#1308 Travis Kling | Bitcoin Saves The World From Speculation

Travis Kling is the Founder & Chief Investment Officer of Ikigai Asset Management. In this conversation, we talk about cryptocurrency prices & protocols, the ultimate use case, liquidity, bitcoin vs gold, Saylor vs Schiff, financial nihilism, allocating capital in today’s market, and more. ======================= Introducing Espresso - the world’s most interactive portable display. They have a portable screen that is incredibly light, comes with a nice stand, and the user interface is very easy. Anyone who listens to this podcast can go to ⁠⁠us.espres.so/pomp⁠⁠. They have a brand new offer waiting for you. ======================= Base is making it their mission to bring a billion people onchain. But what exactly is Base? It's an Ethereum L2 offering a seamless experience for both builders and users. With near-zero gas fees and rapid transaction speeds, Base is shaping the future of the onchain world. Base is a canvas for everyone, with hundreds of apps in the Base ecosystem, whether you're an emerging creator, a seasoned developer, or someone exploring the onchain space for the first time, Base is designed to bring your ideas to life. So, if you're looking for a platform where the future of onchain is being built daily, Base is your destination. Join in and make onchain the next online. Learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠base.org⁠⁠ and follow along on Twitter at @BuildOnBase to see cool things to do onchain, everyday. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode.

• 0:31Anthony Pompliano?

  This episode is with Travis Kling. He's the founder and chief investment officer of Ikey Guy Asset Management. In this conversation Travis and I talk about if prices can go up without any adoption of these crypto assets and protocols. We also talk about liquidity driving investor interest, and maybe crypto is just all one big global liquidity trade. And then why crypto may be the greatest video game in the world and how that actually could be the ultimate use case. We get into is Bitcoin gold? Is Michael Saylor similar to Peter Schiff, which is a critique that one of my friends recently said. And then also we talk about financial nihilism, and eventually we get to how is Travis allocating capital in today's market. This conversation is fascinating. It has lots of taboos. We talk about it all,

• 1:16Anthony Pompliano?

  and I hope that you learn from it. Here is my conversation with Travis Kling.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Espresso, the maker of the world's thinnest portable display. Now, listen up. If you're like me, you feel like you are at a command center when you sit down at your desk. I got a gazillion tabs open and different windows for different activities. There's my web browser, my text messages, I have Slack open, and I got a notes app. I normally work on a desktop and can be very, very productive. But everything falls apart the second I leave my desk. If I'm traveling... If I go to a coffee shop to do some work or just want to work from the kitchen table, my laptop doesn't have enough screen space. I lose my command center and my productivity falls off a cliff. It's a major problem, but this is where Espresso comes in. They have a portable screen that is so beautiful that you think Steve Jobs came back from the dead to create it. The thing is incredibly light.

• 2:30Anthony Pompliano?

  It comes with a nice stand and the user interface is so easy that I figured it out how to do it in less than three minutes. If you listen to this podcast, you know that's not an easy feat. So the Espresso team and I, we became friends. I got to know them because I really liked the product and those screens, they now want to offer them to any fan of the podcast. So we struck a little deal. Here's how it works. Anyone who listens to this podcast can go to us dot E S P R E S dot S O. Or that's too confusing. Just go click the link in the description. If you go to Espresso's website, they've got a brand new offer there sitting for you. You get a little discount and you'll get a beautiful screen. Trust me, I use mine every day. You'll love the Espresso screen and I think it'll make you more productive.

• 3:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Go check them out today by clicking on the link in the description.

• 3:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Base. Base is making it their mission to bring a billion people on chain. What exactly is Base? It's a layer two offering, a seamless experience for both builders and users. With near zero gas fees and rapid transaction speeds, Base is shaping the future of the on-chain world. Base is a canvas for everyone with hundreds of apps in the ecosystem. Whether you're an emerging creator, a seasoned developer, or someone exploring the on-chain space for the first time. Base is designed to bring your ideas to life. So if you're looking for a platform where the future of on-chain is being built daily, Base is your destination. Join in and make on-chain the next online. Learn more at base.org or follow along on Twitter at BuildOnBase. Again, that's at BuildOnBase

• 4:04Anthony Pompliano?

  to see cool things to do on-chain every single day. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Travis here. I think a right place to start. Is there a world where crypto prices go up, but crypto adoption does not happen and crypto products don't work? Like, can we have something where prices make people rich, products do not solve user problems?

• 4:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think that would, I mean, I think we could probably, you know, if you wanted to answer that question exactly, I think we would need to sort of define quantitatively what, you know, adoption looks like, basically. But I, I think what you just described is, is probably my base case for how this, uh, this coming cycle is going to play out. And that was what I tried to lay out in this, in this tweet thread that went so viral that, that you reached out to me about in response.

• 4:58Anthony Pompliano?

  So what, what does that look like? Your base case is what?

• 5:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the name of the thesis is a lack of pretense that any of this shit does anything or will ever do anything. And I came to that conclusion by watching how last year unfolded and how it looks like this coming year is going to unfold. And comparing that to, you know, prior years in, uh, six plus years that I've been in crypto full time. And that's not to say that there's, you know, it's my expectation, there's not going to be any adoption. That's not true. Um, I think stable coins continue to be the strongest product market fit in crypto history, even stronger than Bitcoin.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  And I'm sure there's some maxies that are gonna, you know, uh, be upset about that. But, um, I think the, just the, the numbers and the volumes and things like that would, would support that. I mean, it's kind of ironic that a stable coin, you know, is like a pseudo crypto, right? That it's like, oh, we're trying to like get off a dollar and this, that and the other. But it's like, what is clear, the product with the most demand is a digital dollar that moves around, you know, KYC free and settles very quickly.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  Um, and when you move away from stable coin adoption, uh, it does not look to me like this coming cycle is set up to be a cycle for, um, you know, mass incremental adoption. I'm just not exactly sure where that's going to come from. Um, we had DeFi summer in the 20, in 2020, um, which, you know, I wouldn't call it a flash in the pan, but.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  Because I think that would be overly detrimental. I think what we learned in hindsight is that the tokens associated with DeFi

• 7:04Speaker 02

  have a value accrual problem. And the next summer, we had NFT summer in 2021. And NFTs aren't going anywhere, but in my view, their current form is insufficient to kind of gain mass adoption. And I think a lot of the hype around NFT mania was also just a function of the tremendous amount of money printing that the government did and people were just, you know, there was wild speculation across a bunch of different asset classes. But I actually struggle, as we sit here today,

• 7:45Speaker 02

  to look into the coming cycle and see where even the amount of hype that we got from DeFi summer or from NFTs is going to come from. I mean, there are places you can look in, you know, AI, people put AI out there a lot. D-Pen, people talk about D-Pen a lot. It would be my base case, and this is certainly not financial advice, nothing I say here is financial advice, but it would be my base case that a basket of AI names would outperform the broader crypto market over the next 12 to 18 months. It would be my base case that a basket of D-Pen names would outperform the broader market over the next 12 to 18

• 8:22Speaker 02

  months. But I would not expect, you know, it would not be my base case that the tokens pumping in either one of those sectors would come along with, you know, mass adoption that ends up being sustainable through cycle that drives, you know, a value accrual through cycle. You know, I think it looks like they'll probably pump to the high heavens and then pull back, you know, 95% like we've seen so many other alts do for multiple cycles historically.

