Bill Ottman, Founder & CEO of Minds: An Entrepreneur and Free Speech Activist Talks Crypto and Censorship

Bill Ottman is the founder and CEO of Minds.com. In this conversation, Bill and Anthony Pompliano discuss free speech, social networks, censorship, crypto as money and an incentive, and what Bill thinks about Aliens. ---- Totle is a rare blockchain investment opportunity, one that offers a live product, active customers, an established revenue model. Totle solves three significant problems with blockchain asset exchange: 1) Security 2) Complexity and 3) Pricing. Over $4 trillion of blockchain assets were exchanged in 2018 and growth is forecast for at least the next 10 years. Totle’s sophisticated platform powers the blockchain economy with safe, simple decentralized asset exchanges at the best price for traders, wallets, businesses and other financial apps. Totle’s B2C Web App and B2B API are live and serving customers today. Visit totle.com/pomp for more info. ----- 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. ----- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

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

• 0:01Anthony 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.

• 0:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Bill Ottman is the founder and CEO of Minds.com. In this conversation, we talked about free speech, social networks, censorship, crypto as money and an incentive, and what Bill thinks about aliens. This conversation is wide-ranging and I really enjoyed recording it. I hope you enjoy it as well. I'm sure a lot of you have used Kayak to find the best flight. Total's kind of like Kayak, but it don't find you no flights. It helps you find liquidity on decentralized exchanges and it optimally routes your trades for execution. So Kayak, you find flights. Total, they help you find liquidity. We should get Kayak on for this spot that I'm providing them, but Total instead is our advertiser and you should go visit totle.com/pomp.

• 0:57Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Again, that's blockfi.com/pomp to sign up and start earning crypto today. 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.

• 2:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Bang, bang. Alright guys, I got Bill here. Uh, we got a lot of weird shit to talk about.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Let's do it.

• 2:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Dude, thank you so much for coming.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, dude.

• 2:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright. What the hell is your background?

• 2:26Speaker 01

  I used to organize music festivals.

• 2:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Like Fire Festival?

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Gathering in the Vibes, have you heard of that?

• 2:32Anthony Pompliano?

  No, what is that?

• 2:32Speaker 01

  It's in Connecticut, it's four days, Grateful Dead, James Brown. That kinda stuff.

• 2:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  And I was always into crowds, bringing people together, harnessing crowd energy, that's just been fascinating to me. And then, I mean, I studied English at UVM and...

• 2:49Anthony Pompliano?

  I studied English in second grade, but I gotcha.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  I know, your English sucks.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  So, then I, I actually hated Facebook and social media when it first started. I was almost like anti-tech. Cause I just saw people like looking at their phones, I'm like, this isn't, I was living in Vermont, I was like in the woods all the time, but

• 3:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, we're all

• 3:08Speaker 01

  It was, it was having destructive behavior. I was just, I was, I was not interested in getting involved. And then I started to understand that there's two different types of tech. You have like this proprietary surveillance-based tech that's exploiting people and doing all of that. And then you have free and open source software, decentralized technology that is actually trying to empower. And so the fact that there's that distinction, you know, I was all obsessed with local organic food and, you know, sustainable energy and this kinda stuff. And I started to see that, oh, in technology, there's this distinction.

• 3:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  I didn't realize that.

• 3:44Anthony Pompliano?

  It's the idea that technology's not good or bad, it's how it's applied, right? Uh, alright, so you are, uh, organizing music festivals, the organic food, hate technology, and then you start a tech company. How the hell does that happen?

• 3:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's about bringing people together. We originally started doing live events and we had, we would do these forums, sort of fuse it with music. And so, you know, social networking is live too. It's not just online. And that's how we were approaching it. And then we're like, okay, let's embrace the internet, of course. The internet's like the central nervous system of humanity. It's basically our, I started realizing it's, it is our biology almost. It's an extension of us, technology. So, let's embrace it and let's do it the right way.

• 4:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, and you start Minds in 2015?

• 4:30Speaker 01

  That's when we launched our apps. We actually incorporated way back in 2011.

• 4:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  And we're building out something scalable. Like, we had to rip apart, you know, databases and... Pull in Cassandra and bring together open source frameworks to build something that could. Yeah.

• 4:47Anthony Pompliano?

  And during this time, you know about crypto or don't know about crypto?

• 4:50Speaker 01

  I knew about crypto in 2012, 2013. That's when I first started getting into Bitcoin. But no, we were interested in like building an open source social network before. I mean, we were into cryptography, so we had like encrypted chat, but not cryptocurrency as much. Yeah.

• 5:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And in 2012, 2013, really it's just Bitcoin, right? There's not too much else to talk about at that point.

• 5:13Anthony Pompliano?

  You start building a bunch of different stuff and you end up on Minds as one of the applications that really starts to take off. Maybe give us an understanding of what that is and kind of what the early versions look like. And then we can talk about where it's evolved to.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  We first got like a quarter million users in like a week when we launched. And we believe in the right to anonymity and privacy. And that was when the Snowden NSA leaks were happening. And so people were freaking out about that. It was like, okay. And we got a bunch of press and people saw this alternative. And there were a few alternative social networks emerging like Diaspora, which is a decentralized social network as well.

• 5:53Anthony Pompliano?

  So in 2015 or whenever this was all going down, you guys were doing decentralization and anonymity and privacy were kind of the three core tenants. Is that fair to say?

• 6:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And what's your take on Snowden?

• 6:11Speaker 01

  I like more information. I want more information about everything that's going on. So, you know, in terms of the ethics of, of everything, you know, I'm not trying to compromise national security, but I also think that a lot of the excuses for not being transparent to government and saying that, oh, it's for national security, that's BS. Like, we need to know what's going on. They were violating the constitution, you know? It's, it's, it wasn't, it wasn't really legal. And now that I think they quote unquote, just ended the Snowden program. I saw some press releases about that, but you know, I don't buy it.

• 6:45Anthony Pompliano?

  So you're more of the belief that there's some things that are going to be done under national security kind of cover. And there's an argument that that stuff should happen, but.

• 6:59Anthony Pompliano?

  80% or some majority of the things that happen under the cover of national security shouldn't actually be hidden and they should be more transparent about what they're doing, how they're doing it, how it affects citizens, etc.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  For sure. Let's not open source the nuclear launch codes, but I think that there's so much that we should have access to that they're making excuses for.

• 7:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Any examples of things where you're like, no brainer, this should be more transparent and shouldn't be behind the national security veil?

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Energy technology. I think that there's certainly the surveillance stuff. I think that there's energy tech that they probably have, you know, maybe there's alien stuff. Let's go there right away. We know, all right, here's the thing. We know there's crafts that they have. Whether that technology is government technology or alien technology, you know, that's up in the air.

• 7:54Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you mean that we know there's crafts?

• 7:56Speaker 01

  So have you heard of the Phoenix Lights incident?

• 7:58Anthony Pompliano?

  I've heard a lot of lights in like the southwest of the United States, but what's the Phoenix Lights?

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Fife Symington, who's the governor of Arizona at the time of this, fully admits, and there's footage of it, a monster triangular craft hovering over Phoenix for hours. And, you know, hundreds of thousands of people saw it. The governor had on CNN said that he thinks it was an ET vehicle. The governor of the state, this isn't just, you know, speculation. Yes.

• 8:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, man, let's go.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  So we know that happened. Honestly, most likely it's a government craft, but what the heck?

• 8:36Anthony Pompliano?

  So basically, there's a literally unidentified flying object, right, that a bunch of people see. The governor thinks that it could be something that's extraterrestrial. I think that's how you say it. I would agree with you that it's probably a government associated thing if there was something there. And you think that there's a ton of that type of activity where they're testing things, there's communication, there's telescopes, all that should be much more transparent.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Secret space program, you know, all sorts of.

• 9:09Anthony Pompliano?

  What's your take on the secret space program?

• 9:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Man, I love this conversation. We're jumping right into it, right out of the gate. Let's go.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  We know that it's there, but we also don't know what's there. So, you know, FOIA, Freedom of Information Reform, that's where the focus has to be. And then, you know, that goes along with, you know, in the corporate end, advocating for freeing open source licensing within corporate giants, you know, and we're seeing enterprise companies understand that open source can win. So, you know, WordPress, Docker, MongoDB, all these companies are killing it with an open source model. Bitcoin, not a company, but...

• 9:47Anthony Pompliano?

  It might even be bigger than all of them and not being a company may be an advantage.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. So, you know, the government, what do they... They're so incapable of developing good technology and they're... But simultaneously, they're keeping it so secret. It's just a strange dynamic.

• 10:05Anthony Pompliano?

  I would argue that the government's actually incredibly good at developing technology, like highly innovative technology in very specific use cases, right? Like the internet, for example, you know, it is, many would argue, created by the government, right? There's tons of...

