Jason Williams, Co-Founder & Partner at Morgan Creek Digital: From a 9 Figure Startup Exit To Mining Bitcoin With Car Tires

Jason Willams is the Co-Founder & Partner at Morgan Creek Digital. For the 151st episode of Off the Chain, Jason and Anthony Pompliano discuss building a 500 million dollar healthcare company, thermal demanufacturing, Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks, universal healthcare, plants as quantum computers, and what it was like experiencing a plane crash. CRYPTO. COM-----Crypto.com is a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. With the vision of "cryptocurrency in every wallet", the Crypto.com App offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well designed UX and high security. It is the best place to buy, sell and pay with crypto. COINMINE-----The Coinmine One is like an Xbox that turns your electricity into Bitcoin. You just plug it in, connect to wifi, and tap on the crypto you want. It’s so easy anyone can do it. Everything is controlled from the Coinmine mobile app and the Coinmine keeps getting better with over the air updates that add new coins, features and services to your Coinmine. Visit coinmine.com/pomp to get a Coinmine and earn crypto for powering a new world.

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

• 0:01Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off the Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. The following is a conversation with Jason Williams, co-founder and partner at Morgan Creek Digital. In this conversation, we discuss building a half a billion dollar healthcare company, thermal demanufacturing, Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks, universal healthcare, plants as quantum computers, and what it was like being in a plane crash. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well. Skrt skrt. Wanna know who has the best URL?

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Crypto.com. That's right, Crypto.com. They're a crypto platform with one goal: motherf***ing mass adoption. That's why we're all here. We're trying to get crypto in every wallet. Crypto.com is helping people do that through buying, earning, lending, and card payment. Everything you could want at Crypto.com. Go help your boy out, tell him Pomp sent you. Download the app or visit Crypto.com. Pomp's got you, always. Ever wanted to get into mining and didn't know how? Don't worry, your boy Pomp's got you. Everybody got some electricity and wifi. All you gotta do is go to CoinMine.com, you buy a coin mine, it's like an Xbox or a Playstation that helps you turn your electricity into Bitcoin.

• 1:28Anthony Pompliano?

  That's right, you purchase it, it shows up at your doorstep, you pull it out of the box, you plug it in, connect to your wifi, five minutes or less, you're mining Bitcoin. All you have to do is control it from the mobile app they provide, and then you receive over-the-air updates that add new coins and new features on a consistent basis. Kinda like how Tesla does over-the-air updates and updates the car software. Just you're updating your coin mine. Consumer mining made easy. That's right, go to CoinMine.com, tell them Pomp sent you, and thank me later. 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.

• 2:12Anthony Pompliano?

  You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 2:27Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. 151st episode. We're doing an anniversary week of one year for the podcast. We've had one of my partners, Mark Yusko, come on, and now we've got the other, Jason Williams. This conversation is a long one, but I think that we've got some pretty interesting topics covered. So I appreciate you guys listening to this, and thank you so much for coming and doing this, Jason.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's my pleasure. It's good to be here.

• 2:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Jason and I dressed up. When Mark was here, I had on a button down and looked the part. And now when Jason's here, I've got a t-shirt on. And so does Jason. So perfect.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you called me beforehand and told me to wear a t-shirt.

• 3:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, because I'm also in charge of the wardrobe on the podcast. All right. So Jason and I have known each other for a really long time at this point. Let's go through your background first, so people who don't know you can get a sense of it.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I'm from New York originally, Queens, and moved to Florida. So you were born in Florida, right?

• 3:32Anthony Pompliano?

  In Miami, in Hollywood.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  Miami, Hollywood, Florida. So I was on the East Coast in Stuart, went to high school there, then ended up coming back to North Carolina to go to school, trained as a physician assistant. They started that program while I was at Methodist. Played soccer and football there. Then got accepted to Yale to do a surgical residency as a physician assistant. While I was at Yale, came up with the idea for FastMed.