• 8:57Anthony Pompliano?

  So let me throw a couple of ideas out there at you. Interest is driven by macro in the sense that the pump, the, you know, kind of degenerate behavior.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  If the Fed wasn't easing, we would be having a completely different conversation.

• 9:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes. And so if they do ease to any degree of severity, is that just crypto becomes a play on global liquidity? And people now understand easing equals asset prices get separated from fundamentals, get long, get loud, have a blast on, you know, X and chill. And so like that is the interest is actually has nothing to do with crypto at all has to do with macro.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah, that I mean, I definitely start from there for sure. And it's part of, you know, the thesis in my view. You, because you know, Bitcoin has a unique, I would say more time-tested and well-understood and well-justified relationship to macro and to global liquidity. And the way I would characterize that is that in my view, Bitcoin seems to be purpose-built to sort of absorb an outsized share of central bank balance sheet growth into money supply growth.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  So if you're, if you're bullish M2 money supply growth, if you're bullish central bank balance sheet growth, that Bitcoin is kind of purpose-built to capture, you know, some sort of multiple on the growth of those global liquidity measurements. And you combine that and, you know, we're going into an easing cycle. Fed's, you know, highly likely to cut it, you know, at least a few times this year. I don't think we're going to get QE this year, but I think they will stop tightening the balance sheet at some point this year. And it looks like China is, you know, probably needs to ease a lot this year as well, too. And You combine that with getting spot Bitcoin ETFs, which unlocks

• 11:11Speaker 02

  safe access to Bitcoin for trillions of dollars, literally trillions of dollars that didn't previously have it. You combine that with the halving and to me, that looks like a pretty, you know, what I referred to in the tweet thread as a free walk to all time highs. And we can have a separate conversation about how long it's going to take to get there or how far beyond prior all time highs I think we're going to go, but this move from mid 40s up into the high 60s looks pretty straightforward to me because of all those reasons I just said. And, and there is a memetic reflexivity that comes into play here and it's, it's this meme of three up, one down. You've seen this three up, one down?

• 11:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  Right? It's, it's really strong. I mean, that is a strong meme. And there's a lot of reflexivity that goes along with it. We're in the meat of the good part of the three up, one down. Right now, like I said, you've got these, these other factors that look supportive. So then people take the next step to memetic reflexivity and they go, well, ETH BTC ran last time. Oh, ETH's about to get a spot ETF as well, too. So it looks like ETH had probably has a pretty straightforward walk up to, to all time highs. And then it's like, oh, and then last cycle, all these alt ones ran relative to ETH. So, you know, that's probably going to happen again. Oh, and you know, Dog coins had a good run last time. So that's probably going to happen again and so on and so forth.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  So it's just like, it's a good year. There's, there's such strong reflexivity around this view that it's a good year to be in the casino, regardless of what the kind of underlying adoption fundamentals are for what you're gambling on in the casino.

• 12:54Anthony Pompliano?

  So a second idea, what if crypto is actually just the greatest video game ever created? And what I mean by that is, you know, you and I, when we were kids, we grew up playing Madden, NBA 2K, maybe you'd play 007 on Nintendo 64, Sonic the Hedgehog on Sega Genesis, right? We had all these games and it took up an enormous amount of time for us. As we got older, many people abandoned the video games, but replaced it now with Twitter and crypto. And so much of that attention is driven by what are the little points going up or down, right, on these screens? What's the latest narrative? Where can I find the quote-unquote cheat code?

• 13:38Anthony Pompliano?

  And rather than having to put up, up, down, down, right, left, you know, circle, triangle, on the video game controller, now it's basically like, can I find the Telegram group where someone's going to tell me about the next coin that's going to pump? And so there's this very weird thing of like, the gamification of society continues to happen. And so is this just the greatest video game ever created? And that is quote-unquote a use case or an adoption driver? Is it is about speculation? It is about gaming, a game, not so much, you know, how many transactions? Or what is the product market fit of one of these products?

• 14:13Speaker 02

  I agree with that. Yeah, no, no, I completely agree with that. And I think, you know, one thing I would just say is like, I didn't really get into this for that. And that would be disappointing relative to my hopes and expectations for this technology and this asset class. And it's like, I run a crypto fund, it's called Ikigai. I named it Ikigai for a reason. Probably most people are familiar with this concept. You Google it, you see this Venn diagram, what you're good at, what the world needs, what you deserve to be paid for, what you like to do. You find those four things, you find your Ikigai. It's like this, this what the world needs concept.

• 14:57Speaker 02

  Well, I, you know, in the summer of 2017, convinced myself that the world needs this technology and that it does have the potential to make the world a better place and it can do it quickly, it can do it in a single generation. And I think that the...

• 15:13Speaker 02

  The gamification of society trend is strongly present. I think it would be like a fool's errand to, you know, think that that wasn't going to happen or to try and, you know, I don't know, spend all your time fighting against that. I think that would be, you know, you would just, you just wouldn't probably get very far because I think it's an offshoot of, this is, it's an offshoot of financial nihilism, which is a concept we can probably talk about later. I, I, I think what I would say is that,

• 15:53Speaker 02

  what I see in the crypto market is that, that, that gam- this gambling on vaporware mentality

• 16:03Speaker 02

  is becoming so strongly present in crypto that it, I think, stands to present serious risk of choking out the potential for the technology to make the world a better place. Like, it's just like, there, there's, there's both. There's many things in crypto. There's a potential to make the world a better place in these various different avenues. There's, and then there's lots of things to gamble on and just have a good time with. And, but, but this thing over here, to me, is getting so strongly present that it could just choke out this other thing,

• 16:46Speaker 02

  which to me, that would just be a very disappointing outcome.

• 16:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Is it any different than traditional markets? Nikola, the EV company rolling a truck down a hill? Is that any different than someone putting a partnership on their website in the crypto sector? That's not true. Or people speculating on GameStop? Any different than them speculating on ZenCoin, TrumpCoin? Or any other, you know, token that they think could potentially quote unquote, make them rich? Like, how much similarity is it across these markets? And it's like a society thing versus it is a crypto-centric thing?

• 17:21Speaker 02

  I agree with that. And like I, you know, the, the underlying drivers of that are, you know, I, in my, a large part of that is this financial nihilism concept. And I think,

• 17:31Anthony Pompliano?

