Michael Dunworth, CEO of Wyre: How Blockchain is Transforming Cross-Border Payments

Michael Dunworth is the CEO of Wyre, a company focus on connecting crypto companies to the fiat world. In this conversation, Michael Dunworth and Anthony Pompliano discuss rugby, why nerds go to Silicon Valley, how to build compelling products, and how Wyre is building the essential infrastructure for fiat on and off-ramps. ETORO-----This episode of Off the Chain is sponsored by eToro, the smartest crypto trading platform, and one of the largest in the world. Join 11 million other traders and create an account at etoro.com and build your crypto portfolio the smart way. -----If you enjoyed this episode and want to stay updated on everything Bitcoin, blockchain, and crypto. Check out Off The Chain newsletter by visiting offthechain.substack.com and join 35,000+ other investors currently subscribed to my daily investor letter.

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

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off the Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Michael Dunworth is the co-founder of Wire, a company focused on connecting crypto companies to the fiat world. We had a great conversation in this episode about rugby, why nerds go to Silicon Valley, how to build compelling products, and how Wire is building the essential infrastructure for fiat on and off ramps. I really enjoyed this one, so I hope you do as well. Before we get started though, let's take a look at the advertisers for this episode. First up is eToro. They're a longtime sponsor of Off the Chain Podcast. The company's probably the most underrated in all of crypto. They got started in Israel and quickly built a massive

• 0:42Anthony Pompliano?

  business offering stocks, commodities, traditional currencies, and cryptocurrencies to users around the world outside the US. Last year, they finally launched in the United States and got started by offering cryptocurrency trading. Now, this just isn't any crypto exchange though. eToro has pioneered a concept called "social trading." It's essentially two components. The first is that you can click on any asset on the platform and immediately access a social network or feed around that one asset. Take Bitcoin for example. When you navigate to the page, there are thousands of people sharing information, charts, graphs, and opinions about Bitcoin, its price movements, and future outlook. The same goes for any other asset on the platform. But then these guys came up with an even more innovative feature: copy trading. Let's say that you find someone in the single asset social feeds that you think

• 1:27Anthony Pompliano?

  is really smart or has a unique view on investing. Rather than simply wish that you could invest like them, you can click the "copy trader" button and eToro will automatically mirror your portfolio to that trader's portfolio. When they buy an asset, you buy the asset. When they sell the asset, you sell the asset. It's pretty cool to see a crypto exchange that has both social trading and copy trading all in one location. So, go check them out. They're now up and running in the United States and they continue to grow at an incredible rate. They're also really, really impressive, and so I invested. Here's the little-known secret: eToro is actually larger than Robinhood. Just don't tell anyone. Head on over to etoro.com and sign up for an account. Let me know what you think about their social trading and copy trading. When you hit etoro.com, let them know that I sent you. As I've said before,

• 2:09Anthony Pompliano?

  they really, really hate getting customer service tickets and social media mentions about me. Lastly, Off the Chain is not only a podcast. Remember, I also enjoy writing a newsletter every single morning. You can go to offthechain.substack.com and sign up today to read what I write every morning. Again, that's offthechain.substack.com. Hope to see you there and I hope you enjoy this episode.

• 2:36Speaker 01

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

• 3:02Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Michael here. He came all the way to New York City on a day where it's about 18 degrees outside. So thanks for coming to do this.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, no worries. Still defrosting, but thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

• 3:17Anthony Pompliano?

  And as you can hear in his voice, he is not used to the cold. So we're going to get through this. But let's start with time in Australia, right? So born and raised there?

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Yep, Sydney, Australia.

• 3:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. What's that like?

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Fantastic. Beaches, not minus eight degrees Celsius. It's beautiful. People are chilled, very easygoing, sunny, happy.

• 3:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And growing up, you play sports. What was kind of the life experience in Australia as you grew up?

• 3:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean rugby and cricket. Basically, it's all about it. I sucked at both and I played both. I was in the Fs for rugby. I went to like a full-on rugby nursery, so to speak, like that would produce, it was renowned for rugby and stuff like that. But I had no contribution to that at all.

• 4:09Anthony Pompliano?

  What is a rugby nursery?

• 4:11Speaker 02

  Oh, it's like a breeding ground for like top-tier talent, basically.

• 4:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, really? Like almost like a prep school?

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. It's like a, it's a school. It's, you know, all Catholic boys school, basically. And you would go there, you get shown like how to play rugby really well. I mean, it's not a rugby school, but they're renowned for producing fantastic rugby players. So.

• 4:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And growing up, so rugby and cricket both are not very big in the United States. Obviously, we have, you know, baseball and football and things like that.

• 4:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Is like every kid's dream to be a professional rugby player?

• 4:47Speaker 02

  Yep, exactly. So I mean, most of the time you grow up sort of like, oh, I want to, you know, I think it's changed a little bit now because rugby's sort of got a bit stagnant in like, you know, it's a boring game compared to other games, but um, uh, most people grow up wanting to be a wallaby. Like that's the, you know, the Australian wallabies is like the term for our national rugby team.

• 5:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, got it. So like that is the team. If you can get on the national Australian rugby team, you are like a god in Australia.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Basically, yeah.

• 5:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, and, and.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  Fun fact, actually, the five eight, which is a position like, let's say quarterback, the five eight for the US in the World Cup is Australian.

• 5:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 5:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. Or he was actually like, you know, two World Cups ago, one World Cup ago.

• 5:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, got it.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  My Kirkus.

• 5:34Anthony Pompliano?

  And, and I guess what's interesting about this is, uh, things like rugby, cricket, et cetera. It takes a lot of time, right? Is, is what I understand in terms of it's not just like, uh, hey, do you have the skills? But like the physicality specifically of rugby is very similar to, uh, American football.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  Without pads.

• 5:53Anthony Pompliano?

  You, yeah, where you've got to work out a lot and it's speed, it's power, it's all this stuff. And I played American football, you know, all the way through college. I don't understand how these dudes are playing without pads on.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  It's nuts. Okay. So like, this is the thing, and I feel like a lot of people have analyzed this a bunch, but when you're playing with pads, I feel like that could actually be more just, I'm just going to throw everything at this person. Right? Because they've got pads on, so you're going to be more confident to, you know, there's going to be less repercussions. But if I know that I'm going to break my collarbone, like driving it into your, you know, your hip, then I'm going to be more strategic in how I'm going to tackle you or something like that.

• 6:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, so you're making the argument that because there's no pads, it actually might be safer.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  I would actually say so, yeah.

• 6:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow, huh? I never thought of it that way.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  Neither had I until I watched someone that was like smart and like talking about conclusions and stuff. It was like, actually, we did the research and it's like, I mean, but like NFL is gnarly. Like people are, you know, six, eight, they run a hundred meter dash and you know, 11 flat or something. It is mental.

• 6:56Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I, I just imagine somebody like a Sean Taylor, uh, who you probably don't know who that is, but he's, uh, he was basically, uh, he played safety. So on defense, uh, in American football, uh, he's the farthest guy back, which means that anything that happens in front of them, basically he can run forward and just level them. Right? And so, uh, he was notorious for, uh, pretty much using almost no, uh, technical form in tackling.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  Kamikaze.

• 7:23Anthony Pompliano?

  He, he just would, uh, we used to call it torpedo move, right? Basically some guys run across the middle. I'm going to launch myself as hard as I can into this person and hope that I dislodge the human from the ball. And he was really good at it.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  That was, um, I don't know if it was Jared. So Jared Hain, for, he was Hain plane or Hain train or whatever. He was an Australian, uh, you know, NF, NRL player. And that's like rugby, it's a different code of rugby. So it's rugby league, rugby union. He came over to play with the 49ers actually. That was like four years ago, I think, uh, maybe five. And he was boiling hot, like buzz everywhere. Everyone was like, oh my God, this dude is going to tear it up. He crushed it in like, I think like qualifying or preliminary, like the preseason stuff. Yeah. And I don't actually know what happened in the, he, I think he just.

• 8:12Anthony Pompliano?

  But he was a rugby player who came to play American football.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  Yes, that's right. And he tore it up in the preseason stuff. And then I think, you know, come, like the actual season, he just couldn't, uh, couldn't hold up basically. And, uh, yeah.

• 8:26Anthony Pompliano?

  It, it's physical, man.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  Dude, it's, man, you guys are crazy.

• 8:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Um, all right. So how do you go from, uh, rugby nursery to?

• 8:34Speaker 02

  Sucking at rugby, yeah.

• 8:36Anthony Pompliano?

  To, uh, you came to San Francisco in what, 2013?

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:40Anthony Pompliano?

  What was the impetus for crossing over that massive ocean to come to the tech capital of the world?

• 8:47Speaker 02

  Okay, so the easiest, like the too long didn't read is actors go to Hollywood, nerds go to San Francisco. That's kind of the.

• 8:54Anthony Pompliano?

  That's probably fair.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you know, you like you, you pack up your bags and one way trip and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I just wanted like, I was like, well, I'm young enough. I'm, you know, the narrative hasn't kicked in yet. And by narrative, I mean, you know, you get the house, the family, the car, mortgage, blah, blah, blah. And then life's not life's done, but sort of the opportunity to take chances is, you know, dwindling exponentially from there. So I was working in finance and I did a startup in Australia on the side. So it was sort of like you work in, you know, finance and that was like seven AM till seven PM. And then, you know, you'd hustle after that, after hours, or you'd do like business development in your lunch break and stuff.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  And ended up selling that to a, not like exceeding like a, you know, bazillion dollars, but we made money on it. And that was like a, oh, fuck, that's awesome. Sorry for swearing, by the way.