• 3:57Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, before we get into FastMed, explain the difference between a physician assistant and a doctor.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So think of a physician assistant as someone who goes to school, gets his bachelor's degree, pre-med, then does another two years. So it was born out of naval corpsmen, who were in Vietnam, actually. These guys came back from the war and couldn't transition into civilian work. So at Duke University, they created this program to bring these naval corpsmen into civilian practice as physicians.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Physician assistants and so these guys have tremendous capacity to diagnose and treat, do all kinds of procedures, really manual dexterity, a lot of manual dexterity. And they created physician assistant school. So that's my training. I wasn't in the military as you were, but I actually trained at Womack Army Medical Center because Methodist didn't have a hospital at that time. So all of my training was at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

• 5:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Very, very cool. So you're there and you come up with this wild ass idea while you're at Yale doing the surgical residency. Maybe explain a little bit about what the initial idea was that eventually became FastMed.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. So while I was doing that surgical residency, the surgical team at Yale is responsible to take care of trauma. So anytime there's any type of surgical trauma that comes into the emergency room, the surgical team is called to the emergency room to assess the patient. What I was realizing through that experience was a number of things. The physicians and nurses at what I thought was one of the most prestigious hospitals in the country, possibly the world, were pissed off, angry. And I didn't understand that. My whole life I had, you know, focused and prepared for this really important transition

• 5:56Speaker 01

  into practice of medicine. And, you know, it almost felt like, like volunteer or, you know, like you're contributing something really big to society. And I was really confused by the way patients were interfacing with the physicians and nursing staff and the way the nurses and physicians were interfacing with the patients. It just seemed like everyone was just really angry and confused. And, and it left a big impression on me. I thought it could be done better. I thought that customer service was totally non-existent in healthcare. The whole institution was built to

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Be lined up for the physicians. So it was on their schedule, on their time, on their availability. And the patients were just subjected to cruelty. All right. So came up with the idea to develop a retail oriented medical practice that would do 80% of what you'd find in a emergency room. So it would take care of all the non-life threatening, but urgent scenarios that you would potentially have.

• 7:08Anthony Pompliano?

  And what type of situations are those?

• 7:10Speaker 01

  Right, so it could be broken bones, lacerations, colds, coughs, pneumonia, asthma attacks, allergic reactions. So it's a lot of complicated stuff that these naval corpsmen were trained to do, like right in the sweet spot of a physician assistant. So I knew I could do that stuff using allied healthcare professionals, nurse practitioners and physician assistants and do it at one tenth the cost. If I brought it into a retail center, 3,000 to 5,000 square foot footprint with 80% of the capabilities of a big box emergency department.

• 7:44Anthony Pompliano?

  So basically, the initial idea is you can provide better customer service, more efficient and kind of convenient location. And then from a cost structure standpoint, because you don't have the physician who has the big salary and kind of all the costs associated with it, and you're using physician assistant and the nurse practitioner, you bring down that cost structure pretty dramatically. And I'm guessing that you pass some of that on to the patient as well?

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it was one tenth the cost. So everybody's saving. You know, if you don't have insurance, you're getting access to care. And if you have insurance, those benefits are passed on to the insurer, right? They're getting the big savings because they're not getting a 10x cost. So it was very good. This is. You know, I socialized it to my professors while I was at Yale. They're like, you know, good ideas are hard to come by. You should probably do that. So, literally called my mother, told her I was dropping out, moved back to North Carolina, bought a post office.

• 8:44Anthony Pompliano?

  So, I want to talk about the post office. You know, you're a young guy who's got this idea. You kind of had already jumped, right? And had quit school. You knew you wanted to go do this, but getting a business started in this field in healthcare is not like building a software company, right? So, in the software world, if you've got an internet connection, you got a computer, and you got some skills, you can literally spin up a server, you can build a website, you can kind of go to town right from your couch. You can't do that when you want to build a retail healthcare clinic. You have to go get a physical location. There's licensing, there's kind of regulation, there's staff and marketing, etc.