• 10:23Speaker 01

  DARPA.

• 10:24Anthony Pompliano?

  DARPA, I mean, all this, robotics, right? All of this. And so I think, it's actually the most innovative things they're really good at. It's anything below that threshold of innovation.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  Healthcare.gov?

• 10:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Not so great at.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  I mean, but how does that make sense that simultaneously they're creating the most brilliant technology, but also healthcare.gov, multi-billion dollar to put up a basic website? How?

• 10:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, that, I think that's probably less about the, uh, their ability as technologists and more about the government process of, uh, you know, "Hey, everyone should have equal opportunity to come and build this website." And we all know that it's like the prisoner's dilemma, right? And I know that if I bid high enough, right, and you bid high enough, they're gonna pay one of us some ridiculous price. And so everyone just keeps bidding higher and higher and higher. Uh, and the... Contracts get out of control.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Right, that's more of a of a contract process problem as opposed to not having access to incredible technologists.

• 11:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, like there's people in the government who could build a way better website. They're just doing other things, right? It's the, oh, we're gonna outsource this, right? Like, I would actually even make the argument that the government outsourcing things in some cases hurts them. Like, they would be better off doing it internally and actually not being so bureaucratic and just saying, look, I know that you're a really talented developer. You and three other people get in a room, go build this website. Like, that product is probably better than going through the contracting process and outsourcing it to private companies. There's another argument that I also would agree with in certain cases where the government should outsource a lot of things to the private market, right? So I think it really is case dependent on what we're talking about, right?

• 12:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Building robotics is very different than building healthcare.gov.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Completely agree with the nuance there.

• 12:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, what, um, so let's go back to minds.com. As you're starting this thing, privacy and anonymity are at the forefront. Why was anonymity so important?

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Well, because you forcing identity is, it affects the way that you communicate with the world. You know, if you're not allowed to potentially be anonymous, I mean, the way that you post the psychology involved when you're not worrying about your reputation, it, there's a chilling effect that happens when identity is forced. And it has to do with anonymity and privacy are sort of intertwined. So it's not that we think that everyone should be anonymous. It's that you need to maintain that right because otherwise it sort of becomes a dystopia.

• 13:09Anthony Pompliano?

  It's interesting because I think that.

• 13:13Anthony Pompliano?

  A lot of times when this conversation comes up with friends, there's a very black and white distinction between you're anonymous or you use your identity, right? And Twitter's actually a great example of there's a gray area. There's true anonymity, there's pseudonymity, and there's identity, right? And some of the biggest accounts on Twitter are actually pseudonymous accounts. They're not anonymous, right? They're pseudonymous. And those pseudonyms take on a life of their own, right? And so you kind of get into this world where some people want to have an identity, but it's an identity that's not their own, right?

• 13:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And like, I've always been fascinated by the idea of being anonymous in situations. There's a lot of power. I think you're talking about this chilling effect. How do you see users acting differently when you give them that option? Versus if, let's say, you guys didn't give the anonymity as an option?

• 14:13Speaker 01

  You see both. You see some people abusing anonymity in the worst ways. I mean, you know, vast majority of trolls are anonymous.

• 14:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Not nearly as many self-identified trolls. But most people identify themselves.

• 14:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Most people still choose to use identity, even when they have the option for anonymity. Why do you think that is?

• 14:36Speaker 01

  I think people have an eagerness to be heard and be recognized and to share their thoughts and connect with other people. And, you know, they're not necessarily trying to hide. But just because you don't have anything to hide doesn't mean you should be forced to share everything about you. Some, a lot of people will be like, oh, you know, I don't care if the government's surveilling me because I have nothing to hide. Well, that's ridiculous. That's like saying, you know, you don't need freedom of speech because you don't really feel like you have anything to say. Like, you still deserve the right to privacy even if you have nothing to hide. It's a principle.

• 15:14Anthony Pompliano?

  And do you feel like it is the responsibility of companies to police the actions of the community? Or do you think it's the responsibility of the community? And the reason why I ask that is when you talk about this, most of the trolls are anonymous, right? At some point, there's an argument to be made, hey, we want a community that is, that avoids that, right? Or kind of punishes those people. And then there's the other argument, which is kind of like the gab, you know, audience who says, we're not going to stop anybody from saying anything and just have at it. Where do you guys fall on this scale? And then also, how do you think about the policing? Is it community-based company, a hybrid?

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's hybrid. So first of all, so our policy is that if it's legal in the US, it's okay. So we are moderating for illegal content. Obviously, no inciting violence or, you know, crazy harassment or like spamming, that kind of stuff. And so we do both. We actually are about to roll out a juror system so that when there's appeals or something, a group of 12 users will actually vote, not us, on the outcome. Because we, I don't want to be in that position. That's a horrible place to be.

• 16:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Us subjectively deciding the outcome of, of these decisions is, is really dangerous. And it actually, it also takes off overhead to have the community help with moderation. And

• 16:35Anthony Pompliano?

  So how does that work? Let's say I get on there and I go wild, I say a bunch of crazy stuff, somebody flags it and says, this guy shouldn't be here, right? What do they do? Take all my content, kick it over, there's 12 people who review it and they like vote?

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this, this will be rolled out in beta at the end of the month. And essentially, it's within the terms. So it's not just 12 people saying, oh, we like this or we don't like this. They're in charge of enforcing the terms.

• 17:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. So kind of like a true jury, right? Like, hey, here are the rules that, which the terms of service provide. Did this person step out of bounds on the terms or not?

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Yep. And you have, every user can, you know, just go through this quick test to make sure they're not trolling it. And then you have a queue that a user can step into and hop in the queue anytime they want.

• 17:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Ah, so really you are truly like open sourcing the process of which the judging of the content comes. Did you see the recent article about the folks at Facebook who sit and watch all the like really bad content?

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, with that weird cartoon thumbnail.

• 17:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah. So I read the article and it was fascinating to me, right? Like the claims in the article and I'll get to what I think about it all in a second, but just for those that don't know, there was an article that was written in one of the service centers, I think of it kind of like a call center, but rather than being a call center, Facebook has employees or contractors, I think, sit in these places and they look at flagged content. So content that's been posted on Facebook that somebody has flagged as either dangerous, abusive, you know, not the right thing for Facebook. And these people sit there and they look through and basically approve or deny whether that content meets the rules or not. Kind of like your jury system, but rather than be open source, this is more closed

• 18:24Anthony Pompliano?

  source. And this article was articulating the things that they see are crazy, right? They see people killed, they see people beat up, they see, you know, just nasty stuff and the mental impact or the psychological impact on these people of just sitting all day long and looking at this content. The claim in the article is it's pretty severe.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  PTSD.

• 18:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, exactly. PTSD, I think was like, that was one of the claims, there's a bunch of them in there. People have a hard time sleeping, et cetera. I've got to think that, I'm not a scientist, right? But it would be hard to argue if you can get PTSD from seeing content, events, violence, et cetera, if you didn't sit and watch it all day long, there's a high probability that you could get PTSD from just watching it even if you're not involved, right? So like, I think that's not too hard of a line to draw.

• 19:17Anthony Pompliano?

  But what do you think about the idea of it being closed source versus open source? Like you guys go to this juror model, right? They have that more of like a closed source model. What are like the big differences or advantages you think that you guys get from the open source?

• 19:30Speaker 01

  When you're looking at such a high concentration of that content all day long, I mean, that's going to become your reality and your experience. So that's really dangerous. And I think that we need to look at ways to make sure that people, especially moderators or jurors or whoever, doesn't have too much screen time with that. But the issue is that the research that we have put together with dozens of studies that show that the policy, our policy is open source too. So it's all on GitLab, gitlab.com/minds. Anyone can comment on our terms. We're evolving them as we go. But the censorship research shows that you make the problem worse when you censor it,

• 20:14Speaker 01

  especially if it's in these subjective areas with like offensive comedy or, you know, that round thing on your chest that, you know, isn't allowed on the N-word, nipple.

• 20:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, got it, got it.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  I was like, what? That could have gone a lot of different ways there. Nipple is okay. No, I mean, Facebook is banning old pieces, old statues. I mean, come on, that's not, that's not help, helping society. That's not the direction that we need to go.

• 20:44Anthony Pompliano?

  But do you think that there is nuance to the rules? Like, because I think with the argument that a lot of these folks have, right? That are participating on the side that maybe you and I probably don't agree with, right? But I always try to put myself in their, in their shoes is the rules are the rules and you have a rule that is black and white, right? No nipples, for example. But you have been selectively approving it by saying, oh, it's okay in this situation because it's a historic photo, right? Like, how does any company, Facebook or any other content platform, provide the nuance of their rules?

• 21:19Speaker 01

  Just keep it simple. I mean, Provide filters for the content so you don't have to see what you don't want to see and just if it's

• 21:26Anthony Pompliano?