  What is that? Explain financial nihilism.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  Um, it's like, I'm gonna put 500 K, I'm gonna put $500 into a dog coin that is probably going to go to zero, or I'm probably going to lose money on, but there's a small chance that it could 50x because the $500 isn't enough to make a difference in my life anyways. And neither is like $1,000 and neither is $5,000. And that's just because the American dream is, uh, is unavailable to a wider and wider swath of Americans. There's versions of that that are true in other parts of the world as well, too. Um, that upward mobility

• 18:19Speaker 02

  that was available, uh, to the prior generation and the generation before that, it's not nearly as available in this current generation. And then, you know, there's a host of statistics that, that, um, you know, support this thesis, but the easiest one is just looking at median home prices relative to median income, right? And, and where that level is. Um, and it just causes people to make these different types of decisions financially. And it's one of the, you know, gambling in general is skyrocketing in popularity, skyrocketing popularity. And that is a function of financial nihilism and gambling on vaporware. I mean,

• 18:58Speaker 02

  dude, don't get me wrong. Trying to hit some low cap shitcoin and doing, you know, research to go, to go try and hit some low cap vaporware shitcoin. That is, in my opinion, a much better usage of your time than trying to put together a five leg parlay on, on pick a sport. You know what I mean? Like unequivocally. So it's like, you know, but I think it's, it's just.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm not expecting that all of that is going to, you know, that I like want or expect or want to try and work for all of that to get removed from crypto. That's not my point. I think my point is like the magnitude of that attitude, the magnitude of that attitude being present in crypto, and then what does that mean for this technology's potential, you know, to, you know, fulfilling its potential, you know, to make the world a better place and have a, you know, a positive outcome for a wide swath of people.

• 19:54Anthony Pompliano?

  So when we think about the downsides, I think you're spot on in terms of that is becoming a bigger sector or a bigger focus, it changing behavior, it has potential negative side effects that people may or may not realize. What would you say are the things that are working or have a shot to change society for the better? Bitcoin, stable coins, those are two things you've mentioned. Are there other things that you're like, hey, there seems to be some progress here and like if this continues, I could see this having an impact in a positive way? Or is it really just like one or two things like a Bitcoin and a stable coin?

• 20:31Speaker 02

  Um, so I find deep in to be very interesting. Um, using a token economy to incentivize real world behavior and actions. I find that to be very interesting. Um,

• 20:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain a little bit for those that don't know deep in like what it is with these like physical infrastructure.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. The, I think the headline project to me is helium, which I think is objectively one of the most successful projects in crypto history. They ship, you know, I don't know, one point, something million of these pieces of hardware. People set up these pieces of hardware and then late last year they partnered with T-Mobile and you can now get a $20 a month 5G Wi-Fi plan that is powered by these hardware units that people get paid in these tokens to set up and operate to provide this 5G Wi-Fi network. Um, that's very interesting. And, you know, shipping one point, something million hardware units, you know, that's just a real short list of any projects that have ever done anything like that and providing a $20

• 21:35Speaker 02

  5G Wi-Fi, that's just real world use case that, you know, it's just a real short list of crypto projects that have ever done something like that. So I think that's interesting. The issue that I find with with these deep in uh, projects is that in in my view, just in my view, the these the their token structures. Just how does the supply and demand of the token intersect with the use case of the technology? Does not, it looks to me to be susceptible to blowing a big bubble and then collapsing a big and collapsing a big bubble. And, you know, Axie Infinity would be kind of the the headline name from the last cycle that had that kind of thing. And and, you know, I've been hopeful, dude, I mean, you and I talked.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  The first time I did a podcast with you was fall of 2018. That's a long time ago. And I think we talked a lot about crypto valuation on that podcast. And we have made a stunningly small amount of progress on token structures since then. And I think I would, I would have just thought we could have had more interesting experimentation around token structures to try and get some innovation there to create some more sustainability in how these tokens act through different cycles of the market. Because, you know, I think the issue with a lot of these things is that you blow a big bubble.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  And then, you know, the cycle broadly tops because the Fed, you know, starts tightening. Bitcoin goes down 50, 75%. And then these tokens do it down 95%. Tons of people lose a bunch of money. You torch a bunch of the community uh, members and like in a lot of cases, the projects fall apart and they basically can't make it out the other side of that. So there's just a lack of sustainability through there. And I would just hope that at some point we could get more innovation around that. But it looks like the main innovation around like token structure that we have done this cycle has been the introduction of

• 23:42Speaker 02

  points, uh, you know, leading to airdrops, you know, which is this is just right down the middle of the fairway of Ponzi shit that is not sustainable. It is just not a sustainable, you know, go to market customer acquisition.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  You know, beyond a pump and like, it's just, it does not strike me as very sustainable. So, and it looks like that's what we've done. That's what we're leading with this next cycle. So.

• 24:08Anthony Pompliano?

  So, again, I think that this is a perfect example. There's a lot of early stage startups who, I mean, Uber just turned their first profit, right? And I remember being in San Francisco, Uber and Lyft are in the war. Lyft's got the pink mustaches on the front of the cars. You could literally get across town in San Francisco for like $3. It was wild. You're like, I press a button on my phone, somebody picks me up and takes me and they cost $3. I'm never doing anything else. Like, this is amazing. And what they were doing is they were just burning the hell out of VC dollars. It was a war of trying to acquire users, pay whatever it took, and the promise was they were going to stay forever. Now, if you go and you use Uber today,

• 24:50Anthony Pompliano?

  it's expensive. I mean, the other day, it was pouring rain outside. I was being a little soft, you know, you know what? And I had to go like 15 blocks. I ordered an Uber. It's 20 bucks.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:03Anthony Pompliano?

  And it was so expensive that it almost made me be like, you know what? I don't have an umbrella with me, but like, I might just walk and get soaking wet because it's the principle of not paying the $20, right? And so like, there was like this unsustainable thing and they basically were like, let's race to get enough users to get to the point where we could turn a profit. Now Uber made it. WeWork did not, right? And we can go through a bunch of these and most companies do not make it. And so I do wonder like, how many of these projects or organizations are trying to be the Uber that takes 15, 20 years? Like, they'll eventually get there. And this idea of like, creating a token somehow gives you like a balance sheet or a treasury, but then you don't have to raise capital. Like, you have this thing that you can use as a currency versus, no, actually, these guys are all

• 25:47Anthony Pompliano?

  full of shit. This is a completely stupid way of approaching it. And there is no escaping out the other side, right? And so what you're actually doing is you're wasting time, you're burning people, and like, it ends up being this really negative kind of approach.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  I think you bring up a good point. I think my pushback against that would be, you know, show me the product market fit in crypto that is in the same ballpark as Uber.