• 9:47Anthony Pompliano?

  You're absolutely allowed to swear. Fuck, like, just get it out there.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  But, you know, like, once I did that, I was like, oh, my God, that's awesome. But the problem is like Australia is smaller than California by population. So like, if you've really got an itch to scratch, like, I want to build something and make people's lives better. Like, you may as well start with your, you know, best foot forward. So you've got to roll the dice and you go to the place that has the highest probability of success. And that's, you know, at the time, San Francisco, I feel like that will change a lot with distributed teams and, you know, things like that. But yeah, for me, that was a no brainer.

• 10:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so when you get to San Francisco, do you have like a plan? Or was it just let me get there and I'll figure it out once I get there?

• 10:32Speaker 02

  So I did go with a plan and it was like, I'd, I'd had sort of the next idea that I was working on and had like, you know, friends that were supporting me with this idea. And so like, you know, they were sort of like, hey, I'll back you into the next idea. But I got, I got there and I realized like after grinding for like the first sort of three or four weeks, like I was like. The idea is to get rid of the idea and like I'm I'm limiting myself by coming here with pre like I don't know what I'm in for. So I better just wipe the slate clean, forget about what I thought I knew and start fresh. And the first person I met, or one of the first first people was the person on the bunk bed above me. So bunk beds, it was like 20 people.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  This place was like, it was an orphanage with wifi is the term I would give it basically. Like literally, it was like 25 people in one just hallway.

• 11:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Was like a hostel?

• 11:27Speaker 02

  Uh, I wish.

• 11:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Or that'd be a friendly term.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  It was a 26 year, like some 26 year old that's paying the $3,000 a month rent and he's subletting it out to get 20 people and making 20 grand a month. Literally those numbers. Um, yeah.

• 11:43Anthony Pompliano?

  And and you get there and what's the?

• 11:46Speaker 02

  The first person, okay, so I'll tell you about it. So like I'm there coming over like, oh, cool. Silicon Valley, like it's where everything happens. Get there, first person, I tried to open the door to the place that I was staying at. And the first person like ran out the door, bumped, I knocked my bag over and he's like, oh, I'm sorry. I'm running to this meeting with Andreessen Horowitz. And I was like, whoa, cool. Like I'm here. Like the only thing I'd read about is like hacker news and all this sort of stuff. And like, I was like, wow, I really am in the circle jerk now. This is awesome. And you know, you get there, there's 20 people on laptops, all building shit. And you're like, holy shit. All right. This is cool. It was like the show Silicon Valley, like they could not have done a better job in depicting it. Um, yeah, first person I met on the, he moved on the top bunk bed above me was, uh, he's still

• 12:29Speaker 02

  my co-founder today. So yeah, Yanni.

• 12:32Anthony Pompliano?

  That's amazing. And and so as um, as you're kind of getting settled in and you're realizing, hey, this culture is pretty real and uh, people here just want to build, et cetera.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:42Anthony Pompliano?

  What were you doing? Were you kind of looking for an idea or kind of what were you doing?

• 12:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a good question. Um, I came over with like pretense. Like I said, I came over pretenses. So I was working on that and it was sort of just eating away that that was not the right way to, to do this journey or like, you know, to follow up, like to, to execute on what I'd wanted to do, which is try and build something cool. I felt like I was doing myself a disservice. So, um, you, what was I doing? I suppose just working away at it, but more just soaking it in. And I remember being so like, uh, really lonely because it was like, you know, you one way tick, ticketed yourself and like entrepreneur grinding is really fucking hard anyway. And it's, it's hard if you don't have people around you that are supporting you or invested mentally in what you're doing day to day.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  And, um, and I remember like, you know, uh, calling people, calling my friends and they were like, I was like, you know, I feel like a may, maybe a wrong decision and stuff like that. And they were just like, no, just like soak it up. And, you know, worst case scenario, three months goes by, you have a bunch of fun, you meet a bunch of new people and you've got an experience under your belt. Best case scenario, you come back in 10 years with a really cool story. And yeah, I feel like it was, it was a really hard time at the time. Yeah.

• 14:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And, and part of this, I guess, is, um, it feels like a lot of people go to Silicon Valley and they have a preconceived notion of what they want to do, right? Like, I'm gonna do X. And I think one of the things I took away when I first got there, um, and I think more, a lot of people do is, uh, a lot of what makes Silicon Valley so, uh, powerful and, and beautiful is that the people who get it or the people who realize, no, I'm gonna run a bunch of experiments and I'm gonna let the results tell me where to go. Right? And, and that's a very, um, nuanced but important difference where, uh, this belief that like, I'm gonna implement my will on the world, uh, is probably not actually, uh, nearly as accurate as, hey, I think the world's

• 14:44Anthony Pompliano?

  heading in this direction. Let me go run a bunch of tests and I'll take that feedback and then I'll kind of evaluate again, you know, run a bunch of tests.

• 14:51Speaker 02

  Rinse and repeat, iterate it.

• 14:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And, and that kind of iterative experimenting, uh, type of approach. Get you much closer to the truth and get you much closer to, you know, the ever elusive product market fit than the let me go implement my will on the world and like

• 15:06Speaker 02

  I'm right, they're wrong, what idiots, no, I failed because everyone else is stupid. They didn't understand. That, I think the key thing with that is generally speaking, like to be wrong at shit or to be wrong in general, which is what you're sort of saying is someone was saying they're right and everyone else is wrong, right?

• 15:27Speaker 02

  The reality is timing and being right is one of the same, like that is the chemistry for execution, right?

• 15:35Speaker 02

  And a lot of that comes down to humility. How good are you at being wrong? How fast are you being wrong, basically? Because you want to be like, especially in like, obviously, digital currencies and Bitcoin, you want to be wrong really, really fucking quickly.

• 15:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  The pace is so fast.

• 15:52Anthony Pompliano?

  It is. It's an entire kind of community of people who understand that that testing and iteration is really important. And part of what I think has, has really been seared into my brain from, from living there and working there, et cetera, was this idea of we've got to be really good at designing the test. So understanding what are we testing? Why are we testing it? And how are we going to test it?

• 16:19Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 16:19Anthony Pompliano?

  And then executing perfectly. Like, one of the best pieces of, of kind of, or one of the best things I took away from my time at Facebook was this idea of, in order to run successful tests, you need to do two things. You need to measure and you need to execute perfectly, right? And execute perfectly usually gets left out, but what ends up happening is if I run a test and I don't execute it perfectly, when I get the results, if it doesn't work, I'm left wondering, did this not work because it actually is an invalid test? Like, like we should move on, it's a bad idea? Or did it not work because we didn't execute it perfectly and therefore now we're left and we got to go run the test again?

• 17:01Speaker 02

  Of course. And like, this is one of the things, so, you know, if, like, I suppose, like, just in In the premise of me moving to San Francisco, right? And that is me saying, I want to run the test for can I do something really, really cool? And build something that adds value to millions of people. Like, I don't know, I'm still on the journey, but like, we're figuring it out as we go, right? But that is me saying, I don't want to leave any stone unturned. So that if I'm 50 or whatever, and the story goes by and I'm like, oh, I could have done that. Bullshit, you could have, you didn't do it, but now there's no excuse. So if I don't do it, there was no, no excuse other than I couldn't get it done.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  But I tried and I know I absolutely tried with every single ounce of, you know, energy and opportunity that I could, basically.

• 17:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep, for sure. And, and I guess.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  It's like multi variant testing. Multi variant testing is just numbskull stuff. You can never know what the contributing factor was if you've got 30 different things that you change.

• 17:58Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And, and so as you're kind of going through this evolution and, and kind of soaking in Silicon Valley for all its, uh, at the time in 2013, probably all its glory.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Where do you eventually intersect with Bitcoin, blockchain, crypto? Like, what's the first time you, you hear about it and kind of what was your reaction?

• 18:17Speaker 02

  So I was already into it before I came over, not, not into it. I was nowhere near into it. I thought it was cool, uh, you know, friends of mine, um, were like going in and bought some, bought some together. Uh, and I just like chucked in money at the time. And yeah, I think it was, yeah, that was 2012 or 2013 or something.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, and.

• 18:43Anthony Pompliano?

  So more aware of it than actually into it.

• 18:45Speaker 02

  Cool. Yeah. Sweet. There's this thing. I had no idea what it would do, why it's good or anything like that. I just had sort of like YOLO kind of thing. But yeah, uh, I'm trying to think, uh, yeah. Basically after that, I was like, okay, cool. When we came over here, we were just sort of like, uh, when I came over here, um, I was sort of just intrigued by it because obviously it was going on a massive bull run, right? This is 2013, uh, we just had Silk Road got closed, I think it was in 2013. And that caused a bit of a, you know, kerfuffle. And then they had, I think you guys call it the C-SPAN or whatever the live YouTube stream where they were like, yes, Coinbase is an MSB, but they can still operate. And everyone was like, ah.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  Bull run, basically. And then China goes mental and next thing you know, it's a $1,200 Bitcoin. But getting into it, it was actually from like an actual product. My co-founder and I, we were trying to build a one-click checkout on the internet. So you go shop on 30 websites, you check out, enter your payment details once. And we were like, oh, fuck, why don't we have Bitcoin? Like Bitcoin's kind of cool, it's novel and like it could, you know, get some attention. That might help drive awareness. We did it and then overnight it was just like the top of Bitcoin subreddit. And they just did not stop supporting us.

• 20:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 20:01Speaker 02

  And we literally, like three days later, we were like, uh, fuck, like, close the doors. This is a Bitcoin. Like, that's all we give a shit about now.

• 20:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  And literally that was the start of it and.

• 20:13Anthony Pompliano?