  You basically give the users the right to say, "I don't want to see this."

• 21:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't want to see any sort of NSFW content and but to say that you're going to ban all of that from the platform entirely. This is where I don't, you see the hypocrisy because for instance, Google, you can Google anything. Google is deciding not to ban a bunch of content from Google Search. But when you're on YouTube or a bunch of other Google products, they do. So wait a second, why?

• 21:58Anthony Pompliano?

  What type of content? I actually am unaware of this. So if I Google, do you know something that falls in this?

• 22:04Speaker 01

  If you Google nudity, you're going to find websites that have lots of nudity.

• 22:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  Now, you can't.

• 22:11Anthony Pompliano?

  But I can't go to YouTube and see videos with nudity in them.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  Right. Where's the consistency there? So they're understanding from the perspective of Google Search that censorship doesn't really make sense. I think that, you know, generally speaking, internet companies in the US know that we don't want to completely censor the internet or otherwise we're turning to China. Okay, so but why are we not applying that consistently across our apps? Why are we only applying it to search? It's this strange compartmentalization of information.

• 22:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Could it be something where the regulation and law ends up separating? Like you found a website and even though the website has nudity, the website is just a website and they're all treated the same versus like the video is then porn? I'm just trying to think through like why they would be doing it.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  You mean like where it's hosted?

• 23:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I don't know what the answer is, right? But like I'm wondering if there's just, and this would go to being the rules being dumb, right? Hey, if somebody else hosts the content and you help people get there, that's not bad. But if you host the content, then you're bad, right? Like stupid stuff like that I'm sure is all over these censorship rules.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  There's nothing illegal about, I think if the content's illegal, you're probably not going to find it in Google Search. But they're, they're basically choosing to.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  Not have that on YouTube, even if it's legal. And I think a lot of it comes down to payments and payment processors.

• 23:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  And so I think that there's a force coming from the payment processors to not, there's legitimate reasons. I mean, there's high risk content. So if you have like super explicit content, then, you know, a lot of payment processors don't want to be involved, or there's going to be higher fees associated with high risk content. So I think those are reasons. I think that there's just PR reasons for, for the censorship. But if we, it's getting out of control because now the AI and the algorithms are just sweeping all the content on the network and banning it just by default. You know, and, you know, they're just letting the blowback for people appealing it. And then they'll say, okay, you can have it come

• 24:27Speaker 01

  back. But like, for instance, thousands of creators on YouTube are just getting demonetized out the gate because there's certain keywords associated with their channel. And it's just, it's blowing up. So.

• 24:37Anthony Pompliano?

  But it actually helps the creator sometimes, right? Like, I mean, look, we had a podcast episode get taken down from Apple that ended up not having anything to do with the content, but we didn't know at the time. And I tweeted it to, you know, all these followers. And when it came back, the episode exploded. Now, the content was good, right? But everyone was basically saying, oh, my God, what was that content that got banned, right?

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Stray sand effect.

• 25:04Anthony Pompliano?

  A perfect example.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, that's it. And that's why the, that's a lot of the research that works against censorship logic. It doesn't even work, even if your goal is to say, get rid of offensive speech or, or super controversial speech. Like, we want to make a safer community. Censorship doesn't even achieve that goal. Because when you ban all that content, everyone's like, oh, my gosh, I have to go see what that banned content is. And you're creating these sort of infestations of, you know, sort of like digital ghettos of content that just make the problem worse in some other dark corner of the internet.

• 25:40Anthony Pompliano?

  It's super fascinating. You were on Joe Rogan's podcast recently. How was that?

• 25:46Speaker 01

  It was wild. It's a crazy studio.

• 25:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Wait, why is that studio crazy?

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Just archery range and, you know.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  Fitness and just, you know, ultimate media center and just, it's so cool. The environment. I think having an environment to do the things that you love, do everything that you love in one place. That's just a cool thing to achieve.

• 26:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. How was, how was he?

• 26:13Speaker 01

  He's great. He's, he's super balanced, trying to bring in all sides of the story. And that's what we need to do. We need to not just fall into our, our own echo chambers. We need to constantly be talking to people who think differently than us. And, you know, he's, he's pretty good at not letting the crowd dictate what he talks about. It's, you know, when you have a lot of people yelling at you to, to talk about different things, like you just, you want to be true to your own principles. And I think he's doing a good job there.

• 26:42Anthony Pompliano?

  He, uh, he, he strikes me as a, as a pretty fair guy, right? In terms of the questions he asks and he pushes back on people when, when he wants to. And-

• 26:52Speaker 01

  He plays devil's advocate a lot, which is, which is a very important strategy. I think though, that while doing devil's advocate, it's important to also steel man. Are you familiar with that?

• 27:05Anthony Pompliano?

  No, what's that?

• 27:06Speaker 01

  So steel manning an argument. So you know, straw man?

• 27:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  You're basically creating a false argument of someone that isn't even what they actually think to make them look worse. And it's just a horrible way to communicate. A lot of lazy-

• 27:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Twitter's full of it.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  Yes. Just creating these fake arguments of people. So steel manning is when you're having a conversation or a debate with someone, trying to create the best version of their argument as opposed to the worst version. And then it's such a more honest basis for having a conversation. So it doesn't mean that you're agreeing with them. You're saying, okay, let me get this straight. This is what you think and you're trying to be totally sincere to represent them well. So I think steel manning, while simultaneously playing devil's advocate is, is really effective. I, I think he does both.

• 27:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:52Anthony Pompliano?

  He, he fascinates me because he talks about weird shit. He is, uh, pumps out a ton of content. And I think that he has a variety of life experiences and the people he brings in there.

• 28:07Anthony Pompliano?

  He's just able to pull on so many different things that the conversations are wide ranging. I listened to one recently with Killer Mike. I don't know if you, if you heard this one. They talked for like two and a half hours about everything. Right. And I just said, how the heck does all, do these two guys know that much about that many different things? Right?

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. And why are we limiting ourselves and sort of just creating these

• 28:32Speaker 01

  limited perspectives of what we're actually into? It's, it's so much more interesting to see how everything's interconnected. And to hear random people's takes on, on different things, it makes it more human.

• 28:44Anthony Pompliano?

  I, the reason why I'm asking is somebody recently tweeted at me and said, you know, what do I think about it? And I said, I'd love to interview. Like he always interviews everybody else. I'd love for him to be the subject and just see like, you know, he isn't going to play devil's advocate, right? Like he, actually, he has to be the respondent to devil's advocate. I think would be super, super interesting because he is so fascinating. Based on all these conversations, I mean, he's had a thousand at this point. It's, it's pretty incredible.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. And just being able to search for the truth about so many different topics. I mean, what, what else are we doing here? That's why we're on this planet, to figure out what's going on. So it's sort of, it feels like an exploration into what the hell is going on on this planet right now? Yeah. Let's figure this out because it's pretty insane.

• 29:35Anthony Pompliano?

  It's incredible. All right. Let's, let's get back to social networks. I worked at Facebook, ran one of these growth teams that obviously the Facebook approach has worked very well in terms of growing social networks. You run a social network that some of the core components or beliefs are in direct contrast with what I think people would argue was so successful for Facebook. Whereas if you think of MySpace versus Facebook, one of the things was Facebook made you have your real identity. Right? Versus MySpace that didn't necessarily say, hey, we're a proponent of anonymity, but they allowed you to have some pseudonymity with the profiles, et cetera. And the second thing is their growth hacking, right?

• 30:19Anthony Pompliano?

  So maybe talk through, you know, your perspective as to, let's do like Facebook, Twitter and Google. Right? Walk me through, if you're running those companies, what you would do differently first?

• 30:34Speaker 01

  I'm into growth hacking. It's more consensual growth hacking though. And so that's where they've broken everybody's trust. They've, they've not been clear about consent of what they're doing and, you know, pulling in your contacts. And, you know, basically tricking you into betraying not only your own privacy, but all your friends' privacy. So, you know, when you feed them all your, your friend didn't tell you, you could give your, their number to whatever app.

• 31:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. So let's talk about this, right? Cause what you're basically talking about is, uh, I signed up for Facebook, right? And, uh, and one of the things that they do is they ask you for your contact book, right? Now, from the Facebook perspective, the reason why they're asking you for that contact book is that is probably some of your most close friends, colleagues, acquaintances, except you have their phone number in your phone, right? Uh, if you give me that, it usually has their name and it has their phone number. Their phone number, they've also put into Facebook, right? And as have you. And so now all of a sudden I can very quickly map who you are friends with, or who you know on Facebook,

• 31:42Anthony Pompliano?

  based on that contact book, right? So it's a way for them to quickly figure out, do you, you know, uh, friend recommendations, content recommendations, all this stuff. Uh, very effective.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Effective. And honestly, you can achieve the same thing. They're just missing one step.

