LIVE Q&A: Pomp and Jason Williams talk Bitcoin, Crypto, and the Decentralized World

Jason Williams is a co-founder and partner at Morgan Creek Digital. He previously built and sold FastMed, an approximately $500 million healthcare business. In this conversation, we discuss Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, the Federal Reserve, maximalism, and the core principles to build wealth. =============================== ExpressVPN lets you access the internet as if you’re from a different country. There are hundreds of VPNs out there, but ExpressVPN is ridiculously fast. You can stream everything in HD quality with zero buffering! If you use my link right now at EXPRESSVPN dot com slash pomp, you can get an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free! That’s https://www.expressvpn.com/pomp =============================== The World Series of Trading (WSOT) is the first of its kind to bring the exhilaration of crypto trading competition to the global stage. WSOT believes in the importance of empowering traders who embody the passion and power for crypto trading. This bi-annual event aims to champion the spirit of competition, fair play, and cultivate camaraderie among crypto derivatives traders from around the world with the ultimate goal of creating positive change in the crypto space. This year’s prize pool is a whopping 200 BTC. Sign up here: http://www.bybit.com/wsot_warmup? =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

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 the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Jason Williams is a co-founder and partner at Morgan Creek Digital. He previously built and sold FastMed, an approximately $500 million healthcare business. In this conversation, we discuss Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, the Federal Reserve, maximalism, and the core principles to building wealth. I really enjoyed this conversation with Jason, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into the episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. The first is ExpressVPN. This is one of the coolest companies we've ever had

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

  sponsor. ExpressVPN lets you access the internet as if you're from a different country. That's right. So take Netflix. They've got different shows and movies available depending on where you are. With ExpressVPN, you can unlock thousands of new shows and movies from streaming libraries around the globe. There are hundreds of VPNs out there, but ExpressVPN is ridiculously fast. You can stream everything in HD quality with zero buffering. I personally love to use it whenever I travel outside the United States. ExpressVPN is available on every device, phones, laptops, tablets, and even your television. ExpressVPN makes your life

• 1:26Anthony Pompliano?

  easier. So if you want to use ExpressVPN, you can choose from almost 100 different countries where you can pick what content is available there regardless of where you are in the world. It is so simple to use. You just fire up the ExpressVPN app, you change your location, you hit connect, and then refresh the page, and the show or movie you want to watch will magically appear. ExpressVPN is magic. If you use my link right now at expressvpn.com/pomp,

• 2:02Anthony Pompliano?

  you can get an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free. That's right, expressvpn.com/pomp, and you'll get three months extra for free. Go use the magic app that helps you unlock content from around the world regardless of where you are. Expressvpn.com/pomp. Do it. All right, our next sponsor is the World Series of Trading. They're the first of its kind to bring the exhilaration of crypto trading competition to the global stage. WSOT, or the World Series of Trading, believes that it is important to empower traders who embody all of the ethos and spirit of crypto trading. It's a biannual event that aims

• 2:47Anthony Pompliano?

  to champion the spirit of competition, fair play, and cultivate camaraderie among crypto derivatives traders from around the world. If you believe that you are one of the best derivative traders in crypto, there is a whopping 200 Bitcoin prize pool. That's right, this biannual event has a prize pool of 200 BTC. If you think you're one of the best, go compete and do your best at trying to win your share of the 200 Bitcoin. The World Series of Trading, get on with it. Lastly, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. I break down complex

• 3:30Anthony Pompliano?

  topics into easy to understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. All right, let's get into this episode with Jason. I hope you guys really enjoy this one.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp 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 Pomp 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.

• 4:14Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. So, before we get started, smash the like button on the video, subscribe to the channel, and we're gonna drop in the chat to go to Jason has a new YouTube channel that you can subscribe at. But what's up, man? How are you?

• 4:39Speaker 02

  What's going on?

• 4:40Anthony Pompliano?

  What, uh, what's new? What are we gonna talk about today? Let's, uh, we're gonna go for like a hour and 15 minutes or so. So what, uh, what are some things that, uh, that you want to cover?

• 4:53Speaker 02

  Well, we can talk about some Bitcoin. It looks like you have you have done a fair amount of work on is Bitcoin good money? Is Ethereum good money? Probably like to talk about that a little bit. I'd love to get your opinion on DeFi because again, it seems like you've been doing some work there. Maybe we can unpack why people think that you're a Bitcoin maximalist. I think that's that's interesting. Although you don't own any ETH, which we should also talk about because I find that to be nearly impossible, but we'll see, we'll see. I don't

• 5:35Speaker 02

  know, man. North Carolina, we've had hurricane, tornado, and an earthquake in one week, which I think is really interesting.

• 5:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Seems calm, seems calm.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  2020.

• 5:47Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So let's start with Bitcoin and Ether as money. They're both money in the sense that money is just a belief system. So if two people or organizations are willing to transact them, then they are quote unquote a currency, right? We'll put it as a currency. The problem is which one is good and which one is bad. And I don't mean that in the sense that I come at it from one has to be good and one has to be bad. But I do believe that there's a big divergence in the framework of Bitcoin versus the framework of Ether.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  Do you mind if while we talk, I kind of jump in and interrupt you a little bit? Because I think there are words that we use that are really important. And when I say good money, like I want to understand what your your feelings are, or definition of good money is, because I find...

• 6:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Sound money.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Right. But take it a little deeper than that. Like, what should money do that makes it good?

• 6:54Anthony Pompliano?

  It should protect your wealth.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  Right. And how does it protect your wealth? Like, how does that happen? So think, think a little bit deeper or talk to me a little bit more about why, why should good money protect your wealth?

• 7:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, it all goes back to what are you optimizing for? Right? And I think that in a world where a currency is devalued over time, or it has unlimited supply, regardless of how that is created, what you end up getting is you get a very non-equitable world. And what I mean by that is those who hold the currency end up losing value over time. And those who get out of the currency and get into investment assets end up making money or getting wealthier. So the rich get richer, poor get poorer. If you take that to kind of Bitcoin versus Ether, Bitcoin is a perfect example of the soundest money, right? And

• 7:53Anthony Pompliano?

  what I mean by that is, one, it has a artificially capped supply. So let's compare what is another popular sound money to gold. So nobody knows what gold's total available supply is, right?

• 8:06Speaker 02

  I love that Peter, Peter Schiff admitted to that during your debate, which I thought was a really interesting moment. And I don't know if he really thought about it, because people do try to define, you know, stock to flow of gold, or how much gold is really here. Like, I think he could have answered it better, but he said it's infinite.

• 8:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, it's, so there's, there's the really, really outlandish, like ridiculous position, which is to say something like, there's gold on asteroids, and we're going to mine those in 30 years. And therefore, like, you know, gold has an infinite supply.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  But I would, I wouldn't even go to mining in space, but just trying to contemplate how much gold's in the ocean. I don't think that's too hard to.

• 8:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Gold in the ocean, right? Gold under the ground. Could you actually create gold? Right? If you remember. Gold, so one of the, one of the jokes and before people freak out, right? I'm half joking when I say this, it is widely accepted in the gold community that gold is created from stars, right? And so there's an argument to say it's just alien rocks, right? Like it's created from stars and ends up here on earth. And so you can create gold if you have all of the right inputs and process and all.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  Now that is, that is directionally and something I, yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. Right? If you have the right chemistry and right circumstances, you can create gold.

• 9:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, with that said, gold is quote unquote scarce in the sense of it's hard to dig up out of the ground. So it costs money, right? There, there's a difficult process. There is not gold laying all over the floor, right? So it's not abundant in the sense of everyone has gold in their pockets and, you know, hanging around and it's falling off trees and all that kind of stuff. So in a analog world where the story of an asset was more important than the actual provability of the asset, but the story of the asset for thousands of years, gold took on this narrative of it was scarce and scarce is relative, right?