• 26:15Speaker 02

  You know, there's just, that is just an incredibly short list. And I think if we had a dozen different applications that you were seeing very real adoption on, that my view around maybe some of the unsustainability of the token structures, like I would, I would maybe feel differently about that. But it's like, it's like, not only does it seem like we haven't gotten the token structures right on a lot of this stuff, but also by and large, the overwhelming situation is, is, you know, either products that never ship or products that ship and have no demand, you know, or, you know, solutions that are just looking around for a problem, basically.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  And that that is, you know, overwhelmingly the characterization of end user applications in crypto. And there is, there's, there's one caveat that I, I did mention in the tweet thread that I, I want to mention here as well, too. I think there's certainly technologists in this space, more technology focused people that would say, we still don't have cheap, abundant, safe, reliable, fast block space on L1 smart contracts. We still don't have that. Been trying to get it for eight years, still don't have it. But, you know, for X, Y, and Z reason, this is the cycle that we are finally going to have

• 27:42Speaker 02

  cheap, abundant, reliable, fast, safe blockchain transactions. And that it's a field of dreams, if you build it, they will come type of situation. Once you have that, that like, these use cases are going to magically appear from a cornfield, you know, like Shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams, right? And maybe that's true, maybe that's not. I think.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  That I pay enough attention to this space that if that were to happen, that I would like be able to see that on the horizon. Cause I just kind of pay attention to the space and I don't see things that are like super convincing from that perspective this cycle. And maybe it just means that like, this is a cycle that we get the, the, the block space finally. And then maybe it takes the next cycle to then people be like, oh, it's finally here. And people start building a bunch of end user applications. So then maybe, you know, you fast forward 2028 and, uh, you know, you get, uh, you know, you finally get those, those end user applications that really, you know, get product market fit and it's like, you know, maybe that's what's going on.

• 28:52Anthony Pompliano?

  When you see, uh, these products, um, I, I think that the lack of product market fit is a, uh, a good proxy for like what the actual problem is, right? Or maybe it is just is the problem. Um, how do you view Bitcoin in light of, uh, that perspective? And I'll give you a good example. So Bitcoin is a store of value. I think most people are like, yep, check the box. Like seems to be working as a store of value for people, both in terms of price, seems to be, that's why people are adopting it. Um, and seems to now have seeped from retail institution, like a kind of corporates, financial organizations. And now even starting to get into some of the nation states, you know, slowly, but, but getting there. Electronic cash is the promise of the white paper.

• 29:37Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't actually think that people would all agree that you can check that box yet. Stable coins have more transaction volume. Uh, you know, if Bitcoin's price is going to go up in the future, why would I use it today? Like you, you, you hear all these critiques and so like, does Bitcoin have product market fit? And if Bitcoin does or does not, I think that actually is somewhat of a telling sign for the rest of the market. Because most people look at Bitcoin as like the most successful of all these tokens.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a good question. You know, I think the first thing I would say in response to that is that I actually wouldn't be too worried. I think a Bitcoin is being so different than any other crypto asset in existence. I really do. I just, it's in a category by itself. In my view, it does not compete with other, you know, I guess maybe you could say that it competes with stable coins, but I think it is, it's firmly lost to stable coins. And I wouldn't expect that to change. And I think I'm still okay with that. And that doesn't make me like too super worried about Bitcoin. I am still, you know, I am still waiting on, you know, it does

• 30:46Speaker 02

  seem like Lightning, you know, it looks like Lightning is kind of having, uh, you know, it's not what people thought it was going to be. Um, but I was-

• 30:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Why do you think that? Or explain that more in terms of like, where do you think it's missing the mark?

• 31:01Speaker 02

  Capital efficiency. It's my understanding that the capital efficiency incentives just make it, um, uh, you know, just not as useful as the way people were thinking. Um, but I was waiting for basically like maker built on top of Lightning. Where you, like, it's just like you stake your BTC, you borrow a stable coin against it, you pay some reasonable rate of interest on that. As long as you pay back the stables plus the interest, you get your BTC back. It's locked in a smart contract. If it goes down, you know, if price of BTC goes down enough against you, then you get liquidated. Pretty straight. And I've been like waiting for that product. And that struck

• 31:46Speaker 02

  me as a massively better, like, that's a product that can go compete against stable coins. I mean, it is a stable coin, right? But it's like, that idea made a lot more sense to me. And I, you know, and there is obviously wrapped BTC and, you know, wrapped BTC does have, you know, there's real market cap around that. Um, but, uh, for, for Bitcoin-

• 32:14Speaker 02

  You know, I think that the fact that it doesn't change much, it's very hard to change is part of its value proposition. So I don't worry about that. Um, I think that I know that there is innovation that is getting funded for, you know, L2s and building on top of Bitcoin to a greater degree than, you know, I don't know, maybe ever in Bitcoin's history, that like these projects are getting funded and that there's innovation that people are getting interested in and that there's, you know, there's this modular versus monolithic

• 32:56Speaker 02

  blockchain, um, uh, argument that's going, debate that's going on in crypto right now. I think it's going to be one of the headline situations for this coming cycle about, uh, you know, modularity and this idea of sort of data availability and separating data availability from consensus. And there's this view that like, maybe you could use Bitcoin as the data availability layer. Um, and then you do the computation on, uh, these other blockchains and, and, and, uh, Bitcoin can maybe be this kind of foundational part of the, of the, this modular blockchain thesis, you know, I'm, you can get way smarter guys than me to come on here and talk to you about the minutia around all that. Uh, I think that's worth paying attention to. Overall, Bitcoin is pristine collateral.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  Um, I like that moniker. I've liked that moniker for a few years. Um, the US dollar is the world reserve currency, but, um, US treasuries are the collateral foundation of the global financial system. And this is a debt laden global financial system. So the collateral foundation for a debt laden financial system makes a huge difference. And, you know, I think objectively, the investment case for US treasuries over a multi-decade timeline is a challenged investment thesis.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  But then when you go look someplace else, we go, okay, well, what else could we use for the collateral foundation of this debt laden global financial system? That you really run out of places to look immediately because the US is the best monetary policy house on a really shitty monetary policy block. And like, we're not going to use ECB debt, we're not going to use JGBs, right? You know, it's like you run out of like, what else would we use? And then eventually you kind of turn to Bitcoin. You go, no, maybe Bitcoin could be this. And it's like, that's certainly not the kind of thing that's going to happen overnight. But I think if Bitcoin just kind of makes chips away at that, you know, pristine collateral,

• 34:55Speaker 02

  competing against treasuries for the collateral foundation of the global financial system over the course of this decade and into the next, then like, obviously, if that works, then, you know, we're going to 100,000 and then 200,000 and then 500,000 and a million dollars of Bitcoin. Like, you know, it's just like, whatever, you know, the market value of all the treasuries in existence is, you know, I don't know what the number is. It's like 15 trillion, 20 trillion or something. So, um, yeah. One thing I wanted to ask you, sorry to go back just a little bit, just because you're a social media power user. Have you played around on Farcaster? Have you spent time with Farcaster?

• 35:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Not a ton of time. Early on, I looked at it and I think they did exactly what you have to do, which is do none of the growth hacks. Right? Like, you know, after being around so many of these, you know, I helped create apps at what's number one in the App Store, like all these different things. The number one thing that people mistake is all the growth hacks at work in fintech, B2B, you know, software, all that stuff. You cannot do those when it comes to social networks because you have to allow the social networks to actually form. It's almost like an evolution. And so if you, very similar to our company, think about early stage company, you can suffocate a company by not giving them enough capital.