• 31:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. What is that?

• 31:59Speaker 01

  The one step is if I want my number to be shared by my friends, so they can find me on whatever app, why don't I just say, hey, look, everyone, that's okay. And so my number now goes into a pool of numbers that it's okay to do it with.

• 32:12Anthony Pompliano?

  But what you're basically saying, and so people at home understand the nuance here. If I sign up for Facebook and they ask me, do you want to share your contacts? They ask me the, you know, user number one, and I do have to agree. Now, one of the arguments that detractors have is they may not make it as clear as what they're going to do with the number. They could do things that would improve that experience, but they do ask. And you do have to consent that I am going to give my phone contacts to Facebook. You are user number two. User number two's phone number is in user number one's phone book. You're making the argument that user number two owns their phone number. Do you disagree with the idea that user number one owns their phone book? Like, how do you, and it's really nuanced.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  They own it for themselves. It's, but I think that user number one, you know, if they could have the information of which of their contacts are cool with that or not, I think that they would be more than happy to respect their friends' privacy. What do they care?

• 33:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I would agree with that. So like, the idea is basically, there would be, almost be a third option, like, yes, I want to share my contacts, no, I don't want to share my contacts. Or, yes, I want to share my contacts, as long as my friends agree that their numbers can be included.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the type of thing we want to achieve in every little feature like that. Every invite feature, the types of information that we're keeping and whatnot.

• 33:35Anthony Pompliano?

  So, look, I worked at the company at Facebook, right? I know a ton of people who work at the Googles and the Twitters, et cetera.

• 33:42Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't think that

• 33:45Anthony Pompliano?

  99% of the people are malicious in any way.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  Agreed.

• 33:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, I actually think that they are good-hearted, well-intentioned people who are doing their job.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  And most of them are brilliant.

• 33:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Right, it's super smart, I mean, the whole thing, right? You couldn't be more, you couldn't speak more positively about the individual people. What tends to happen, I think, across all of these companies is there's metrics. And they're trying to do things to increase the metrics, because that's how they increase their business, right? Metrics can be revenue, users, connectivity, content, you know, frequency, all this stuff.

• 34:21Anthony Pompliano?

  And the way that they do it, they're basically pushing new frontiers, right? The idea that I could ask you for all of your contacts before cell phones was almost impossible, right? What are you gonna do? Send me your phone book? Right? Like, it wasn't a thing. Now, suddenly, we have these mobile phones, we actually have a digital version of all of my contacts. And with the press of a button, because of the way the phone is set up, I can immediately share my entire phone book with somebody else. If I share with a friend, not that big of a deal. Share with a company, ah, now we're getting into some of the nuanced arguments here. How do we, do you think we should reverse some of this stuff?

• 35:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Or do you think it's okay from now on, we've got to address this stuff moving forward? Like, like, how, how would you go about kind of addressing what's already happened?

• 35:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, damage control is positive.

• 35:14Anthony Pompliano?

  I didn't want to call it damage control, but you, you said it. So what the damage control, how would you address it?

• 35:19Speaker 01

  I, I think that they can't, they are pushing new frontiers. And so I understand you can make mistakes along the way because you're just, you're pushing and you know, you didn't realize that, you know, maybe this.

• 35:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and it might not even been a mistake at that time. And now we realize, right? It's like cigarettes. At first no one thought they were actually bad, right? And then also, hey, this is actually really bad for you.

• 35:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:38Anthony Pompliano?

  In hindsight, mistake at the time with the information everyone had, not a mistake.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  It's been 10 years since Facebook knew it was a mistake, at least, and all the others. So, you know, there is a clear consciousness of this situation. And there's, you know, the conversation is starting to be had. So this is why we see, you know, Dorsey talking about Bitcoin more and Zuckerberg talking about blockchain and decentralization and more privacy and encryption. But like, you know, WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton left WhatsApp because he knows that they're, they're betraying all of those people's privacy. He feels horrible about it. That's why he invested $50 million in Open Whisper and.

• 36:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Signal as well.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Signal, or yeah. And the Instagram founders left. The Oculus founder, I mean, they're all, there's something going wrong where there's a disconnect.

• 36:34Anthony Pompliano?

  So I, I will say that, um,

• 36:40Anthony Pompliano?

  that happens at every company, right? And the reason why I say that is like, if you look at Apple, Google, et cetera, the founders stay for a while and eventually they go to leave.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, but these were explicitly stated reasons.

• 36:50Anthony Pompliano?

  So I do agree with that, right? So like the founders leaving to me isn't as big of a deal as it is the reasons why they're saying don't leave.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  For sure. Yeah, you move on, you do new projects.

• 36:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Yeah. And the part to me that is, uh, is interesting, I think. So like, go to the privacy stuff, right?

• 37:11Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know if there's a right answer, right? In the sense of what you think is privacy may be different than what I think is privacy. We're both technically right, right? Like my, my self-privacy or my personal privacy may be different than what you define that as. For a platform with 3 billion people, it's, it's damn near impossible to get the solution for everyone, right? Now, what I think you have to do is you got to do the trade-off of, from an ethical standpoint, right? What do, what does the content owner believe? What does, uh, what serves the purpose for the most amount of people, right? And then also, there's probably some kind of like downside, the extreme protection of like, if you're doing something that serves the most amount of people, but then like somebody can die. You're, you probably have to address that, but I don't know.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  I'm not even saying that sharing all your information is necessarily ethically wrong. Some people would, would all agree, I want to livestream my whole life. I want Facebook to have all my data so that they can feed me the best stuff. And that should be an option for people. But also, you know, have a toggle of options across the spectrum so that the user on the onboarding can decide. And yeah, it's going to be a rougher UX if you fully lock down your privacy. That's just the reality. But so I'm not taking it from a purist perspective. We're only going to do the hyper-privacy focused option.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  I think that we could get into options where as long as consent is there, sure, there can be open data. There's so many amazing things you can do with analytics and AI and open data. None of those things are inherently positive or negative.

• 38:51Anthony Pompliano?

  What, what is, uh, other than the privacy stuff, right? Like, like what do they do with your data? What do you consent to? What do your friends give them, all that stuff? What, what are the other big areas that you think are, are important for the large social networks to, to address?

• 39:06Speaker 01

  I mean, I think they all need to free all their code.

• 39:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, explain that more.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  So, you know, I think we all agree that we want to know what is in the food that we eat. So that, you know, there's not gonna, we're not gonna get poisoned.

• 39:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  Why wouldn't you want to know what is in the app that you're eating? That you're buying, that you're installing, you're basically, you know, and you want to talk about transhumanism and, and, you know, extensions of our biology. Our phones are, they are extensions of ourselves. They're streaming out information about us. They're pulling in information. They're how we're downloading information and processing it.

• 39:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  So, why would we want to be installing things that are abusing us? And, and, and, because when you don't have access to the source code, it doesn't mean you're gonna go in and inspect the source code. There's tiny percent of people that are gonna be interested in do that. But at least the peer review community and the experts have the ability to do that for the people. And this is why the, you know, labeled food movement got huge.

• 40:09Anthony Pompliano?

  I was just gonna say, some people would argue that we don't know what's in our own food.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the same principle and, you know, we are seeing that industry explode.

• 40:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  We're seeing Bitcoin, open source, crypto. It's exploding for that reason.

• 40:25Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think comes out of, so, uh, let's say Twitter says, alright, you know, we believe in all of this. We're gonna open source the code. Is it more of having the ability to verify that they're not doing nefarious stuff with the data? Is it more of, uh, being able to understand if they're doing something bad?

• 40:45Speaker 01

  That's one major component, but there's also the innovation component where if they do it, open source the code, then we can move towards decentralization. We can have everyone set up their own node. We can have everyone building on top of the beautiful platform that Twitter's built. It's epic software. Why force companies like us and you know, these and these other emerging alternatives to reinvent the wheel? It's like, what's our actual mission here? And so, and with certain licensing, you know, companies can still protect themselves. It's not like you're just giving away all your secrets and you're screwed. I mean, how does the open source enterprise software business thrive? By sharing, because you know, you're going to achieve network effects by sharing.

• 41:27Anthony Pompliano?

  It is, uh, it's very interesting to me, the psychological elements of capitalism versus collaboration, right? Like, a lot of times, those two things are in direct conflict, where I actually can gain more, my entity, my organization, by not working with you.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  You think that?

