#470: Kevin Rose on Decentralization on the Internet

Kevin Rose is an Internet entrepreneur who co-founded Revision3, Digg, Pownce, and Milk. He has been building compelling products for a long time and today serves as a partner at True Ventures. In this conversation, we discuss early days of building on the internet, modern media models, content moderation, deplatforming, and the importance of decentralization. ======================= Exodus is an absolute game changer in the crypto wallet space, and we’ve teamed up to offer an exclusive discount for you, as listeners of the podcast. Sign up for Exodus today using my promo code Exodus.io/pomp. This is a no brainer for both newcomers and crypto heavyweights - go sign up today. ======================= Crypto.com is the only all-in-one platform that allows you to BUY / SELL / STORE / EARN / LOAN / INVEST crypto all from one place. Join over 1 million users currently using the Crypto.com app. Download and earn $50 USD using my code ‘pomp2020’, or use the link https://platinum.crypto.com/r/pomp2020 when you sign up for one of their metal cards today. ======================= Download the top-rated DraftKings Sportsbook app NOW and use promo code POMP when you sign up to get one hundred to one odds on any football game THIS WEEKEND. That’s code POMP for new players to get a shot at one hundred dollars on any football action this weekend.… for a limited time, only at DraftKings Sportsbook! =======================

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

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Kevin Rose is an internet entrepreneur who co-founded Revision 3, Dig, Pounce, and Milk. In this conversation, we discuss early days of building on the internet, modern media models, content moderation, deplatforming, and the importance of decentralization. I really enjoyed this conversation with Kevin, and I think you will as well. Before we get into today's episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Exodus.io. Exodus is one of the most popular cryptocurrency wallets and has been around since 2015. It's supported on both desktop and mobile.

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• 3:38Speaker 01

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

• 4:04Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. Got a very special guest. Probably one of the earliest internet entrepreneurs, Kevin Rose, is with us. We are recording this as part of the Stacks Conference, which is Block Stacks virtual event. And so there's been a ton of great speakers and lots of great information. So highly recommend you go and check out the rest of them. But Kevin, thank you so much for taking the time to do this.

• 4:30Speaker 02

  I'm so glad to be here. I know we've traded emails over the last like six months or so, or three months, whatever it is, and couldn't find a time. And it's awesome. As a, as a listener of your show, it's cool to actually be on. So thanks for having me.

• 4:42Anthony Pompliano?

  So I have to say that there was a moment where all of a sudden my phone started blowing up, middle of last year. And yeah, I started looking and everyone was like, Tim Ferriss and Kevin are talking about the Chamath episode of the podcast. And I was like, wait, what is going on? And so I went and I listened to the episode. And I guess you had listened to Chamath Palpatia right in like the heart of the pandemic and the economic crisis, pretty much just say what he meant. And he really kind of went off. And so it was cool to kind of hear your thoughts about one of the episodes. But maybe let's start with your background. You know, you've worked on so many important pieces

• 5:24Anthony Pompliano?

  of what I kind of consider that the internet, you know, economy, maybe just like, how do you describe where you grew up and how you got into the technology industry?

• 5:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I, of all places, I grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada. Like I was, I moved out there. My dad was in finance. He worked for a company called Principal Financial Group and like they had a good paying job. And it was like a chance for us to like, have a little bit more money. We were like standard kind of middle class family. And so he moved out there. That put me in the middle of all things Las Vegas, did not really enjoy that. But I got into tech and computers out there and desperately wanted to figure out a way to get to the Bay Area because I just had been reading about how everything was going on, you know, especially in 99, 2000. And so I said, well, I got to get to SF, figured out a way to get kind of a low level job working in San

• 6:15Speaker 02

  Francisco, moved out there, fell in love with the city. Eventually it took me a little while to love that city. And then, yeah, started my own thing in 2004, when the kind of web 2.0 was just getting started. And I launched the first social news website called Digg. And so that happened in, in late 2004. And kind of to my surprise, just

• 6:40Speaker 02

  People like to vote on articles and tell you which ones are the best and have a say. And all this stuff was relatively new because there really wasn't a way to do this stuff in a real time fashion. That type of technology was just coming online. So like a great example is, you know, when we, if you were to dig something back then, or eventually later, you know, about a year later, when Facebook added likes, or you upvote something on Reddit, people used to forget it would actually have to take you to another page. Like when we first launched dig, you would have to say like, dig something would take you to another page and say, thank you for your dig, because there was no way to do it in line. And so when they came out with asynchronous JavaScript to make that happen, you could actually click something and

• 7:22Speaker 02

  see the page refresh with the number. And as silly as that sounds today, that was like bleeding edge back then. And so that's, that's kind of some of those early kind of new versions of ways to manipulate JavaScript was what led us to creating some of this real time voting. And it was right place, right time, lots of luck, and it just took off from there.

