#921 Alexander Leishman On Bitcoin As Major Political Force

Alexander Leishman is the Co-Founder & CEO of RIver, It's a Bitcoin-only company that allows you to buy Bitcoin as well as mine Bitcoin In this conversation, we discuss building a Bitcoin-only company, updates on the regulatory space, Bitcoin maximalism, and why this is the year that Bitcoin is establishing itself as a major pillar in our political system. ======================= Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp ======================= Imagine coinmarketcap - decentralized. 3X in valuation is 15 billion dollars from the current price. Cryptotoday.com starts at zero, at fair launch on 7th of March. No VC. No pre-sale. Team tokens locked. For the people, by the people. For decentralized crypto. Visit http://cryptotoday.com and read the whitepaper for the details.

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Alex Leishman is the founder and CEO of River, a Bitcoin-only company that allows you to buy Bitcoin and also to mine Bitcoin. In this conversation, we talk about Bitcoin, building River, what's going on in the regulatory world, and his thoughts around Bitcoin maximalism. I really enjoyed this conversation with Alex, and I hope that you enjoy it as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I first want to talk about our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by BlockFi. BlockFi provides financial products for crypto investors. Those products include the BlockFi Wallet, a US dollar loan

• 0:43Anthony Pompliano?

  collateralized by your crypto, and a no-fee trading product. BlockFi also released the world's first crypto rewards credit card. It's a Visa credit card that gives you crypto back as your rewards, instead of cash back or airline miles. They recently introduced Rewards Flex, so customers choose which crypto assets they receive from their credit card rewards from the BlockFi Rewards credit card. For people in the US who own or are interested in owning crypto or stacking more sats, the BlockFi Rewards credit card provides the easiest way to earn more crypto, because you earn 1.5% back in crypto on every single purchase, and you have no annual fee. I'm an investor in the business and a very, very happy user. The BlockFi Rewards credit card is the easiest way to earn crypto. For a limited time, when

• 1:26Anthony Pompliano?

  you sign up using my link, blockfi.com/pompcc, you will get $75 back in crypto on your first swipe. Use your everyday spending to diversify your crypto portfolio. I've got the credit card, I love it, and I think you will too. Head on over to blockfi.com/pompcc today. Next up is Choice. It's time to stop paying capital gains taxes on your Bitcoin, and Choice is here to help. Choice is rebuilding the way Bitcoiners approach retirement by making it possible to invest in Bitcoin and 19 other digital assets inside your IRA. Right now, every time you make a trade, you have to pay capital gains taxes that can be as high as 37%. Choice enables you to trade real Bitcoin, other cryptos, and stocks without having to pay a dime.

• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

  And capital gains. The best part, they just released an iOS app, so you can open an account in less than 10 minutes and take control of your future from the palm of your hand. Join me in the 20,000 other Bitcoiners who have started their tax efficient stack and open your choice account today. Search stack sats in the app store or visit choiceapp.io/pomp. Again, search stack sats in the app store or visit choiceapp.io/pomp. And one more thing, if you want to hold your private keys, choice lets you do that, too. Start stacking tax efficient satoshis today and visit choiceapp.io/pomp. This episode is brought to you by cryptotoday.com. Exchanges

• 2:51Anthony Pompliano?

  got decentralized, money got decentralized, and the only bottleneck is the very sites listing them all. cryptotoday.com is like decentralized coin market cap. It's the first of its kind. There's no bribes, no connections, or heavy fees are needed to get listed like on the centralized sites. You can simply request on the blockchain and disperse the prize on-chain to the community and get fact-checked by thousands of eager crypto users. cryptotoday.com treats very differently. There's no pre-sale, no VC money, and all of the team is locked up for at least one year. All the centralized competitors have valuations in the billions of dollars. cryptotoday.com started

• 3:32Anthony Pompliano?

  out at $0 as the first decentralized token information site. You can read the white paper at cryptotoday.com. Again, go to cryptotoday.com to learn more. All right, let's get in this episode. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 3:44Speaker 01

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

• 4:08Anthony Pompliano?