• 41:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, here's my argument, is in some situations, that's definitely true, right? In very binary situations, you and I are both going after a customer. I'm not going to help you because I want the customer. If I get the customer and you don't, I make more money, you, you don't make that money, right? I think your argument, and what I want to hear you elaborate on, is there's a whole nother part of business where collaboration actually can be more profitable than the capitalistic kind of binary type approach.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I don't want it to get confused as if like, just because your, your software is publicly available, that means that you have to, you know, live stream all the secrets of everything happening within your company. So, um, yeah, it, it's, um, there's the innovation benefit, there's the ability to inspect for malicious stuff argument, and, you know, I'm just trying to contribute to, you know, evolution. That's, that's why I'm here personally. So, and I think companies think they're doing that too, and they are in certain ways.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  I mean, it's not as if mainstream social media is all 100% evil. I mean, they've facilitated revolutions, they've spread information.

• 43:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think that Facebook and Twitter are net positive to the world or net negative?

• 43:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Like all the good stuff, all the bad stuff, you put it down, you write it on a piece of paper. Are we net positive or net negative for having them?

• 43:18Speaker 01

  We're fluctuating somewhere in the middle.

• 43:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Really? You think it's neutral?

• 43:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I, I, I think that, well, are you familiar with Richard Stallman?

• 43:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, I've heard the name before. Why, why do I know that name?

• 43:29Speaker 01

  He is the founder of the, of GNU/Linux.

• 43:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah, open source. So I saw the documentary, Rick Burton from Balance, uh, sent it to me and I watched the, uh, that, that's why I know what it is.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, you know, he is like, fully hardcore, you know, he won't even interact with anything on his machine that is proprietary. You know, he wrote the general public license. He, you know, co-authored GNU/Linux. So, you know, epic dude. But his argument is convenience over, um, freedom is just not, it's, it's, he's, he'll never make that decision for convenience over freedom. Just never. It's just his principle. You know, I'm not, I'm, I'm certainly not that hardcore. But I think, you know, the internet existed and

• 44:15Speaker 01

  you can't change the past. So I don't even know what to say. If, if someone else would have popped up and we still would have a social network, you know, it's not like just because

• 44:28Speaker 01

  Facebook and Twitter came along that no one else would have. So it's hard to say. I, I, I think that we need to be focused on making decisions that align with our principles.

• 44:41Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I think that it is a fair argument. I probably disagree in the sense that I find it hard to argue it's not a net positive. There's still tons of issues, right? So it's not like it's a hundred percent positive stuff. It may be, it could even be 51, 49, positive to negative, right? But it's the, the, the positives outweigh the negatives in my mind in impact on the world. Now, there's an argument to be made if you take that same debate and I say, is it positive or negative to an individual's psychological state?

• 45:16Anthony Pompliano?

  There might be a bigger argument for the negative side.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  That in, yeah.

• 45:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Like, like that actually may be more negative than positive for certain people.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  For information flow, it's undeniable, but I'm not going to give credit to, or full credit for, you know, the, the information flow of, you know, breaking events and, you know, everything that social media has, has been amazing for. I'm not going to give that all to Facebook and Twitter. I'm going to give that credit to the internet.

• 45:41Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that's fair, but you like you could you have to share the credit, right? It's not the internet doesn't internet doesn't get 100% credit. Facebook and Twitter don't get 100% credit. There are there are just a lot of different platforms and everyone contributed something.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  And what bothers me is that they know about open source. They contribute a lot to open source. I mean, react angular, you know, we use angular Google, you know, these companies sponsor amazing open source projects. And so they're so well aware of this rift in what they're doing. Infra for for deep infrastructure of of applications, they're there. You know, they know they want those open source developers helping them out. They want that adoption and they know the only way they're going to the adoption with like the, you know, server level stuff, database stuff is if they open source it. But with the, you know, super competitive edge, the front end fancy stuff, you know, even a lot, you know, well, look, neither the backend nor frontend of Facebook is fully open source. So.

• 46:38Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think about a part of the blockchain space or crypto space is this idea of like on chain businesses? So the idea that if I'm getting paid on chain and I like fully decentralized, I fully with full transparency. So what I mean by that is you're able to see as anybody out there in the world can see what all my expenses are, what all my revenue is, my profitability, what I actually paid people.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Everything too extreme. Do you think we're actually going towards that? Where are you on that?

• 47:14Speaker 01

  I'm I'm into that. I'm into I'm into moving in that direction. I mean, so we did it. Our first funding round was equity crowdfunding round.

• 47:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  So we had to publish our financials, financials with the SEC.

• 47:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 47:24Speaker 01

  Which was which is cool.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  And, you know, more more transparency with how the company is operating. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we're not paying everyone in crypto yet, but, you know, we're basically trying to educate people about how to go on chain. So the way our system works is you can you we distribute rewards off chain, but we're incentivizing people to go on chain. So you can like boost your. Posts on chain or off chain, you can send tokens in between users on chain or off chain. And we have these tutorials for MetaMask and you know, how to do it. But you know, fully on chain, social networks, you know, you're paying gas for everything. It's just not, it's not gonna go mainstream. Yeah, it, yeah, it, we're moving towards that.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  But also, you know, blockchain is probably not going to solve all of our problems for decentralizing the social network. We're also, we're, we're working on a side project called Nomad, which uses your Ethereum address from your Minds wallet as sort of your username verified entity in, in Nomad. And then we're using React Native and Node. And then have you heard of DAT protocol or IPFS?

• 48:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, IPFS, yeah.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're similar. And so these are like fully peer to peers, you know, no central server networks, torrent style. And you know, those types of tools are much more scalable in a lot of ways, you know, more, there's more ephemeral data. You know, you don't need everything on the blockchain. I think we want a lot on chain. We want other decentralized protocols to help us out too. So we're sort of trying to mesh them together.

• 49:03Anthony Pompliano?

  What about, you think Telegram actually doesn't keep everything?

• 49:08Speaker 01

  There, I, we have no idea, they're proprietary.

• 49:10Anthony Pompliano?

  And that's where, for example, if they open source, we'd know.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I, I don't see the loss. Like I remember when we first were releasing all our code, it was scary. Cause you know, why? Cause you have that feeling like, oh shit, is someone gonna come and steal our, steal our secrets and compete with us? And get bigger than us? And we just put four years of work into building the scalable infrastructure and oh my God, what's gonna happen? It's so anticlimactic. And then you're just like, oh, I feel so much better. We're abiding by our principles, the code's out there, developers start coming in and, and helping out. And you start to feel the benefits of it. And so there's just so much fear involved in people not sharing it.

• 49:49Anthony Pompliano?

  They, because it's new or because there, it's the unknown?

• 49:53Speaker 01

  It's the unknown, you, people, you know, when you invest all your time, money into building a business and you know, Have this fear that someone's just gonna grab what you're doing and compete with it. It's scary, but that's what's cool about Copy Left, free software licenses like AGBLV3. Is that if someone takes your code and makes changes to it, they have to share those changes with the whole community. So it's it's self-propelling. And you know, then there's like Apache license and you know, MIT and stuff where forks don't have to share their code. And I think that there's value for that, too. But AGB, you know, free software, AGBLV3 is it's really powerful.

• 50:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Facebook has a blockchain team. What do you, what do you, what's your take on them going into blockchain? Zuck talking about potentially like decentralizing Facebook Connect, this reported stablecoin.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  It's proving the value. So I love that they're talking about it. It's just, it's validating everything about the industry. So, great, let's go there. But likely, it's gonna be proprietary, it, you know, just, they should just do it the right way.

• 51:13Anthony Pompliano?

  So here's my take, this is my hot take.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah.

• 51:16Anthony Pompliano?

  I think they are.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  You think they're gonna?

• 51:20Anthony Pompliano?

  I think there's a more than 50% chance that they come out with like a decentralized offering. I don't know exactly what it's gonna be. But like, I know some people on team and they're in these Telegram chats and like, they're doing their work.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:39Anthony Pompliano?

  The big question is, can the people on the team who understand the ethos, believe in the ethos, are attracted to work on that team because of the ethos, right? All that stuff. Can they get the approvals?

• 51:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Right. So like the team actually have a very high degree of confidence in. It is, that's the showdown. And I bring that framework up because I know many of the people at the Wall Street banks working on the blockchain stuff. And the teams actually want to do the right things.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 52:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And then I'm like, yeah, we walk into the board and like, you know, unnamed CEO at whatever bank is like, no way, like that nonstarter. And so they gotta go back to the drawing board and they get frustrated. Right? And so like, to me, it is the separation of people who grew up with one type of approach to building companies in direct conflict with people who actually understand and believe in the things that you and I believe in.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I think that boards get in the way and that is possible, but I, you know, with Facebook, look, if Zuckerberg wants it to be an open blockchain, it will be. That's it. It's his decision if this is done the right way or not.

• 52:54Anthony Pompliano?

  I agree with that. The, the thing that I'm hoping is a saving grace, right? Maybe it was Naval or somebody on Twitter had tweeted, uh, after Bill Gates said, you know, something about Bitcoin like helped kill people or not. I don't know what the hell he was talking about. Um, but somebody tweeted and they were like, you know, don't get it confused. If Bill Gates was still a teenager, he'd be working on crypto. Right? Like, you know, basically you rage against the man. And when you're successful, you become the man, right? That type of stuff.