• 7:44Anthony Pompliano?

  How did it feel to have built something that really became part of people's habits on the internet, right? Kind of the, the early users of dig ended up, a lot of them going to be very successful technology entrepreneurs as well. But just, I'm sure people would tell you all the time, like, oh, I use dig every day, or literally, you know, I remember using dig so much. How does that feel today, or even back then?

• 8:08Speaker 02

  You know, it's, I think that anytime that you can have a small little impact on the internet and change, just a little tiny piece of it is, it's a beautiful thing. And I would say the biggest one was probably when Drew, the founder of Dropbox, came up to me and was like, we launched on dig. And that's what really blew us up on that first day. And he's just like, thank me for that. And I'm like, wow, you like, you created Dropbox. Like, thank you. Like, that's awesome. So it was, it was a cool, it was, it was. It was such a small community back then, though. Like when Web 2.0 happened, it wasn't like, you know, in today with all the money in the Valley and all the startups and, you know, there being thousands and thousands of different startups

• 8:51Speaker 02

  kind of all competing for the same eyeballs and just a flood of money. Back then, it was a handful of folks. So like you knew the Twitter folks and, you know, Zuckerberg was really curious about digs before he added likes. So he came over to my office and like just sat on the floor with his slippers and like talked about like how it worked and like there was like all those early days, but no one was thinking it would be this big. It was like, it was just like, well, how can we make our websites better? Like there was still mobiles, like how can we just make our websites better? What features can we add to attract more users? So to watch and see how, you know, Twitter and Facebook and some of the other bigger platforms, Reddit and others have changed the world is just, it's so cool. It was, it was a great time and lots of mistakes made.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  I was in my early twenties, definitely had no idea how to manage people, no idea how to properly hire or fire or prune or any of the things that a good founder and CEO should do. It just, we, it was, I was just so immature. So, you know, I look back on those days and just see a lot of mistakes, but really it's just lessons learned, you know? It's just, I, I used to beat myself up about them. Now I just consider them, you know, really valuable lessons that I wouldn't make today and ones that I had to go through.

• 10:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And obviously being a little bit older, having more experience, it helps in the hindsight there. Talk a little bit about the evolution of content moderation. You know, as you built that kind of first site and you had to break a lot of ground and kind of figure things out. I don't know how many really, you know, examples you could pull from, you know, even Zuck had you to go and talk about likes and digs and all of that. How have you seen some of the decisions that you guys made early on evolve into today's world? And how do you think about content moderation on the internet today?

• 10:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's funny. I was talking to a friend of mine who, who was kind of our, our head of content moderation at Dig. And he's now been at Reddit for seven or eight years, something like that now, and, and does a bunch of moderation over there. And just seeing the, and hearing about this, the, the better, just the technology that they have to on the machine learning side and, and the things that they're doing to identify spam early on that we didn't have back then. But, you know, I look at what's happening on Twitter with the issues that they've had around moderation. And I really feel, it's, it's when you've been behind the scenes and you see what happens, you realize the, uh, just how crazy it is.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  And the general public typically doesn't see this type of, of, of thing. And so like, for example, um, and I'm sure Reddit has to deal a lot with this. It's like, when you want something on the front page of Reddit and you want to get it, because you know, there's, you know, millions of eyeballs there, right? If you can get a story on the front page of Reddit, that's worth a lot of money, right? So spammers are going to go and try every single angle of attack to try and get something on that front page. And oftentimes what happens is they'll go in, attack something and then claim foul play and say, you are, you know, suppressing the story. This is false moderation. And from just a standard consumer on the site, you're like, yeah, this, this thing had thousands of votes.