  And so it goes back to this idea, though, of like you were building a bunch of different things. And all of a sudden the data was overwhelming. Hey, there's something here and you guys saying, let's go focus there and kind of, don't worry about anything else. Like, let's go where people are pulling us into.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  You've got to be data-driven. Like, yeah, it's, it's literally, uh, I don't know why you would never, ever want to quantify your decisions. If you have the opportunity to, all you're going to do is you're looking for an excuse almost. Um, when the excuse not to have an excuse is being shoved right in front of your face. It's data, data, data. Like, listen to it. It will, it's there to help you. Um, yeah.

• 20:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, it makes sense. Um, and so once you guys start focusing on Bitcoin and kind of this one check uh, or one-click payment, kind of, how do you get from that, whoa, Bitcoin is real and we should focus on it? To wire today? What's that journey look like?

• 21:07Speaker 02

  Uh, so very iterative, basically. So like the vision was always, you know, I, we've always been the vision is we don't have a vision. And that's like a very fair, a fair statement to make because at the time it manages expectations. So when you hire people, if you hire really talented people, when you say, we're going to be the leading Bitcoin checkout company. And then we added, you know, let's say we added five different altcoins. That's not going to sit well with someone that's got a lead, a lot of conviction, who's a very talented developer that wants to. Work on Bitcoin being, you know, as big as it can be. And so you lose talent and talent retention becomes tricky when you have a vision. So we've always said the space is too early to have a vision. So we just iterated, so started at the checkout.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  And then we thought, well, the next iteration, if you're a checkout, like a browser extension, right? Very similar to what Lolly is, uh, Lolly is really popular. If we go, the next iteration would be, well, brands, we were saying we would have enough data to see who is shopping where we could go to Amazon or go to Zara or go to Newegg. Be like, integrate it natively. It's worth it. Here's the dollar value that it's going to return to you guys, if not the promotional value. And, uh, so the next iteration was native merchant checkout. So like a bit pay competitor. And then as you build that, uh, you start realizing that spending only happens when people have made 500x ROI in like 12 months. So you're like, all right, cool. What's next? A less seasonal version of it is wallets.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  So people are still going to buy, but in that market, like 2014, 2015, wallets weren't a sustainable business yet because the, you know, the ocean wasn't big enough. Now it is big, like it's huge. You've got bear market, bull market. If you are a brokerage service, you're worried about the competitive market saturation more than you're worried about. Oh no, it's crypto winter. No one's coming outside to buy Bitcoin or whatever. And so as you iterate on that, uh, yeah, I don't know if that makes sense, by the way.

• 23:05Anthony Pompliano?

  No, it does. And so I guess really as you're thinking through, uh, where do we go? You guys have done a lot of stuff, right? So, uh, one of my favorite stories is this idea of the superhero laundry service. Explain what you guys did there. And then I think that'll help illustrate, you know, your guys openness to just trying a bunch of different things and seeing what sticks.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. So we did basically, we had writer's block. I suppose it's the equivalent, like where you're sort of banging your head against the wall. Can't, can't get past the next milestone. So we stopped, uh, you know, my co-founder and I, we said, what's the most non-

• 23:43Speaker 02

  This thing we can do right now, like the complete opposite of what we're doing. And what we did was basically started a laundry hero, like superhero laundry delivery service. So you basically put in an order, you say when you want us to pick it up. We pick it up 5:00 AM in the morning, drop it off that night and you pick the superhero, right?

• 24:01Anthony Pompliano?

  So like Superman, Batman.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  Superman, Batman and Spider-Man, I think it was. Uh, and so our buddy, this is so funny. Our buddy was like, oh, I shock on Batman. And it, we were like, okay, sweet. Everyone wants Batman. Why the fuck would I want to get up at 4:30 in the morning to dress as Batman? And then like, you know, one week later, he's like, getting real tired of this shit, guys. And he's sitting there putting his Batman outfit on. Uh, but, but yeah, we did that and that was awesome because, uh, it was completely different. Got a lot of traction because when you show up as Batman at 7:00 AM and a, you know, a five-year-old answers the door, ready to go to kindergarten. That five-year-old is now your shill, basically. Your internal referral loop, uh, amongst mom and dad to go, you know, why didn't Batman come and pick it up again? And, uh, yeah, it was lots of fun.

• 24:47Anthony Pompliano?

  That, that's awesome. And, and really it sounds like you guys tried it. Hey, it's got a little bit of traction, but, uh, might not be the most scalable thing in the world to send people in costumes running around San Francisco picking up laundry.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, we made, we made a decision, sort of like, it would, it would either go the direction of like, oh, is this going to become like Lyft or Uber where you open it up and you see different neighborhoods where it's like heroes and villains. And you see little like hero and villain icons, sort of like which one do you want to pick up your laundry kind of thing? Um, but that would be sort of giving it a nudge. And I felt like there's better things in the world to do than another laundry delivery service, which is, you know, catering to us lazy, fortunate people that are being, you know, focused on convenience and not adding value.

• 25:29Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And so a- as you were building wire, right? And, and understanding that Bitcoin itself, I think a lot of the, um, kind of testing and, and, uh, the open-mindedness to try new things. It seems like you guys have found a very specific niche in helping people go from fiat currency to, uh, crypto and, uh, all of the technical rails and, and kind of infrastructure that's needed, but also on the licensing front. Maybe describe, uh, what you guys are doing today. And then we can go through kind of the work that's gone into, uh, to get to this point.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So basically, um, you know,

• 26:08Speaker 02

  Fiat to crypto, you know, when you put your card down, you make a payment, you get Bitcoin in your wallet. That's really hard to do. And there's a reason why it's such a pain in the ass for everyone to go buy crypto. Like, you know, you go sign up at Coinbase or anywhere, most of the time you're gonna go blood sample, stroke of your hair, your star sign, shirt off your back, selfie, everything. That is all because they need to do that because of the risk and compliance association with doing it. And so as everyone's going through this, ourselves included, we realized to build our company, we had to actually get all these same licenses

• 26:45Speaker 02

  and MSP and all this, all this knowledge that's just like, you know, it's a big vacuum of resources, time, energy and capital. And so when we did it, we were like, oh, I mean, fuck, everyone's gonna do this. No chance.

• 27:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 27:01Speaker 02

  We should productize this. This is our journey. So, you know, some people grow up and it's like, oh, I lived in a country and we couldn't send money internationally. So I moved and started Western Union and that's their pain point they solved and bravo. And that's fantastic. I was very fortunate. I didn't have that pain point. The pain point I had was I was trying to build a fintech company and I was just getting slaughtered at every angle, trying to get it done, not trying to sidestep, like trying to play ball, but it's like, you gotta have a lot of money to play ball. And so as we did it, we, you know, over the years we did it, we're like, fuck, we've got to just give this to people so that the whole industry can move fast enough because the window of opportunity we have for like digital currencies

• 27:43Speaker 02

  to be as impactful as they can be is finite. The big don't eat the small, the quick eat the slow. And that's

• 27:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Wait, say that again?

• 27:53Speaker 02

  The big don't eat the small, the quick eat the slow. That's

• 27:57Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a really good saying. I never heard that before. The big don't eat the small, the quick eat the slow.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  That's right. That's one of the things is like, try and Well, I feel like I beat a beating a dead horse, not beating a dead horse, banging the drum, but we always say that at work. Like, I mean, not at work, because it's not, it never feels like work. Why would I ever call it work? But, you know, like in the office, it's like a mentality. We were very sort of like, if you ask people that work there, um, I feel like they'd say that. That's definitely one of them.

• 28:25Anthony Pompliano?

  So there's a, uh, there's an Instagram account that you just made me think of. It's called Nature is Metal.

• 28:31Speaker 02

  Dude, that's so funny. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.

• 28:33Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So, uh, I follow it.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  What's your favorite? Like, do you see the shark crocodile one?

• 28:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, I've seen a lot of them.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  Nature is metal. Like, that is the best description of it.

• 28:44Anthony Pompliano?

  So, all right. So just so people understand, there's an Instagram account. It's at nature is metal. And what it basically does is it takes photos or videos from, uh, just hardcore wildlife. So you can get on there. Next thing you know, you see, uh, a lion eating an alligator, or you see, um, a snake that has the two feet of a rabbit, you know, uh, right before it swallows it. I mean, just, it's really gruesome and it's really, uh...

• 29:11Speaker 02

  It's raw. Like, it's just like, you know, it's not national, like, that's the real national geographic. This is hunt or be hunted. This is the food chain. This is how, you know, the world works, kind of thing.

• 29:24Anthony Pompliano?

  So it is, uh, it's a type of account that you follow when you want a daily or multi, multiple times a day reminder of, uh, there's this saying I see people post all over Instagram. That's, uh, this life is a hundred percent on you. No one's coming to save you. Right? Like, that's essentially what nature is. And, and the part that I like about, uh, this account is, um, yeah, they've got the, the crazy, uh, I saw a video there the other day where, um, basically a lion was running or a leopard or something, right? And it caught like an antelope.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:57Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's just, you know, again, the, the quick eat, the slow and all this kind of stuff.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 30:00Anthony Pompliano?

  But the, the ones that get me are, uh, the ones that are really gruesome, where you see the, you know, the panther after it's eaten the prey, uh, and it's just...

• 30:11Speaker 02

  Savage.

• 30:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Blood everywhere. And you look at it and you're just like, that is the animalistic nature, right? It's just... It needed to eat.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  Had to like.

• 30:23Anthony Pompliano?

  And so what did it do? It killed to eat.

• 30:25Speaker 02

  Exactly. That's what it has to do to survive. End of story. It's not emotional in anything like that. It is fight or flight. Uh, that's, yeah.

