, like everyone trusts that person.

• 52:52Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that some of that is social capital envy almost, right? Of like, I have that talent, right? I have this training, I've put the work in, but I don't have the same result. And therefore, is, are they actually questioning the process that they've been following and saying, the world's different now, right? I was trained on one way, but now I need to go do this other thing.

• 53:13Speaker 02

  That's a really good point. And I've never framed it like this, but you just gave me an insight. So when I was in college, we were trained on the ethics of journalism. And we were, I was tested on media law. I was tested on following the AP Style Guide, stuff like that. And now, if you look at what it takes-

• 53:36Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm laughing because I'm thinking, is there a Twitter AP Style?

• 53:38Speaker 02

  There definitely isn't. So now, what it takes to become a successful journalist is much more business savvy of the ability to understand how to sell a subscription, the ability to understand how to actually build an audience. And now, like traditionally, there was a big wall in journalism. Journalism. There were salespeople in the organization and then there were journalists on the other side and there was very little cross pollination between them.

• 54:04Anthony Pompliano?

  And they didn't really like each other.

• 54:05Speaker 02

  And they, right. So now what we've had is journalists. So Bill Bishop, he writes a newsletter about China. I did some back of the envelope math.

• 54:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Cynicism.

• 54:16Speaker 02

  Cynicism.

• 54:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Which is hosted on Substack, which I am a very, very, very big fan of.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  So I did the back of the envelope math and he makes somewhere between a million and 1.2 million dollars per year, based on his subscriptions. That is a damn good living and that is because he's been able to cross the chasm between those two things.

• 54:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and just sorry to interrupt, but he was, for those that don't know, I believe he was a traditional reporter at Axios. And started writing on the side around China and it grew and it grew and it grew when Substack got created, which for those that don't know, Substack is basically a platform that lets you have an email newsletter and you could sell subscriptions against it, right? So people will pay you for it. It got to the point where he said, I, there's no reason for me to be a traditional journalist. I should just go do this full time because he's making, you know, quite a good living. And he jumped and so he literally quit the traditional world to go kind of be his own boss to some degree.

• 55:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, this is a sort of an idea that I haven't really thought through, so let's do it. So I think that there was a kind of redistribution in the old method of journalism where it was very hard for top tier journalists to actually quantify how popular they were. So I guess you could do it with who's speaking at Davos, how many people write letters to the newspaper, but it's very hard to know, for example, that I like David Brooks at the New York Times and I subscribe for that person. So what I think happened is that the really good journalists were paid less than they were worth.

• 56:00Speaker 02

  And they actually almost subsidized the rest of the journalism required.

• 56:06Speaker 02

  acquired to actually fill the newspaper. And so you had all these other journalists who say were making $50,000 a year, roughly what they were worth. But then you had the people at the very top who are bringing in millions of dollars worth of subscriptions, who are maybe only paid $200,000, and I think that they were serially underpaid. And so now what you're seeing is those people, and it's the Bill Bishop's and the Ben Thompson's who write at Strategery that are sort of proving out this theory. And I think it's true that now what we're seeing is those top tier journalists are getting paid what they're worth. And it's funny because we're living in a world right now where journalism is seen as not a good way to make money.

• 56:48Speaker 02

  I predict that by the end of the decade, there'll be hundreds of journalists making millions of dollars per year. And we're going to see the journalism return to a, I hope so, because the world needs it. I hope that then these top people are paid what they're worth.

• 57:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and part of this was, I think that subsidy not only was happening internally, but externally, one of the metrics that people would use to kind of measure who's more popular, how many Twitter followers do you have?

• 57:15Speaker 02

  Hmm, right.

• 57:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And that actually has nothing to do with, you know, writing long form content and Twitter followers. Well, you may be a better writer, but I'm better than you at Twitter, so I have more followers, right? It does not really kind of a one to one comparison. So the world's weird, right? When you start getting into financial incentives and social capital incentives, I think it can get kind of out of hand. And frankly, that's what we're seeing now with Twitter also, right? Is how many of those traditional journalists are firing off the hot takes, right? And now we're actually seeing, you know, one of the recent stories is there was a CEO in New York, Away is the name of the company where they make luggage. And basically, there was an article written in a traditional outlet.

• 57:58Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a bunch of outrage on Twitter, which just Twitter, you know, has that outrage culture and can kind of fuel that. The CEO decided to step down. And then a couple of weeks later, the CEO said, wait, we kind of overreacted to the Twitter mob. And now I'm going to step back in. They'd already hired another CEO, so now we're going to be co-CEOs. All of that, I don't know what's true, what's not true, what's right, what's wrong, etc. But the fact that the Twitter mob became blamed, you know, they were blamed for overreaction. I think there's a lot of people are sitting there saying, wait a minute. Are there now going to be situations where when that Twitter mob comes calling for somebody or the cancel culture, etc. People just say, look, we're gonna wait, right? We're gonna, we're gonna kind of let the dust settle and see what the facts are.