  We have our friend Alex from River here. How are you, sir?

• 4:11Speaker 02

  Hey, guys. How's it going?

• 4:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Doing fantastic. How are you?

• 4:14Speaker 02

  It's great to be in Miami.

• 4:15Anthony Pompliano?

  I was gonna say, are we gonna convince you to move here at some point?

• 4:18Speaker 02

  You know, every time I come, I stay longer and longer. So at some point, the math, the math will work out that I just sort of end up here the rest of my life. We'll see how, we'll see when that happens.

• 4:29Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. You guys have been launching a ton of stuff at River. You have the ability to buy and sell Bitcoin, but you do it in a very unique way, which I think is interesting in that you built, pretty much, from my understanding, a fully vertically integrated, like custom Bitcoin-only solution. Talk a little bit about like, as you guys were starting with the first product, like, why did you do that versus just go work with some of these other providers?

• 4:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we did things the hard way at River. We could have built on a existing custodian that had all the licenses and everything, you know, that allows to get up and running real quick. Instead, we chose to go state by state, get all the licenses ourselves, and build our own custody system. The reason for that is it gives us the longer-term flexibility to do, build all the products that we want without having to rely on some third-party to approve us or build something out that we wanted to see. It gave us full control over everything. You know, we took the low-time preference Bitcoin approach to this, and we've been really happy with that because now that we have that solid foundation,

• 5:35Speaker 02

  we've been able to launch new, really novel, innovative products, like our new mining product, which allows people to buy Bitcoin miners directly in the River accounts and have that Bitcoin show up directly in their custody. We've abstracted away, basically, as much complexity as possible when it comes to mining. And because we own the full stack of custody, of licensing, and we can hold our clients' funds and transmit funds and, you know, and all that stuff, we can provide the seamless experience.

• 6:06Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about the mining product, why mining? Is it just your whole vision is like, how do we help people acquire Bitcoin? And so buying is one component, mining is another? Is that like a fair way to think about it?

• 6:16Speaker 02

  So what we've seen in the last year has been a massive growth in the Bitcoin mining industry, especially in the United States after China banned Bitcoin. And with that, we saw, we saw large institutional miners really scaling up in the United States, generating really, really large returns on their investment. And what we realized was retail didn't really have a great way to add. Access these returns. And so we stepped in and decided we wanted to basically give Americans the ability to easily access these returns as well by buying this equipment, by passing through the economies of scale that we can provide by procuring this equipment in bulk, having large hosting agreements with our colocation providers where we host our clients' machines

• 7:01Speaker 02

  and giving them access to cheap electricity and give individuals in the United States access to these Bitcoin cash flows. So Bitcoin mining isn't, it's not a guaranteed, you know, infinite home run. It's a different risk return profile than just buying and holding Bitcoin directly. Historically, especially over the past year, it's been a very lucrative investment. And we'll see what the future brings, but it's, you know, there's been a lot of demand so far and people find it very interesting.

• 7:28Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you think of mining, this is, I'm using River as my partner or my kind of infrastructure to actually mine. It's equipment you guys bought. You have somebody who's obviously providing the colocation, but this isn't like you're just simply hooking up to somebody else's mining equipment and kind of playing middleman. Like you guys are actually the ones who have procured that equipment, et cetera.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  Correct. And when you're, when you mine with River, you own your machine. So you own your hardware at the end of the day. You own a, you know, an asset, a physical asset that actually lasts typically a lot longer than people would expect. And then that asset, that machine generates Bitcoin cash flows for its lifetime. What we're actually seeing in the markets is the S9s, the older Bitmain models, are worth more in dollar terms today than they were brand new five years ago. So the actual miner itself has stored value pretty well and throughout its lifetime has been generating a Bitcoin cash flow for the owner.

• 8:28Anthony Pompliano?

  What does your average customer look like right now?