• 30:34Anthony Pompliano?

  And, and so to me, um, you know, I know it's a little bit of sidetrack, but, uh, it's one of those accounts that, uh, it's a mentality thing. It's really interesting to, uh, to see. So, uh, everyone go check out, uh, at nature is metal. Um, I, I should get whoever runs that account to come on.

• 30:50Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Hundred percent.

• 30:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting. Yeah. Uh, but, but I do think.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  The quote that they said, it was like, everything's on you.

• 30:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, so, well, I've seen different variations of it. Basically, uh, this life is a hundred percent your responsibility. Like no one's coming to save you.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  True. It's so true. Like, and you know, it's funny. Like I remember, um, like when I was young, I had to write out a thousand lines, which is, you know, you do something, you fuck up in school and you gotta do it. And I remember trying.

• 31:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Thousand? Dude.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  Oh, man. Australia is tough. In the U S it's like, hey, rate 50 and go take a, go take a dessert break. Yeah. Right. They caught wind of those, you know, 10 pens attached to each other. So they pushed it up from a hundred to a thousand. But it said, uh, whatever it is to be is up to me. And that.

• 31:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Whatever it is to be is up to me.

• 31:35Speaker 02

  And it's, yeah, this is not a dress rehearsal. This is, this is it, you know? And, uh, like it, lump it, hate it, love it, whatever it is, you just gotta manage your own expectations and realize that's the case. Uh, you're gonna fuck up. You're gonna drop the ball. Like, like, I wouldn't say we, but I definitely know myself. Uh, and as a company, like, we're really good at being really shit at stuff. And that's, that's a fantastic attribute, especially in a fast moving industry. The faster you can be like, oh man, I look like shit in the mirror today, or not, that's how we're judging the company. But, you know, they say a friend tells you, you look good. Your best friend tells you, you look like shit. If you look like shit. Um, and I feel

• 32:16Speaker 02

  like we're very good as a team and as individuals on the team, uh, cause everyone is so bright. And this industry is full of really brilliant people, but if you're not humble enough to iterate on your own opinions, you wanna be discovering, you don't wanna be right. You wanna get the right answer. You know what I mean?

• 32:37Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you do when you identify that you're bad at something?

• 32:40Speaker 02

  Uh, usually take too long to make the decision to cut the arm off or whatever it is. You know, obviously you want to make that decision as fast as possible, but uh, yeah, you, you just sort of, you make a change, you identify the-

• 32:53Anthony Pompliano?

  But do you bring in somebody who's good at it? Do you try to get better at it? What do you do?

• 32:58Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, firstly, you have to identify it, right? So you, you can't fix anything until you identify that it is a problem. And I think, uh, identifying a problem as a team, it's not about, oh, just doing someone a favor to say, okay, well, we'll cater to your opinion. It's like, no, no, no, guys, we've all got to see this. Is this a problem? Can we move forward successfully? In the long term, short term, eh, maybe, you know, don't do, don't fix something because I'm asking. Let's understand why it is a problem, because then, you know, you're infinitely going to grow in alignment if that's the case. But if you're doing me a favor, it's not going to be a long-term successful opportunity.

• 33:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And I think this goes back to part of Silicon Valley's, uh, beauty is people are ruthlessly honest.

• 33:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And in most parts of the world-

• 33:47Speaker 02

  Sorry, yeah.

• 33:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, explain. Why do you say ish?

• 33:49Speaker 02

  I mean, uh, like, I actually don't think that. I would say it's sort of, people are very, especially in the entrepreneur world, right? If you're an entrepreneur, um, or I'm an entrepreneur, I go to you, I'm like, hey, I want to raise capital, here's my idea. Now, you rely on deal flow as an investor and you don't want me to be saying, you want me to be evangelizing our conversation that we have. And so you don't want to say, your idea sucks, here's why, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Because so many people are carrying their dreams to you to make them happen with, you know, capital raising. And personally, tell it like, shoot it straight, that's fine, because now I can iterate, I just want the right answer.

• 34:30Speaker 02

  But a lot of people are going to be like, I can't believe he said that to me, like, he doesn't like me, like how it, it's like, he wants to make an investment and he wants to make, like, you are doing them a favor, shooting them straight, but you're risking them- bitching about you to their friends and their network and now your deal flow tightens up.

• 34:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, the downside could be, hey, he's an asshole, right? But, but I think that-

• 34:54Speaker 02

  But you're not being an asshole, shooting it straight. This person, if you really want to be like the spinach in the teeth thing. Oh, he's being an asshole, telling me how to spinach it. No, he is trying to save you time.

• 35:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  Time is the most valuable asset on the entire planet. We all get the exact same amount of it. It's who realizes that, you know, it is most valuable. You can't, like, you can't earn time. You can save it or you can spend it. You cannot earn it. So you're never going to get more of it. So you can use it wisely. I feel like that's a pretty good saying.

• 35:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Have you ever seen the movie with Justin Timberlake in time?

• 35:32Speaker 02

  Trash. And I'm a trash.

• 35:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, you don't like it?

• 35:34Speaker 02

  No, I've never even seen it. That, is that the one where he's got like the, the things on his arm or whatever?

• 35:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so, so for those that have never seen the movie, basically, every human has a clock or like a countdown clock on their forearm. And you go to work, you get paid in time. So literally time is the unit, is the currency.

• 35:54Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 35:54Anthony Pompliano?

  And so let's say you go to work today and you get another 24 hours, right? We got to come back to work tomorrow to get 24 more hours.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:01Anthony Pompliano?

  But if at any point you run out of time, you die. Now, if you are rich, you end up having on like infinite amount of time, right? No, you just have infinite, infinite amount of time. So you end up with, let's say that, you know, a hundred centuries worth of time or a hundred years, right? Or 50 years worth of time or whatever. And then if you are poor, you are usually living with less than 24 hours in the movie.

• 36:27Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 36:28Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, you know, quote unquote, poor, meaning, hey, you don't have a lot of time. So what ends up happening in the movie is the people who don't have a lot of time, they run everywhere, right? So they're literally sprinting because they don't have a lot of time.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  Ah.

• 36:40Anthony Pompliano?

  And the only way to get more time is to go to work. So they're literally trading labor for quote time, right? So there's all these metaphors of real life.

• 36:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:48Anthony Pompliano?

  But the wealthy- When you go to the wealth zones,

• 36:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:52Anthony Pompliano?

  These are people who have a lot of time. You can't go in between these wealth zones without certain thresholds of time.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, like tears.

• 36:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes. And so if you have, let's say, more than 20 years of time, that you're allowed into, you know, the wealthiest zone.

• 37:04Speaker 02

  The president's club, whatever it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And nobody runs there. Actually, running is a sign of not having any quote unquote money or time.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 37:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Because why are you in a rush? Oh, you must not have a lot of time.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 37:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And so the reason why I like the movie is.

• 37:18Speaker 02

  I really like the premise of this, by the way.

• 37:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 37:20Speaker 02

  Sorry, Justin Timberlake.

• 37:22Anthony Pompliano?

  It's the parallels to life of what are we all actually optimizing for? Right? We say it's money. We say it's all stuff. But at the end of the day, it's time, right? And time ends up being really, really important. And what I think a lot of people don't do is they don't put a monetary value on their time. Right? And it's one of the easiest things that I tell young people to do, which is,

• 37:45Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 37:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Decide how much your time is worth to you. Right? How much would you pay to get an hour of time?

• 37:51Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 37:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Is it $5? Is it $100? Is it $1,000? What is that?

• 37:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:56Anthony Pompliano?

  And also, what are you willing to get paid in exchange for your time? Right?

• 38:01Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 38:01Anthony Pompliano?

  And so when you come up with those two numbers, hopefully those two numbers match.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:07Anthony Pompliano?

  In some cases, they don't match.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:09Anthony Pompliano?

  But when you come up with those numbers, now all of a sudden, the decisions of what you do with your time become super, super clear.

• 38:16Speaker 02

  Absolutely. This is, this is mind blowing, actually, that you're saying this. I one, I could not agree more. And I think it becomes, time is, that's the currency. I mean, that's the, the measurement for everyone, right? But what people get paid in determines what's valuable to them and what they prioritize. So if you give me money for my time, or like, let's say, I go, hey, I really want an hour of your time. You're like, okay, cool. I want you, and like you might say, all right, I want 1,000 bucks. And that quantifies out to your, your hourly rate. Or you might say, there's actually, you can give me more than money. You can put five hours of your time onto this problem I'm trying to solve.

• 38:59Speaker 02

  And that is more valuable than 1,000 bucks.

• 39:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 39:03Speaker 02

  It's fascinating.

• 39:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and the education or information may give you more time later. So I'll give you an hour today that's worth X dollars, but it's because that hour of time today is going to save me 50 hours of time later.

• 39:18Speaker 02

  100%.

• 39:19Anthony Pompliano?

  And so what do we call that when it's capital? Investment.

• 39:22Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 39:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? I'll invest an hour with you today because you're going to give me something that later is going to pay off 50X what I invested.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 39:30Anthony Pompliano?

  And when you start thinking of your time that way, as if it's capital, I think people start changing what they do.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I remember my old boss at work, he was like, hey, you've been doing the same thing for like four hours. And I had to do this really like repetitive process, uh, you know, 280 times or something to go through some updates or something. This is like years ago and I spent five hours and I hadn't done one of them. And it was the case of, I'm really lazy. So like as a person, I'm extremely lazy. So I will always be like, ah, what's the, what's the catch here? There's got to be an easier way. And that was me spending like five hours so that it's automated, so I don't have to do it again. And then, yeah, he was stoked with that because now no one else in the future has to do it either. And it's like, you know, everything, especially in investing, right? For you, like, oh, is it a good investment?