• 58:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Which is what journalism used to be, right? You didn't actually have to just, who's the first one to fire off a tweet? It was, let me go talk to sources, let me get information, let me confirm facts. And then tomorrow's newspaper, I can kind of lay it out in a very kind of well thought out way. Twitter kind of ruins some of that, but it feels like there's this undertone of people saying, you know, maybe, maybe being patient is actually a good thing in some of these scenarios.

• 59:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, look at The New Yorker. The New Yorker used to, the editor used to just give people, hey, here's six months, here's, here's a year. Go explore what you want, dive super deep into it, and then come back to me. And sometimes those absolutely, say those above average stories weren't run because there were great stories that got ahead of them. And now we don't have that. Now, there's too much of the media is trying to just produce more, more, more, more, more. Hey, there's zero marginal cost of a new article, there's infinite shelf space, we don't have to deal with this. The New York Times famous slogan was all, all the news that's fit to print. It, it, it implies scarcity, implies constraint. Now, hey, new article, free to do, let's just get more traffic.

• 59:45Speaker 02

  I had a conversation with a reporter at one of the big three media companies in New York. And they told me, I cannot believe they said this. Sometimes it is my job to write faster than I can think. I, I have to write some days between five and seven articles a day. I'm exhausted and it frustrates me that page views is the biggest thing I'm evaluated on. If that sentence, that idea, doesn't capture the essence of what media is right now, I don't know what does.

• 1:00:26Anthony Pompliano?

  It makes sense because that's what the incentives are, right? Like, okay, you need page views because you need to sell ads. What's the downside of kind of the subscription economy and the "I pay directly you for content", right? But I don't get it if I don't pay?

• 1:00:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's that information that's free liberates so many people. Information is something that you use to learn about the world. It gives you access to things you wouldn't have access to. Look at me, I was a college kid in North Carolina. The reason that I was given access to ideas and information is because of Twitter's ad-supported model, because of Facebook's ad-supported model. So we love to hate on advertising. Advertising is the death of democracy. And, look, I've read "Attention Merchants" by Tim Wu. I agree, there's a lot of bad things with advertising.

• 1:01:24Speaker 02

  But at the same time, if advertising doesn't democratize information, I don't know what does. I've spoken to countless people in other parts of the world who have been able to start their learning journey because information is free. And advertising is important because it gives information to people who don't have the means to pay for it.

• 1:01:51Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. You said earlier that you think by the end of the decade, there will be a bunch of reporters who are making millions of dollars a year. I don't think that you are wrong, but I know that another thing that you believe is that we will start to see teenage billionaires. Explain kind of how you get to that and how you see that playing out. Because that's probably, to me, one of the more controversial thoughts that you have. But controversial for those who haven't critically thought about this stuff. I'm in the camp of I think you're much more right than wrong that that's going to start happening.

• 1:02:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's...

• 1:02:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, I would put money on the fact that it happens.

• 1:02:32Speaker 02

  I would put money that there will be a billionaire teenager by 2030.

• 1:02:36Anthony Pompliano?

  How old is Kylie Jenner? Do we know?

• 1:02:41Speaker 02

  I don't know, but if somebody wants to-

• 1:02:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Joe, what do we got, man?

• 1:02:44Speaker 02

  Go for it. But if someone wants to say that doesn't count, that's fine.

• 1:02:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so Kylie doesn't count.

• 1:02:49Speaker 02

  Structure the parameters of this saying you need to start with some net worth below whatever, right? So like, you can't-

• 1:02:57Anthony Pompliano?

  You can't be rich and famous, basically, during your childhood because of family inheritance, whatever.

• 1:03:07Speaker 02

  Twenty-one years old.

• 1:03:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Twenty-one, so she wasn't a teenager.

• 1:03:09Speaker 02

  So, basically, what's happening right now is it is getting easier and easier to start a big company with just your computer, and you have kids who have access to computers, and they're able to do some, create tremendous wealth for themselves. And what I've seen, so I've seen a couple little points here. So WhatsApp, when it sold to Facebook for, I think, nineteen billion dollars, had only fifty-five engineers. Something like that. I just had, so one of my very good friends named Annie McCoon,

• 1:03:48Speaker 02

  he just sold a company to Squarespace at twenty-four that he started. The actual acquisition price isn't out, but they had twenty-five million users, I think two million who were paying twenty dollars a year subscription. So they were making pretty solid money. And he was building, he built Earth, the Instagram handle, which has 1.5 million followers. He started that when he was in high school. And he didn't go to college, and he built millions of dollars of wealth in eighteen months. My point being, you're seeing the early signs of tremendous wealth being created by younger and younger people, and you can all-