• 8:31Speaker 02

  So the typical customer, well, I think the easier way to sort of describe our client base is we have two segments. We have the mass market client who is a, they're typically a, you know, young professional. They, you know, have a good income. They're saving, they're saving in Bitcoin. And they typically are also able to, you know, afford a new miner, which is right now, the market price is around nine or $10,000. But you can buy as little as $10 of Bitcoin in River if you really wanted to. And so that's sort of the average, the average client. Then we have our white glove private client tier that serves sort of high, high value VIP,

• 9:16Speaker 02

  ultra high net worth clients, everyone from, you know, finance people to athletes to politicians. And so that's a tier of our service sort of reserved for, you know, people with deep pockets.

• 9:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Gotcha. And when you think about the way people are coming in, they're coming in to buy Bitcoin and then discover mining, or did you see an influx of people who wanted the mining and then they're finding the other products?

• 9:39Speaker 02

  It's both ways. We really get both. Some, mining has actually attracted a lot of people who historically haven't really been into Bitcoin because they see it as an unproductive asset, an asset that just sits there and doesn't do anything, in quotes. And mining, they're actually much more able to reason about it from an investment perspective. An example of this is guys who are used to investing in real estate, things that generate cash flows, you know, they can do the math, you know, I put this much up right now, here are the cash flows I'll generate over the coming months and years. That's a paradigm that they're much more comfortable with allocating capital to. And so mining really appeals to people looking at that. We find mining clients actually sort of fall in two different buckets.

• 10:21Speaker 02

  One is they're actually, you know, they're thinking about Bitcoin denominated returns, the Bitcoin native type of people. And then the, the guy's thinking, what is going to be the return of my dollar investment? And so those guys actually come into Bitcoin through mining typically.

• 10:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I know you guys were at the Bitcoin conference. What was your, your takeaway from the conference?

• 10:44Speaker 02

  I thought it was amazing. 25,000 person Bitcoin 2022 was, it's, it's showing the level of interest and growth that the space has seen. I mean, I think we all have been to, you know, the, years ago, these small conferences where Bitcoin was still very much a sort of nerdy, sort of niche interest. And to see where we've come from that has been incredible. And we had a booth there and it was also just really humbling and great to see all the, all the customers, both, both existing and future customers come up to us and say how much they love our company. And, and just to see all of the great work being done in the space by all of the companies at the conference is really cool.

• 11:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 11:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Framework I have in my head is, I don't figure what year it was, but maybe 2018, 2019, something like that, when the Bitcoin conference in San Francisco, part of it was in the parking deck, right? To the Miami Beach Convention Center, like, you know, started at the bottom and now we're here. And I think it's a testament to one, the Bitcoin Magazine BTC Inc., you know, team, and just like, they've grown immensely and kind of upped their game, but also the audience continues to grow as well in terms of people who are interested in this stuff.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And then the diversity of types of people in the audience, everything from the techie engineer crowd to now, there's a hugely growing art sort of contingent at the conference. There's a big like art delegation there of artists and creators. You know, every sort of group of people under the sun was there. It was pretty cool.

• 12:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I know that you've got lots of thoughts on lots of different things, so I figured we'll just go kind of topic to topic and go through as many of them as we can.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  Let's do it.

• 12:26Anthony Pompliano?

  We're hilariously all laughing at Putin price hikes, which just feels like they really think we're stupid. Is that your general take on this? Like, what is going on?

• 12:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's so obvious. I mean, and the sad thing is, like, it's like, this spin on the narrative is probably working for them, but, I mean, it's really hilarious to think that, you know, you could print, I don't know how much it was, $7 trillion out of thin air, and then, you know, blame it on Putin who invaded Ukraine, you know, a few months ago. Blame this like multi-year, you know, inflationary trend and upswing on that is just absolutely absurd.

• 13:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Do you think it's working? Like, do you think the average American is like, yeah, it's Vladimir Putin and Russia?

• 13:17Speaker 02

  I don't, I don't know. So, you know, our bubble sort of in the Twitter sphere is obviously much more clued in on the root causes of this stuff. I really don't have enough insight into sort of the

• 13:31Speaker 02

  You know, the recent conversations people outside of that bubble have been having about it, I would guess it's working a lot less than it used to. I think people have heard the word Russia and Putin for like five years now as like the the source of all of our ills as a society and are starting to probably get pretty tired of it.