• 40:20Speaker 02

  Is it a bad investment? Well, what's your time horizon? Is Bitcoin a good investment long, long term? Absolutely. Is it a good investment today? Nah, I don't know. Flip a coin. Like everything is relative because the value is going to be relative. Like value is in the eye of the beholder, right? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If I've never eaten a, uh, I haven't eaten in three weeks and you bring me an old cheeseburger, I'm going to be like, oh my God, thank you. But if I just had dinner and I've had like beautiful dinner, I'll be like, get that shit out of here. And it's sort of, everything is relative. So adding value to anything is always going to be relative.

• 40:58Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. So one of the things that somebody, uh, I think it was Naval recently tweeted, he said, uh, earn with your mind, not with your time.

• 41:08Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, usually I'm too stupid to get his tweets, so it takes me like thirty reads. But yes, I see you. Yeah.

• 41:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Right. And so the whole idea is just the value you create is much more the intellectual value you provide than the like manual.

• 41:27Speaker 02

  Brute force kind of.

• 41:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, or just your time, right?

• 41:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:30Anthony Pompliano?

  So if you spend an hour doing something and I spend two minutes doing something.

• 41:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, and I get paid more than you get paid.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Does that make me lazy? Does that make me smarter? Does that make me just understand the rules of the game better?

• 41:45Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 41:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? All these different things.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:47Anthony Pompliano?

  But I think that that was a really powerful way to to kind of articulate some of these ideas of just like earn with your mind, not with your time.

• 41:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:55Anthony Pompliano?

  And that changes again behavior because people begin optimizing for something differently.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  What are we all optimizing for right now? I mean, look, we're in a beautiful office, fifty fourth floor. Everyone is, everyone is chasing, they're chasing something. And I had this conversation at this hacker house in Tribeca. Yes, I think it's Tribeca.

• 42:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, that's a place you uneducated idiot. Yes. Yeah. But I had.

• 42:22Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know if that's where you were, but that's definitely a place in New York.

• 42:24Speaker 02

  Okay, right, right. Um, but like having this, what are we all doing? Like literally, where, why are we going to work? Well, we're going to work to make money. Why are we making money? Oh, so we can pay the rent. Why is the rent? Oh, because they want to make money because they've got an investor. Like it all just, and you know, says Bitcoin solves this. Dude, like, I mean, as philosophical as you want to get, call it bullshit, call it not bullshit. The reality is like, it does. At the end of the day, if, imagine if, let's vaporize money out of the conversation. What do humans do day in, day out? They be themselves. What is the, your superpower, like as POMP, right? Nobody can be you but you. That is

• 43:07Speaker 02

  your superpower that you give to the rest of the world. No, you are that. And your originality is what humans as people, at least this is sort of, you get kind of philosophical But I mean, dude, I'm down the rabbit hole here for six years, 10 years in Bitcoin. So give me a break. But the reality is, if money is coming just super easily, then what do you do? And it's sort of like you're trying to think about people. Well, I look at the people on X Factor or, you know, American Idol or whatever. You know, you get the 70 year old or 60 year old woman that sings and blows everyone's mind. Why does people like that? They like it because, one, it's original and they never saw it coming. So that originality sparks a fire in us. And the second part is that they ask the story, oh, what happened?

• 43:51Speaker 02

  Oh, well, you know, I ended up, you know, falling out with my parents when I was young and then I lived on the street. And then I just had to meet, make ends meet and I got an office job and life got in the way. Life got in the way of that. And that could have been Picasso, Columbus, whoever everyone celebrates. But that is the problem and life getting in the way is not, oh, there was just too many people being themselves. It's the rent was high, the bills got to get paid, da, da, da, da, da. And so like, I feel like it's sort of a great thing when you think about Bitcoin solves this. I mean, Bitcoin is the first thing that looks like a opportunity at money vaporizing.

• 44:33Speaker 02

  I mean, like, look, it's hard money. It's absolutely, but it's sort of going to be to the point where it makes it not a thing anymore.

• 44:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep. And I guess part of this really comes down to, we are asking people to be experts at multiple things. Right? And I've talked about this before, but I want you to earn a living, being everything from a teacher to a fireman, to a finance professional, to an accountant, to, you know, a marketer, whatever your job is.

• 45:07Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 45:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And then I want you to be a professional investor to protect your wealth, right? I need you to do that because inflation is going to steal your wealth if you don't.

• 45:16Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 45:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And so you have to understand asset classes, portfolio construction, all these different things. And if you do not understand those, but you still want to protect your wealth, then you need to pay somebody to protect your wealth for you. Right? And it's all because systematically you are incentivized to get out of cash. Right? Now, that is a pretty big problem. When you add in this layer of machines and automation and all this stuff, right? People start to worry about, are they going to lose that income?

• 45:46Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 45:47Anthony Pompliano?

  And one of the things that drives me, I think, to share this with people because it seems so obvious, but maybe it's not. Is that in a world where automation and machines become so prevalent and pervasive? Creativity is the one thing that the machines are going to kind of automate last.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  Right?

• 46:08Anthony Pompliano?

  It's the, it's the human ingenuity. And if you can optimize for a job or making a living, leveraging creativity and human ingenuity? You got a pretty good shot of surviving the automation wave.

• 46:24Speaker 02

  You are the last person, I, yes, a trillion percent agree. And this is where it's going because the light, like if we think about machines, right? And I'm in like investment groups, very intelligent people that dismiss this premise. And they say it's far too early. I'm like, look, if you look at it properly, Bitcoin is the carrot. And you know, like that experiment with monkeys, right? The scientist, he's got bananas and there's monkeys, 10 monkeys lined up. They go, I want a banana, they grab a banana. The banana is thrown into a room and the door closed behind them. The monkey is caged, so the monkey wanted a banana, but now the monkey's in a cage and it doesn't have its own ability to do whatever it wants or whatever. So it's caged in now, it does not want a banana. It wants to be itself again.

• 47:09Speaker 02

  It wants to like, just let me out of the cage, take the next 20 bananas, don't give them to me. That is, if we look at history, we were formerly like before. Us now, which is like intelligent beings or whatever. It's other than you and I. But basically it was, you know, cavemen or whatever. We didn't have our brains firing as well as they are. Basically, the next iteration, we're in the middle right now between intelligent, like, you know, cavemen and superintelligence, which is computers. So if you're a computer, right? Imagine, imagine AI in 30 years from now and you look back at a capitalist American society, money hungry, ads, ads, ads, buy, buy, buy.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  What do you think the carrot is or the banana to get us into locked in the cage? It's going to be money, right? So that's the banana. So people think we're, you know, de-shackling ourselves from governments. But I mean, there's a very, very clear path that that could become, we're actually handing over the keys from the government to ourselves, but it's actually not ourselves, it's machines controlling our money.

• 48:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and I always go back to this idea of creativity is mispriced, right? And creativity being mispriced is the fact that it's going to actually appreciate in value over time.

• 48:27Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 48:27Anthony Pompliano?

  People don't yet understand that. And so therefore they put a lower price on that creativity. And so if it's an underpriced asset or mispriced asset, investing there today will pay off pretty well in the future. And if you think about where the machines and automation are going to come in, actually the people who can leverage creativity and kind of human intelligence and ingenuity the best, the automation is only going to further the moat for those who are in the creative business.

• 49:00Speaker 02

  Literally, the only thing right now, like you can train data sets for, you know, yes or no questions, is that a flower? Yes or no, whatever. Write me a poem, stuff like that. You know, if you look at how this, how this goes, if we've got machines that can do everything for us, everyone's going to be like, oh, I want a day in the life of Drake, or I want to do this, or I want to do that, I want to be this person. Everyone starts shaping themselves towards being the same almost. And what's left after everyone's sort of been Drake for a day and they've been everyone, they're like, eh, okay, what's next? Originality is it. That is the, that is the key ingredient that is going to be the most important commodity of the future is originality. And right now, money squandered,

• 49:43Speaker 02

  like money gets in the way of that. So like the singer, the artist, it was like, oh, life got in the way and I couldn't share my voice with the world. That voice could be an opinion, that voice could be Mozart or whatever. Who else has crushed it in the past? But like you do a history test, they're not saying, hey, uh, you know, what was Drake's first album on that? No, it was who was the first person to write this? Who was the first person to discover that? Who went to the moon first? Da, da, da, da, da. They don't remember second, third, fourth. They remember the first. And that's because it is original and it is new. And our brains, that's why humans evolve the way we do is because, yeah, what's behind the curtain? We're always

• 50:23Speaker 02

  looking for shit. And that evolution of asking, asking why, and that iterative process, that's, that's literally how we evolve. And so like having the mindset that being, knowing that first or like managing your own expectations, whether it's in life or running a company or anything like that, when you know things are going to change, that's okay. And it doesn't mean you're right or wrong. You can just always like saying, we're like, you know, on our team is always plan for the worst, hope for the best. End of the day. And some people come back like investors are like, oh, that's a really negative outlook. I'm like, no, that's not a negative outlook. That's a very realistic outlook. Statistically probable, like, and the odds

• 51:05Speaker 02

  of us being wrong. Yeah, let's plan for the worst. What's the worst case doomsday scenario? If we've got a playbook for it, then everything else is cream.

• 51:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, this goes back to, um, so there's a very

• 51:16Speaker 02

  Sorry for the rant, by the way.

• 51:17Anthony Pompliano?