• 1:04:35Speaker 02

  Basically, you could almost build a billion dollar company from the phone in your pocket. And then there are probably some things that you would need a keyboard to do. The fact of the matter is, you no longer need to go buy a big factory. You no longer need to go manufacture airplanes, get an energy plant. Kids have tools and technology. And what you have is this weird inversion. Take the legal profession. Who are the best lawyers? Well, we say the best lawyers are the people who have done the most schooling. They went to law school, they went to Harvard, they worked, whatever. And our Supreme Court justices are quite old. And so we say the older you are, the more educated you are, the better of a lawyer you're gonna be. Technology kind of inverts that paradigm in some ways.

• 1:05:19Speaker 02

  Where who is the best at making TikTok videos? It is not Auntie Sue at the Thanksgiving table, right?

• 1:05:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Or the Supreme Court Justice.

• 1:05:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:05:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Although, I'll throw an interesting fact out. Uh, I'm a big fan of, uh, in our building, they have, uh, TVs in the elevator. And they always throw these, uh, weird facts out. And so people probably heard me talk before. Uh, the first time I started paying attention was I read that dogs can get sunburn.

• 1:05:43Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:05:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Didn't know that, right?

• 1:05:45Speaker 02

  Didn't know that?

• 1:05:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:05:47Speaker 02

  Different kinds of dogs, different levels of sunburned?

• 1:05:49Anthony Pompliano?

  All it said was dogs can get sunburned. Did you know? I was like, I did not know that.

• 1:05:53Speaker 02

  Golden Retriever.

• 1:05:55Anthony Pompliano?

  What I saw today was, uh, Justice John Roberts, I think is the name of Supreme Court Justice. Uh, in, uh, some either proceeding or writing, uh, used the phrase okay boomer in an age discrimination case. And so we might be careful that the, uh, the Supreme Court justices aren't on TikTok soon.

• 1:06:14Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:06:14Anthony Pompliano?

  But like, continue with your point.

• 1:06:15Speaker 02

  Well, my point is that young people, technology inverts the law paradigm. Meaning that for certain skills, actually being young is an advantage. And if there isn't a teenage billionaire by the end of the decade, there will absolutely be a teenager who's worth hundreds of millions of dollars. So how about Vitalik? So Vitalik, what was he worth at peak Ethereum?

• 1:06:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, I don't know. A lot, at least hundreds of millions for sure.

• 1:06:43Speaker 02

  So that's not that far. I mean, he started that when he was a teenager, right?

• 1:06:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, I think he might've, again, been young twenties.

• 1:06:50Speaker 02

  Young twenties.

• 1:06:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Joe will tell us here in a second. So yeah, he's worth low hundreds of millions, low nine figures. When did he start Ethereum? 2014, so just maybe look at what his age is now.

• 1:07:02Speaker 02

  My point is, no matter how old he is, we're now just

• 1:07:05Anthony Pompliano?

  He's much younger.

• 1:07:05Speaker 02

  Like a standard deviation. This isn't like some radical paradigm shift.

• 1:07:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:13Anthony Pompliano?

  So yeah, so he was either late teenage, 18, 19, or into his 20 years. Now, you talk about this inversion, another inversion that I think is playing into this and actually gives me more confidence. Historically, what companies have done and entrepreneurs is they build a product. They build the company and then they go build distribution, right? So what's our product? Okay, who do we want to sell it to? And it's very sequential in that. Now, what we're seeing, Kylie's a great example, right, and others, is no, no, no, I'm gonna go build the distribution and then I'm gonna build the product, right? If you think about it, if you had to choose, you would absolutely want to build the distribution before the product, right? Because it is much higher percentage chance of success.

• 1:07:56Anthony Pompliano?

  If you get the distribution, the product is kind of, not actually an afterthought, but there's a high probability you can get a big audience to buy something. The reverse is not true. A lot of people build products, they never get sales because they can't get distribution down. And so the phone, right, or the technologies that these young kids are using, they're actually building the distribution, whether they realize they're doing it or not, because they're building audiences. Those audiences give them influence. And so there's this massive shift underway of like how some of these companies get built that I think plays very nicely into this trend of like, there's gonna be teenage billionaires.

• 1:08:30Speaker 02

  Totally. I mean, this has been the subtle thread through what I've done is I didn't know what company I wanted to start. And if you don't know what company you want to start, the best thing to do is start writing online. So I'm obsessed with this idea where, so I'm gonna go a little bit macro, where the American dream is not what it used to be. If you go Raj Chetty, he's an economist at Harvard, if you go on his website, Opportunity Insights. He's going to win a Nobel Prize, another prediction. What you see is a downward sloping curve from the northwest to the southeast. And the curve is the percentage of kids who made more money than their parents.