• 9:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Maybe just describe, you know, one, how'd you pick where you were going to get the first location? And then, I know the story, but let's go through the, how you acquired the post office.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think what you're describing are like asset-light businesses, you know? This is an asset-heavy business, highly regulated business. And even though we use technology, so there's lots of tech in healthcare, this is pre-electronic medical record. So, when I started, we were using paper medical records, paper systems, paper claims. I go out to first Citizens Bank, I, you know, I'm 23 years old, and convinced them to lend me just enough money to go to an auction to buy a post office in this town called Hope Mills, North Carolina. I picked the post office because it was like the city center, right? It was away from

• 10:18Speaker 01

  the hospital, the institutional kind of aggregated area where you'd have found typically medical offices. This was near your Starbucks, your coffee shop, where you went to the grocery store, post office, etc. That was the general thesis at first. So I won the post office at auction, bootstrapped it with some friends, hired a medical director because at that time physician assistants still needed oversight, right? It's a dependent practice. It's not an independent practice. So you have to work as part of a healthcare team. Again, that's what made it so attractive to me. You know, you're building a healthcare team, that coordinated care and communication, we could leverage

• 10:59Speaker 01

  and be far better than your primary care doctor in the same location who's not being challenged by some smart kids who are practicing alongside of them. Does that make sense?

• 11:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, so first practice, I start early 2001, then we deal with 9/11. We go through that. I learned a lot during that time. The business and the practice is super successful. You see, if you look back over the decade that I ran that, that healthcare is economically insulated from a lot of the things that you historically have to deal with, with other businesses when you deal with economic collapse. I mean, if you think about from 2000 to 2015, while I was part of FastMed, we went through a lot as a country.

• 11:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  And our trajectory as a business was up until the right.

• 11:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, it also, you know, the acquisition of that first property, right? I think one of the things we've talked about a lot is this idea of like, the banks are likely to lend money to people who don't need it. And when people need money, they're unlikely to lend them money. And so being a young kid without a track record, right, and kind of just an idea, the options of financing a business, I think when you have that asset heavy type business, there's not a lot of venture capital, right, that's available. And even back in 2000, 2001, that wasn't a very popular way to finance businesses outside of maybe the Silicon Valley area. And so you have to look at these other financing mechanisms,

• 12:38Anthony Pompliano?

  right? You have to go to banks, you have to go to private investors that are kind of less sophisticated in venture capital and more in a private. Equity model. And so it's kudos to you that you even got it done, right? Let alone was able to kind of scale that over time.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, pump my accountant would tell you that I wasn't in the urgent care business. I was a real estate developer because that's really the way that we got the banks to lend the money. They weren't banking my, my early stage venture into owning urgent care. They were lending me money to buy a post office.

• 13:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Right? So we were leveraging that property at first now using, you know, financing to buy an asset, build it into a revenue generating model. And I quickly learned that you can use this levered real estate thesis over and over again. I, I never made one mortgage payment personally. The businesses float these, these mortgages and, you know, at the end of this story, at 123 locations across the country.

• 13:39Anthony Pompliano?

  So what I want to talk about is how do we go from the first post office to 123, right? What, what was the kind of in between story of, I think a lot of people, when they get, when they build a successful business, people want to know what's the origin story? And they want to know what was the outcome, but that middle part, um, I think for most businesses is where a lot of the meat happens, right? And execution. Um, and then obviously with your story, there's multiple transactions and kind of a bunch of stuff that happened in there. But maybe just walk us from, okay, you start the first one, it's successful. You see that the model works, kind of where do you go from there?

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, uh, we opened the first urgent care in Hope Mills, North Carolina. I'm working nights in the emergency room still, you know, because you're paying yourself last. Um, you know, and I'd like to talk at some point about, you know, how I, uh, how I feel about entrepreneurship, self-employment, being a business owner, how you deal with investments. I think that's interesting. It's something that, you know, um, I was able to confirm through just reading as I've gotten older and like you pick up books, Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Cash Flow Quadrants.

• 14:46Anthony Pompliano?