• 10:18Anthony Pompliano?

  So if it's harder to find than other assets, of course, yeah, it's quote unquote scarce, but you can't prove the scarcity. And what I mean by that is we have no clue if somebody tomorrow hits a gold deposit and floods the market. Now getting, and I'm not claiming that that is likely or probable, but I'm just saying that the possibility creates a situation that we'll get to in a second, uh, is no longer necessary. The second thing is we don't know how much gold actually has been discovered. So we don't know the total addressable supply and we also don't know the circulating supply. Now, not a huge issue in the sense of, uh, You can still buy gold, create jewelry. You can still buy gold and hold it, do all these

• 11:03Anthony Pompliano?

  different things. There's a market, so there's buyer and sellers. Like, all of that is true. But what I'm specifically getting at is, there is no provable scarcity. The scarcity is a story, and there are data points that you can use and kind of intertwine in that story to tell the story. But you cannot say, what is the total adjustable market, the total adjustable gold available with any level of accuracy and provability. And you also can't do that for circulating supply. Now, it still is considered sound money, right? It's served as sound money for a long time because of that story and that scarcity. When you look at Bitcoin, Bitcoin solves that problem in a very

• 11:45Anthony Pompliano?

  unique, important way, which is Bitcoin, you can prove the total available Bitcoin in terms of the total supply, and you can also prove the current circulating supply. And so now, what ends up happening is you move from a scarcity asset based on a story and a common belief to, in a digital world, you move to something that can be proven. So they're both sound money. One is provable, the other isn't. And I think that, while it seems like a very small nuanced detail, is incredibly valuable as we look out over the next 50-plus years.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  Yep, that's probably right. It seems that scarcity is bubbling up as a hot topic right now, specifically in kind of the Bitcoin maximalist world that have turned their focus to ETH and the question of ETH being money, and ETH even being able to prove how many ETH there are.

• 12:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Look, I wrote, I forget exactly when I wrote it, but I wrote a while ago, ETH is not good money, right? And what I meant by this is, there is a meme that goes around, and be fair, actually, before you even get to the meme, there's two parts to the Ethereum ecosystem. One is Ethereum, the network, and the other is Ether, the digital asset. I'm a huge fan, right? I wrote this morning about I'm a huge fan of the Ethereum network, right? We've invested in companies that are building on top of it. We're invested in in businesses that literally are hiring Ethereum developers, all that kind of stuff. And I believe that the Ethereum network is going to empower an incredible amount of innovation over the coming years, right? It is going to be one of the core pieces of infrastructure to build a decentralized world.

• 13:32Anthony Pompliano?

  But with that said, the Ethereum narrative has started to shift. And now you've got a bunch of people running around because they see decentralized finance as something that can be built with Ethereum. And now they start yelling and screaming ETH is money. No, it's not, right? ETH is being used as a tradable asset. But when you look at the actual structure, it is identical to a fiat currency. And what I mean by that is, one, there is no total supply. There's no set supply. So it's an unlimited supply as of today. That could change, but as of today, it's an unlimited supply. Two, all of the inflationary or deflationary decisions are

• 14:13Anthony Pompliano?

  made non-programmatically, meaning that there is votes, and it is a response to the current environment. As we have seen, humans are horrible at this. They overreact in times of fear, right? And they they underreact in times in the good times. And so this is true in the fiat world. This is going to be true in the ether world. Now, to the Ethereum community's credit, right? And I try to be kind of think of both sides, the positive and negatives. To their credit, every time that they've had to make this monetary supply decision, they have decreased the supply. So they've done the right thing so far in terms of decreasing the supply. But the possibility

• 14:54Anthony Pompliano?

  exists where they could increase the supply schedule. And so that is very similar, right? The US Federal Reserve can decrease or increase the monetary supply, right? Same thing with with ether world. And then when you kind of get outside of that, The key piece that came up this weekend was the provability. Now, it got solved, right? But the thing that caught my attention was not that specific issue, right? Okay, great. And by the way, it's comical that Pierre Rochard, who's a Bitcoin proponent, paid for, yeah, put a bounty out to pay for it to get the script. By the way, it's solved, right? So there's now a open source script that's available. I'm not worried about the one specific issue.

• 15:38Anthony Pompliano?

  What I was shocked by was the cavalier-ness and the nonchalantness of the Ethereum community to what is a pretty simple question. How many Ether exist? And to hear people say, it doesn't matter, or we're close enough, but yet be off by 343,000 Ether, which is 130-plus million dollars. It's like, wait a second. What else is not that important or you're close enough to, right? And so again, it comes back to this thing. And actually Ethereum has the same exact thing that Bitcoin Cash has, right? So I'm going to make two connections here that I think will, will kind of start to

• 16:20Anthony Pompliano?

  tie a lot of these assets together and why the Bitcoin community has such a staunch belief in something. There is no difference between Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum, both saying it's not important for individuals to run full nodes or have the ability to run full nodes, right? They both make that claim. And so today, or this past weekend, what we saw was if you had an Ethereum node and I had one, and we both queried the same blockchain at the same time, we could potentially get two different answers. That's not good, right? That's been fixed, right? So it's no longer an issue at the moment, but it is very enlightening when people are

• 17:04Anthony Pompliano?

  saying things like it's close enough, or they're taking pictures of third-party data providers and saying like, oh, here's the supply. Like this whole idea of don't trust verify, right? That is what is enabled by this new digital world where you can prove you can verify things. And as a fan of Ethereum, the network, I was shocked to see that reaction. And I get it, some of it's the tribalism, right? They see Bitcoin, you know, folks saying things. So immediately your reaction is to fight back. So, so kind of ignore all that. But it just goes back to why is this stuff important? It's all about the provability, not so much just the, oh, trust me. Because that looks very similar to a fiat currency.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 17:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Agree or disagree?

• 17:48Speaker 02

  No, I, I agree with, I agree with your point. I think there's a lot that we should discuss around inflation and deflation. Cause I, I've been always, I, it's, it's a, it's a complicated, it's a complicated discussion. But it's something that even recently I've just, I've been overwhelmed with the deflationary aspects of Bitcoin and how important they are. And I wanted to add one data point. It looks like Peter McCormick has gotten Vitalik Buterin to agree to a, just discussion with Samson Mao,

• 18:35Speaker 02

  which will be interesting, you know? I, I hope that Peter is able to, to be impartial and really sit between that and allow for a good discussion. I'm not interested in, you know, people trying to measure their dicks in, in a fight. But I'd like to have an intelligent kind of discussion and exploration of these topics with, you know, people who know a lot about it.

• 18:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, here's one other thing that I'm going to say, which if you are watching this right now, you're going to have to have an open mind to hear this, this mental pretzel, which is. I actually believe the price of Ether is going to increase significantly in this next bull market.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 19:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And it is likely.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  It may outperform Bitcoin.

• 19:20Anthony Pompliano?

  I actually think it's likely that on a, on a pure US dollar value, the price of Ether is likely to go up more than the price of Bitcoin. Now, people will say, whoa, what do you mean? So two factors into that. First of all, is whenever you see a market where there are large cap assets and small cap assets. Today Bitcoin's market cap is about 5X that of Ethereum. When you get into a bull market and all assets rise, the smaller cap assets will almost always appreciate more than the large cap assets. Right? So that's kind of the first thing that's going in Ether's favor. If you're looking at it from a pure financial return perspective. The second thing is look at the drawdown from the current all time high. Bitcoin's down about 40% give or take.