• 1:09:15Anthony Pompliano?

  From the northwest to the southeast.

• 1:09:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's going from the top left of the curve to the bottom right, or of the graph. And what you see is it's getting harder and harder for kids, millennials, people like me, to follow the traditional path and have it be successful for them. We're seeing what I call credential inflation, where you have all these people who are 30 years old, they have, say, three credentials, they have a bachelor's, a master's, and a PhD, and they can't find a job. And they're $100,000 in debt. I mean, it's tragic, you know? And so what I think is, also, we're seeing a collapse in the startup formation rates for America. There's all this attention on Silicon Valley, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google. We're in the golden age of entrepreneurship.

• 1:10:00Speaker 02

  Well, actually, the data shows the startup rates in entrepreneurship are also going way down.

• 1:10:07Anthony Pompliano?

  The number of companies being started, or the success of them?

• 1:10:09Speaker 02

  The number of companies started.

• 1:10:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting.

• 1:10:12Speaker 02

  Are going way down. And so across many different axes, American dynamism is falling. And the American dream, I think, is to be able to have financial freedom and to rise up so you can buy a house and live a good life. And so what I increasingly think is that the new American dream is that it is getting easier and easier to start companies because you can now build these audiences. You couldn't really do that 20 years ago. And you can use plug-and-play software, like Teachable. So for the, for Red of Passage, we, we use Teachable, we use Zoom, and I use ConvertKit to send my emails. These are amazing pieces of software. I don't pay very much for them.

• 1:10:56Speaker 02

  And I can do plug-and-play. I don't know how to code, and I have a software-enabled business. How crazy is that? So it's getting easier and easier to start these companies. I, early in my career, was terrible. Terrified terrified of automation, which is actually what led me to that personal monopoly idea. I knew that if I had a skill that could be retrained whoop by that's a Southeast Asia skill. It's going to be run by somebody in India, Vietnam, or Indonesia, or it's going to be automated by robots. So I tried to build a skill that couldn't be. But the flip side of global competition for jobs is also global opportunity for customers. So what you can do is you can build this kind of global audience.

• 1:11:37Speaker 02

  Then for your product, you now sell to that global audience. And what I think is basically what I want to do eventually with rite of passage is I want people. I have built an audience that's done rite of passage is fantastic. Now I want to help people build a product. How do we do that scalably? And then how do we actually scale up those businesses? And I just want to take tens, hundreds of people every year, get them to $200,000 in money that they make. Once you hit $200,000, you can support a family and it's your business. You have full freedom. You don't have a lot of employees with these software companies. And I'm just obsessed with how do I give that to thousands of people?

• 1:12:19Anthony Pompliano?

  So you hit on one of the ideas that I used to not tell people this because I felt like it was kind of the Peter Thiel. Like it was a secret I knew that others either didn't agree with.

• 1:12:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Automation, while it crushes the repetitive, kind of somewhat intellectually non-stimulating jobs. It actually makes one skill very, very valuable. That's creativity.

• 1:12:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:12:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And so the more that the machines can do the monotonous work, actually there's going to be this premium placed on creativity. And so if you think about creativity exists today and there's going to get a premium. Is it that the like the, the price or the value of creativity increases? Or is it actually that today we under price the creativity and it's merely going to expose the true value of the creativity? Right? Like you can either say it's undervalued or hey, it's correctly valued today, but over time it will increase. Either way, it becomes more valuable than we look at it today, which I think is a really important thing for people to understand as they think about that skill development.

• 1:13:22Speaker 02

  Right? Exactly. So I would, the way that I would phrase it is that. You have more leverage on your creativity. So if I write a Howard Marks, when he started at Oaktree, he would write a memo, a letter. Well, he actually sent that letter to people. He would put it in the mail and he would put stamps on it and it would go out to all of his investors.

• 1:13:46Anthony Pompliano?

  I've read every single one of them. I think he started in 1972 and they are fantastic.

• 1:13:50Speaker 02

  They are phenomenal.

• 1:13:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Timeless information.

• 1:13:53Speaker 02

  And how do you read them now?

• 1:13:54Anthony Pompliano?

  On the computer.

• 1:13:55Speaker 02

  You go on the computer, right? So he presses publish and now voila, he doesn't have to do that work. So you have more leverage on your creativity because when he presses publish and you go on, that website might be hosted on Amazon Web Services, which has robots running automatically to keep that AWS machine and that website going. So he has automation working for him already. And creatives are now able to capture value from their work in ways that they didn't used to be. I've become decent friends with a French artist named Alora. Big fan of her work. She does these kind of hyper-realistic photographs, which then she touches up of Japan.