• 12:05Speaker 02

  Why is it not on the front page? But what you don't see is behind the scenes, 80% of those votes came in a, a, not a natural way, but a way that they've determined to be fraudulent. So that can be people going directly to the permalink site, without actually naturally discovering it through the kind of upcoming section or any other page. It could be a bunch of new accounts, all voting on the same thing. It could be a bunch of accounts from the same IP address. It can be a bunch of accounts, all our votes all happening within a very short time window. There's just like a thousand different things to look at and, and from a, just a consumer looking at the total number of votes, you would say, well, something is wrong, like Reddit suppressing this or Dig is suppressing this or whoever it may be.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  But in reality, there's just a whole. Mess that that you have to and you can't come out and say and call them out right publicly. That's just not a thing you do. So it just turns into, you know, scandal or quote unquote, deep state trying to keep us down or whatever it may be behind the scenes. And in reality, there's a bunch of shady stuff going on. And so when I see that happening at Twitter and other places and just, you know, when we added like, you know, messaging or the ability to communicate behind the scenes and you see people all getting together in big groups, like trying to all zero in on an article to try and promote. And it is, it makes me feel very fortunate that I'm no longer in that game because it's messy. It is really messy.

• 13:34Anthony Pompliano?

  It also feels like there's this constant healthy tension, right? If you're that person who wants traffic, you want to do everything you can to increase the probability of getting traffic, getting, you know, better placement, getting kind of up in the rankings on the various sites. But at the same time, people don't want you to do that, run the site. And so, you know, there's always the trick of like, I love when a startup will email me and say, you know, product hunt, hey, don't click on this link, but go to the product hunt website, you know, scroll down, we're ranked about, you know, 30th right now, you'll find us around there and then upload us. And so it's funny to kind of see the constant cat and mouse game. I think it, but what that does lead to though is you've mentioned a couple of times,

• 14:17Anthony Pompliano?

  like almost malicious actors, right? Or kind of bad actors. And so how did you guys previously deal with this at Dig or maybe some of the other companies you've invested in? And then now we're seeing more of what I'll call just like deplatforming or kind of completely taking people offline. Is that not really a new thing? And that's been going on for a long time. It just maybe people didn't talk about it as much, didn't have as much tension. Or is it something that maybe is a more aggressive response to kind of the ratcheting up of activity from users? Like, how do you just think about the evolution of that?

• 14:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's tough because you have to put users like there's, there's, there's not one universal policy that'll just apply and work well to everyone. So there's different intentions behind each of these different types of, you know, quote unquote fraud or manipulation of the system. And so sometimes we had like, to your point, like there are people that come in that have great articles that just want to get more exposure. And so they tell their friends, go try and find this organically and vote it up and blah, blah, blah. And that there's not really a lot of harm in that. There's confusion in that. Like, I remember one time when CNET, they had probably 75 of their employees go and sign up for dig accounts and all dig the same article and they were pissed that it didn't make the front page. And I'm looking at the data and it's all like CNET email addresses and it

• 15:36Speaker 02

  was all employees and they'd all created accounts within the last 20 minutes. And I'm like, you guys don't understand, like, there's a whole karma system that you can't see behind the scenes that is attributed to each one of these accounts. We know these are new accounts and we're not going to give them the same weight as we say would someone that's been on the site for three years. So they just couldn't understand why their content wasn't making the homepage. And so it's frustrating for those people, especially when they're, they believe they're trying to do something good. In this case, it wasn't, it wasn't a bad act. It was like the legitimate article, they were just trying to give it a little extra love. Now, there's, there's the other side of things where you know you have a spammer, you know, you have someone that's really trying to promote paid content or content that is just like, you know, the typical spam that you would see in your inbox, you know, stuff like that. So we would do all different types of things, including

• 16:20Speaker 02

  we had a system where you could set a flag on someone's account or a series of accounts or hundreds of accounts and tell them they were called like silent accounts. And what that meant is they could come and dig all day long and they would actually see the numbers go up. But if they logged out or anyone else looked at them, the numbers would ever, never go up. So they actually were just spinning their wheels. They thought they were like actually positively voting on something. And so this was great because the second you ban a spammer, they see that they've been banned and they go and create another dozen or five dozen or whatever it may, you know, new accounts. And so this just kept them believing that they were doing something when in reality they weren't. So there's just so many different tactics. And then of course, the kind of like actual physical banning of people, like we did that by

• 17:02Speaker 02

  That, you know, we probably, I don't know how many we had by the time that I left dig, but it was in the hundreds of thousands, if not over a million accounts banned. You know, it's, it just, um, there are certain times where people are so malicious that you, you just can't, they can no longer be active on your platform and you have to do everything you can. Like, I mean, hate speech, um, things that threats, like I had to have, when I was doing a live podcast one time, uh, 24 hours before we were going to go live, we had a bunch of emails that were sent to saying that someone was going to bring a gun and shoot me and kill me at the live podcast. And so we had to hire, um, personal security to come out and like frisk everyone, check their bags when they came in for the live show. Um, and we talked to the FBI

• 17:47Speaker 02

  back then and it was just, you know, it's stuff like that where you, you gotta be careful.