• 20:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Ethereum's down 70% from its all time high. So if they just go back to their all time highs, you get about a 60% increase on the Bitcoin side. You get a 400% increase on the Ether side. Now, if you simply want to be a trader and look for financial return, knock yourself out. Use that data however you want, right? Not financial advice, but like use that however you want. I personally believe though, that there is a big difference or a divergence between Ethereum and Ether. And it goes back to where else have we seen this? There's actually another cryptocurrency or a crypto asset where we see this exact divergence, which is Ripple and XRP.

• 20:41Anthony Pompliano?

  So my argument for XRP and Ripple has always been the Ripple software company, the actual private entity that is the software company that's selling software to banks. I wish I was an investor in Ripple, the software company.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 20:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? I would have loved to have been a seated investor because the company's worth billions of dollars and it's a pure SaaS based company. Right? They sell software to banks. Awesome. When retail investors go and buy XRP because they believe that, oh, if the banks adopt Ripple, then XRP's value will increase, you lose me. So the investment thesis breaks down for the liquid digital asset. Same with Ethereum and ETH, which is even though Ethereum is going to be this core piece of infrastructure, that does not necessarily mean that the fat protocol thesis is true and the price of ETH has to go up, right? Actually, I think many people have proven that the fat protocol thesis is not correct. And so what you end up getting is the the price appreciation of ETH is driven by something else. It's not

• 21:39Anthony Pompliano?

  driven by the adoption of Ethereum, the network used as infrastructure to help people build applications. It's built by this, it's driven by the speculation that is happening in those applications. So look at the current use cases for ETH, stablecoins, CDPs, DeFi, right? ICOs, all this kind of stuff.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  NFTs.

• 22:01Anthony Pompliano?

  NFT, all of that, right? Now, again, you can separate, and it takes a very open mind to do this, and people will freak out, but it will take a very open mind to understand that Ethereum and ETH are two different things in terms of one could be successful without the other. And by the way, the the opposite is true, too. ETH could explode in price and Ethereum could not be adopted at all. And it would just be pure speculation, right? So these two things are not interchangeable. I think that the key difference is if you look at the Bitcoin network versus the Ethereum network, more people believe in the long-term value of Bitcoin than they do in Ether. And people say, well, how do you know that? Well, I'm using one specific data point, and you can choose to agree or disagree with

• 22:44Anthony Pompliano?

  it. The data point is over, I think it's 62 or 63% of people have not sold or moved their Bitcoin in the last 12 months.

• 22:56Anthony Pompliano?

  It's like 56 or 57% for Ethereum. So you're telling me an asset that is a 5x larger market cap, more people hold the asset for longer periods of time than the smaller cap asset. You start to say, wait a second. Now, again, that doesn't mean you should go change your entire investment thesis. It's all about what you're optimizing for, whatever. But that's just the data points that people have to start looking at. And so I always go back and say, look, I'm not doing this just to get rich. If that was the case, I would just lever up on the latest shitcoin that somebody's pumping. It goes up 500%. You know, you're 20x levered and you make a killing. That's what it's about. It's just these ecosystems have two different things. One's inflationary, one's deflationary, and they're trying to solve different problems, and they should both double down on what they're good at.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I mean, I want to make it clear, though, you're not just in it for the tech, because I that's that's not true. I mean, you have decided to put a fair amount of your net worth in this investment or in this space, both to protect it from all the things that we're talking about, but also to benefit from all the things that we believe Bitcoin offers you.

• 24:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, yeah. Look, look, my belief is that the US dollar is going to fail at some point in my lifetime, and Bitcoin will be the global reserve currency. And maybe I'm off in terms of doesn't happen. You know, I probably got 50, you know, if I'm lucky, 60 years left.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  And so can they coexist? It doesn't have to fail, but they could coexist?

• 24:24Anthony Pompliano?

  They could absolutely coexist, but so far, the US dollar and the Bolivian are coexist too. But like, the Bolivian failed. So you could fail and it not disappear, right? But but in the sense of the global reserve currency, I believe will ultimately be Bitcoin. And it goes back to, in the digital world, if you can prove things versus trust people and organizations, I believe that the superior model is to prove things. And look, that there's people who I think are in positions of power, whether that is world leaders, congressmen of the United States, etc., who are starting to wake up to this idea. And it's unpopular today. I think it eventually will become

• 25:05Anthony Pompliano?

  More or or less taboo, right? And then eventually it'll just become the popular idea. And the beauty is, nobody has to crown something one way or the other. It's just people as they trade decide to use something else. And so I think that's where we're headed. And so the belief isn't like, hey, I think there's a lot of people in crypto who say, I'm going to invest in something, I'm going to wait for it to go up, I'm going to sell it back into dollars. And then I'm like, go buy a house or buy a jet or do whatever. Right? That's not my belief. My belief is that the Bitcoin that we are buying today will ultimately be something that you like literally pass down to your kids' kids. Right? Because it's going to be like those families, you know, 100 plus years ago, 200 years ago, 500 years ago,

• 25:49Anthony Pompliano?

  who are like, hey, here's all the gold.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was just gonna say, you you sound like every time the stock market runs, and then you start to hear the gold commercials on the financial networks. It's like, it's like an old man or an old lady saying, you know, the stock market's got me a little worried and I find comfort and I can sleep at night because I own gold. And then they go into this big gold mantra. And it's funny to hear those commercials right now, Pomp. And then the next commercial is like grayscale Bitcoin trust or grayscale trust. You know, it's like the history of money and

• 26:25Speaker 02

  and I mean, that's really playing out right now. So, you know, and one other data point I wanted to to lift up because I take a lot, a lot of heat. I don't know if I may take more heat than you do on this topic because I tend to look at Bitcoin, Ethereum, altcoins and shitcoins, and I talk openly about them. I find you don't, you don't talk about Rune very often. So, yeah, right. So that that's more of my kind of world. But, you know, Andreas Antonopoulos feels pretty much as you and I do. Like, he takes a tremendous amount of heat for exploring the intellectual, kind of being intellectually curious and thinking about Ethereum.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  And just as you've described, I think he would be directionally in favor of the things you've discussed today.

• 27:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and look, what I think is probably the most misunderstood thing about the Bitcoin community is if you hear what I just said, right? A world where I said, I believe that it is likely ETH will appreciate more than Bitcoin in the next bull market, yet I hold none. What you start to realize is there's a divergence, I think, in terms of the Bitcoin community doesn't, the hardcore, kind of, the people that folks would say like, oh, that's a Bitcoin maximalist. What I think actually is ends up happening-

• 27:44Speaker 02

  I mean, those guys are starting to like, fight about big block and small block size. I mean, it gets heated internally. And I, yeah, anyway.

• 27:54Anthony Pompliano?

  The way that I think about it is, the most important thing that the human race is working on right now, the most important thing, hands down, bar none, is if we can figure out how to successfully move back to sound money, it will have lasting ramifications across every facet of society, right? And I'm talking about very material. And so if you go back and you look at everything that has been created coming out of the sound money, right, and coming off of the gold standard and all this kind of stuff, what you realize is it has made the world incredibly unfair. And what I mean by that is you have a system

• 28:37Anthony Pompliano?

  that is built that 50% plus of people, they can't get ahead. They will not be able to get ahead because ultimately the system that they're in-

• 28:47Speaker 02

  But wait a minute, would you say that coming off of the gold standard created the system of rehypothecation?

• 28:55Anthony Pompliano?

  It's not even that. Like, that's such like a minute detail in terms of the big picture. And the big picture is, right now, in the United States, 45% of Americans own no investable assets, right?