• 1:14:40Speaker 02

  And she, her background is in video game design. She's like 24 years old. And I started buying her art. I just thought it was amazing. And she was, grew up in rural France, was living in Japan at the time. And now she makes enough money that that's what she does. Because she goes and she goes on Society 6 and she sells her paintings. So my point here is that Howard Marks, he can with, he just has more leverage when he presses publish. That can reach anyone with an internet connection 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And then my friend Alora, she's now able to sell her art. She doesn't need to move to New York and go to Sotheby's and start selling her art and whatever, or go to Chelsea, to the art galleries.

• 1:15:24Speaker 02

  She doesn't need to go through these institutional gatekeepers anymore. She can go on the internet, build her Twitter following. She's crushing it and I love it.

• 1:15:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's really crazy how the distribution channels have drastically changed. And I think a lot about globalization, right? So part of even 10 years ago, right? So 2010.

• 1:15:49Anthony Pompliano?

  The connectivity wasn't there, right? So if you think of most companies, technology companies, they got built, you know, starting in the United States, they had to penetrate the US market, and then it was a big boardroom decision, "Let's do international expansion in 2012." Well, you could only expand as far as the internet was, right? There was a lot of countries, a lot of populations, that they just didn't have internet access, they didn't have devices, right? Now, for the most part, you see a lot of more internet coverage, right? I don't know the latest numbers, but there's billions of people who are connected to the internet, who have devices, etc. And so, when you start a company, right? Things like Stripe, things like Shopify, things like Teachable, you know, all that stuff, you can have a global business on day one, right?

• 1:16:29Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think that that is so, so powerful, but it goes back to another trend that we see in technology, which is, I don't think that the whole, like, "I want to build a venture-backed software company that's either a billion-dollar company or zero," is going to be as sexy as, "I want to build a business that can provide me a living, and I actually want less employees, I want profitability, and I want kind of control." And those two things are very different paths to pursue, you know, kind of different strokes for different folks, but I do see a resurgence in that idea of, "I want to build a kind of personal business," very similar to what we saw before the internet existed, with small businesses, right?

• 1:17:14Anthony Pompliano?

  People wanted to build businesses that served their community. Well, now that community isn't geographically based, it's kind of interest-based to some degree.

• 1:17:20Speaker 02

  Absolutely. We had, in our third cohort of Rite of Passage, six months after it started, 196 students from 28 countries.

• 1:17:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 1:17:29Speaker 02

  28 different countries of students. We had a guy named Dozy, who would stay up in Nigeria. 3:00 AM, he would show up to the live sessions. One of my best students, Anna Fabrega, she was in Panama, she would show up. We had a guy named Victor in the Ukraine, and we would all come together to talk about writing.

• 1:17:48Anthony Pompliano?

  And that's pretty cool.

• 1:17:50Speaker 02

  It's, it's, it's, it's, it's just amazing to watch us all come together, and how global this thing already is. And to your point about...

• 1:18:03Speaker 02

  About the globalization is one of the big constraints now isn't internet access for me, it's time zones where I can't have more students because a lot of students want to be there for the live sessions, but still, my second biggest market is India. I have so many Indian students and I love them because they're consistently the hardest working people in my course. And the big thing for us is what do we do with time zones? And time zones are actually going to be one of the constraints on this new global economy.

• 1:18:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What are some other trends that you're super excited about? Kind of an intersection of media and technology, influence and kind of business building, writing, etc.?

• 1:18:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that I'm going to just phrase this a little bit differently. One of the things that I've been thinking a lot about, this is a bit tangential, but just cities. There's been a lot of the economic, so I'll talk about the economic consensus where I agree with it and where sort of their big blind spot. So I have this idea called the merry-go-round, that cities are a literal merry-go-round. What is a merry-go-round? It spins, it spins, it's kind of a party, there's all these horses and weird people and, and, and there's sort of themes, there's music, it's sort of a party and then you're off the merry-go-round, you're like, whoa, I want to be on that thing, right? And I actually think cities are very similar, where what's happening is the economic returns to being

• 1:19:29Speaker 02

  in cities are increasing. I think that 50%, this was an Axios idea, 50% of American growth last year came from something like the top five or 25 American cities. So basically, the main point here is that the, the quote that the reporter uses is, "Success in America increasingly hinges on one variable, where you live." And so I think that I spent, I wanted to really spend some time in America, so I spent 18 days in Michigan last summer. And I saw a lot of factory towns that had been hollowed out. And I went to Michigan because I saw a stat that like in 1950, five of the 10

• 1:20:12Speaker 02

  wealthiest cities in America were in the state of Michigan. Now, none of the top ten are.

• 1:20:18Anthony Pompliano?

  And that's from like car manufacturing.