• 53:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Zuck's very well off and he's been very successful. Uh, I actually think he deserves a lot of, you know, what he's gotten because of what he built. But he's still young enough where I think that he's not the 50 plus year old, like, like he's like over the line and will never get him back. Like. That's the one thing that I'm hoping, right? I think Jack Dorsey's similar, like I think Jack's a little bit older than Zuck, but they're still just young enough where I think that they will be attracted. We know Jack obviously is.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're listening to the people a little bit. I mean, you can't deny it. They're aware of cultural trends and memes. So, you know, and the constant uproar over all of the abuses of, I mean, how can they not be listening? It's, you know, they're losing active users. People hate it. They're freaked out. So, you know, I'm not, you can't pat them on the back too much for, I, I just think that they have a lot of work to do to regain trust.

• 54:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so go down this line of thinking, though. Do they need to regain trust? Because if they just decentralize things and start being super transparent, is it less about gaining trust and more about just giving people the ability to verify?

• 54:45Speaker 01

  Make it trustless. Yeah, I mean.

• 54:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Because that's the best they can do. That's the chess move, right? Is it's the judo move of, cool, Facebook 2010, everyone's yelling and screaming about your desktop focus. You guys don't understand mobile. Chess move, we're going all in on mobile, bam, become one of the biggest, you know, mobile successes in our lifetime.

• 55:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Now also, every, oh, you're centralized, you're, you know, you're too centralized, you're abusing data, all stuff. Can they do it again, right? So, Facebook specifically, could Twitter do it? Could Google do it? Chess move, we're gonna actually go the exact, we're gonna go all in on decentralization, we're gonna go all in on transparency, all in on blockchain tech, like, that's a pretty big bet. And it's very much 180 degrees from what's working today. Like, the thing with mobile to desktop is like, it's more of a shift, right? And your mobile usage doesn't necessarily cannibalize your desktop usage. Like, you, there's some people who have mobile phones who don't use desktop, right? And vice versa.

• 55:53Anthony Pompliano?

  This would be a much more extreme bet, I think.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  I don't think it needs to be so extreme. Like, it's not like, it's not like everything needs to be 100% fully decentralized. Like, we need, you know, decentralized with parentheses around the DE. Like, you, you need, central servers are going to be important for certain jobs. That's just a fact. And it's not like, we, but we want the option to go fully peer-to-peer. You know, maybe.

• 56:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, so you think that really the solution could just be, give people the optionality?

• 56:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 56:26Anthony Pompliano?

  And, and literally, if you just say, 90% of our users continues to use our centralized product, but we do have the option, if you'd like to operate on our decentralized Facebook product, then you can opt out and go to that product. That alone would be a huge milestone.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, yeah, of course. I mean, and the thing is with.

• 56:43Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't think that's an extreme view.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  No, it's really not. It's actually balanced.

• 56:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I mean, I actually, I actually like that idea. You're the first person who's told me that. But like, the idea of you don't have to go 100% either way, you can provide optionality. Like, I like that because that is very much in line with a lot of the ethos of like, you have the personal freedom to choose. Do you want to operate and use the product on centralized service? Or do you want to use it on a decentralized service?

• 57:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, different benefits to both. You know, you can't delete from a blockchain. Maybe you want to delete your photo. You, you probably want a server, a central server, if you want to do that. So, what, why don't I have the choice when I'm posting? If I want to unleash it into decentralized, you know, Cosmos? Or, you know, put it on a server?

• 57:26Anthony Pompliano?

  The, uh, the idea of not being able to delete photos, I don't know why I just thought of this, but like, every, you know, young college couple who like, hey, we're dating, they post a bunch of photos and then like, three months later, they go delete them all, right? Like, it's like, uh, the old school, like, get a tattoo, right? Of like, a guy or girl's name, and you can't get rid of it.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:46Anthony Pompliano?

  It's like, you post the photos on the blockchain, can't get rid of it.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  Well, there's all these weird paradoxes between privacy and blockchain. Because GDPR is actually not even compatible with blockchain, really. So, because this right to be forgotten, well, guess what? When you're cruising around the internet, writing to databases, whether it's decentralized database or centralized, you're having a footprint. Even deleting from Cassandra, which is a NoSQL centralized database, it's hard to delete stuff from there. Like, you have footprints and tombstones of interactions of data. So, saying, "Oh, I have the right to be able to delete every trace of myself from the internet."

• 58:32Speaker 01

  Well, it's like, well, I can't delete the fact that I just walked by that guy five minutes ago. Like, our paths through the internet, it's not that simple, from a technical perspective.

• 58:45Anthony Pompliano?

  What's your take on users outside the United States? Do you think they actually care about this stuff?

• 58:55Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure, don't you?

• 58:57Anthony Pompliano?

  You think so? My take is that Facebook specifically, because they're more probably international than most, I don't think that anyone outside the US is really aware or paying attention to a lot of the privacy stuff. Like, I think that it's the tech media, North American users, like, everyone's really rallied up right now. In those other, in a lot of countries around the world, not, I don't even know if it's most, but a lot of countries around the world, Facebook is the best option. Hands down, period, like, not even close.

• 59:29Speaker 01

  Well, we just, about four months ago, got, within 48 hours, got 150,000 users to sign up from Vietnam randomly. Our site's not even, it wasn't even translated to Vietnamese yet. And that was because there's a new "cyber security law" coming out in Vietnam, which is essentially a revolving door between Google and Facebook and the government to censor and surveil people. So, all, you know, some really big-name journalists from over there signed up and brought their followings over. And so...

• 59:59Speaker 01

  People can't be passionate about what they don't know. I think that once you have options before you, like, you know, more options, the better. Look, if I have the option to have internet freedoms respected and the functionality is equivalent.

• 1:00:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Let me ask this. Would you ever sell your company to Facebook?

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:00:20Anthony Pompliano?

  No? Why?

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  Because it, it, there's no point. It, it would, unless they literally, I would buy them. I mean, not that I ever could.

• 1:00:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  But they're, they do everything wrong. Unless they started doing everything right and unleashed all the code and it, I, it wouldn't, no, it's not, it's not possible.

• 1:00:45Anthony Pompliano?

  What if they created the?

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  They just take our code. They don't need our code, though.

• 1:00:50Anthony Pompliano?

  What, what if they created the optionality? So they said, hey, you know what? We hear the people. We're going to have a centralized option, decentralized option for Facebook. You get to choose, personal choice.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:02Anthony Pompliano?

  We want you to come help us build it.

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, no.

• 1:01:05Anthony Pompliano?

  No?

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  No. No, I'll come help them build it without buying the company. So I'm, I'm here to help. I, I want to help them. I want them to transform, but I don't, it's not.

• 1:01:15Anthony Pompliano?

  The reason why I ask is, uh, I'm very interested to see how talent starts to look at a lot of these internet companies and the decisions they make and should they go work at them? Should they not? Are there startups that are better or worse, right? Some startups actually may be worse. It, it's just, uh, the impact on the ability to hire talent is going to be very interesting as well.

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure. I mean, I think that the best developers are starting to not want to work at these companies because developers care about these things. They, you know, they're into crypto ethos. Why, why do they, you know, it's so, they get tempted with, you know, huge salaries and but it, you know, they don't get to share their code that they just spent four years working on with everyone. That's why developers like to go work for. Crypto companies, because a lot of them are open source and their work gets to get shared.

• 1:02:08Anthony Pompliano?

  It's crazy.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:09Anthony Pompliano?

  What, um, explain to everybody how you guys use crypto as an incentive on the platform?

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  So we launched ERC 20, we didn't give founders any, or you know, and we had the product on day one and we went through all the variables that, you know, most people hate about a lot of ERC 20s and made sure that we were doing it as right as possible. Basically, for all the engagement you receive every day, your engagement is divided by the total engagement in the network. So that's your percentage of the daily token reward pool. And that just runs every day and we have a supply and it basically, we increase the supply in parallel to user growth. And you can use your tokens, like one token will give you a thousand extra impressions when you boost with it.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  So you earn virality, essentially. We want it, we're never going to bring in the crazy newsfeed algorithms and you know, our whole thing is we want creators to get heard. I don't want to take your reach away. I mean, I had pages on Facebook with like five million followers and we were driving crazy traffic from Facebook to Minds. And then now you're only reaching like three to 5% of your own followers on Facebook. I mean, that is the ultimate bait and switch. Like, oh, okay. Yeah. Let's build a social network so people can post their friends, but then only let them reach 5% of their friends.