• 29:08Speaker 02

  And by the way, I don't mean to interrupt you, if you get into kind of different demographics of people, it's shocking, the amount of debt and the lack of assets. And it's scary, actually.

• 29:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And when you understand like that is the average American, I'll speak specifically to Americans, that's the country, obviously, or the economy that I'm most familiar with. But so 45%, they don't own any investable assets. 50% can't come up with 400 bucks for an emergency payment. So that means that they live paycheck to paycheck, all of their wealth is sitting in cash, and they don't have a lot. Right? And now what you get is you get an inflationary system, which the argument says, oh, we have to do this to spur economic activity. Right? That is the argument behind this inflation. But what they don't tell you is that the arbitrary nature of that inflationary system and the ability to

• 30:04Anthony Pompliano?

  print unlimited amount of money ends up actually being the greatest cause of wealth inequality in the world. And so what people end up having to make a decision of is it's not like gold, which is sound money, was not inflationary previously. There was still some gold added to the circulating supply. It was just really hard to produce, right, to get it. And so what you get is it was a very, very low inflation percentage. And also, there was nobody who could just wake up one day and say, I think I'm just going to create more. Right? And so I think that's where you ultimately get the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. And we've seen that the data is indisputable that the rich have gotten richer and the

• 30:48Anthony Pompliano?

  poor have gotten poorer. And there are also the anecdotal pieces of that. My favorite stat right now, the billionaires in the United States in the last five months have made over half a trillion dollars while there are 50 plus million Americans who lost their job. Think about that for a second. And what we saw was we saw the Federal Reserve step in, they printed trillions of dollars, they pumped liquidity into the market, asset prices exploded.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? So you just get in this world of like, what's the number one thing we could do? If Bitcoin becomes the global reserve currency, I believe it'll have a more positive impact on the world than all philanthropy combined. Because what you'll do is you'll literally rebuild the structure to have a more equitable world. Now, that is a big, big task, right? And there's a lot of things that can go wrong. There's a lot of obstacles. That is not going to be easy, and it's not going to be tomorrow. That is a multi-decade type thing. But if it happens, the impact would be bigger than anything else that anyone's working on.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  Interesting. You know, I forget who tweeted this. I think it was Pierre Richard. He said that Bitcoin will solve wars. We, uh, we, we actually had a counter thesis to that, that I've explored with Bitcoin Tina in the past. We actually both believe Bitcoin will cause wars. Imagine if the things that you're saying happen and Bitcoin becomes a global reserve currency. It totally consumes the market cap of gold. It starts to consume the market cap of, of, of different commodities, real estate, all the fiat in the world. And it's moderately centralized where banks didn't get a chance to front run it.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  And individuals own large amounts of Bitcoin that could be worth some number that.

• 32:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Hope you there?

• 32:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm here.

• 32:57Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. I don't know. Last I heard was, um, uh, the individuals have a large amount of Bitcoin.

• 33:04Speaker 02

  Right. I was saying that imagine if Bitcoin starts to consume the mark, market cap of, of stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities. It starts to take out gold. It takes out real estate, takes out all of, of global money supply. I'm just, I'm just riffing here, but imagine Bitcoin is $5 million of Bitcoin and it's sort of centralized. You've got a bunch of individuals that own a lot of Bitcoin. Banks didn't get a chance to front run it. How does that not cause like wars?

• 33:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, the US dollar, the US dollar is definitely more centralized than Bitcoin. Right? So if you look in the United States, there's literally, you know, it was a 2% of people. Uh, or, or I think it's the top 1% owns 99% of the assets. Right? So, so when you look at it from that standpoint, the US dollar is, is definitely much more centralized, uh, in terms of ownership. But, but the second piece of it is, uh, war doesn't solve that problem.

• 34:02Speaker 02

  In what way?

• 34:03Anthony Pompliano?

  If I have Bitcoin and you kill me, you don't get the Bitcoin.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  Well, there's always a negotiation before and after war, Pomp. So that war is just a potential unnecessary step, but it happens on occasion. So when you have war, then you have some type of a, an agreement coming out of the war and that agreement could be, give me all your Bitcoin or war continues.

• 34:28Anthony Pompliano?

  But, but I think that, that's what people don't realize.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  That's really how war works. So.

• 34:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Is, but that doesn't change anything to do with Bitcoin. Right? Because ultimately what ended, what ends up happening is in today's world, the reason why you don't see war in terms of, I'm coming to steal your physical assets, right? The last two times we've seen that have really been over oil, right? As a commodity, but you can't take the oil with you back to your country.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  Well, you have to occupy.

• 35:03Anthony Pompliano?

  It's in the ground and so you can occupy, right? Or you can have some sort of, as you're talking about, arrangement where basically like we get a cut.

• 35:09Speaker 02

  And then that's, and that's what happens.

• 35:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, the difference here is when you look at Bitcoin, every time that there's ever been global conflict, those global conflicts end up, somebody takes out the superpower and then they install their currency as the global reserve currency. The difference this time is that was all.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  I think that's what happened with the British pound.

• 35:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  It was World War II, right?

• 35:36Anthony Pompliano?

  It, but, but here's what you have to remember is that's in an analog world, right? Is where violent conflict, you have to first take out the person that has the global reserve currency in order to implement your own. And the way you do that is you show superior military might. In a digital world, it's the exact opposite. You have to have the greatest defense to have the superior might, right? It's not military might, but it's the superior power is whoever has the greatest defense. And so we can go and hack China all we want, or China can hack us. But if we just kick you out, then it doesn't really matter, right? It's whoever has the greatest defense.

• 36:15Anthony Pompliano?

  And so what I think is going to happen is Bitcoin will ascend to the global reserve currency status and never fire a single bomb, bullet, or any sort of violence. And the reason is because it doesn't have to take out the current global reserve currency. Because if you go to attack Bitcoin, there's nobody to attack. You can't shut down the network and there's nobody to fight back against.

• 36:41Speaker 02

  But there is a war and many, many smart people have contemplated the war that China would bring against the United States would never fire a bullet pump, but it would be an economic war. And, and that's sort of what we're dealing with now, in my opinion, that we're in an economic war and there's another participant and that's Bitcoin.

• 37:03Anthony Pompliano?

  But the thing is that you can't have an economic war with Bitcoin. Every, every, every single attack that you have has no effect on Bitcoin. So the, the old model of we're going to go to war with something, they've always fought something that's centralized. So you could do it economically, you can do it through society, you can do it through military might, you can do all this stuff. None of that impacts Bitcoin. And that's the beauty of decentralization. So the economic war, you can't have an economic war with a decentralized currency that is fully distributed, fully decentralized and has no other GDP, has no other output, right?

• 37:43Speaker 02

  You know, I, I find it really funny because I do watch peripheral projects and I think it's Adam Back. They launched that satellite and they transmitted some Bitcoin over satellite. And I always think like, why would you go through all that pain to do that? And it really probably comes as a result of them contemplating attack vectors. Like if I, if I wanted to shut off the internet, you could shut off Bitcoin, but then.

• 38:14Anthony Pompliano?

  But you can't.

• 38:15Speaker 02

  Right, but then, right. What will, why can't you?

• 38:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Because you're not going to be able to get global coordination to shut down the internet on a global basis.

• 38:25Speaker 02

  But you can shut it off in a country.

• 38:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course, but but I can still but you don't take my Bitcoin when you do that.

• 38:33Speaker 02

  No, that's right, but you stop potentially my ability to to send or transfer. You affect some of its portability.