  One of my favorite books.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  No, but I'll tell you that, you know, that's the, the greatest thing that can happen to you is you can try something, you can, you can test a thesis. It seems to be working for you and then smart people confirm that, you know? So that confirmation just hardens your conviction and then you just keep going. And that's really what happened with FastMed, right? We opened up the first urgent care. I'm recruiting my friends, my other PA buddies, uh, from around the, the country.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Hiring physicians, working nights in the emergency department. Open up my second office, open up my third office and actually take quite a bit of time. I'm only opening up one office a year at first.

• 15:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, really?

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was like from 2001 to 2009, I probably had 10 locations.

• 15:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  10 locations, 74 employees. Most of them are ancillary staff, physicians, physician assistants. But we have a nice business, all located in North Carolina. And in 2010, October 2010, we complete our first transaction for outside capital with a small venture group called Comvest Capital out of Palm Beach, Florida.

• 15:57Anthony Pompliano?

  And so when you do that, what was the thought process in terms of taking outside capital to kind of scale faster?

• 16:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's it. It was, there was a lot of interesting things happening in the US healthcare system at that time. You had the election of President Obama. I was looking at universal healthcare as being something that was highly likely to be passed. And what would that mean to US healthcare? Would access go down? Would access go up? Who would be the gatekeepers of healthcare? Would it be the insurance companies or the primary care physicians? And then how did FastMed play into the overall landscape? Because it was unbelievable to me at 23 and the group that I had working with me, that

• 16:47Speaker 01

  we could go into any town in North Carolina to start and open up infrastructure, healthcare infrastructure. You would think you couldn't do that. It would be like the privatizing of fire departments. You know, you just don't see that happening. But we were able to pull that off quite dramatically. We tested that in North Carolina and then into multiple states.

• 17:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so you take the transaction with Comvest and then eventually you end up doing something with Blue Cross Blue Shield. Maybe talk a little bit about the second transaction and kind of what happened there. And it was somewhat groundbreaking in the healthcare industry.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we completed the transaction with Comvest in 2010, October. Used that capital to like blitz scale. So really fast growth.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  Nine, ten offices, October 2010, 74 employees. 2015, 1400 employees, 123 locations across the country. So I was hiring over 300 people a year and just managing crazy growth. In 2012, this was an important moment for us. It was the first time in US healthcare that a major payer had invested in the provider side of healthcare. If you step back for a second and you let that kind of wash over you, think of the competitive nature and the ethical questions you'd have that your payer, the insurance company, owns the provider of the healthcare.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  Where are the incentives? Is there alignment? Are they cost-conscious and making decisions based off of their fiduciary responsibility to drive profit? Or are they truly spending money to provide you with the highest and best healthcare, sparing and not contemplating profit?

• 18:45Anthony Pompliano?

  What was the answer?

• 18:49Speaker 01

  It was doing the right thing. And I can tell you, while I was there at FastMed, the insurance company did a great job of blinding us to who were those who had Blue Cross, Blue Shield, but allowed us to develop patient steerage campaigns to help guide decision-making, because that's part of what was wrong with healthcare and what I recognized in 2001, when I dropped out of Yale. The reason everyone was so pissed off is because people were in the wrong place, right? You're at Yale at 8:00 PM with a toothache in the emergency room. Of course, the emergency room physician's going to be like, "Why are you here?"

• 19:33Speaker 01

  But the patients like, "My doctor's not open. Where am I supposed to go? And this thing hurts. I need antibiotics and pain medicines." It makes sense?

• 19:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  So, all I wanted to do is create an option for them between the hospital emergency room and their primary care physician, who was closed. He was not optimized for urgent, urgent needs, right? It was all scheduled appointments.

• 19:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and the kind of family physician, or whatever that role is, is really more of a lifestyle-type thing because they're dependent on the doctor, right? If the doctor's not there, the physician's not there, there's not a lot of work getting done, right? And so, you know, we've talked at length between you and I about-

• 20:10Speaker 01

  There's no work getting done, really. There's refills and reschedule, but there's no decision-maker there. There's no decision-making there, so-

• 20:18Anthony Pompliano?