• 36:14Anthony Pompliano?

  You can, or I'm sorry, you can starve them by not giving them enough capital. You can suffocate them by giving them too much capital. The same thing can happen with a social network. You can starve it by not having enough users show up, but you can suffocate a social network by having everyone show up at once. There's nothing really there yet. There's not enough content. There's not enough connections. The connections aren't real. People don't really know what is the culture of it. What is the conversations? What am I supposed to be doing here? All this stuff. And you only really kind of get one shot. And so if you see what they've done is they have that really nice exponential user curve. And they, I mean, they spent years. I think Dan, I think the first time I talked to him was maybe 2018, 2019, something like that. When he was first started this thing, there was nobody using it. And most entrepreneurs would get frustrated by that.

• 36:58Anthony Pompliano?

  But I think he understood, no, you have to let the community kind of build itself and allow that organic growth. And then that's where you get the breakout compounding. You never know when it'll hit, but it hit for them. And I think I saw recently, like in the last like two weeks, they 10x the user base or 10x like daily active users.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, but wasn't it off of like an incredibly low base?

• 37:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course, I think now they have like 60,000 daily actives, right? Or whatever. But, but the, but the point being that like, at one point they had 10 people on the social network and they weren't like, let's get to 100,000 users tomorrow. It was like, let's go find the 11th person who's the right person. Right? And, and I, the way that I found out about it is Dan literally was like, I will personally onboard you and do a call and like, he was just methodically going through the right people, adding them to the network. And so, uh, one of the things, if I was to critique crypto in general, everyone has such impatience, which feeds into like the financial nihilism feeds into like, I need the 10x, 100x coin, et cetera.

• 38:01Anthony Pompliano?

  But if you're building a product, you have to understand, is this a product where urgency is the dominant, you know, posture? Or actually, in the case of social networks, patience is really important. And if you remember Facebook, yes, it grew quickly on Harvard's campus, but no one else could sign up except for on Harvard's campus. It was like a limited, you know, growth. And then they added one other campus. And so they allowed this thing to kind of build. And then eventually it was a huge deal when they let people not with .edu emails sign up. But that was like, I think if I remember correctly, three or four years after they started.

• 38:37Anthony Pompliano?

  And so it's same thing here is like, how do you just allow patients to be the dominant posture? When you're building that type of product versus maybe something else, you actually want it to go as quick as possible. Now, last thing I'll say is Bitcoin actually had the exact same benefit. I do not believe Bitcoin can get disrupted today because today if a coin launched and wanted to be a global reserve currency, electronic cash, you know, whatever. It doesn't have time to fester and kind of grow organically because everyone's looking for the next coin. So the fact that people had ignorance when Bitcoin was released in 2009 was a huge benefit. And so it kind of like went up the ladder and then pulled the ladder up behind it for that use case.

• 39:19Speaker 02

  Strongly agree.

• 39:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Because people can't, it's just like we're too degenerate, too degenerate. Anyone who's creating anything is going to tell someone and that person's going to turn around and yell to everyone else on Telegram or on Twitter, like, yo, I found it. And it actually will screw up the building out of the network.

• 39:34Speaker 02

  Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I just going back to the, just the use cases. You know, I think decentralized social media is a interesting use case that is worth innovation, worth funding innovation. Um, you know, Friend Tech had its moment last year. You know, looks like it was probably a flash in the pan at this point, you know, it was this kind of marginal incremental innovation relative to kind of what else had been out there. So I think it's good. And I wouldn't be surprised at all. It would almost be my base case that at

• 40:15Speaker 02

  some point, you know, you get incremental innovation on incremental innovation on incremental innovation. And then it's like, you know, maybe the great, great grandchild of Friend Tech or something like that ends up being the thing that gets, you know, 50 million users or whatever the number is. So I do, you know, I do find that interesting. And that just kind of the fundamentals around crypto and like, you know, just being able to connect with users, connect with fans in this kind of unique way. You know, trying to monetize and incentivize these things like that seems like a, you know, a hotbed for this kind of technology and for, and for, you know, what crypto represents.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  I just don't see something in existence today where I'm like, that's the thing that's going to be 50 million users. Yeah.

• 41:07Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, if you also think, um, you know, look, there's a, a far caster, there's DSO, there's, there's a bunch of these, I think that, um, uh, people are trying it. But, uh, I wonder how much of crypto has the, what I call the AI problem. So right now there's an explosion of AI companies that, uh, they're smart, you know, hardworking, uh, people who say, oh my God, new technology. I gotta go build an AI company. But actually what we're seeing value accrue is companies who are solving a real problem, use AI technology internally. But it's not necessarily an AI business, right? It's kind of like a company that existed and then all of a sudden the internet comes along. I'm going to use the internet, but I'm not necessarily just going to go do something

• 41:50Anthony Pompliano?

  because there's this new tool. It's not a hammer looking for a nail, right? It's, it's a business that says, hey, there's a new technology that will help me do what I was already doing better, cheaper, faster, whatever. The AI companies that seem to be really winning, like, I mean, Facebook is a great example, right? You obviously Amazon, Google, you see these companies integrating this stuff and those are the big guys, but there's also small companies that are figuring this out as well. Is crypto and AI actually going to fit into the same hole? When you, we zoom out, you know, 20 years from now and we say, man, all the people who tried to build a crypto product actually were thinking about it wrong. They should have built a product that solved the problem. And if the crypto rails made it easier, then they used it. But they made that evaluation the same way that they would make the evaluation over,

• 42:33Anthony Pompliano?

  should we use a SQL database or something else? It's just a toolbox. And so like, rather than say, I'm a crypto entrepreneur, you should say, I'm an entrepreneur in healthcare. By the way, the best database to use is a SQL database. The best, uh, you know, hosting site is this. My cloud provider is AWS. And oh, by the way, the way we do this feature or this thing uses crypto rails. But it's kind of in the background more so than it is like, I'm a crypto founder. I have a crypto company.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  Yep. One thing along those lines that definitely caught my attention was last year, BONK, the meme coin on Solana. You probably followed it. Did you, did you see the point where the Solana Saga phone had enough BONK airdrops to it that it paid for the phone?

• 43:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 43:27Speaker 02

  And then the phone, and then the phone sold out in 48 hours, like right in the midst. Like it's like, you know, I don't think they moved that many phones of this thing, right? First, and then it just kind of sat there. Nobody was really talking about it. I can't remember when they first launched the phone, but you know, we went through the bear market. People kind of stopped talking about this thing. And then it was like BONK started running. And then at some point they were like, oh, all the Saga phones get, you know, X amount of BONK. And then this thing is, you know, I don't know, it's up like 9,000% or some shit. And it's like, at some point on the run, it was like, oh, the phones, the phone's a thousand bucks. Oh, you can get a thousand dollars worth of BONK on the phone. And then the phone sold out in 48 hours. And now it looks like, I think, cause, cause now the phone's getting other airdrops as well, too.