• 1:20:20Speaker 02

  Exactly. In, uh, in early World War II, um, this stat is a little bit disputed, so take it with a grain of salt. But the Detroit economy had a bigger economy than every single country in the world, except for something like France, Russia, and Britain. Like, everything except for three or four countries. Detroit was a hotbed of economic opportunity. And we're still seeing the same thing, where you move to New York and San Francisco, there's so much opportunity here. There's this dynamism, but we're not building new housing. The transportation is awful. Our infrastructure is crumbling. We build the Second Avenue subway, the new Q line, it costs $2 billion a mile.

• 1:21:01Speaker 02

  I mean, come on, you can't get to, I, I, I was looking, it was cheaper to get to JFK by helicopter than by Uber? Because the traffic is so bad. So we have, what's happening here is we're not allowing more people to move to cities. So you're seeing this increase in pricing. And to go back to the merry-go-round metaphor, it's spinning faster and faster. So it's becoming this sort of club for people who have access and opportunity. But it's getting harder and harder to get on. And so, what though the economists are missing is cities, while they're good for economic opportunity, are not good for community. I have felt at times, especially my first two years in New York, tremendous bouts of loneliness. It was really hard for me to meet people.

• 1:21:46Speaker 02

  I still, in order to go hang out with friends, then I'd have to take 40 minutes subway. And it's bizarre how you can walk down Fifth Avenue at 6:30 at night and you have thousands of people that you're looking at, and yet somehow you feel like you are in your own echo chamber, like a London phone booth that you're just trapped in, and that you can't actually talk to any of those people. And my worry is that cities are places without community. And that economists, by telling people to move to cities, we devalue rural life. We de-

• 1:22:22Speaker 02

  We value the social institutions that have kept them so strong as communities for so many years. And the ultimate question that I have is how can we create cities that are big enough to give people economic opportunity, but small enough to give people love and people in their lives that touch their heart?

• 1:22:43Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the stats I saw recently, there's been two articles in the New York Times that have been written about housing in New York City. And it's specifically touching on luxury condos. So from 2010 to 2020, or 2019, really, there's this big boom in construction, right? And between 2010 and 2015, there was massive sell-through. Meaning that they built apartments or luxury condos, they sold out of inventory. What does that mean? Build more, build more, build more. And there was this kind of really big push. Now, obviously, you don't snap your fingers and build a building. So there's some kind of lag between we need more housing, let's build the housing. Where are we going to build it? What's the design? Construction, okay, now you can buy it.

• 1:23:29Anthony Pompliano?

  What percentage of luxury condos that have come onto the market in Manhattan since 2015 do you think have been sold?

• 1:23:39Speaker 02

  Thirty-four.

• 1:23:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, fifty.

• 1:23:42Speaker 02

  Fifty.

• 1:23:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Fifty percent have been unsold. Part of that is foreign dollars aren't flowing.

• 1:23:49Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:23:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Kind of as well as they used to flow. Two is the cost, right? And three is a lot of the sentiment that you're talking about where other areas right outside of the island of Manhattan have become more popular. Brooklyn, etc. have kind of pulled people away. The other article I read is they were trying to estimate, and there wasn't really kind of a clear answer, how many apartments that are above, I forget the cutoff of the floor, are empty in New York City? And it's, again, Material double-digit percentages are not even unsold, so meaning that hey, you can come buy it, but unrented as well.

• 1:24:30Anthony Pompliano?

  And so the whole idea was you've built all of this stuff by projecting demand, but the demand's not there. And so if you understand economics, it's either what you built isn't good, so supply issue, right? Or there's too much supply, or the pricing is wrong, right? There's a mismatch of the supply and demand. That stuff moves in cycles. But one of the buildings that they talked about, and I won't say what it is, because frankly, I don't know enough about it, but this one building, it was like 40% has been sold, right? This luxury building built two years ago. And so I was reading through the article and it said they've now started to do rent to own. So they want to sell, nobody wants to buy, so they'll do rent to own.

• 1:25:15Anthony Pompliano?

  You basically can go in and rent for a year, they contribute that towards the purchase price, and then you can buy it. And so I said, that's interesting. I've never heard of a luxury building doing rent to own in New York. So I went into the website. The available units started at $4 million and went up to $7 million. And I was sitting there and saying, no wonder you're not selling any. Who is going to buy a, you know, 1,200 square foot unit for $7 million? I don't care what the view is, I don't care what floor you're on, you know, all this kind of stuff. And what ends up happening is kind of that feeling of the London phone booth, right? How many people are actually seeking the community and other aspects of where they live?

• 1:25:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Then just, I got a really nice place with a nice view and I'm willing to pay, you know, $7 million for it, right? I mean, that's asinine for 99.9% of people in the world to think about. But that is a problem in one of the most prosperous cities in the world.