  There are choke points on the business, right? And so, it's super unscalable because if you don't see the physician, you don't go there, right? The only reason to go is to actually see the physician and have them look at you and have them make the decision. And they obviously can only see so many patients per day. And then, at some point, they want to go home to their families, etc. And so, that kind of leaves open the opportunity for something like FastMed.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  And it's a little worse than that, too, for the primary care physician because they have admission responsibilities. So, they're also rounding in the hospital. So, and then to create new revenue opportunities, some of them will take on nursing home responsibilities. So, all of that provides less access for the patient. So, those were the things that we knew we could disrupt in 2001. Now, you have the advent of hospitalists. So, the primary care physician doesn't necessarily have to round on you when you go into the hospital. I don't know if that's necessarily the greatest thing, though, right? You want your primary care physician to see you and take care of you and be the coordinator of care. But now, you have these patient care teams

• 21:22Speaker 01

  that you hope are communicating in the most efficient, transparent of ways.

• 21:29Anthony Pompliano?

  So as you're building the business, obviously you get to 1400 employees, which is a lot of employees.

• 21:36Anthony Pompliano?

  And then you've got the 123 locations, you've got this huge business multi-states. And again, this multi-state is important because it's a highly regulated business, right? So not only are you dealing with kind of federal healthcare rules and regulations, but also at the state level, then you've got the insurance and all these different things going on.

• 21:54Anthony Pompliano?

  And at the same time, you mentioned it earlier, not only are you building the business, you're actually executing a real estate acquisition effort as well, right? Because the model here is not to, hey, I'm going to go set up my practice in a WeWork, right, where I just walk in, sign a piece of paper, and I've got a one-month lease. You actually have to go and acquire physical infrastructure. So you've got to get land in a building. And then you've got to build that out to ensure that it can facilitate the work that you want to do inside of that building for healthcare. So not only just, you know, hey, are there checkout rooms? Are there beds or all that kind of stuff? But also it has to meet certain specific requirements from the regulators. And then you run the business, right? So you kind of have these dual businesses or business lines that are being built.

• 22:39Anthony Pompliano?

  One is a real estate acquisition, one is actually building the business. Maybe talk a little bit about balancing those two responsibilities and kind of how you thought about where to put your time versus maybe hiring others to handle some of it.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the the real estate acquisition component is super critical. So I spent a lot of time on that. And we built a pretty sophisticated cloud mapping technology. We used, I don't even know if you guys still use Google Earth at all.

• 23:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's around.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  Right, but it was actually a pretty cool tool when it first came out because you could load.

• 23:12Anthony Pompliano?

  It's like satellite view.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  Right, but you could load all of these different demographic things and indicators and create a model that could give you a, an idea of a ZIP codes potential to place one of our centers. So we had about 40 unique demographic indicators that we used, and they were peculiar. They had to do with access, line of sight, traffic patterns, traffic count, population sophistication of the population, the socioeconomic situations in the population.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  And on and on and on. I can go on there. We felt really smart. All it showed me was Blockbuster Video Stores. And at the same time I was scaling the business, Blockbuster was going out of business. So, all we did was go out and pre-lease Blockbuster Video Stores.

• 24:09Anthony Pompliano?

  So, Jason started out buying a post office and then he basically, I think he became one of, if not the largest acquirer of Blockbuster Video Infrastructure.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, we literally started a program inside FastMed that was called Warehousing. So, before the Blockbuster Video Store would go out of business, I would go to the owner of these blocks of Blockbusters and say, "I'm going to pre-lease your store. I'm going to pay you right now $9 a square foot," something like that. "And I want the first option on the store once it closes down." So, we had all kinds of real estate tied up, a huge growth plan set up, and a huge market. I mean, I was doing 1.5 million patients a year. So, just to give you a sense of what that means, a large emergency department will do 45,000, 80,000 patient visits a year.

• 25:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  One hospital emergency room. We were doing 1.5 million patient visits a year.