  No, no, no, you're, uh, you're dead on. There's a very famous, um, approach that Nick Saban, uh, the coach at Alabama, uh, and a few other professional coaches have, uh, have kind of, um, solidified or made famous, which is, uh, focus on the process, right? And do your job. And so in football, for example, there's 11, uh, folks on the field. And, uh, on offense, right? When you have the ball, every play is drawn up to be a touchdown. Right? I've never, I've never seen a play drawn.

• 51:48Speaker 02

  You mean where they're like the arrows and all the X's and.

• 51:50Anthony Pompliano?

  All that stuff. It's a touchdown.

• 51:52Speaker 02

  I think you've mad in 95.

• 51:54Anthony Pompliano?

  They score every single time on the chalkboard, right? And the reason why that doesn't happen in real life is because one of those 11 folks.

• 52:02Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 52:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Doesn't do what they're supposed to do, right? So the example I always give is the quarterback's job on, you know, the play we're about to run is to take the snap, take three steps and hand the ball to the running back, right? The guy who snaps the ball, his job is to snap the ball, take two steps, you know, to his right, post his right arm, lock in the guy in front of him and then turn and block anybody who comes off the backside.

• 52:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Then the running back's job is to step to the right, run upfield, take the ball, run through the hole, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And every single one of those people has a job. Now, the whole thought process behind do your job is if you're the center, the guy snapping the ball.

• 52:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Don't worry about if the quarterback's handing the ball off or not. Make sure that you snap the ball, you take two steps to the right, you post your right arm, etc. Right? Yeah. It's just do your job. And if all 11 people on the field do their job on this play.

• 52:53Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 52:54Anthony Pompliano?

  We're going to score a touchdown, right?

• 52:56Speaker 02

  That is mind blowing. I didn't realize it was so non, like, that seems, I mean, it makes sense, sorry. Go for broke, obviously, but I mean, and that can happen in football, obviously, because you can get that 60 yard throw or whatever it is. But I feel like.

• 53:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Every play. No, it's not just the 60 yard touchdowns. This is the key piece of where this, where this goes to.

• 53:14Speaker 02

  More strategic ways to be like, let's march up the field to start with and then go for broke when we're close to like.

• 53:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, so it's not going for broke though, right? This is the big secret and I think there's a lot of core that's just the business. So the whole idea here is don't worry about scoring.

• 53:27Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 53:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? If you're the center, don't worry if we score or not. All you need to worry about is something very simple. Snap the ball, take two steps to the right, post with your right arm, hinge and make sure you get anyone off the backside.

• 53:38Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 53:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And if, that's all you gotta worry about. You don't have to worry about what play we've run. You don't have to worry about who's in the game. You don't have to worry about what the score is. You don't have to worry if we score or not.

• 53:45Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 53:46Anthony Pompliano?

  All of that stuff is a distraction.

• 53:47Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 53:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Just do your job on this one play.

• 53:50Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 53:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Focus right now on your job and do your job.

• 53:52Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 53:52Anthony Pompliano?

  By the way, if you trust that the other 10 guys on the field each do their job on this play, we end up scoring.

• 54:01Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, so I I see you. I think that's interesting, but if I was a football coach, I would say, well, the whole, those 11 people at the time, they're all looking at the coach or the manager, whoever it is, and saying, I trust that you are absolutely certain that you have accounted for every permutation of what's, what out, what they're going to throw at us. Because that is what's going to cause me to not do my job successfully, which is going to unbundle all of it as a house of cards. And it's like, yeah, it's kind of inch by inch, life is a cinch, yard by yard, life is hard. Have you heard that saying? No, what is that? Well, it means one step at a time, like, you know. Inch by inch, life is a cinch, yard by yard, life is hard.

• 54:45Speaker 02

  So like, as in, one step at a time, it'll fall into place. So that's sort of like, you know, if you want to go for a touchdown, yeah, like, sure, you can go for it. Probably not going to be as successful. It's sort of like, oh, how, it takes years to become an overnight success. Oh, my God, Uber, everyone's, I could, I could have built Instagram and sold it for a billion dollars. No, you couldn't have, because you didn't know all the iterations that they went through. It started as a bourbon photo app or something like that, that iterative process. But that was their inches, like, one step at a time. They didn't go, like, look at the evolution of the internet, right? People used to knock on neighbors' doors and be like, hey, morning, have you picked up the paper? Imagine if I came to you in 1990 with the internet and I go, hey, uh, upload all pictures of yourself.

• 55:29Speaker 02

  Tell me when you go, uh, in gate, congratulations, by the way. Um, tell me about you getting engaged, uh, where'd you go on holidays? I want to see photos and you're going to share these with strangers that you've never met before. You'd be like, what the fuck, no? But it crept up to where it is today. And we look back and we're a long way from Kansas kind of thing. But at the time, it's just, oh, just like, you know, your bedroom is like, you've got Metallica posters. Yeah, make your own website. That's kind of like your digital bedroom. And then it's, oh, tell us what you're thinking. And that's your, your consciousness stream of Twitter or whatever. Just show me where you are. What are you doing? And then you look and you're like, holy fuck. I'm right there with everyone. So the world gets really small really quickly because

• 56:11Speaker 02

  you feel like you're in your neighbor's house automatically. So, um, but if I said that to you at the start, you would not have bought into it. It wouldn't create success. Uh, Instagram wouldn't be popular if it came out day one of the internet. People would feel like it's invasive. And so to change behavior, which is typically what most companies that have a huge breakthrough are trying to do, or let's say technology like Bitcoin, it is iterative. But, uh, you know, it doesn't mean that you should, it's zero, 100 is wrong, but both things can get there at the end. If it's meant to be, it's meant to be kind of, you know, it'll figure a way out. It's just, do you want it to take six years or do you want it to take 15 or 20 years?

• 56:56Speaker 02

  Um, and that's sort of like a premise, even if I am like, let's say a Bitcoin bull and I think Bitcoin's gonna, you know, vacuum in a lot of the value that we see today. Is it a bad thing to have 40 different alternatives that are trying to throw shit at the wall and iterate? And Bitcoin can sort of see that and adopt that over time. Like, is that gateway drug mentality? The right answer or is it? No, it is it or get out of the way.

• 57:23Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think?

• 57:25Speaker 02

  Um, well, I think I go back and forth with buddies around this, but I think, look, at the end of the day, the downside to gateway drug mentality is, I mean, the, the upside is that, you know, um, you get to see and learn and adopt it if you are Bitcoin or if you are, you know, the biggest in the room. Um, but the downside is obviously there's a lot of people that get, can get hurt from that. So there's a lot of scammers and stuff like that, which it, it feels like, oh, that person's never going to trust cryptocurrencies again because it's given this bad name, da, da, da. They're coming back. Like every bull run, you see your friend, you know, everyone's got those tweets or those direct messages where they told their friends to buy Bitcoin in 2013 or 2011

• 58:10Speaker 02

  or whatever it was. And they said no, then they don't miss it the second time. And so that's the, you know, the mob comes, they're coming either way. Whether we like it, whether we don't, whether you're a government, whether you're the poorest person on the planet, it is happening. You can just choose to take a risk earlier or later. And people are usually rewarded for their risk. But the funny thing is, is the earlier people get into it, it typically is indicative of their principles as well. Like a lot of the people, when Satoshi makes Bitcoin, right? Um, funny thing, Craig Wright.

• 58:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Who?

• 58:47Speaker 02

  Craig Wright, he was, I think he was actually a lecturer at the university I went to in Australia, which is funny. Um, just kidding. Actually, I think he was, but I wasn't there then. Um, the, when Satoshi makes it, Satoshi has a choice to go, holy shit, I've just invented irreversible digital money. That solves porn, gambling and every high-risk industry. But is that the best way for the network to evolve in a hard way? No, it's to go to really brilliant cryptographers and say, hey, I need your eyes on this. What are we missing? Like, let's work, let's harden the base. And so like, if you look at teams like doing token sales and stuff, you go list on Binance, that's a great payday. And I think Binance is awesome for like, if you're a trader and stuff like that.

• 59:31Speaker 02

  But you know, if you've got some sort of thing that you're trying to control, it's, you're trying to nurture, like raising a child, that's what like a distributed network of cells is what raising a child would be. And networks are like biology, really. So you want to nurture it so it grows in the most optimal direction for the core principle that it was founded to be. Now, if I find it to be a scam coin or anything like that, I'd grow it to be a scam coin. But if I'm really trying to solve a problem or like hard money, that I want to nurture it for the long term and not take the poison apples, which might be, you know, short, short-term self-interest. Sorry for the rant.

• 1:00:11Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you guys think about that at Wire, right? So, so like, who are the types of customers that you guys are trying to work with?

• 1:00:18Speaker 02

  Um. So I mean, predominantly, it's developers, uh, you know, fintech teams, brokerages, uh.

• 1:00:26Anthony Pompliano?

  It's people who need the infrastructure.

• 1:00:27Speaker 02

  It's people that need the infrastructure. So a lot of like exchanges, wallets, things like that. Um, yeah, we want to get to as many people as possible because, you know, we, we just want people to realize like, just don't bother with doing it all again. Don't go get the banking relationship. Like this is a many hands make light work situation. If we all work together, we band together as one, which is we take care of, you know, everyone bites off a piece of expertise. Like we're talking about with people and their personalities, like creativity, or what are you an expert at that I can extract value from? And in return, give you value. Um, and those are sort of harmonious relationships.

• 1:01:06Speaker 02

  But if you look at banks now or neo banks, right? So you look at a neo bank, it is a cosmetic layer over the best of stock trading, the best of this banking service, the best of international transfers. And they bundle it all together to look like a bank and they present it much better. And banks are, you know, a construction of five different products, lending, saving, borrowing, whatever. Um, neo banks are like that, but they pick the best of each. You know, if we look at how we can build the future of, you know, uh, digital assets and digitizing money, generally speaking, you know, Bitcoin bites off one of those pieces. Uh, most likely though, everything will rely on it.