• 1:26:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I have two comments on that. So the first one is, how many people live in cities? And they look at suburbs and they say, I don't like the suburbs because you don't know your neighbors. You basically live in your own enclosed environment and...

• 1:26:27Speaker 02

  You just live in this place that feels modern and kind of without character. The funny thing is a lot of these tall new buildings have the exact same character.

• 1:26:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely.

• 1:26:37Speaker 02

  People get in the elevator, they don't even know their doorman. The places have no character. I just find it funny that now we're actually importing suburbs into the sky of cities. But, and this is gonna be a little bit complicated, but I think it's worth it because it's so interesting. But I think that we have these very, so I was looking at the San Francisco housing market. And what you're seeing is you're seeing more poor people and more wealthy people. And the middle of the market is being driven out. So basically, the middle class in San Francisco is going away. And part of it is that for a lot of high-rise buildings, what ends up happening is they get subsidies to build low-income housing.

• 1:27:18Speaker 02

  And it is so expensive, the construction costs are so high, and the regulatory environment is so, what Patrick Carlson calls, "the promiscuous distribution of veto power," which I think is an amazing term. But what you have is it is so hard to build now that unless something is at the high end of the market, you can't actually return the money and the investment that you spend. So then what you have is at the high end of the market, you have all of this unused supply. Whereas at the middle end of the market, if you actually look for an apartment in New York, it is so competitive. Like, you find an apartment, boom, gotta get on that. And I was talking to my real estate agent about this, and he said that something kind of flips at around 4,000 per month,

• 1:27:59Speaker 02

  where basically, there's a lot of liquidity, especially like under 3,500 per month. And then you get up and all of a sudden, the entire market changes, and you get into some of the dynamics that you were talking about.

• 1:28:11Anthony Pompliano?

  It's crazy, right? And the part to me that, and this gets into some of the crypto stuff, right? Five years ago, I didn't understand a lot of the macro economy, the systems, etc. And as you kind of learn about it, what you find is it's all structural, right? And the two components are, there's a lack of financial literacy. People don't understand how money works and what to do with their money. And the second is the way that the is set up right and kind of the the inflationary nature of it and what is inflation inflation is I'm going to debase your currency so it's literally going to get less and less valuable every day

• 1:28:49Anthony Pompliano?

  but if you think about it 50% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck they have no investments right they store 100% of their wealth in cash and they believe quote-unquote saving is the way that you build wealth the problem with that is that saving is simply you're putting your wealth into a currency that is being devalued away so rather than have any sort of rate of return which you're seeing is actually a negative rate of return right and I think that that lack of financial literacy combined with kind of the structural component right there's positives to inflation as well they want to they want to incentivize economic activity right and consumption and all stuff

• 1:29:29Anthony Pompliano?

  but if people don't understand it what ends up happening is they've been told their whole lives save instead there's a combination of you should save us some right some some level but you should also invest right and I think that there's a gentleman Murad Mahavish I don't know if you've come across him but Murad was the first one to talk about this with me which is we ask anyone of any profession a teacher a firefighter you know whatever to be good at their job and to also be a professional investor that's how you protect your wealth in America right is you've got to understand what you do for a living how you make income but then you also have to understand how to invest and investing can be you're actively managing something you're investing in passive vehicles or maybe you go and hire a professional right

• 1:30:14Anthony Pompliano?

  but if you don't do that you can't protect your wealth or you can't grow your wealth and so it becomes this really interesting kind of structural psychological sociological geopolitical issue that that's where the middle class goes right they get pushed one way or the other and to me I always just chalk it up to it's the people who understand the rules of the game the people who know the rules they actually usually tend to thrive because they understand how to play but the people who don't understand the rules they have this sense of I can never get ahead I'm always behind I can't get ahead I can't get ahead and I think that's really where you see that feeding into how housing is built how societies and cities and all this stuff comes together

• 1:30:55Anthony Pompliano?

  the hope is that crypto can in some form or fashion right depending on who you talk to can change that or influence that to kind of improve the world right Alright, he's gotta go in five minutes. So I got one question for you. You are friends with many people who are very educated and enthusiastic in the Bitcoin and crypto world. Give us an overview of what you know in terms of, and then what your view is as a quote-unquote outsider. So someone who doesn't spend all day on this.

• 1:31:25Speaker 02

  Well, let me just talk by my actions. I am super bullish on Bitcoin. I fundamentally believe that Bitcoin is going to be a very transformative part of the next 30 years.