• 1:03:22Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So I have to defend Facebook because I actually ran along with a engineering colleague, the growth team for Facebook pages. And our job was to get people on. And so the one thing that I will say in their defense is some of it is not their decision. And here's why. If you get, let's say you start a page, right? And you get 10 followers and you post content, right? And those 10 people reload their newsfeed, those 10 people will have, uh, let's say, uh, I don't know,

• 1:04:02Anthony Pompliano?

  eight slots for commercial content in that newsfeed load, but they only like or follow your page. So they just signed up for Facebook. You're the only page. You have a very high probability of getting in one of those eight slots with your content because you're the only page, right? Actually, you might fill all eight slots depending how much content you have. They then go in like 10 other pages over a couple of months, then they like 100. At some point, they like 250 other pages. Now, you plus the 249 other pages are all competing for those same eight slots. So there is some like natural decay, not in Facebook changing the algorithm, just in that

• 1:04:43Anthony Pompliano?

  the longer users been on the platform, the more types of content have access to their platform. Now, what Facebook does do, right, or did do, at least when I worked there, is they'll do things like if you're a new page, let's get your content a lot of distribution, because what we know is if you get a lot of engagement early on, you realize that people are there, so you stay.

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:05:05Anthony Pompliano?

  If you start a page, nobody's there. After seven days, you're, ah, I'm out of here. Right? So they do things like that because it actually keeps you on the page. Now, there's two ways to look at it. They need to do it to get you to stay retained, right? To actually use the platform. People want your content, they subscribe, they help you build an audience, they're helping you build your business. The only way to look at it is they gave me a bunch of reach and they took it away from me. Right? Like, i- it's such a complex problem that I am glad I don't have to deal with that anymore.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  No, I understand, and I actually think that there's lots of benefits of algorithms and having that as, again, as an option. But I think that the default news feed should always be 100% raw chronological.

• 1:05:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so your argument is basically don't have the ranking algorithm, instead just do reverse chronological order, basically the newest.

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  Have the ranking. Have an alternative, but the reason obviously they do the ranking algorithm by default is for all these reasons of retention and whatnot, so.

• 1:06:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, the ranking algorithm is absolutely better on almost every single metric other than the content creator.

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  Getting their distribution.

• 1:06:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, let me do two things. Unless you're one of the highest rewarded content creators. So the very best content creators get the most distribution because they get the most engagement, you know, it's a kind of self fulfilling prophecy. The argument I think they would have is, well, shouldn't the, like, we let the audience decide.

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  No, they don't.

• 1:06:40Anthony Pompliano?

  So I want to hear your responses, but their argument would be, we let the audience decide who the best is, that we use engagement as a proxy for their votes, and therefore engagement leads to more distribution, right? You would argue?

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  Well, what do you actually think? So what would you prefer for your default newsfeed?

• 1:06:59Anthony Pompliano?

  It's different. Actually, on Facebook, I like the fact that it's ranked. And the reason is, uh, on Facebook, the way I use the platform, right? And you could argue, actually, I use the platform this way because of the algorithm, right? So there's kind of a chicken and egg type thing causation. But I use the platform because I only want to see the highest quality things. Like, I actually don't want to see my 20 friends who posted something stupid. I don't care, right? I want to see the highest quality things. And usually because those people are, it's a much more curated list of people, right? It's family, it's close friends, etc.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:07:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Twitter, I got 190,000 followers. I got, you know, I don't know, 2, 3, 4,000 people I follow. I follow those people not because I think they have the highest quality content. I follow them because I know that the content is almost always in some version of reverse chronological order, right? Or relatively near time. And I'm curating the list of people to benefit from that. So I follow a bunch of reporters. Why? Because they have news, right? Like, it's very different. I don't follow those reporters on Facebook. So it's almost like, there's not a one size fits all. It's the different platforms actually want different algorithms.

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I'm, look, I want different algorithms. I just think that reach matters. You, you know, if you, you work years and years building up a following under the notion of, of an algorithm, like reverse chronological.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  You just worked on that platform for years to build up your following under that preconception. So when that is taken away after years of work to build a following and then suddenly the default feed is no longer that and your business is destroyed. A whole industry was destroyed when Facebook started killing organic reach. You know, people who were driving traffic and surviving. I have so many friends whose businesses are gone because of that. So I think that the agreement that you, again, consensual agreement, you know, a contract that you're creating with an app that you're signing up for. Like if that's how it is when you sign up.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, they, look, they, they can do it, but I don't consider that cool.

• 1:09:18Anthony Pompliano?

  You're more in the camp of they shouldn't change the algorithm unless there's a vote. Or, or there's some sort of consensus agreement that this is good for majority of the people involved.

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  Let the user decide the feed that they want by default. And don't, you know, on Twitter, actually, they no longer do. You, in the upper right of your newsfeed on the app, you can put it to reverse, but they always put you back. You have to do it every day to go to chronological.

• 1:09:50Anthony Pompliano?

  So Cause it's better, right? Better in the sense of increased engagement, like it, it drives all the business metrics. Right. It drives all the user metrics. It like

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  But it doesn't drive the metrics for the users of the platform. The, the, the metrics, the metrics for the

• 1:10:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, it drives it for the best, the people who are the best, right? So like my Twitter, when they went to the algorithm, I got way more engagement because my content continued to get engaged with. And it was at near the top of the feed, right? So I actually benefited, I was a beneficiary of the algorithm change. Right. So I'm sitting here as a self-serving, you know, individual saying, I love the algorithm. Right? Reverse chronological, the switch to ranked hurt a whole bunch of other people. Right? So, so it's kind of like it has different impacts to different people depending on how the algorithm affects you.

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  Are you sure that if your posts were going to?

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  See, you don't know who your poster go. You don't actually even understand the algorithm. And this is the problem. Like, you don't know the numbers of comparison right now. If you were to post to the chronological or the whatever.

• 1:11:03Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a way for me to be tested.

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  No, you can't. So we actually, and that's, we need to see the algorithms. I mean.

• 1:11:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, you think that they should open source what those algorithms are?

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  Everything.

• 1:11:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, man, people would game that so much.

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, but

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  that's okay. I mean, just people want, I subscribe to somebody, I want their stuff. It's just become so overcomplicated. If I don't like you, if you're bothering me, like, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna push you away.

• 1:11:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Can you imagine if people knew what the Facebook ranking algorithm was? Like, exactly, like, exactly what it was. You know, you get this many likes and this many minutes and everything.

• 1:11:42Speaker 01

  But I think it would make users just be so much more careful about who they're following. And, you know, it, it has a lot, it has a lot more to do with the relationship between the subscriber and the person getting subscribed to. You're not gonna spam if, you know, you're, if, if the people are following you are getting pissed at you because you're just trying to game the algorithm.

• 1:12:04Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that's true.

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  I don't know. I just want options. I'm not an absolutist, man. I'm not trying to come at this from like.

• 1:12:09Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. I love it. I can talk to you for hours. All right, before we wrap up, what is the most important company in crypto? Rapid fire questions.

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  Most important company in crypto is,

• 1:12:31Speaker 01

  I, I can't, I can't, I can't. I can only talk about Bitcoin and Ethereum. I, I can't pick in a corporation right now.

• 1:12:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, perfect. No, that's great. That's my answer. It is, I always, hey, you'll either pick Bitcoin or I pick Facebook. And the reason why I pick Facebook is because whatever they create, they will probably launch to more people than have, than all people who have already been exposed to crypto and Bitcoin and blockchain to date. So let's say there's 50, 60 million people, whatever. If Facebook turns something on. They could hit 100 million people and all of a sudden, that's the first interaction that a wide majority of people will have had. And so it's really important, whatever they create.

• 1:13:08Speaker 01

  Totally agree.

• 1:13:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Right. And then Bitcoin, just because no, no one's taken out the king.

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  I just hope that they're smart, man. I, I, I hope that they do it with principles.

• 1:13:18Anthony Pompliano?

  I got faith, but I'll be the first one. If they mess up, I'll, I'll be the first one to admit they messed up.

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 1:13:23Anthony Pompliano?

  What, uh, what one regulation would you change or improve if you could?

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  Any regulation?

• 1:13:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Any.

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  Any government, any law?

• 1:13:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  Um, I want, I want access to all the, the black projects.

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  I want to know the secret technologies.

• 1:13:42Anthony Pompliano?

  The secret tech.

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:43Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I think that's a legitimate ask. They'd never do it, but that's fine. What, uh, what's your most controversial thought in crypto?

• 1:13:52Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you believe that the highest majority of other people would disagree with you?

• 1:13:57Speaker 01

  I believe that, I mean, we've sort of already gone over it. I, I, I think that if you're doing a proprietary closed blockchain product, project, it's just like you're wasting your time. I, I, it's, it's maybe better than other things you could be doing this life. You could be going around killing people. That's worse. But just put it into the ethos that Bitcoin was founded on. Let's stay on that train. Why are we trying to distort it?

• 1:14:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think it's fair to encourage experimentation, even if it's experimentation with things we don't agree with?