• 1:01:46Speaker 02

  Because if you look at a digital world with computers, computers have never had a unified clock. Let's call it as simple as that. Like we look at the sun, the sun goes round and round. That is the source of energy that provides us with coordination at scale. Um, a clock is the same thing for machines, uh, the Bitcoin block height, sorry. So regardless, it's not about whether I like Bitcoin more than I like Ethereum or anything like that. Bitcoin is the longest running track record. So if I'm telling you the sun's wrong.

• 1:02:17Anthony Pompliano?

  And determine the most valuable by the market.

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  Of course, but it's, the problem it solves is what value does Bitcoin add? Oh, it's not fast enough. The only thing it has to do is not change. Imagine if the sun fell out of the sky and we're like, oh shit, we were wrong. There were actually there's four suns. Whoops. You'd be like, huh? No, the sun is the sun because we know that that thing's been there the longest thing since the beginning of time.

• 1:02:42Anthony Pompliano?

  It's gonna turn on tomorrow, man.

• 1:02:43Speaker 02

  What? Yeah, it's gonna turn on, man. He's got a good work ethic there, son. Um, but you know what I mean? And it's just being respectful of that. That is, that's the fact. Call it how you see it.

• 1:02:53Anthony Pompliano?

  You guys raised money during the depths of the bear market. What was that like?

• 1:02:57Speaker 02

  Um, I have an exceptionally, like I said earlier, I was terrible at a lot of things. Raising money is one of them. Um, but I think like the most interesting takeaway when we raised money was definitely managing expectations. So, um, you know, in bull markets and bear markets and stuff like that, you have obviously peaks and troughs. Uh, and when you have such seasonal, like financial markets are seasonal, especially financial markets in a newly adopted technology. So to say, oh, we're going to grow 20% month over month, you just, no, you are not. Because you have not quantified every single contributing factor to be able to determine that at all. So, um, managing expectations was the best part about that.

• 1:03:41Speaker 02

  Where I said to our best, I said, look, we are going to make less money than we did this year. Unfortunately, I mean, sorry, like that was the premise. The focus was on the core way to determine whether or not we have done our job is our KPIs on distribution. How is our reach going? Because, and it's not like, let's just get a bunch of users and monetize later. But it's like, it truly is, these are networks. Networks operate on connectivity and distribution and tying things together to create resiliency. Like that's how a network is survives. It's flat, but everything's connected and that, that's its resiliency. And so distribution is like our focus because the tech is there.

• 1:04:21Speaker 02

  And there's brilliant people that are more focused on it, more obsessed with that specific component of it. Like let, let them be masters at it. And then that's better for us to have a conversation with them about, hey, how can we take advantage of that? Or how can we add value to you guys building this tech and vice versa? So like, you know, whatever that tech is, I mean, like whether that's, uh, There's a million and one things it could be, but I think it's, yeah, I think that's just the way that you've got to play the game. And a lot of people, I think the default setting in finance, generally speaking, well, anytime there's money involved, self-interest, self-interest, self-interest, self-interest. What does it look like long-term when you are

• 1:05:05Speaker 02

  not a company living quarter to quarter and you are sacrificing self-interest for what could be the greater piece of the pie? Like, is it in our best interest as a company to make our company's stock worth more? Or is it in our best interest to buy a significant amount of Bitcoin and grow the pie more? What is going to be long-term more sustainable? What's going to add more value? What's going to get there faster? I'm not saying I've just bought bags and bags of Bitcoin, by the way, but I mean, like, it's, it's a thought process. I mean, that is a very legitimate approach. And some teams, some teams that are very successful in the space, they actually have that approach. It's a good redundancy. If you're betting on the space, as if you're a company and you're committing your whole

• 1:05:50Speaker 02

  life to this space, I mean, may as well load up your bags while you're on the plane, kind of thing.

• 1:05:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, for sure. What, um, what do you think is the biggest challenge in the industry right now?

• 1:06:00Speaker 02

  Identifying what adds value and what doesn't add value.

• 1:06:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain that.

• 1:06:04Speaker 02

  Nobody focuses on adding value. I mean, sorry, not nobody, very few do. What adds value? So I'll give you like, so I have a very big belief that, uh, what browser do you use on your computer?

• 1:06:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, I use a couple, but Chrome mostly.

• 1:06:20Speaker 02

  Nice, nice. Um, so I was just curious, actually, but like Opera browser. How much do you make after tax on an annual?

• 1:06:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Joe's laughing. Somebody came and just asked me some random questions.

• 1:06:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, nice.

• 1:06:33Anthony Pompliano?

  You're my social security number next.

• 1:06:34Speaker 02

  Because he's spying through your camera because of Chrome. But like, so Opera browser, right? Opera browser is three to four or five percent. Like, it's one of the, it's, I think it's in the top five browsers on like, on the planet. They have 350, 400 million users. Now, that is something that is really interesting to me because that penetration is on a different side of the world. So if you have that and every person on a device with a browser that can Extract value from this like, you know, what is adding value? Is it me like talking about adding value? Do we create a product that gives a 5% savings to people or borrowing money at 20%

• 1:07:16Speaker 02

  interest rates or whatever? Like whatever's going on in crypto at the moment, who should you target? Well, value is in the eye of the beholder. If you give someone who's got 30 choices to create a bank account, you say, oh, no, no, but like, try it. It's awesome. It's because it's crypto or it's Bitcoin. It's like, whatever dude, like the switching costs are not worth it. Basically, I don't give a shit enough because there's not enough value to me to switch. Now, if you go to someone in, uh, let's say Argentina or, you know, Africa, hey, you're not going to suffer like 15, 20% inflation. You will break even at the end of the year. If you had a hundred dollars this year, you will have a hundred dollars or $99.50 at the end of, at the end of

• 1:07:58Speaker 02

  the year. Argentina, if you bought Bitcoin at the top of the bull run, 20K, and you sold it at the bottom, when it's 3,800 or whatever, you did, uh, it was better to have done that than to hold the Argentinian peso.

• 1:08:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 1:08:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, you're smart. I'm not. I didn't know that. I was like, holy shit.

• 1:08:18Anthony Pompliano?

  I, the only reason why I know that is because I have people tweeting at me all the time.

• 1:08:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:08:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Which currencies are failing and.

• 1:08:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. And this isn't, this isn't Venezuela. This isn't, you know, this is, it's getting close to home and it will start like.

• 1:08:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, it's gonna happen in the US. Hyper, hyperinflation is gonna happen in the US. They're already hedging. Uh, they got their interest rate, you know, manipulations going. QE's raging on. And, uh, I think, I can't remember if it was the US or the ECB recently, they started to hint at the idea of like, oh, we may actually allow inflation to go over the targets, but like, that's okay because we're planning on it.

• 1:08:52Speaker 02

  Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. God almighty. I'll tell you what though, like if you look at the. Like there are different tiers, right? So you know, you're in the investment side. You look at the individuals that have gotten into crypto earlier and Bitcoin and they're, you know, really enthusiastic and thought leaders and they're rewarded for their enthusiasm. And they're rewarded longer term with financially when they, there was no incentive at the time to buy it. They were there on principle. And then you look at banks like say Silvergate Bank. Silvergate Bank is a fantastic case study, in my opinion. You know, we've like, obviously we're a crypto company and they specialized in saying, hey, we're not going to dismiss it. We're going to focus it. We're going to double down and take a look at it. Because if there is something here, then we should be serving it.

• 1:09:35Speaker 02

  And they're going, they're getting rewarded for their investment and time now. And the next layer on, you talk about like, you know, institutional money's coming in, da, da, da. And there's this whole narrative, people are just sort of frothing at the mouth over. Look, they'll get here eventually. Just make sure you are in beforehand, basically. Because after them, then the next one is going to be governments. And there's obviously already governments that do hold Bitcoin and there's governments that don't. And those that hold Bitcoin early are going to be rewarded for that investment, whether that's a hedge or a desperation. It doesn't matter. It will all come full circle and you'll find that, damn, I wish I could rewind time. And there's no time machine, unfortunately. So, yeah, I don't know.

• 1:10:18Speaker 02

  I didn't even know what you asked. I literally just fire hosed you with trash. Sorry, mate.

• 1:10:21Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. All right. Let's do what rapid fire before we wrap up here. Most important company in crypto other than wire?

• 1:10:29Speaker 02

  Fuck, how do you go rapid fire on that? Oh, uh, most important company.

• 1:10:36Speaker 02

  Oh, man, can we cut this?

• 1:10:38Anthony Pompliano?

  No.

• 1:10:38Speaker 02

  Oh, fuck.

• 1:10:43Speaker 02

  Shit. Uh, make it out.

• 1:10:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 1:10:47Speaker 02

  Gateway drug.

• 1:10:49Anthony Pompliano?

  That is not what I expected you to say. All right, explain.

• 1:10:51Speaker 02

  What was I supposed to say?

• 1:10:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And that's not a popular answer, so I want to hear why you think that.

• 1:10:55Speaker 02

  I was gonna say Blockstream, OpenNode, or MakerDAO. And I felt like MakerDAO right this second, because they are upholding a ton of the come try crypto, like they are underpinning a lot of-

• 1:11:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Are they though? Are people's first interaction with MakerDAO or with something else?

• 1:11:10Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, the first interaction is obviously with, most of the time with Bitcoin, but MakerDAO is providing the, all the digital money that is getting done by GUSD, USDC, Pax, and all those guys. I mean, you would say, what, are they a competitor to a decentralized stablecoin? Yeah, I mean, would, no, what they're doing is, that's a crowdsourced education on ramp.