• 44:12Speaker 02

  And now it's looking like those phones, the phone costs a thousand dollars and it's going to get like 10,000 plus dollars worth of free shit. That gets airdropped on it. Cause now it got, um, some NFT that's now like, you know, you can sell this thing for how like a thousand or 2,000 bucks or whatever. It got some GTO or some Jupiter, you know, this, that and the other. And, uh, that did, and they also were like, oh, not long after they sold out the first one, they're like, hey, we're doing a Solana Saga version two phone. And like, I don't know if they're going to do it version two or not prior to that happening. Maybe they were, I don't know, but it's like, and I just was thinking that.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  A traditional like web two company or any kind of traditional marketing advertising company had to have looked at that and been like, well, that's pretty interesting.

• 45:07Anthony Pompliano?

  So we're talking about things that Bitcoin maximalists don't talk about. Right? They don't give a shit about this stuff.

• 45:17Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that if somebody was to talk to you and I five years ago, we would have been much closer to Bitcoin maximalist than maybe we are today. And some of that is probably driven by what is the financial return? What is the current development and adoption? And also, it's not an either or, it's not a net, you know, like a zero sum game. It's much more of a positive sum game. Bitcoin won in this global store value game, and there will be other things. And I'm at the point now where like, anyone who thinks that the other things are all going to zero is probably actually doesn't even believe that they're just saying it because it sounds good, right? But also, they're just not paying attention. So.

• 46:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Are people, the most ardent, you know, kind of hardcore Bitcoin maximalists, have they locked themselves into becoming the new gold bugs? And like, you know, a friend said this to me, and I can't get it out of my head, is Michael Saylor the new Peter Schiff? Is the, you know, is the, the gold bugs who are constantly saying doom is right around the corner, buy gold, get your physical gold, you know, build out your shelter, the world is ending. Does Bitcoin have an issue with potentially entering into, you know, that realm? Is that a possible pathway that Bitcoin maximalist doesn't mean that they have to go that way? They should just be aware of not transitioning into an area where you're

• 46:47Anthony Pompliano?

  not mentally flexible enough to be able to evaluate everything else?

• 46:53Speaker 02

  Well, I do think that there where Bitcoin sits right now, that there's certainly a real potential that it kind of, I know this sounds weird, that it like stops being a crypto. That it just like, like crypto native capital, like that's not the capital that is going to take this thing from a $1 trillion to $2 trillion to $5 trillion and that, this, that and beyond. And then the crypto native capital kind of looks at that and they're like, oh, like it doesn't have enough meat on the bone. Like there's not enough meat left on the bone for the returns of this thing. And that now that we've got spot Bitcoin ETFs, passive

• 47:35Speaker 02

  flows, um, this thing over the next, you know, coming year and then years after that, that it's just, it's playing a totally different game in terms of, of asset allocation and like asset gathering type of situation. And that the returns, and I've talked about this, I've written about this before, the return, you know, it's like Bitcoin is probably levered NASDAQ returns with like a call option on the world reserve currency, the next world reserve currency. And then it's like, and you can actually look at it like, you know, you can look at it like that. And it's, and I think it's just because that

• 48:15Speaker 02

  tech stocks have this same, similar type of relationship with global liquidity that Bitcoin has. Um, and that does just kind of put it into a category by itself and, you know, Bitcoin maximalist, you know, I mean, I don't know. I don't know what your viewership is exactly like these days, but like, you know.

• 48:46Speaker 02

  From cycle to cycle, if you rewind four years ago,

• 48:52Speaker 02

  and then fast forward to today, you know, the people waving the Bitcoin flag the hardest, you did not get an upgrade on those people over the last four years. And you can, you know, disagree with me about that. You can get mad at me if you feel that way. That's my view. You know, I won't go into a bunch more detail around that, but like,

• 49:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I'll take a step further for you. You don't have to say it. Bitcoin has now escaped the video game. And when it gets pulled into the traditional financial world, it gets overlaid with politics. And what do you get rewarded for in politics extremism? And so the more that you pull people hard left, hard right, they yell and scream at each other. That's what happened to Bitcoin. You get rewarded in Bitcoin for being an extremist. Right? And extremist, not in any other sense than like you're an extreme Bitcoin maximalist. The more extreme you are, the more that, you know, you get a certain way, the way you adhere to the religion. In some weird way, it's like, you know, if you are the traditionalist, right, then you get rewarded with social capital. And I'm not even saying that's anything that's bad.

• 50:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? It's just, it's just calling it what it is and kind of how it has developed. What is funny about it or unique about it, interesting, is when you look at these surveys, like 85 to 90% of Bitcoiners hold another asset. So what ends up happening is there are some people within the community that are playing the status game. And then there are some people who are playing a capital allocation game. Right? And when you meet people, sometimes you don't know. Sometimes you definitely know. Right? And I think that there is this very unique development where, again, you know, it just seared in my head when my friends, who by the way, my friend is a Bitcoin critic. Right? When he said the thing about like Peter Schiff and Michael Saylor are the same person.

• 50:42Anthony Pompliano?

  But his point was if Peter Schiff came out tomorrow and said gold is bad, gold would tank. Right? He's like, if I sold all my gold, Michael Saylor, actually, I think would be even worse.

• 50:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And Michael, Michael's done a fantastic job. Like, one of the things that Michael has really done, I think, is he has helped shepherd in an entirely new cohort of people that he basically said, come in, the water's warm, it's okay. Right? You can come check this out. And so he's been this huge net positive. But if you're sitting in Michael Saylor's seat, if all of a sudden the returns start to go down, again, I think he's buying it to protect the capital on his balance sheet. So it's still going to check that box. But now where does the future growth of the firm come from in the future?

• 51:26Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 51:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And again, it's unclear what that return profile looks like. If Bitcoin goes down to a 10% annualized return, that's probably still pretty good. Right? It's better than holding cash.

• 51:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:37Anthony Pompliano?

  If it goes down to a 5% return, right? Is that still good enough? I don't know, right? And I'm sure he's thinking about these things and trying to figure out, hey, what are the other things we can do to drive cash flow, etc. But I do think that the ground underneath the industry has been shifting. And your point about like, does Bitcoin have enough meat on the bone? I've said for a long time, the reason why I liked Bitcoin was because when I would go talk to hardcore Wall Street people, they would say Bitcoin is the riskiest thing in my portfolio. But then I would go talk to like the D Gen, you know, pseudonym on Twitter and they're like, I don't own Bitcoin because that's Boomer coin.

• 52:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:13Anthony Pompliano?

  And so if you're like, you know, I'm kind of a cowboy, but I'm also like, not going to go speculate on Zen coin.

• 52:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:20Anthony Pompliano?

  But actually Bitcoin is like, you know, it's the riskiest thing in the conservative people's portfolio. It's the conservative thing in the risky people's portfolios. Like,

• 52:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:26Anthony Pompliano?