• 13:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 13:49Speaker 02

  So.

• 13:50Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a good point is that like, yeah, he got blamed for politics, he got blamed for inflation, he got, you know, just at some point, people were like, this guy must be a genius.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:00Anthony Pompliano?

  He literally has just got our number every time.

• 14:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. And you know, that's not to say that, you know, the things he's up to are are good or anything like that. I don't think that's the case either. But, you know, it's pretty silly that, you know, the United States, most powerful nation on earth is, is, you know, our leaders are constantly blaming blaming things they don't want to happen on, you know, some guy halfway around the world who doesn't, it doesn't make any sense.

• 14:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What is your thoughts on inflation right now? Like, we saw the 8.5% number. I'm assuming you don't think that that's the real number, but like, how do you kind of read this?

• 14:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, I agree that 8.5% number, I don't think it's actually reflective of what most consumers have experienced over the last year. I think we've all seen the prices of whether that's rent, whether it's food, go up substantially more than that. You know, I think there's also a lot of shrinkflation that people are not, you know, that people are noticing at the grocery store, they're just paying the same but getting less for it. And so I don't think that number is reflective at all in sort of people's out of pocket expenses, the increase in people's out of pocket expenses. But, you know, I don't, I don't know how this ends. I'm not some sort of economic genius. I don't, like, the economy is an extremely chaotic system and complex system.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  Do they raise interest rates and sort of get this thing in check? And it causes some pain to the economy, but you know, they have the they have the discipline to do it? I don't know. I don't know how this plays out.

• 15:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I don't know either, but it definitely feels like they don't have all the tools that they used to be able to use to the severity. And also if they go to use some of those tools or way later than they normally would have used them. And so if you're delaying the use of them and also they may not have the same, you know, potential impact, it's kind of a bad situation. Then you get into like the pick your poison, like inflation or recession, right? And I don't know if there's a right answer there.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, we're in a terrible position and you know, it's not and we're not, I think, you know, people also, to be intellectually honest, this isn't something that we just got ourselves into overnight either. You know, this has been building for decades of profligate government spending and sort of the political incentives that basically force the federal government to be extremely financially irresponsible. And those root causes are not even close to being fixed. So whether it's this this cycle or sort of, you know, over the next few decades, I think we're, you know, I think it's pretty obvious this isn't going to end well.

• 16:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What is the intersection of Bitcoin and politics look right now? I know that you and I have seen each other a number of different events where there's various candidates that are interested in Bitcoin or whatever, like, how do you read that right now?

• 16:59Speaker 02

  I think Bitcoin is, I think 2022 is the year that Bitcoin is establishing itself as a major pillar in our political system. I think it is a it is a major rallying point for all sorts of people who have been frustrated by the inadequacy and the failures of both political parties.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  I think on the right, what we're seeing is that this is the first thing that conservatives have where they can rally and say, here's a future we want to see, right? Historically, the right is the party of no, it's the party of slow down, don't do that. Bitcoin is giving the right the chance to be the party of speed up, run to this. This is new and interesting and civilization changing. I think that's a huge, underappreciated paradigm that's happening right now. And then on the left, I think a lot of people on the left are increasingly frustrated by the focus of the Democratic Party on issues that frankly just don't impact the lives of the vast majority of people in the United States.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  Like, the identity politics stuff is getting to such a level of absurdity. And, you know, I think most rational people are sort of asking themselves, like, have we lost the plot, you know, on the left? Like, what are we, what is this actually doing to improve sort of the lives of ordinary people? And they see, and increasingly, these more moderate, I would call them candidates, are also aligning themselves with Bitcoin because it represents decentralization. It represents a concept that they can get behind where focusing more on your local community, taking power away from this failed, you know, central government system that isn't improving a lot of the ordinary person, and putting the hands, putting the power

• 18:50Speaker 02

  back in the hands of the people and enfranchising them.

• 18:55Anthony Pompliano?