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  Open experimentation.

• 1:14:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, explain that.

• 1:14:38Speaker 01

  Okay, so do

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  like, let's say, you can start new blockchains.

• 1:14:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:14:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:14:44Speaker 01

  Of course. Tokenize all sorts of things.

• 1:14:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:14:47Speaker 01

  Equities, points, you know.

• 1:14:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Even, even if they go against Bitcoin's ethos?

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  As long as you're being transparent and sharing the results of your experiments, I am for experimentation with blockchains.

• 1:15:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. So you're less about you have to do X, Y, or Z, and you're much more about no sacred cows, do whatever you want, but the process is the most important thing around transparency, testing, publishing those results, etc.

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  I think that's a- What's yours?

• 1:15:23Anthony Pompliano?

  What would I change-

• 1:15:24Speaker 01

  What's the most controversial?

• 1:15:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, most controversial, Bitcoin's gonna become the global reserve currency. And I say it's the most controversial, not because I think people in crypto think that, like, don't think that. I think that, like, maybe 1% of the global population believes that.

• 1:15:41Anthony Pompliano?

  But I put the odds at like over 50% at this point.

• 1:15:45Speaker 01

  I want that.

• 1:15:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And it's just all predicated on a single idea of

• 1:15:52Anthony Pompliano?

  as time goes on, people will learn to trust the algorithms over the humans. Like, this idea of human-led central banking and just all of the bias and kind of decision-making, just, it's all flawed when we have algorithms with transparency and the inability to corrupt them. Right? So, yeah, I think that's probably the, there's actually a lot of people in crypto who don't even believe that.

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm happy to have algorithms guide me around or drive my cars, but I just want some crazy computer scientists to be able to go in there and make sure that all the cars are not gonna get simultaneously hacked and, you know, 500,000 cars go off the road at the same time.

• 1:16:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Fair. Well, think about these, you pay attention to the Boeing 737s that recently got grounded? Like, that, that's literally a computer glitch, right? It's got something, I don't even understand the full thing, but it's something about the software pulls the plane into a nosedive, and the pilots are reporting that they're basically pulling, they're like, what the hell, what the hell, what the hell? And there's been two crashes. And it's because the software, something about it, it believes that it's like, the nose is too high, so it pulls it in, it tries to like, pull it in equilibrium, but actually pulls it into a nosedive and they crash. Like, what happens if that's in cars? Crazy stuff.

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  We have to maintain the humanity. Like, if you, because if the profit motive causes the software to become corrupt and all of these, like, we need, when, if machines are going to take over the world and our biology, we just, we need to remember that there's humans. And if, if for now, the AI can just take over in a, in a secret database somewhere that no one has, that's why OpenAI exists. You know, that, the smartest people in the world know that open systems work better.

• 1:17:49Anthony Pompliano?

  I agree with that. Uh, favorite book, or actually not favorite, most important book?

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  Most important?

• 1:17:55Anthony Pompliano?

  That you've ever read?

• 1:17:58Speaker 01

  Um, I am going to say, the most important recent book I've ever read was this, uh, truth anthology called Truth by Orwell. And I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna say it's number one, it just came in my head, but it just talks about who controls information flow is controlling the planet's perception of reality. And so, you know, the, back in the day, the newspapers were controlling thought. You know, if you control thought and information flow, you control history. And so when people look back on history, this is their interpretation

• 1:18:37Speaker 01

  of history if information flow is totally centralized and locked down. So, yeah. What about you?

• 1:18:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Guns, Germs and Steel, the Jared Diamond book about evolution of humans. Uh, before I end, um, I usually let you ask me a question, but aliens, real or not?

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  Real.

• 1:19:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Real?

• 1:19:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Hundred percent?

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:06Speaker 01

  They have to be.

• 1:19:06Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Now, everyone usually comes in here prepared for the alien question. So I've been asking, the depths of the ocean scare the hell out of me. We don't know what's down there. Like, we actually probably know more about space than we do about our own ocean. Would you rather go to space or go to the depths of the ocean?

• 1:19:23Speaker 01

  Space.

• 1:19:25Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm with you. I'm with you.

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  The, the, the alien question is, is so present because it's not even, it's taboo, but it's not taboo anymore. Like it's so mainstream.

• 1:19:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, they're real.

• 1:19:38Speaker 01

  It's, yeah.

• 1:19:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Come on.

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  And so like,

• 1:19:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Dude, I saw.

• 1:19:42Speaker 01

  What conversations do we have to have? Who do we have to get in on the call or in a video conference to have the conversation to just declassify this stuff? Like, how can we, there, there are basically two civilizations on this planet right now. There are people who have access to the classified information about what's going on, and there are people who do not have access to it. So there are two levels of consciousness happening on Earth right now.

• 1:20:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Dude, I'm gonna blow your mind. I just read an article this morning.

• 1:20:11Anthony Pompliano?

  I, don't quote me exactly on this. I'm gonna get some of the numbers wrong, but a really fucking far away away, like four billion miles away or something. I think it is. There are two galaxies colliding right now. I don't even know what happens when two galaxies collide, but, and they're named like URH372 is colliding with URH373 or something, right? And they're colliding. And I was like, oh, that's pretty interesting. Like, I wonder what happens when two galaxies collide. Then I kept reading the article, reading the article. And it was in four billion years, our galaxy is going to collide with that bigger one. I

• 1:20:51Anthony Pompliano?

  was like, whoa, like, what the fuck? Four billion years from now, they're saying that our galaxy is going to collide with this other one. What happens?

• 1:21:04Speaker 01

  Gotta become that spacefaring civilization.

• 1:21:06Anthony Pompliano?

  It might not matter. Being a multi-planetary species, if the galaxies collide, I don't even, I don't know what happens. I'm gonna go research this.

• 1:21:14Speaker 01

  That's assuming that, you know, physical reality is even, you know, the basis of things. So we don't even know if consciousness is, is actually the fundamental force of the universe. So it's actually irrelevant if, you know, galaxies collide. We, you know, the, the debate between the nature of consciousness, that's really where this. Ultimately goes because you know, things aren't going to end necessarily just because two galaxies collide.

• 1:21:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Wild things to think about.

• 1:21:41Speaker 01

  I do.

• 1:21:42Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm I'm going from the aliens now. I'm literally going to do some research this weekend on what happens when galaxies collide. I'm like scared of what I'm going to find. What one question you have for me to to finish up?

• 1:21:54Speaker 01

  When was the last time you

• 1:22:00Speaker 01

  sat alone with your own thoughts for an hour, just focused, not like fully being present, meditating? Do you ever do that?

• 1:22:10Anthony Pompliano?

  No, I'm not big on meditation necessarily. My girlfriend tries to do it every day and like she swears by it. I do.

• 1:22:23Anthony Pompliano?

  I've gotten lazy. I don't walk to work anywhere. I live about a mile, like 1.3 miles from the office. And so there's been a couple of times where I've walked. But I try to walk home every night. And

• 1:22:37Anthony Pompliano?

  I can't say that it's quiet with me with my thoughts because I walk through Times Square.

• 1:22:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:22:41Anthony Pompliano?

  And I do always try to remind myself like, it's pretty cool to live here where like you're literally watching people who have like dreamed about coming to this one location in the world that they consider like the center of the universe. And they're like walking around just looking at all the lights and just, you know, their faces are in awe. And most New Yorkers walk by, they're like, yeah, get the hell out of my way. Like, like, stop stopping in the, you know, in the sidewalk. And so it's just like a reminder of like, we're all pretty lucky. And so I think it has some of the effect of that, but uh, but never somebody to like really sit. I just, I got things to do, right? Like, I, if I sit in there for an hour, I'd either get antsy and go try to do something or I'd fall asleep.

• 1:23:20Speaker 01

  Fair enough. Yeah. Walking through the streets of New York City, I'm always just feeling like we're in the, the blood veins of, of a super organism. It just, it's You zoom out and you're, you know, when you fly into New York, you're just like, that looks like veins of a, of a body. And it really is. That, that, I mean,

• 1:23:40Anthony Pompliano?

  It's crazy.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  Earth's an organism. And we're just like these little, little.

• 1:23:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Flying around in metal tubes all over it, man.

• 1:23:47Speaker 01

  All right, thanks for having me, brother.

• 1:23:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Thank you, uh, thank you so much for coming. This is a ton of fun. Um, after I do my, uh, my galaxy collision, uh, research, maybe we'll have you back and we could debate the finer points of, of space travel, but, uh, I appreciate it very much.

• 1:24:02Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:24:04Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:24:48Anthony Pompliano?

  So you can actually take your Bitcoin, you can deposit it with BlockFi and get paid an interest rate of 6% in return. Go check out blockfi.com slash pomp. Again, blockfi.com slash pomp to sign up and start earning interest on your crypto today. 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.