• 25:07Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a lot.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  So, in terms of allocation of my time, huge portion of it was citing new sites for growth. The other one was culture. You know, and that's something that you and I don't really spend a lot of time on. I don't think we've ever really talked about the importance of culture. But for me, holding together the growth and maintaining the integrity of the practice, right? We're in the practice of healthcare. I don't think that practicing healthcare and being profitable have to be mutually exclusive. I ripped off a quote.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  From, oh gosh, what the, I'm blanking on it, but I'll give you the quote. Essentially says, profit should be your first social responsibility. Right? If profit's your first social responsibility, then you can do all the other things that you want to do. Peter Drucker, it's Peter Drucker, essentially. Yeah, so you have to have money and then you can give all your money away if you want, but it can't be the reverse. It can't be the reverse.

• 26:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, it's also this idea, yeah, if you go back to your example at Yale where everyone's pissed off. Right? And the quality of the care suffers, the experience suffers. It's kind of the people you interact with where we've all gone to some kind of service provider, whether it's healthcare or something else. And the person doesn't want to be there, right? And you're just like, man, this sucks, right? Like, I know this person doesn't want to be here. I feel like a burden on them. That's fine if, I don't know, it's a lawyer or something like that. It's completely different when you're coming in, you're the one with the toothache, right? Or the gunshot wound or, you know, whatever it is. And so I think that your idea around culture is really important. It probably trickled down into the customer experience.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, Pop, I literally fought every day to maintain the empathy and that connectedness between, you know, our staff and the patients. I mean, your point is exactly that. It's what was lacking in my experience in 2001 where hospitals treated people as patients and we were treating patients as customers. So it's really a simple nuance, a simple transition, but just if you want, if you, if you want to create a premium customer experience, well, what do you do in healthcare to do that?

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Your healthcare establishment doesn't feel, it's sterile, but it doesn't feel sterile. It may feel more like your community coffee shop. You know, you have technology there and you use it, but maybe it's not the showcase. Maybe there's different seating, different aesthetics, you know? Those are the things that, that we really worked hard on.

• 27:58Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. All right. So you built this thing into an absolute beast. It's what like the second largest, I think, retail chain of urgent care facilities.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 28:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And then Abri comes along. Maybe talk a little bit about who Abri is and kind of how that happened.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. So Abri is a Boston based private equity firm. We ran a process just like we did in 2010 and 2012. They gave me an opportunity to have a complete exit, which was interesting and scary. You know, this was my whole life's work as an adult. I mean, I started the company at 25 years old. So to exit was, was pretty dramatic, but it was, it was a great event for myself and for investors. It was nearly half a billion dollar exit. And now it's Abri's.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  You know, it's really, it's really wild.

• 28:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Screw it up, guys.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, good luck. Yeah. But so I'm blocked out of healthcare for 10 years. So can't do anything non appointment based. And I had been doing some angel investing before my exit and thinking about things I wanted to do next. Really interested in biochemistry, physics. I've written some patents in robotics, like jumping robots. I was inspired watching a guy on the side of the road work with a reciprocating tamper. Do you know what that is?

• 29:24Anthony Pompliano?

  That's the thing, the actual like, it looks almost like a jackhammer.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, that you hold and it smashes the ground, right?

• 29:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Funs it out.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Right. I built those that are automated. So you don't have to hold them, which is pretty, I mean, pretty interesting, right? So to do that, you have to have accelerometers that, have you ever seen them kick that DARPA, like robotic cow?

• 29:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  And it won't fall over. That's the, that's the stuff that I've worked on. So written patents in that issued and also in like thermal demanufacturing.

• 29:58Anthony Pompliano?

  After you sell the business and you sign the papers, kind of money all gets wired, everything, the next day, what are you thinking?

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Well, I think-

• 30:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Like you'd gone to work every day for 15 years and worked your ass off. Like, did you just say like, "This is cool"? Or are you sad? Or like, what's the feeling?

• 30:18Speaker 01

  Well, it actually happened on a Thursday.

• 30:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  So I was negotiating what I may do going forward with the acquirer, Abri, and with FastMed, and we couldn't really come to terms. Like, it wasn't going to be big enough for me.

• 30:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  So on a Thursday, they told me I could have a complete exit. And I moved out of my office on Saturday.