  When I think about a lot of this, it does feel like, and people sure talk about it, but it does feel like now you have to be pro Bitcoin. Or, I don't know if everyone will be pro only Bitcoin, right? I think what a politician will basically do is like, hey, we don't want to pick a technology, so they're going to say, pro crypto. Whether we agree with it or not, like, they're going to end up being pro Bitcoin and crypto, probably is the way that they'll frame it.

• 19:21Anthony Pompliano?

  But that's becoming a necessity. Like, at this point, we're now getting to a situation where, like, if you're anti, whether you're anti Bitcoin, or you're anti Bitcoin in crypto, or however you frame that conversation, you're probably going to battle uphill to get elected or to stay in a seat because the user base and the people who are interested in this stuff is just getting too large and too wealthy and too influential to ignore and continue to kind of shit on. Is that how you see it?

• 19:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree. If you look at just cryptocurrency ownerships across the United States, it spans political boundaries. It's neither a right-wing thing or a left-wing thing. It's sort of almost sort of shifting, shifting the political debate a little bit. It's bringing people's attention to sort of, hey, you know, this whole economic freedom thing really helps accomplish what both parts, some of the sort of concepts both parties want to achieve. And everyone is, everyone, I would say, I think it's a generational, I think, I think this split is actually generational. I think it's sort of the old guard versus the new guard in both parties. And the new guard is winning.

• 20:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Can Bitcoin bring together the parties? Like, could Bitcoin be the issue that ends up actually uniting politicians on both sides of the aisle in America?

• 20:38Speaker 02

  I don't know. I don't want to be naive in thinking that, you know, we'll ever have some kumbaya moment. I think that it's possible that it is an issue that people rally around. The alternative would be it actually causes a sort of, the dividing line just moves between, like, there's a new, the line dividing left and right, you know, changes its location. And there's new issues people care about. And maybe it's now like centralized, people who want more centralized power versus people who want more decentralized power. And some people from each party sort of switch sides and switch alignment based on

• 21:23Speaker 02

  their leanings.

• 21:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Joe, John, what questions you guys got?

• 21:26Speaker 03

  How much, I'm assuming you guys look at kind of the broader market, obviously, for trends within your business and future growth and stuff like that. But how much do you think that's going to change over the next year? Like, what are you guys projecting? Obviously, some people think on a macro level, we may see a recession and things like that. But on kind of a smaller level, we're obviously expanding the user base and everything. Just talk me through how you guys think about your business specifically and the growth that you might see.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  So, I've been working in this industry for, in the vast majority of my career at this point, really about nine years. And the one rule that we always follow is always be ready for the worst, but build, but always sort of like from a fiscal responsibility as a company perspective, be ready for the worst, but always build as if there's going to be a massive bull market tomorrow. Because that's when you capture the economic value. That's when you're really providing the value to your customers is when things are going well, you don't want to be the site that's down. You don't want to be the provider that can't help your clients when prices are rallying.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  But at the same time, we also run the company so that we can keep building and stay heads down and focused during the worst of bear markets. So that's the mindset we run with. I don't know what the markets are going to do this year, but we're prepared either way. That's how we think about it.

• 22:44Speaker 03

  Stay ready so you don't got to get ready.

• 22:46Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 22:47Speaker 04

  My question actually has to do a little bit, something with that is like, how do you prepare your business, excuse me, how do you prepare your business for that down year, right? Like, how do you keep, if you have the trading volume, like volatility is good for business, but if you have a bank model, then like you want more assets on your platform, like how do you just prepare River for a down year?

• 23:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I mean, there's no simple answer, right? Down years are never going to be the most fun years in the world. But we focus on building a company of having the highest leverage people possible, right? So, we invest in our people, we invest in our automation to make sure that we never need to get too overextended from a human capital perspective. And we can scale up and down pretty flexibly and every person at our company, by making them very high leverage and very high impact and only hiring the top talent.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  We can do a lot more with less,

• 23:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Gotcha.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  which keeps us leaner and nimbler.

• 23:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Gotcha. When you think about the business today, like, how big is it? Like, whatever metrics you can share, like, how do you think about how big the business is?