• 38:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely, there would be an impact, right? It would be crazy to say that it's not, but it goes back to this idea of you still have the core piece, which is the sovereignty of the asset allows you to protect your wealth. And so it's such a different thing and such a divergence from the way that we've thought about currencies and money and war and all this kind of crazy stuff that myself, other people, everyone is still thinking through this stuff, right? And we're going to see how it plays out, right? But I do think that if we are incorrect about Bitcoin, it is likely that we are underestimating how important and impactful it will be rather than overestimating it.

• 39:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And it's because it's a market expanding technology. Right? It's when you have a digital world and you take a analog business, right? I always say, what analog business do you know that went on the Internet and is smaller than it was when it was analog? None, right? Same thing here is by digitizing this stuff, it's only going to get bigger, not smaller. And so when it gets bigger, store value asset like gold. Bitcoin will be bigger at some point. I have no clue when, right? I don't know if that's a, again, 10 years, 50 years, could be 300 years. But at some point, all of the the structure and the system and the mechanism and the provability, all of these things are superior, right?

• 40:10Anthony Pompliano?

  The portability, the divisibility, the the digital nature, like it's all superior. And so what ends up happening is you just need time to occur. And ultimately, people will gravitate towards that value. The big question is just how long does that take and how quick does it happen?

• 40:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 40:28Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  Well, one of the things that, you know, I've found probably recently, I hate to admit that, is I kept even half a decade ago, questioning the use cases of Bitcoin. But the things we're discussing right now are the use case. It seems like it always was the use case that this is sound money.

• 40:51Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, I don't even think that it's debatable at this point whether Bitcoin is the most sound money in the world or not. There's not a single, you know, look, here's the crazy part.

• 41:02Speaker 02

  scarcity. Prove scarcity.

• 41:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Gold, US dollars and Ethereum all have unlimited supply as they are designed today.

• 41:10Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 41:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Because there's no cap. And now some people look at that as a negative, but when you start to understand and unpack the value of provable scarcity, provable cap to an asset, it ends up being pretty compelling.

• 41:24Speaker 02

  Again, I also add, and I don't know if you've used this term before, I listen to you speak a lot and we do a lot of pitches together. But I think Bitcoin is infinitely divisible.

• 41:38Anthony Pompliano?

  For I mean, essentially, yes, right? There's people who will debate the finer points of mathematics, but yes, essentially.

• 41:45Speaker 02

  So you have 21 million Bitcoin and it's infinitely divisible. So as the price goes up and if you, if you chose to transact with it, you can, there is actually enough.

• 41:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And I think that people forget you transact today with digital goods or digital assets, right? So when I go online and I buy something on Amazon, right? Or I, or I transact with you, I send you information or value, right? It's just that the difference here is the monetary policy and then the provability of that monetary policy. And so every currency in the world, in my opinion, is going to be digital, every single one, US dollar will be digital, all of these, right? And digital being, you know, some sort of either blockchain based or a variation of a blockchain

• 42:40Anthony Pompliano?

  where it's not the electronic money, or I use the terminology.

• 42:43Speaker 02

  Hey, Pomp, I actually think it's going to happen. Before the nations digitize their currency, banks will have a digital asset that represents their currency. And that's how it'll be digitized. They'll first say that it's a stable token backed one to one by their said currency. And then they'll dump that and become central banks themselves.

• 43:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's the corporate central bank thesis. Like every single one of them is going to try to do this. And I actually believe, right? And wrote about the fact, I think that politicians should immediately implement a rule that says, if you are a bank, a private corporation, whatever, you cannot create a digital currency tied to a currency or a commodity backed one to one. And then in the future, unpeg it. So if you want to create a different one later on, pegged to something else or not pegged anything, knock yourself out. But you can't drive adoption under one promise or thesis and then later change it by completely removing the peg.

• 43:54Speaker 02

  It's happening. Like, I absolutely think that will happen. And I hope that politicians or the treasury or the Fed is thinking this way.

• 44:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 44:05Speaker 02

  I mean, I can't, I, that has to be the motivation of JP Morgan and, and the like, making stable tokens.

• 44:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course. Before I forget, if you're watching this right now, a couple of housekeeping things. One, smash the like button on this so more people on YouTube can see the content. Two, make sure you're subscribed to the channel. Three, go to Jason's YouTube channel, which is called Going Parabolic, P A R A B O L I C.

• 44:32Speaker 02

  Fire.

• 44:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Make sure that you're subscribed to Going Parabolic. He goes live every single morning, no brainer. And then also go sign up at pompletter.com and you can get the email right every day. So like this video, subscribe to this channel, go subscribe to Jason's channel, Going Parabolic, and then sign up for pompletter.com. All right, I got questions for you. It, let's put Bitcoin to the side for a second. What do you think's happening in the macro economy? And what would you do as an investor? What are you doing?

• 45:05Speaker 02

  Um, you know, I was listening to Raul Paul recently and he, you know, I love when people that I respect confirm a strategy I've deployed. So, you know, I have a pretty large position, about 12% of my net worth in Bitcoin. And I think that's really, really important. And I'm probably moving that to 15%. I own gold, I own silver, I don't have cash. I typically was someone who had a large portion, about 20, let's say 10 to 20% of my net worth was in cash,

• 45:47Speaker 02

  just to be opportunistic. That money has been moved to digital assets, specifically stable tokens. So I'm, I'm enjoying that stranded asset that was being subjected to inflation and kind of being stolen from me. It's working now. And I like that. I love real estate. So I'm making a lot of moves in residential real estate that I understand. I'm kind of waiting for a commercial real estate collapse, which I think will happen. It seems to be playing out and I'd like to try to pick up some, some high quality commercial real estate. And I don't have any

• 46:32Speaker 02

  real exposure to the stock market. I missed that whole upside. But, you know, I've done, I've done just fine sitting on the sidelines there. I think there's a lot of inflation that's been hidden there. I think that PPP and the Fed have propped up a lot of companies that probably should have went out, out of business.

• 46:52Anthony Pompliano?

  What happens with that? Like, I agree with you that they basically are just saving dying businesses and just prolonging the inevitable. How do you think that plays out?

• 47:00Speaker 02

  Well, I think it flies in the face of free market capitalism and kind of what should happen. Like, let me use this example, which I spoke about this morning on Going Parabolic. You saw JCPenney and Sears file Chapter 11, then went bankrupt. And they exist as anchor tenants in a lot of US malls. So it obviously hurts the real estate market, hurts retail, and it eventually could hurt banks who are holding the paper on these mortgages. But when you let the free market work itself out, you get this to happen.

• 47:34Speaker 02

  Amazon walks in and says, you know what? Rather than me building a million square foot distribution center, let me go into the mall and put my distribution center there. And when you think about that, because I've used that thesis over two decades, Pom. I put fast meds into blockbusters and fast meds into cookouts and fast meds into, you know, mattress firms and I repurposed real estate. And I guarantee you it will, it will be worth its weight in gold. This thesis that someone at Amazon came up with because they're going to be able to rapidly expand into these big spaces with big parking lots and cheap power and revitalize malls

• 48:19Speaker 02

  and bring jobs to, to people. And I think that's, that's something I support. So that, that, that's my financial conservatism. That's me supporting free market capitalism. And that's an example of what can happen if you let these companies go out of business. But when you prop them up like we have, you kind of don't allow for the good things to happen, the things that have made America great. You know, like even this Kodak thing, it, it just perverts things. Like you have a $765 million loan to Kodak from the Fed to turn it into a pharmaceutical company?

• 49:04Speaker 02

  They may have expertise in chemicals, but this is a pivot that if it was really something that should happen, Pom, the Kodak investors, the people who love Kodak, who own the stock and the leadership should have went to the market with it and let the people invest in it. But then you get this perverted stock option thing and, and now the SEC has put the brakes on the loan and.