• 1:11:33Anthony Pompliano?

  What, what does MakerDAO look like 10 years from now? And do you think they're still around?

• 1:11:37Speaker 02

  I would say MakerDAO, yes, I think they're still around. I would say they'd probably be-

• 1:11:42Anthony Pompliano?

  I'd probably agree with that.

• 1:11:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'd say they'd still be around. I think they would have probably migrated a lot of their, you know, firstly, they have a lot of different assets, and those different assets would be underpinned by something more secure. So something like Blockstream Liquid, for example, that's collateralized Bitcoin. That is, like, people are gonna realize that if it's not the most secure party in town, you're gonna wanna be on the most secure chain, and I feel like a lot of teams may end up migrating. Maybe not. I don't know.

• 1:12:13Anthony Pompliano?

  This is my surprise trend of 2020, calling it now. I've been calling it for a few weeks now. DeFi merges with Bitcoin, and it ends up all getting built around Bitcoin.

• 1:12:26Speaker 02

  Yep. I mean, at the end of the day, I don't disagree with that. I don't think, I don't know if it's strange, I mean, like for us-

• 1:12:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it may, it may take more than 12 months. It may take a little bit more than 12 months to actually, like, fulfill the promise, but there will be multiple companies that get launched to do this in 2020.

• 1:12:44Speaker 02

  Yes, and I definitely think that that's something that we look at a lot, just purely from a security standpoint. If it's, you know, if we're looking at the longer term thing, what does it, what does it mean to be on Bitcoin? Does that- Mean, oh, you gotta build everything on it? No, it just means that the lens of truth is the hardest chain to bullshit, basically. And I think like that means, you know, if if I was doing backups and I wanted to prove that I had something, I could put it on chain A, B, C, D, or E. I'd just choose whatever the longest one is and the hardest to bullshit so that someone can't wipe over it later. And that means that I built that proof on Bitcoin. It doesn't mean that I had to build all the tech and stuff.

• 1:13:28Speaker 02

  It just means the keys sit on that and the recovery, it's like a backup machine, basically.

• 1:13:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Hey, that's fair.

• 1:13:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:35Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the one regulation?

• 1:13:36Speaker 02

  Rapid fire.

• 1:13:38Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the one regulation you would change or improve if you could?

• 1:13:41Speaker 02

  I think you asked, I would say just either wipe investor accreditations or make it relative to people's proportionate net wealth. Everyone's got enough information on how much people earn, so you may as well figure it out.

• 1:13:52Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm not gonna touch that right now because people already know my thoughts on accreditation.

• 1:13:56Speaker 02

  What are your thoughts on accreditation?

• 1:13:59Anthony Pompliano?

  It's changing. The SEC recognizes and they're gonna, they're gonna add some improvements, but shorts, long story short is we should go to an education-based system.

• 1:14:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:14:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Where people have to take a test rather than use wealth as a signal for intelligence.

• 1:14:11Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:14:12Anthony Pompliano?

  And my favorite thing is like, how many dumb rich people do you know?

• 1:14:15Speaker 02

  I'm looking at one right now. No, I'm joking.

• 1:14:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Just dumb poor person.

• 1:14:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:20Anthony Pompliano?

  But no, I, I think that, I think that's, you know, the biggest thing and I've been quite vocal about it's a violation of the American dream. It is discrimination against people based on wealth. And I think it's gotta change.

• 1:14:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, look, at the end of the day, if people bark loud enough, like people that work in the government, they're not, they're just like, I mean, sometimes like we've met, we have to meet regulators and stuff. And they're not there like, oh, great. How can I make your life miserable? They're like, yo, I've got a Netflix subscription. I like Spotify too. Yeah, I like to drink beer and I wanna go home, watch TV.

• 1:14:54Anthony Pompliano?

  They're super rational.

• 1:14:54Speaker 02

  Like, I mean, they're human beings. At the end of the day, if you can make their life easier with, you know, it's kind of a, do you go one step forward? One step backwards to go 10 step forwards or do you just grind against the grain? And sometimes it's give and take, so.

• 1:15:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Aliens.

• 1:15:13Speaker 02

  Believer, non-believer? Well, I define alien. You define it. Okay, well, so the little people, the gray, gray people or whatever, you know, the little gray people you see in stereotype. I would say that they're probably human beings on a, like, that's an evolved human being, like a chimpanzee meeting a human being. If we went to a planet that was full of chimpanzees, that would be like an alien coming to us. So. Oh, you think that they're way more advanced than we are? Yeah, they're carbon based, same thing. They're just evolved, like they're the next iteration. So chimpanzees. So we don't want to come. Land in a plane. Yeah, we don't want to come in contact with them. Um, well, I don't know if we do or don't, don't, but. Well, I don't think they're problematic. They're more intelligent and more developed than they have superiority over us, right?

• 1:15:56Speaker 02

  Uh, yes, I would say so, but um, hmm, then maybe superiority is not important. It's important to us now, but maybe they don't value that.

• 1:16:08Speaker 02

  Like, as in, we, we're threatened by superiority, right? You just say, and maybe that's. It's because we use superiority. Yes, we use superiority, but why do we do that? I mean, like, you know, we impose our will because we all have our agenda because we have to operate on our self-interest and not what we can do to add value to the collective group. So if we're always operating on self-interest, it is a kill or be killed. It's, nature is metal, you know, that is, who is the apex predator? And it sounds like the alien coming down from a spaceship or a little green man or whatever it is, is your apex predator. Crocodile, saltwater crocodile, shout outs to Louis for this one, but saltwater crocodile versus a great white shark.

• 1:16:51Speaker 02

  That's the apex battle, I'd say. They haven't evolved since Jurassic. White. Salt, sorry, so, saltwater crocodile. Okay. Versus gray white shark. Who wins? It's like

• 1:17:07Anthony Pompliano?

  No, who wins?

• 1:17:10Speaker 02

  Ah, I'm convinced now the saltwater crocodile takes the cake.

• 1:17:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 1:17:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. I went swimming with great white sharks. It was fucked. It was amazing.

• 1:17:18Anthony Pompliano?

  You just gotta punch him in the nose, right?

• 1:17:19Speaker 02

  Oh mate, have you seen these things? You are second, you are the number two person like in the food chain. The moment you see these, you will never feel anything more primal, instinctively like I am number two food chain. Like just immediately, they swim at 40 knots an hour, let's say 40 miles an hour underwater. These things are big, thick, like they're like a submarine. Um, but they're agile, they're fast. And yeah, there's a reason they haven't evolved for, you know, 350 million years or whatever.

• 1:17:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Cause what they're doing is working.

• 1:17:48Speaker 02

  Dude, yeah, it's doing just fine. Yeah.

• 1:17:50Anthony Pompliano?

  What, uh, what's the most important book you've ever read?

• 1:17:52Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm a terrible reader. I can't read really.

• 1:17:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 1:17:56Speaker 02

  Uh, like, yeah, I can't comprehend properly. I've, I'm really bad at comprehending, so I have to, anything I read, I have to read 20 times, like.

• 1:18:04Anthony Pompliano?

  That's less times than, uh, reading Naval's tweets 30 times.

• 1:18:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm working on it. Yeah. He's like the, yeah, the final boss in terms of comprehension.

• 1:18:14Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. To wrap up, I always let, uh, the guest ask me one question. What you got for me?

• 1:18:17Speaker 02

  How much do you make after tax? Joking. You should have seen it was a joke. Yeah. Have you seen Step Brothers? Um, that's what they think. Uh, I want to say, what's the most important thing for you? The, uh, what's the one thing you're grateful for, for 2019? And what is one thing that you would love to see for yourself as a person for 2020? What's important to?

• 1:18:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, 2019 is super easy. Uh, as pretty much everyone knows, uh, I got engaged. So, uh, so Polina takes the cake on that one. Um, and, uh, in 2020, uh, it's funny, we talked about time earlier. I have, uh, I've become much more ruthless with protecting my time. Um, I, uh, I made a promise to, uh, to, to Joe, who's smirking over in the corner, uh, and Polina, that I was going to travel a lot less in 2020. And so, uh, I've just been, um, saying no to a lot of things, a lot of these conferences, et cetera.

• 1:19:13Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:19:14Anthony Pompliano?

  And, uh, you know, I'll still have to travel a little bit, but, uh, I think this year, um, I should, I should look it up. Uh, I think I took more than 140 flights.

• 1:19:25Speaker 02

  You're a busy dude.

• 1:19:27Anthony Pompliano?

  140 flights. Like if you start doing the math on that, that's more than one every three days.

• 1:19:32Speaker 02

  It's, that's insane. It sounds like you play for a baseball team or something.

• 1:19:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:35Speaker 02

  So no, no, by the way, no discipline is a modern day superpower when everything like no is I so I suck at saying no. That's literally what I'm getting.

• 1:19:45Anthony Pompliano?

  I used to suck. I'm much better at it now.

• 1:19:47Speaker 02

  No, no, you're not. But yeah, that's awesome. Yeah.

• 1:19:52Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, man. Listen, I appreciate you doing this. Super excited about what you guys are building. I think that a lot of people across the industry are starting to realize that the infrastructure is necessary. And it's quite difficult to do on their own. So they are coming to you guys. So thanks so much for the work.

• 1:20:08Speaker 02

  I appreciate you having me. Thanks, guys.

• 1:20:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. All right. We'll do it again soon.

• 1:20:11Speaker 02

  Thanks, Pop.

• 1:20:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Hey, everyone. Pop here. If you like 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.