• 17:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And it feels like, uh, there's a difference between if I am maliciously like, uh, you know, trying to vote things up and, and almost, uh, not creating content, but more so trying to manipulate it. That's very different than if I'm the one who's actually creating the content. I'm saying things that are malicious, hurtful, you know, and, uh, kind of violent, whatever. And both from a moderation standpoint, is it different? But also, uh, there seems to be more sensitivity and, uh, much more anger around I'm being silenced versus I can't take an action on a site, right? Like, to me, it's the, the, the silencing component seems to be where all of the focus goes. But really what you're saying is, hey, for, you know, two decades, there's been all sorts of things that these platforms have been doing, uh, not necessarily in a bad way,

• 18:37Anthony Pompliano?

  but they're, they're trying to make the experience and the product as good as possible for the people who are there for the right reasons.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  That's right. But the other thing too, is you have to realize is this is not a freedom of speech issue. It's not the government saying, I can't say something, which is what freedom of speech is. It's, it's essentially a private company. It's offering a free service to its users saying, we don't want you in our store anymore. We don't want you in our house anymore. This is our private company and it's completely within their rights to say that. I mean, that's, that's the beautiful thing about America. Like we can say, I built this service. I don't, you're not, um, I have a series, a set of rules and guidelines. You're not adhering to those and so you are no longer welcome here. And I, I, I'm not directing that at Trump. I'm directing that at, I mean, this is all users.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  Like, that's the beautiful thing about these private businesses is they have the ability to do that. I, I think it's, it's a thing that we need to protect. Like, it's very important. It's, it's, it's the people, I think the vast majority, it's sad to see on Twitter that a lot of people believe freedom of speech means I, freedom of platform. Like I, if I'm on Facebook, I get to stay on Facebook no matter what I say, or I get to stay on Twitter no matter what I say. And that's not the case. They're giving you a free service. You're not even paying for it. And you just expect to be able to spout whatever you want and they have to, have to keep you on. It's not the law. That's not the way it works. And there's just a lot of confusion there.

• 20:01Anthony Pompliano?

  So, and I tend to agree with you, right? That like, look, these are private companies, uh, and they're basically reminding us that they're private companies and they can do this, right? And I think people may have forgotten that or be confused. Does the analysis change or kind of how do you see the difference when, um, you know, let's say it is, uh, a random, you know, 25 year old person in the United States who, uh, isn't well known by any, you know, measure. Uh, and it's just kind of going about their day, uh, and want to interact with family and friends, let's say, versus the president of the United States, right? Or some other, uh, well-known figure, especially if it's politically related, uh, either in the United States or internationally.

• 20:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, how do you think about almost, um, the, uh, the magnitude of the person and the weight of the words? And how that plays into some of these decisions? Cause it feels like that is a nuance that might not be discussed as much, um, in the press, but the technology companies seem to put a lot of, uh, importance on that specific component.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's, I don't know, this is above my pay grade. It's, it's difficult in that I feel if it's, it's hard to say what you would do if you were sitting in that position, right? Like, I feel there's importance that, that you want to allow the information to get out there. And it's going to get out there one way or another, whether it be like if someone gets cut off on Twitter, they can go to their private email newsletter, they can go to their website, they can go to a thousand of their outlets. Most of them have large followings, people that they can text because they signed up for some type of text me at this number to join our group, you know? So there's a lot of ways to, to spread this information. So it's, it's really, I, I think that Twitter is, it's tough because on one hand, they realize

• 21:45Speaker 02

  that, and I also think that if, if you cut off, the, the thing that I'm most concerned about, that I'm scared about is that when you kick people off of a platform, they will find an alternative. And we are very close technology wise to completely decentralized systems that will allow these to exist no matter what is said. Now, they may not be in the app store because obviously Google, Facebook, Samsung, others, they control the content in their app stores. But the content could live in a decentralized fashion that cannot be censored. And that's, a lot of people are working towards building these systems. And there's a lot of good in those types of systems, but I can imagine there being in