• 49:30Speaker 02

  I I I've kind of rambled about, but that that's how I feel. So macroeconomically, that's how I'm playing the game. From a free market capitalist perspective, I wish they'd let let the chips fall, like let it happen. Like, I I felt instinctively like when the Fed and the government shut down small businesses and knocked out, you know, 70 years, 100 years of jobs that were created, they should have done something. But I think we're in QE forever now. Like, I really do. I I don't I don't see how how we get unemployment back into single digits.

• 50:13Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't think that they can stop. I mean, we pretty much already knew they couldn't stop printing, right? When they tried that or quantitative tightening, uh, you know, laughable in terms of just the gyrations of the market. It's very obvious.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  And pomp. This may be MMT without anyone saying it.

• 50:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, it's, I think it's Travis Kling was the first person that I heard say this. I don't know if other people have said it before him, but he was the first that I heard say quantitative easing is just UBI for rich people, right? Basically, every time they do quantitative easing, they're just bailing out the rich people. And if you look, we saw it perfectly over the last five months, which is the rich got richer, the poor got poorer, and that's because the government decided to do that. And by the way, that even happened while they were sending $1,200 checks directly to people, like all this, you know, nonsense about, oh, we're bailing out the people, right? No, it's not about bailing out the people. But, you know, I said, as soon as I heard that $1,200, that is a payment to not have social unrest.

• 51:13Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 51:13Anthony Pompliano?

  We gave you 1,200 bucks. We gave you 1,200 bucks.

• 51:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 51:16Anthony Pompliano?

  But we just gave Jeff Bezos $40 billion.

• 51:21Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 51:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Net worth.

• 51:22Speaker 02

  Do you do you believe that inflationary environments make the rich richer and the poor poorer?

• 51:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 51:31Speaker 02

  You know, I've had some people try to to to say that's flawed logic, but I just, I it seems very simple to me that rich people don't hold cash, they have hard assets, and those hard assets benefit in inflationary environments.

• 51:48Anthony Pompliano?

  What's their argument against that?

• 51:51Speaker 02

  Oh, you know, I probably can't even articulate it very well because it was just illogical to me. I just wondered if you if you had a a counter thought to that.

• 52:03Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that there's a lot of people who are in the Bitcoin and crypto world, who are talking about economics and other things and they don't have a good grasp of many of the basics, let alone the intricacies. I by no means am claiming that I'm some expert either, but I do believe that we don't do a good job of educating people on this stuff. And there's a lot of people that are basically preying on the lack of education. And politicians are the worst offenders, right? This idea of, hey, I'm just gonna give you money, I'm gonna give you money. You know, one of my favorite things and Peter Schiff is probably the guy who's nailed this the best.

• 52:47Anthony Pompliano?

  And I've heard him say it multiple times and he and he couldn't be more accurate is we live in a world where he really focuses on this whole idea of they're stealing your wealth, right? Through the inflation. And then also what they'll do is they'll say things like, we're giving you tax cuts. And when you really kind of unpack it, they're not giving you a tax cut. Right? They're finding other ways to actually take more money from you. And so I went and I started like really digging into the US federal budget and all this kind of stuff. And so the data and I might be off a little bit if I don't remember the numbers exactly correct. But in the last six fiscal years, each year, we have set a new record in terms of federal

• 53:32Anthony Pompliano?

  income tax revenue. So we've taken more every year for six consecutive fiscal years from the citizen. So kind of raise taxes on an aggregate level in the United States and got more income from that. Yet each year, the annual deficit continues to increase. So not just the total deficit, but each year, the gap between income and expenses was getting wider and wider and wider. This year, we may have a multi-trillion dollar deficit in the United States. You start to think about that, you say, wait a second, this isn't, it's not a revenue problem.

• 54:16Anthony Pompliano?

  It's an expense problem, right? And when you start to under-

• 54:20Speaker 02

  I don't mean to interrupt you, but how about this? It doesn't matter and the government's contemplating just getting ditching taxes. Right? So they're not even concerned about the revenue spend gap.

• 54:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, why do they need to collect federal taxes if they can just create money?

• 54:41Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 54:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Now, again, I actually believe if we had the right financial system, taxes, all this stuff would make sense in terms of, okay, that's where you get your revenue from, you use those revenues, you have expenses, you actually settle your books, you've got a little bit of profit, you can use that to pay into things like social security, all this kind of stuff, right? Yesterday, people freaking out, two days ago, whenever I tweeted it about social security system. It's a Ponzi scheme, right? Now they can say that it's pay as you go, right? This is like the classic government thing, oh, it's a pay as you go system. What that means is Jason, you're going to pay into the social security system and we're going to immediately take your money and we're going to pay it out to another person who invested. That's how they're going to get their returns.

• 55:26Anthony Pompliano?

  We're going to use your money to pay them back for their investment. That is, that is the definition of a Ponzi scheme.

• 55:32Speaker 02

  Hopefully you're not the last person holding the bag.

• 55:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, so that's definitely one thing, but now if you go back to how it was designed, the idea was Jason would contribute money into this system. That system would then take the money, it would earn interest and it would use the interest payment, the interest payments from Jason's deposits to go ahead and pay out people.

• 55:59Anthony Pompliano?

  But the problem is that we no longer can use the interest payments from Jason's deposits or payments into the system to pay the obligations. And so we had to start doing was dipping into the actual deposits to now we're in a system where we can only keep the system afloat if we continue to use the deposits into the system to pay out. And so it wasn't intended to be a Ponzi scheme, but it evolved into that. Interest rates came down. There was a much longer life expectancy than originally calculated. Demographics changed, all these moving parts, a highly complex problem. There's a belief in the United States from everyone from studies have been done at Wharton

• 56:38Anthony Pompliano?

  School of Business all the way to nonprofits and all these groups that this social security system could be insolvent in the next 15 to 20 years. And it's like little things like that, right? Where we say, why is that? How is that? And it all goes back to the monetary structure that we have is an incentive for things to go wrong. And when things are incentivized to go wrong, they usually do. So we're seeing it over and over and over again. And I love the system that Marty Bent says, or the phrase that he uses. He says, if you want to fix the world, fix the money. And I think that's a perfect way to think about this is if you want to fix the world, fix the money.

• 57:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, did I lose them? See here, I think I might have lost Jason, or maybe Jason lost me. Let's see. Jason, are you still there? Maybe, maybe not. All right, guys, I think I might just be here by myself at the moment. Hopefully we'll get, we'll get Jason back here in a minute. While we're waiting for him to come back, a couple of things, make sure that like the video, smash that like button, that thumbs up.

• 58:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Make sure that more people will see this on YouTube. We need to get the Word out about this important information. So hit the like button and then go to pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com and you can go ahead and subscribe to the daily email that I sent or that I send every single morning to over 50,000 investors. So I will drop the link right now in the chat, but make sure you go to pompletter.com and subscribe. Make sure you smash the like button on the video and subscribe to the channel. I'll start taking some questions. We're waiting for Jason to come back. Make sure that, uh, let's see what you guys got.

• 58:47Anthony Pompliano?

  I would love to answer questions. So let's get the questions rocking. Can I explain what BlockFi does? So BlockFi is a business that essentially has a number of products. We are investors in the business. They advertise on the podcast, but they basically do exactly what kind of your fiat bank or wealth management services do. So let's start with the first product, which is you can take your crypto and if you want US dollar liquidity, but you don't want to sell the crypto because there's tax ramifications or whatever, you can give them the crypto. They'll take that as collateral and they'll give you a US dollar loan against it. It's a pretty compelling product, both from the borrower. You don't have to sell your crypto and you can get a US dollar loan.