  That actually is pretty attractive to a public company. Right? Who wants to be on the forward edge of this? And so it's a very interesting dynamic that we don't have the answers to yet as to like where we're going.

• 52:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. Do you think we're going to get another Saylor type of situation this cycle or a Tesla type of situation?

• 52:45Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that Sailor actually had an impact. I don't think Tesla actually had an impact in terms of like they reiterated the trend, blocked it or squared, did the same thing. But I think the zero to one of the first public company that wasn't a crypto company to do it was like 80, 90% of the value of like that happening. And so I don't think at this point it really matters. Like if Apple tomorrow went and said, we're putting Bitcoin on the balance sheet, like, yes, there would be some short-term price, you know, movement, whatever. But I think now the market is kind of like desensitized over the medium to long term, that like, they just have priced in like, of course, every, you know, these companies are going to do some percentage

• 53:23Anthony Pompliano?

  of it. I think the only really, really big zero to one last one is a sizable developed nation, either government or sovereign, right? And I asked myself, like, what is that threshold? Obviously, if some of the largest, you know, Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds did it, that'd be a big deal. But like, El Salvador, I think rallied the Bitcoin community. I don't think actually the market gave it any credit outside of the Bitcoin community. But I think people are kind of just like, whatever, it doesn't work. Like, they didn't really do anything, and they just completely discount it. And so it's like, okay, that was a small nation. Like, what is the threshold, right? You know, if Italy did it, would anyone care?

• 54:08Anthony Pompliano?

  If Spain did it, if India did it, right? Like, where is that kind of tipping point where all of a sudden, everyone pays attention? And Michael Sailor and Michael Stradegi were very unique in that, like, they weren't a massive company, but they were a multi-billion dollar company. It was big enough. And he articulated it in a way that I think it was that tipping point. He got to zero to one, and it was incredibly valuable to the community and obviously drove a lot of people to take a look at the asset.

• 54:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Great mouthpiece, for sure. Yeah, really, yeah, really good mouthpiece. Yeah, I think the El Salvador.

• 54:42Speaker 02

  I mean, it's my understanding that the Bitcoin, like, things are much, much, much better in El Salvador since Bukele got, you know, got into power. But I don't think really any of that has to do with Bitcoin is my understanding. And that, and I don't have the details around that, but I asked somebody the other day because I was writing about it in my monthly. And I asked somebody that you and I both know that would know, like, how's the El Salvador Bitcoin thing going? And they're like, it's not, you know, it's not basically.

• 55:14Speaker 02

  So.

• 55:15Anthony Pompliano?

  But it's also like, in that, and that's actually a pretty good use case, I think, where like, most of the people who were in government who went and said, we are going to embrace this. There was bigger talk than there was action in a lot of cases, right? So like, I remember at one point Greg Abbott, in Texas, the governor, Mayor Suarez in Miami, and Eric Adams, the mayor in New York City, were all like competing on who was going to be the head honcho, like, capital of Bitcoin in America. Right? And like, you know, the mayor of Miami, who, to his credit, was very early to it. He, I would argue, he kicked it off, right? At one point said, I'm going to take my next paycheck in Bitcoin. And then the mayor of New York's like, well, I'm gonna take my first three paychecks.

• 56:00Anthony Pompliano?

  And it was like, all right, like, we got a little bit of, you know, like a dick measuring contest going on here, but like, okay.

• 56:06Anthony Pompliano?

  When you see that happening, I know for specifically in Miami, because I talked to him. He ran into roadblock after roadblock after roadblock, trying to get anything done in terms of buying Bitcoin for the balance sheet, paying employees in Bitcoin, you know, any of this stuff. And so like, you have to remember, government is still bureaucratic. One person, it's really hard to change, but Bukele, as the president, got a lot more executive power. And so I do think that it's like, kind of nation states are different than cities and states, where the president is able to get things done, even if there is resistance from those around them, in a way that you just can't do at other levels of government.

• 56:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree with that. Yep.

• 56:44Anthony Pompliano?

  If you look at the macro environment, you mentioned earlier Bitcoin is a trade on global liquidity. Isn't all of crypto, or do you think Bitcoin is unique in a way?

• 56:55Speaker 02

  Uh, no, I think all of crypto is, it's just that the.

• 57:02Speaker 02

  Bitcoin's relationship is more Lindy, a lot more Lindy. It's multi-cycle Lindy, like three up, one down. That is accurate for Bitcoin. It's accurate for the crypto market broadly. But then when you try and drill down into specific crypto assets, it falls apart.

• 57:31Speaker 02

  And I think the way I always explain this is looking at tokens that can make new highs against BTC in the cycle after they started trading. All kinds of tokens make highs. You know, they're introduced in the bear, they're introduced, you know, at the end of the last bull or whatever, and then their first bull market, the first, you know, up three cycle. They skyrocket, you know, Bitcoin's up, you know, whatever, 500%. And these things are up 9,000% or whatever the number is. And then you've got the down one year, Bitcoin does it down 75%.

• 58:14Speaker 02

  These tokens do it down, you know, 95%. And then you come back to the next cycle and they pump again, but they won't make a new high in BTC terms. And I think Doge and XRP ironically are the, I believe, the only two that made higher highs against BTC in the cycle after they were introduced. But you know, there's a lot of irony that it's those two names. But I think that's, you know, and for Bitcoin maximalists or for people that would say, just have all your crypto exposure being Bitcoin.

• 58:56Speaker 02

  This is like what I just described is the number one thing to hang your hat on for that. Where you go, do you have the time to pick the shit coins that are going to pump? And pick the right part of the cycle and sell in time? Can you do all of that while you work your day job? Or, you know, whatever, right? And that's very hard to do. And I, and, and it's a great point, you know, for it's like, it's pretty crazy. Like for as much hype as ETH had last, last cycle for the returns that it had, ETH BTC wasn't higher than it was in January 2018. It's pretty crazy.

• 59:34Anthony Pompliano?

  What, what you're highlighting is the difference between saving and investing. Right? In my opinion, like

• 59:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Saving in Bitcoin and just set it, forget it. Right? And basically just hold it. Uh, it's no different than decades ago when people would save in gold. I always, you know, tell a story of, uh, in India, the culture is like, you never sell your grandparents' gold. It gets passed down from generation to generation and you just saved. Right? Same thing, uh, I think with Bitcoin and it really is your, your, the line you're drawing is like you save in Bitcoin. And then there's like speculating and investing in everything else. By the way, buying Berkshire stock is speculating as well. Right? But like the investing game is very hard. The saving game is all about just discipline and frankly, like a lack of ego. Right? It's just, hey, keep doing the same thing. Now, what becomes very interesting though, is as you look at, let's take an ETH. Another thing I've thought a lot about recently, uh,

• 1:00:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Ethereum's maximalist or amateur hour compared to Doge and XRP? Think of the, think of the how, think of how rabid Dogecoin and XRP kind of, uh, maximalists are. They rival the maximalism of Bitcoiners. That's why I think those assets have the unique kind of performance that compared to an Ethereum, et cetera. Because actually what we found was the Bitcoiners were missionaries. The ETH users were mercenaries and a lot of them jumped ship when Solana came around. It was cheaper and faster. USDT jumped to Tron.