• 22:30Speaker 02

  the next five years, you know, a Twitter like service that you just can't take down and you can't delete and everything stays up there forever. It's stored, information is stored on the blockchain and it just becomes a free for all for misinformation, for spreading of hate speech, for a lot of, a lot of really bad things. So it's, um, you know, and then what happens? Do we try and break? Block that or break it at the IP level? Like, do we try and actually shut down, uh, you know, our, our block? Uh, when the, the, the traffic is encrypted, there's not really a way to do that, you know? So there's, it's, it's, uh, it's just a whole can of worms, you know? It's, there's no easy elegant solution here.

• 23:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And so you actually started to touch on what my last question was going to be just around. It feels like, uh, the more and more that decentralized companies, which by the way, has been the default. It has led to incredible value creation and it's probably been, I think, pretty undeniably the best solution so far. Um, in terms of building a centralized corporation and it owns a product and monetizing it. Um, the more that they kind of, um, highlight or, uh, leverage the power and control that they have. Um, and again, in a positive way, the way that they think is the best way to run their service and they're legally entitled to do it. I do think that there's more and more interest in the youngest generations in decentralization. Right?

• 23:51Anthony Pompliano?

  And I, I think you're right in highlighting like, hey, that's not necessarily just a, uh, positive solution. Like there are downsides to it. How likely is it? Do you think that we get, um, what I'll call kind of mainstream decentralized? You know, whether it's a social network, a mobile app or a website. Um, and, and really the perspective I've had on this is like, I don't know, maybe five years ago, definitely when you started DIG. Uh, if anyone said, hey, I'm going to build a decentralized website, they kind of got put into the like, oh, you're just paranoid category. Like, like, why does it need to be, you know, decentralized? That seems to be changing now. Um, and so is it something where it's like, yeah, actually maybe the default is going to switch to decentralization? Or is this just, hey, we're human and, and we're having short-term kind of, uh, overreaction?

• 24:37Anthony Pompliano?

  And like the truth somewhere in between, I mean, we have like coexistence between centralized and decentralized systems moving forward.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there's going to be a little bit of a coexistence between the two. Like I, even today, like if you, if you're running, say something like the Brave browser, which is, you know, like a Chrome-based browser that has privacy first. You go to the New York Times, it offers you with one click to open it in Tor and have it to be a completely anonymous. Now granted, it's going to be much slower, right? Like decentralized systems in general, they don't have the crazy edge servers and caching and all the other stuff that, uh, a centralized service will bring you. They give you, you know, Crazy response times that load the page in a quarter of a second. So some of these systems are going to be certainly slower. I certainly believe that you're going to have

• 25:22Speaker 02

  a lot of the types of users that were banned that are spreading certain types of information, whether it be the misinformation, or you know, some of the evil hate groups and things like that, they will move to decentralized solutions like because there is not going to be any other home for them. And the tools moderation tools will get better and better over time. Right? So if you know today, you can post something about the KKK and it'll last for three hours on Twitter, you're still pretty happy with that. But you know, as a if that their moderation tools get better and that stuff is removed instantly, then you're going to move to something else. So it's, it's going to be a question of whether or not anyone like, do people put this

• 26:05Speaker 02

  in the bucket of kind of the dark web, where only a certain subset of people that know what they're doing and know what they're getting into go to, or will there be any legitimate users on there that kind of somewhat make the platform seem like it is a place to hang out for an everyday user, if that makes sense?

• 26:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, we would be doing everyone a disservice if we didn't talk about Bitcoin being kind of this, you know, really probably the most valuable, best example of these decentralized services that seems to not only be working, but also getting mainstream adoption. Talk just a little bit in closing about kind of your thoughts around Bitcoin, and maybe the importance of that system in the world and kind of how entrepreneurs are seeing that as an example of what they can aspire to build?