• 59:32Anthony Pompliano?

  But also what they'll do is it's compelling to them because they have an over collateralized loan where they have the collateral. And so it really prevents them from having loss of capital and asset backed lending. The second product is they've got a crypto exchange. So you just go buy and sell crypto. And that's pretty self-explanatory. And then the third product is a product that is an interest bearing account. So most of you are basically taking your fiat currency, you're depositing it in your bank and they pay you some nominal fee in exchange for that deposit. So they may pay you, you know, 0.03%, 0.05%. So you've got three to five basis points somewhere in that range. What BlockFi and what your bank does is they take those dollars and they go and they lend them out on the backend, right?

• 1:00:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And sometimes they lend them out six, seven, eight, 10 times. Through leverage and things like that. BlockFi essentially does a very similar thing, which is you deposit cryptos. Let's say you deposit Bitcoin, they take your Bitcoin, they go and they lend it out. They earn interest off those loans and they pay you a high percentage of the amount that they get in that loan. And so for Bitcoin, I think they pay like 6% APY. I think on stable coins, it's 8.6%. So there's pretty high rates of interest there. In terms of BlockFi, you know, obviously we're very big investors.

• 1:00:55Anthony Pompliano?

  I have literally invested eight figures in the business and kind of believe that people want to use their cryptocurrency the same way that they use cash that includes for payments. But it also includes all sorts of wealth management services. And so BlockFi is going out to do that. But that's kind of how it works and we're super excited. You know, I'm a user of the product and been a very happy user for quite a while. What's my thoughts on the Grayscale's commercial? So I just saw the commercial, for those that don't know, Grayscale is a big asset manager. They may be the biggest asset manager in the digital asset space. They're now running a national commercial across a whole bunch of different TV channels.

• 1:01:38Anthony Pompliano?

  And look, they basically are positioning a narrative where if you want to be part of this new digital world, you should invest in digital currency. So I already saw a bunch of comments, they don't specifically say the word Bitcoin. They show all of their investment assets, right? So they've got everything from Bitcoin to Ether. I think they even have like Ethereum Classic, a whole bunch of these things. But what ends up, you know, kind of being true at a macro level is I generally believe anyone who's doing good work to get the word out about this industry, about this space, about these assets is doing a great job, right? We need as much help as we possibly can get to get more people interested in this and start paying attention and understanding this is real. Having somebody like Grayscale that manages four plus billion dollars is fantastic.

• 1:02:23Anthony Pompliano?

  And yeah, I get it, people are upset maybe, or some portion of people are upset that they didn't name specific assets. That's look at the end of the day. It's one of these things to where I think Michael Jordan one time was asked. All right, we got Jason back now, but Michael Jordan was once asked. Why don't you donate any money to politicians or why don't you ever talk about politics? And he said, Republicans and Democrats both buy sneakers. And I think that's what you're seeing with grayscale, which is, you know, at the end of the day, they may have personal opinions. Whether you agree with them or not, they definitely do. But what they're trying to do is they're trying to build a business and what's the best for business?

• 1:03:01Anthony Pompliano?

  For them specifically, my, my assumption or my guesses is to have people invest in assets regardless of what their personal belief is in those assets. And so it's more of an infrastructure type play where you just provide access to a bunch of different digital assets or currencies. Without actually trying to play, you know, kind of kingmaker or put your opinion on to others. So I see both sides of the argument, but anytime you've got national commercials running, I think it's generally positive. You good over there, man?

• 1:03:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know what happened. Was that you or me?

• 1:03:33Anthony Pompliano?

  No, that was you. I thought maybe you were borrowing Peter Schiff's dial up internet for a second.

• 1:03:37Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, that AOL.

• 1:03:40Speaker 02

  I was waiting. No, I thought it was you.

• 1:03:42Anthony Pompliano?

  That was legit back in the day.

• 1:03:44Speaker 02

  I was gone for a while.

• 1:03:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 1:03:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. One other point I want to make.

• 1:03:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:49Speaker 02

  Going back to good money because this really infuriated me and it's, it's sent me on this kind of this mission to write my own book. Which I'm working on now.

• 1:04:00Speaker 02

  You trade your life working. Whatever your profession is, whatever it is that you do, you set out, you go and do that. You spend most of your time away from your family, away from your loved ones, away from things that you want to do. In the pursuit of earning enough money to take care of life's necessities or make, you know, have a little bit more, whatever more is to you.

• 1:04:24Speaker 02

  If you're capable of saving something beyond what it costs for you to live and have that little bit more, that should be enough. That should be enough. And the US dollar has proven it's not enough. Like, I can guarantee you this, and I can't guarantee you many things. I can guarantee you that your US dollar is going to be worth less tomorrow than it is today.

• 1:04:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Agreed.

• 1:04:52Speaker 02

  I can guarantee you. I can also guarantee you, or I can't guarantee the price of Bitcoin in the future. But through all the things that we discussed today,

• 1:05:03Speaker 02

  it appears to me objectively that Bitcoin acts as good money over time. It it just it's set up to do that. And I can't guarantee that tomorrow Bitcoin's price is going to go up. But it has the framework that if it works, is far better than the way the US dollar is set up.

• 1:05:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I mean, look, it it is, uh, it's understanding the structural elements and having very long time horizon, right? And and, you know, one of the things I always say is, uh, and you're in this category too, is like, we have decades of life in front of us, right? Or or viewpoint. There's a lot of people, um, who just don't have that, right? So if you're 60 plus years old, like, yeah, you know, look, again, maybe you've got 30 years, which is awesome, right? And and hope to God that that's true for everybody. But 30 years versus somebody like me who's got 60 years ahead of them. If we both die, you know, at 90, uh, you know, it it's just, it's a very, very different perspective.

• 1:06:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, and I I think that one of the key pieces to investing in general, um, that people have to remember is, uh, and in our third partner, Mark Yusko, uh, says this all the time, and I believe that he's right in it, which is, it's all about asset allocation. Everyone wants to be like the the stock picker, right? Everyone wants to go, this stock's better than this stock or whatever. It really just comes down to asset allocation. And so I think. That understanding how much do I want exposed to stocks? How much do I want exposed to real estate or crypto or dollars or whatever it is? That decision is going to be much more important to delivering you returns than did I pick the right stock inside of my stock allocation? And so I think that people just got to kind of get educated on that stuff.

• 1:06:54Anthony Pompliano?

  But ultimately, if they can, that's where they'll drive a lot of the returns.

• 1:06:58Speaker 02

  Yep, totally agree.

• 1:07:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? All right, I'm gonna take two more questions. Jason's Twitter account is at GoingParabolic. So is his YouTube channel. So you go to GoingParabolic on YouTube, you'll find it there.

• 1:07:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's see.

• 1:07:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's see here, what other questions do we have? What will make you change your mind on Bitcoin? That's a great question from Abdi.

• 1:07:30Anthony Pompliano?

  I've been pretty clear about, I think, the things that would make me change my mind. Number one would be that there is some sort of self-inflicted wound that is catastrophic to Bitcoin. Meaning that if all of a sudden there was a software bug that was introduced to the code that materially changed it or made it susceptible from a security standpoint or something like that. That would definitely be one thing. The second thing I think is if there was some invalidation of supply and demand economics, sound money, those types of things. Obviously, I don't think that there would be, but there was definitely a world before people understood that stuff.

• 1:08:13Anthony Pompliano?

  So maybe there's some other great thing out there that we don't understand yet, but I don't think that's coming. And then ultimately, lastly, I think that what would make me change my mind about Bitcoin is it being rendered worthless. And what I mean by that is Money is a belief system and it takes a network effect to make money valuable. If all of a sudden everyone walked away from Bitcoin, it would become worthless, right? And what I mean by worthless is like literally it could go to zero. And so if that happened, I think on that day, everyone who were like the last defenders of Bitcoin would be like, well, I guess this is over, right?