• 23:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we have, so at our company, we have around 40 people. We've seen a seven, in 2021, saw a 7X growth in our net revenues.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  From a size perspective, you know, we're still, we're still not anywhere near sort of Coinbase scale.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  But we are certainly on a trajectory where if we keep executing on our vision, we will get there over the coming, you know, five years.

• 24:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and I guess part of it ends up being, as you're building this, you're pulling talent from the Bitcoin world, you're pulling talent from like the tech world, and you're pulling talent from the finance world as well. Like, you really do need kind of different skill sets to be able to build a business like this because it touches on all three of those.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we're just in the very early days of Bitcoin itself. And one of the things that we are really leaning heavily into is how do we give our customers access to the next generation of financial products built around Bitcoin? And what those looks like are products that build, that generate Bitcoin cash flows, right? This is like sort of a, just, people are just starting to explore this stuff. So we need engineering talent, we need finance talent, and we need the consumer product talent.

• 25:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Have you talked about any of the other ideas that you guys are working on or thinking about yet?

• 25:13Speaker 02

  Well, one thing I can say is that we are investing very heavily in the Lightning Network. You know, our Lightning node is one of the biggest Lightning nodes in the network. We think that there's huge potential long-term to build financial products, you know, on or around the Lightning Network. There's a lot of things happening. One, just being the secular growth of the Lightning Network. The second being this Taro announcement that Lightning Labs put out last week, which is basically the, you know, the vision of bringing, of bringing assets to both the Bitcoin blockchain and the Lightning Network, which will enable decentralized exchange on Lightning. These are all things we're exploring, looking at, we think are very fascinating trends. They're not going to happen overnight.

• 25:57Speaker 02

  They're going to take companies like ours, building out the infrastructure to make it happen. So we're very interested in stuff like that.

• 26:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Last thing I want to ask you about is open mindedness in the Bitcoin world. We don't have to go into all the details, but there's been a bunch of folks who maybe they're not so open minded and maybe they

• 26:17Anthony Pompliano?

  counterbalance that with also this level of toxicity, which I've rebranded, we officially rebranded toxic to just asshole. Right? And what's your take on kind of the importance of open mindedness?

• 26:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, you know, I think a lot of people assume just because we focus on Bitcoin, we, you know, we were fundamentally anti everything else in the cryptocurrency space. And that's just not the case. And I think there's by no means all and by no means the majority. There's a small amount of people in the Bitcoin worlds who refuse to even sort of like understand or sort of explore sort of why we're seeing massive growth in the DeFi ecosystem and in the, you know, and just these other altcoins or layer ones. And I think that comes from the historical, you know, historically, you know, there was a lot of scam stuff happening in the crypto space.

• 27:12Speaker 02

  Lots of new tokens, rug pools, things that really just were terrible for consumers. And that's all real, that all happened. And there's still a lot of really scammy things, but there are some really interesting trends that are like with stable coins, with allowing people to engage in financial services in a decentralized ecosystem like collateralized lending, like uncollateralized lending, like having access to the dollar if you don't have an American bank account. All of these things are blowing up because there's demand all over the world for this stuff. And I think it's very short sighted to pretend that none of this stuff is interesting or important. And the only thing that could possibly ever matter is Bitcoin. And I just don't think that's the case.

• 27:57Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't think those people actually believe it. I think what they're doing is they're replacing intelligence with religion.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  I agree. It's a dogma and it's a, and what I've noticed is actually it's, it's a

• 28:11Speaker 02

  it's a dogma used to almost fleece their customer base and try to.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Just make money off of them. It's really just taking the scam ICO playbook and applying it to Bitcoin maximalism.