• 1:01:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Cause it was cheaper and faster. And so what you end up getting, again, it goes back to saving and investing. You can use mercenary versus missionary, right? Like there's all these frameworks that you can use to really, uh, highlight the idea that, um, The performance of these assets really is driven by global liquidity plus like what is the community and to a stock investor like that sounds insane but if you think of like that community component the assets that have surprised people to the upside have tended to have a very unique culture to them and be much more missionary than mercenary and so people don't jump and then the other thing that becomes really interesting is like Bitcoin is not the first digital currency you know I wrote recently about like it's the product of 40 years of R and

• 1:01:46Anthony Pompliano?

  D Ethereum actually is the first blockchain with smart contracts and so if you said to me right now gun to your head pick which one's the AOL it's Ethereum Bitcoin doesn't have competition to be the digital decentralized global store of value it's the winner it's the king and there is nobody who's coming for it so far right you and I could spend 10 minutes rattling off all the layer ones that are coming for Ethereum and you can even argue like did they lose did they lose ground you know the price can still go up but if others go up more like that's still an L to a degree yeah and so it's just a very very unique difference because again I go back five years ago you and I couldn't have these conversations because none of this was

• 1:02:30Anthony Pompliano?

  true now the world has changed drastically in the last five years

• 1:02:34Speaker 02

  yep yeah no no it's a good point and I think it's gonna be your Solana it's gonna be fascinating to watch Solana this coming cycle I think Solana has a chance to make higher highs in BTC terms this cycle to you know break that trend or you know enter into this very small club I think Solana's community is noteworthy and that community's ability to stick together and stick around after FTX collapsed was noteworthy and surprising surprising to me and you know even

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  characterize you know I think Solana was up 900% last year and it's like characterizing how that happened

• 1:03:28Speaker 02

  You know, it's impressive and I'm not, I'm still not sure I completely understand it. Um, but part of it is certainly the community of users, the community of developers. Part of it is, um, is the, uh, difficulty that the space continues to have to provide cheap, safe, abundant, fast block space. Um, and reliable block space. And because that continues to be hard to get and Solana made tangible improvements to the network functionality, you know, their, their outage yesterday notwithstanding.

• 1:04:10Speaker 02

  Uh, but they, you know, they did make real improvements to it. I think, I think that was probably part of it as well, too. I, I don't know this off the top of my head, but my guess is that same thing I talked about with alts versus BTC not making higher BTC terms in the cycle after they were introduced. My guess is all competitor alt ones versus ETH, that probably holds true. Uh, that same situation, I, I don't know. I don't have my computer up right in front of me, but, um, maybe Tron, I don't know if Tron made a higher Tron ETH, maybe that made a higher high in the cycle after. But it's like, it's a simple, it's kind of a similar type of like, you know, it's, it's a, that is a

• 1:04:53Speaker 02

  quantitative metric that helps you tell a qualitative fundamental story about how the market is thinking through value, you know, assigning value, accruing value across these various different names.

• 1:05:06Anthony Pompliano?

  You want to hear a crazy statistic?

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:09Anthony Pompliano?

  If MicroStrategy had bought Ethereum instead of Bitcoin, they'd have more money right now.

• 1:05:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh yeah. I knew that.

• 1:05:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And so if you think of it from that perspective, uh, the time in which we have this conversation matters because I don't actually think that'll be true if we talk about this in five years. Right? Like, like Bitcoin would have been the better choice over 10 years, but over the last three years. It's kind of, and it's not like, oh, they'd have 10% more. Like, I think it's like Bitcoins up 4X and Ethereum's still up like 6X or something, right? And so, given the size of capital that they've deployed and what it's worth today, like, it's like a billion or $2 billion difference.

• 1:05:46Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, like, if I'm a ETH maximalist, I'm yelling and screaming about that. If I'm a Bitcoin maximalist, I'm kind of saying like, chill out, you know, give us some time, right? And like, over the long run, let's see what happens. But I do think that we've now entered a world where it's not 2017, 2018, like, buy crypto and like, sit on your hands and like, you're gonna get rich. We've now entered a game of like, you actually have to do some sophisticated analysis. And I think that's why Bitcoiners, like, the single greatest thing that they could tell people is like, opt out of the speculation game and just save.

• 1:06:17Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:06:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Like, you are not, you're not Warren Buffett. You're not, you know, name your favorite macro trader. Just save. And that is a very, very different message than I think what is happening in the rest of the market, to your point, like, sets Bitcoin aside.

• 1:06:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Because the digital hyperconnected world is just making people more impatient. They're gonna make mistakes, like, all the issues that we know. And so, I think it gets pretty interesting. Before I let you go, uh, how are you guys allocated today? Like, that'll tell us a lot, kind of how you think about the future.

• 1:06:50Speaker 02

  Oh, gosh, I gotta be really careful about that.

• 1:06:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Or what are the themes, maybe, that you guys are allocated to? So, not actual assets, but like, the themes that you think are interesting.

• 1:07:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, uh, Ikigai is mostly a quant fund. And we have historically focused on BTC and ETH, and, because that's where we've been able to find, you know, predictive power in quantitative data. And that continues to be where the large majority of our efforts are today. Our mandate is very broad. We can kind of do, you know, in terms of like what are our offering documents say? We can kind of do like sort of whatever we want to with very little limitation. So we have historically, um, you know, had room for and spent time on, you know,

• 1:07:45Speaker 02

  qualitative, liquid venture type of stuff that is not just, you know, combing through enormous amounts of raw data to find predictive power, you know, type of stuff. And we continue to do that. Um, and, you know, I find the deep end space broadly, um, very interesting. I think it's going to be in a cycle that may have a real dearth of, um, actual adoption. I think it has a chance to be the brightest spot of actual adoption, actual, you know, use cases that you can see, you know, solving real world problems for real people.

• 1:08:30Speaker 02

  And I think that it makes sense to me that in a universe where people are starved for that kind of thing, that they are going to gravitate towards these projects that can actually show, you know, real, real user adoption.

• 1:08:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's, I think that's what I would say about it.

• 1:08:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about Ikey Guy if they want?

• 1:08:52Speaker 02

  Uh, Twitter is always good. Travis underscore cling on Twitter. Uh, there's links to the fund and, and whatnot there. I write a monthly that goes out the first every month that, that, uh, people like a lot. And, um, yeah, appreciate the time. Enjoy the conversation, man.

• 1:09:05Anthony Pompliano?

  I always enjoy, uh, listening. Hopefully, uh, they don't come for us, but sometimes you just got to talk about the things that are going on, my friend. All right. We'll talk soon.

• 1:09:14Speaker 02

  Bye, man.