• 1:08:56Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, if you kind of go back and things like eGold or, you know, other, other digital currencies, like eventually they got to that point. The way I've thought about it is just like, I'm willing to go that far, right? And so that's why I also am not 100% in Bitcoin. But, but I think that it's just understanding kind of your, your limits, both in terms of exposure and then also risk on the downside, right? Some people say, hey, I'll put, you know, Jason may say, hey, I'll put 15% of my net worth in Bitcoin. But if it goes below 5K, that's a signal to me of market demand and also market belief and I'm out. Right? If it gets to that point, you know, everyone's got to make their own decision. But that's how I kind of think about changing your mind.

• 1:09:40Speaker 02

  You've, you've shown pretty tremendous conviction though, that you're willing to ride this thing down and buy tremendous dips. I mean, I was watching you on TV in 17, 18. I think Becky Quick was asking you, while Bitcoin was taking a 75% drawdown, are you a buyer of Bitcoin? And you, you were saying things like all the way down, like I'm, I'm, I'm a buyer, which I thought was hilarious. That was there, right?

• 1:10:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I mean, look, it's what Jason and I always talk about kind of in private, which is

• 1:10:10Anthony Pompliano?

  you either have to have a very long-term belief in this or not, right? And part of what I think is so interesting is there's been times on paper in US dollar value.

• 1:10:25Anthony Pompliano?

  We've made a lot of money in Bitcoin and then there's been times where we lost a lot of money in Bitcoin. But understanding, it's not about like that, that has no inch, that literally could not be interesting to me. It to me is much more something like watching the market cap. At what point do we surpass the gold market cap? I don't know when, but the day that happens, that'd be much more interesting to me than Bitcoin's individual, like an individual Bitcoin hitting a certain price, right? And ultimately, it's because it is finally the market recognizing that it is a superior store of value. It is a provably digitally scarce asset. So I think that's the type of stuff that, you know, at least I think about.

• 1:11:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And we'll see what happens, right?

• 1:11:12Speaker 02

  I've got a question for you, which is not, it's along the same lines of what would kind of shake your, your commitment to Bitcoin, but it's less structural. Is finding out who Satoshi Nakamoto is in any way part of your equation that could shake you from Bitcoin?

• 1:11:32Anthony Pompliano?

  No, I'm not, I'm not interested at all.

• 1:11:36Speaker 02

  Actually, do you think it is a non-event either way? Or do you think that finding out who that is or that group is could be a problem?

• 1:11:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, it could definitely, I mean, look, there are scenarios where it's less than ideal. I don't know if it'd be a problem, but you know, I'm not even gonna, I'm not gonna speculate, but there's definitely, let me go to a really extreme example. If it came out that Al Qaeda was the creator of Bitcoin, I think there's a lot of people would have, you know, pretty big issue, right? Be like, oh, wait a second, hold on. And especially at the government level, right? No, I do not believe that, you know, I don't think Osama bin Laden created Bitcoin.

• 1:12:19Anthony Pompliano?

  But with that said, the reason why I'm not interested is because I actually think one of the strongest things for Bitcoin is the fact that nobody knows, right? Look, look at the Ethereum community, like whenever something goes wrong with Ethereum.

• 1:12:30Speaker 02

  But I know that's your position. That's why I asked the question. So it appears to me that it would, it would cause you pause if they found out that Craig Wright was Satoshi Nakamoto.

• 1:12:41Anthony Pompliano?

  There's zero percent chance in my mind that that is who Satoshi is.

• 1:12:47Speaker 02

  No, I know, I'm just throwing out some, I'm throwing out a ridic, like in my mind, someone who may cause you pause.

• 1:12:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course, there could be, right? But I think that's part of this is most of the people who would be in the less than ideal bucket. They couldn't keep their mouth shut for 12 years. They wouldn't be able to resist, you know, whatever it is, billions of Bitcoin that were mined. Like, it's just that those are the people that would be the first to dump the coins, you know, when it hit $5, right? You know, or whatever it is, speaking of

• 1:13:24Speaker 02

  Or speculate into some other investment, right? Because they're so smart.

• 1:13:27Anthony Pompliano?

  They would try to leverage it into

• 1:13:30Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:13:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Other things, right? They would, you know, go do whatever, you know, I mean, literally the person that you mentioned, who I will not name, was like tweeting one time like billionaire mode or god mode or whatever the hell he was saying like, and it's just like, sure, like, by the way, if that makes you happy, like, knock yourself out, right? Like, like, if you want to go do that stuff in life, like, not for me, but like, knock yourself out. I make no judgment in terms of as long as you yourself are happy. Until you then start to try to make claims that I think are pretty verifiable or inaccurate. At least that's my personal opinion. And so, look, we'll see what happens, but, you know, who Satoshi is, is the fact that we don't know, I think, is actually a great, great advantage.

• 1:14:15Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, because no one's calling up Satoshi when Bitcoin dropped from 8,000 to 4,000 in a single day in March of this year. And being like, dude, what's happening? Right?

• 1:14:24Speaker 02

  Right. That's fair.

• 1:14:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Has nothing to do with the creator. It's, uh, it's interesting, though. I don't know. All right. What, before we wrap up here, Jason, I gotta go do other things. What, uh, what, uh, what do you want to tell the people? What do you got?

• 1:14:42Speaker 02

  Me?

• 1:14:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, you.

• 1:14:45Speaker 02

  Man.

• 1:14:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Everyone wants to, by the way, hold on, before you say anything, everyone wants to know where they can go get that shirt.

• 1:14:51Speaker 02

  Can I made it? Maybe I'll make, yeah. Uh, no, I'm opening up a store on going parabolic. I'll sell them there.

• 1:14:57Anthony Pompliano?

  You should, you should definitely sell that shirt. Everyone, everyone would buy that shirt.

• 1:15:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm making, I'm designing hoodies right now, so we'll, we'll get it all sorted out.

• 1:15:06Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. What else you got for people?

• 1:15:09Speaker 02

  Nothing, man. I think, uh, the end of this week, I'm on, um, I'm doing Lea Halperin's podcast, so it'll be fun. That's her first one. Um, so go check her out. Um, I don't know, man, just trying to buy some art. We didn't even talk about NFTs. I'm super stoked on those. Um, you know, I changed my name to, uh, Jason, Sir Art Pumping Williams. Uh, did you, did you see that? I was on the phone with you that night, where I, where I pushed that NFT's price by Trevor Jones to $55,000.

• 1:15:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. For those that don't, for those that don't know, Jason was bidding on a piece of digital art. It ultimately sold for $55,000, uh, and it only sold for $55,000 because he was bid it all the way up to $55,500. And then eventually somebody outbid him.

• 1:15:57Speaker 02

  I just fell asleep. I was not, I wasn't intending to stop, but it just went on and on. So,

• 1:16:04Speaker 02

  Trevor Jones is, is real. You gotta check out Trevor Jones's art.

• 1:16:08Anthony Pompliano?

  I agree. Um, all right, guys, before we let you go, remember to smash the like button, that big thumbs up. Hit that so more people will see this on YouTube. Uh, make sure you subscribe to the channel. Go to Going Parabolic on YouTube. That's Jason's channel. You can go subscribe there. Uh, and then go to pompletter.com and you can sign up for the email I send every day. That's it. What do they say? Uh, you ain't gotta go home, but you gotta get the hell out of here. We'll, uh, we'll see you guys next time. Thanks so much, guys.