• 28:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes. And I think on top of that, you can see it, there's always two red flags to me. One is people who yell and scream and pound their chest about they're ethical, they're honest, and they're transparent. Like, the more that you say it, usually the less you are, right? I always joke that like, I've never met somebody in business that I greatly respect and like, I'm an honest person. It's always the person that's lying. There's always a person that's lying to me, tells me how honest they are. And then the other piece of it is,

• 28:55Anthony Pompliano?

  if you have very off-market product offerings, meaning that if an entire industry is coalescing around something, fees is always like the one that I go to, right? If everyone else charges for to make it easy, you know, 0.1%, and you charge 10%, like, why? Right? And people always have reasons for it, right? And every once in a while, there's a good reason, but usually what you find is the religion is wrapped around, as you're saying, kind of this extraction of value from the audience, right? And I think it is actually one of the most important things we need to pay attention to. Like, we need to be very careful, right?

• 29:37Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I continue to tell people that like, being a Bitcoiner is going to be one of the things that's like on the right side of history, in my opinion. But being an open-minded Bitcoiner is going to ensure that you constantly are staying on top of like whatever the next thing is. Because like, the best example I have right now is Taro. Whether it works or not, I know some Bitcoiners think it's absolute shit and they're like, there's no way this is going to work, it's all nonsense. I know some Bitcoiners are like, oh my God, this is going to be amazing. Let's just... Make the assumption that it works and you can now create stable coins. You can do tokenization, you can do all this stuff on top of lightning. There's an entire group of folks who have said anything other than Bitcoin is a scam

• 30:20Anthony Pompliano?

  and anything else, nothing else needs to be tokenized. If in that world, we get stable coins, tokenization, all this stuff on top of the Bitcoin network, like I feel like people's minds are going to be in a pretzel. Right? Like, yeah. Like, where do I stand, right?

• 30:35Speaker 02

  And I think a lot of this, I think there's some of this comes from the sort of like, sort of marketing dogma. Some of it also comes from a sort of a technical hang up and they're saying, well, if you, if you're trying to put a real world asset like a dollar onto a blockchain, then you're trusting somebody. So you're removing the need to have it on a blockchain to begin with. But I don't think they really realize is like, one of the big values of DeFi is that it's basically a way to route around this extremely ossified system that we have. It's not, it's not, it's not a way to reduce trust. It's a way to route around an insanely Byzantine maze of rules and regulations and infrastructure that is the United States banking and financial system.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  It's a, it's a, it's a regulatory arbitrage and it's a standard protocol that might not necessarily be the most perfect technically solution, but it's good enough. And that, that's not, that's not a, and that's, that's just an objective truth because you just have to look at the growth and that's what's happening.

• 31:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I, I agree. Where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about River?

• 31:41Speaker 02

  River.com, very easy. And then my Twitter is at Leishman.

• 31:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Did, is there a good story behind getting river.com?

• 31:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we used to, we used to have, we used to be, we used to have a different name. I won't say what it is, but we got a, we got a angry cease and desist letter with our, with our original name.

• 32:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Hence why he won't say it.

• 32:02Speaker 02

  That's why I won't say it. But our domain, our domain name was .financial. So it was honestly a pretty crappy domain name anyways, for what we wanted to build, which is a really great consumer brand. And so we, so we saw it as an opportunity to build like a .com, get a .com and get a name we loved and we. We worked with a domain broker and came across like river.com. We saw it was for sale. There's zero chance like we could afford this, but like, let's just see. And the price actually like it wasn't cheap at all by any means, but it was, it was, it was within budget, which shocked us, seeing like voice.com sell for like $30 million or whatever around the same time.

• 32:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  And so we snagged it up and have not regarded it for a second.

• 32:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Good thing Michael Saylor wasn't on the other side or you'd been paid 30 million too.

• 32:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. No, luckily, luckily the seller was a bit, um, yeah.

• 32:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Less bullish on river.com than voice.com. Amazing. All right. Well, listen, thank you so much for coming. We're definitely gonna have to keep doing this as once you move to Miami, then, uh, then we'll have you come in all the time.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 33:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, I think that we guys are building pretty cool. And if anyone who's interested in being able to buy Bitcoin, mine Bitcoin, uh, or any of the future products, they build, go to river.com and check it out there. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you guys enjoyed this one. Make sure you subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to pompscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry. It's a three-week intensive training program with over 50 events packed into that three-week time period. Go to pompscryptocourse.com to learn more and I'll meet you guys for the next episode.