• 1:31:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 1:31:38Speaker 02

  Because of what you're talking about with inflation. I think a lot of people don't want to trust any government with their currency. And a lot of people in other countries outside of America think that, like for example, people in China. What I hear about the Chinese economy is that that currency is sort of on quicksand. And I think a lot of people feel that way. A lot of, for example, apartments here that we were talking about. People are trying to get their money out of China, out of parts of Europe, parts of Russia. And they're trying to get their money into big apartments here. And that's why some of the prices of New York real estate has been inflated.

• 1:32:22Speaker 02

  And then at the same time, I know, I've had two people come to the top of my mind this week who said, "America's doomed." And so you've had the American currency, which has basically run the world since the Bretton Woods Conference after World War II. And people no longer have that same trust, right? It's just like what you're talking about. I think a lot of wealthy people, they're not happy about taxes in America. And you have different movements like seasteading and stuff like that. Or people trying to move to other parts of the world where their taxes aren't as high. And then you have people at, who maybe aren't making as much money, who feel screwed by the system. You have Cantillon effects, right?

• 1:33:06Speaker 02

  You have inflation pumping to the economy and it's going to people at the top before it's going to people at the bottom. That's a rigged system for people who know the rules. And so to get back to me, I believe all those things and yet I don't own Bitcoin.

• 1:33:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 1:33:20Speaker 02

  Because I don't want to go on Coinbase and pay the fees. I want to do it right with one of the crypto wallets, you know, where I sprinkle nail polish on it and all that thing. And I just like, I just don't, I mean, part of it too, is I fundamentally am so bullish and believe so much in rite of passage. That I think that the rate of return that I can get on investing in my business is higher. But also, any real rational calculus here would say, dude, put one or 2% of your money in Bitcoin. And I just haven't done it, even though I am surrounded by crypto.

• 1:33:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Because you think it's hard to do?

• 1:33:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's hard to do, it's confusing, what if I lose the key?

• 1:34:02Speaker 02

  I don't know, I mean, it's just like, it's kind of scary buying Bitcoin. It's like, am I doing this right? It still kind of feels like this new future thing that might not be legit, even though I believe in it. It's funny, it's like, it's always weird when you have these, these, these weird cognitive dissonances. Where I have like theoretically, I really believe in Bitcoin, but obviously I have some kind of aversion to it. Oh, this is big too. I, my family would think that's so crazy. And, and so it would turn into such a, what are you doing with your money conversation? And as a result, I just haven't bought Bitcoin. I intend to change that and it kind of bothers me, but that's why.

• 1:34:45Anthony Pompliano?

  I love that view though, you're super rational about why you don't own it. Like you, you believe, but you just are like, hey, it's hard.

• 1:34:51Speaker 02

  I, I just know crypto is the future. Like I just believe in it so, or at least Bitcoin, like I really believe in Bitcoin and.

• 1:34:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Between me and Arjun, we're going to get you, we're going to get you hooked up. All right, before I let you go, what, what is the, what's the most important book you've ever read?

• 1:35:06Speaker 02

  Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan.

• 1:35:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 1:35:08Speaker 02

  So Marshall McLuhan was a, remember I was talking about the space and time bias? So Marshall McLuhan was a media theorist who wrote in the 1960s. And don't actually read the book. Listen to his interviews. He actually did an interview on, with Playboy magazine, which is the very best Marshall McLuhan interview. And then YouTube, Terrence McKenna, 53 minute breakdown of Marshall McLuhan's ideas. They absolutely transformed how I saw about the, how I looked at the world. Because what the book is called is, his most famous book is called Understanding Media. But he didn't define media as the media that we were talking about. He defined media as technology, things that actually mediate our senses.

• 1:35:53Speaker 02

  So for example, the wheel as an extension of the, of the foot, a hammer as an extension of the hand. And he went all the way back in time, going back to the invention of language and stuff, and looked at what are the systematic things that happen when a new technology comes into society? And what happens is you get this big speed up, a big acceleration, and then you get a flip, an inversion, which is why I use that word all the time, where we go back and we retrieve the old. And what Marshall McLuhan has shown me is that what's happening right now isn't entirely new, and has given me a framework for understanding shifts in technology that then I've been

• 1:36:31Speaker 02

  able to apply, so that I can have a modicum of calmness in a vortex of fear and anger.

• 1:36:40Anthony Pompliano?

  We're, we're ending right there. You're a fucking legend, man.

• 1:36:42Speaker 02

  Boom, boom!

• 1:36:43Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, listen, thank you so much for coming to do this. Where can people find you and Rite of Passage?

• 1:36:47Speaker 02

  Um, I'm on Twitter at David underscore Perell, perrell.com, P-E-R-R-E-L-L dot com is my website, and Rite of Passage is spelled W-R-I-T-E of passage. So W-R-T-E like rite of passage. Thank you very much.

• 1:37:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome, man. Thank you so much for coming.

• 1:37:10Anthony 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.