• 26:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, Bitcoin has been a fun one to watch. And I think we're finally getting to the place where a few things are coming together that are giving it kind of renewed life. Not renewed life. It's always been alive. It's just the question of adoption. And so I think there's a few different levers that are that are happening all at the same time. One, it's just age is a big deal. Like every week, every month, every year that goes by, where this thing has been hammered on and pounded on. By everyone and there is increased confidence in the technical feasibility, although that's been there from the get go for the geeks. The average consumer and institutional buyers get a lot more comfortable with placing bets in that in that arena.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  So you'll see more funds on the institutional side moving in there as the confidence in the in the protocol grows. On the more consumer side, we're just seeing the on ramp and and ability to get into Bitcoin just being so easy. I mean, the fact that you can go into PayPal now and just buy it directly in your PayPal account is insane. I mean, and that's that was that was Square Cash. And everyone's like, oh, yeah, I've used Square Cash, maybe I'll use that as mine. And then it was, you know, Robin Hood and a few others. But now the big, big players, not the Square isn't a big player, but you know PayPal is much larger. They're going to get in the arena and say, there's money to be made here. Let's go ahead and and offer this to our consumers. And I would imagine we start seeing that.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  It wouldn't surprise me if major banks start doing the same thing. And when that happens, it's just really going to unlock a lot of demand. And I think that things continue to go higher. That coupled with the fact that the United States is just printing money. A lot of other governments are way worse than than we are here in the States. And so it gives us something that we can all point to as like a universal store of value. I think that becomes more and more true over time. In terms of the actual utility of it day to day, am I buying bread with Bitcoin? No. And I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. But, you know, the same thing, you're not buying bread with your gold ETF either. So it's it's I I'm I'm pretty excited about the future of Bitcoin.

• 29:05Speaker 02

  You know, it's being extended, blockchain, some interesting stuff to extend it as well, create smart contracts on top of it, things of that nature, make it more Ethereum like. I mean, these are the the industry is maturing quite a bit. So it's.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  It's pretty exciting and I think that if you're, this is the crazy uncle question I always get at Thanksgiving and now over Zoom Thanksgivings is like, should I buy Bitcoin? And the answer is, is really simple. If you're trying to flip it and you just want to double your money or triple your money, like stop, stop. Like you're putting in too much then because it means a lot to you. And so you're better off putting in less money and forgetting about it for 10, 15, 20 years than you are putting in something where you just want to see it double. So, you know, for me, that means 2% of my overall portfolio, maybe 3% of all of my different assets across all asset classes. And if you can just put it in there and forget

• 30:02Speaker 02

  about it for the next 10, 15, 20 years, and then figure out, has this, has this grown to a point where it's 10, 15, 20% of my overall assets? And if so, consider doing some, you know, moving around and pruning to make sure that you, you have the allocation targets that you're looking to hit. So, but I am, I am, obviously, if you are a brand new country getting started today, you're not going out and buying printers and printing money. Like, digital currency is here to stay. There's no doubt about that. It's been the case for a long time now. And, you know, with Bitcoin, you obviously have, have the leader and I can't see that changing anytime soon. So, I'm, I'm, I'm a fan and will continue, continue to be a fan because it's, it's just the future. It's like, it's like electric vehicles. It's so obvious.

• 30:47Anthony Pompliano?

  I could not agree more. It's also funny to me because if you talk to young kids, people say, oh, that is the, you know, kind of Robin Hood generation portfolio, right? It's like Tesla and Bitcoin. And it's like, well, yeah, because they understand maybe some trends that, you know, older, older folks aren't quite aware of yet. So we'll see how, how it all plays out. But I tend to think that your perspective is, is pretty accurate and spot on. Where can we send people to find you on the internet and find out more about your work at True?

• 31:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, so trueventures.com is where I invest day to day. So I'm a partner over there. We invest in the very early seed stage, Series A. And that's kind of my day to day. I focus on consumer internet, cryptocurrency, and a few other things. I also do a newsletter that I send out probably every other month or so, and you can just find that at kevinrose.com. And it's just all of the crazy things that I'm investigating, new technologies, things I'm excited about, books I'm reading. And so it is a kind of crazy hodgepodge of all different types of links and fun stuff. But I try not to spam people. So every couple of months is about the right cadence for me. And you can sign up for that over at kevinrose.com.

• 32:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome, man. Well, listen, thank you so much for doing this. As I started off saying, you've literally built some of the coolest companies on the internet and been a huge part of a lot of people kind of following your footsteps. So, you know, one, congratulations on all the success. And two, thank you so much for joining us today.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  Oh, dude, it's my pleasure. Keep doing the great shows because I will I will keep listening. You are you're definitely one of my default podcasts. Thank you for that.