• 30:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  And I started my next startup on Monday.

• 30:48Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. And so as you do that, let's talk a little bit about PRTI and kind of what that is and how you got involved and kind of where you guys are today.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I had a number of early-stage venture businesses that I had been investing in, starting in 2014, let's call it, writing checks like $100,000, $250,000 checks and trying to help from the periphery. One of those investments I made in 2014 was PRTI. It's a really interesting company. It was founded by this Italian inventor named Franco Feini. And Franco Feini had exposure to the waste industry.

• 31:31Anthony Pompliano?

  So this Italian- As every Italian does.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, why not, right? So this Italian family has a waste business, started in 1974, called Idrina Dill. They invested in Franco Feini's technology. They spent about 12 million euro to take it through three iterations of like FormFactor and then idled that technology. So it came to this group that I invested in's attention, and they wanted to domesticate it, move it to the United States, and potentially roll it out across the country. You know, the group- Were real estate developers and a guy who had renovated Bennigan's. I don't even know if Bennigan's still exists.

• 32:15Anthony Pompliano?

  It's around.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  It's like Applebee's. Okay, so this group wanted to build an international waste management business that used a proprietary piece of technology to process synthetic polymers.

• 32:30Anthony Pompliano?

  I love them all.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  I mean, they're savages. I mean, absolute savages, right?

• 32:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, we're laughing because we know them and the courage and also the delusion it takes to say, I can do that. Is frankly, the people that you want to be around, right? But also having people that are pragmatic and realistic enough to understand. We can do this, but we can go faster and be more effective if maybe we bring more and more people in that have the scientific backgrounds, the technology backgrounds, et cetera, to accomplish it.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, and especially a business, we talked about asset light businesses. This is a super asset heavy business.

• 33:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Jason's two for two on the asset heavy businesses.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it was, it was something else. So I made an investment. I joined their board and then I told them, look, I'm going to leave FastMed June of 2015. I'll come on as the CEO, run the business, raise the capital and we'll go. I mean, and they're like, what do you, what do you want to do? I said, I'm going to package the plant that's in Armagh in Italy. I'm going to put it in Conex containers. I'm going to ship it to some land that we'll buy in 15 miles from my house in Raleigh and we'll build this waste to energy oil refinery there. And, and just go from the ground up.

• 33:47Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So hold on, before we get into shipping this, let's talk about how the business works, right? So when you say waste to energy, there's kind of three separate components to the business, right? There's a front end, kind of a scientific process, and then there's the outputs. Walk us through kind of those three different sections of the business or kind of bodies at work.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. So here in North America, there are 300 million used car tires a year that need to be disposed of. And traditionally, you Either shred, bury, or burn those tires because tires are built to last. They're built to not fall apart. So there's no real smart way to dispose of them. You've even heard people, I think it was in Florida, where they started to construct reefs underwater with these tires. They chained them together and put them at the bottom of the ocean. What they found were giant dead reefs. So they've now had to pull those tires up.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  PRTI and Franco Feeny developed a way to heat a tire. A tire is a semi-solid. It has some natural rubber component, some steel, some fabric associated with it, and a lot of oil. You'd be surprised at the amount of oil that's in a tire. But he developed a way to thoughtfully break that apart and capture those constituent parts that the tire was made of. So you have a huge total available market of 300 million tires a year that need to be disposed of, a legacy business that is bullshit, like the total dinosaur, shredding, burying, burning.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  You have a technology solution that's thoughtful, environmentally friendly, scalable. Super interesting to me. Super interesting to me. They'll pay me to take the tires. So it's kind of an infrastructure play on the front end where you're just a waste management business.

• 35:44Anthony Pompliano?

  So just to summarize this, the tires are getting disposed of already, right? They're used, they're coming out of wherever, and they're going to get thrown away or destroyed.

• 35:58Anthony Pompliano?

  The destruction you just described is actually really bad for the environment or

• 36:02Speaker 01

  Energy intensive.

• 36:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And so, you know, as we've talked about this, the things that have caught my attention is they throw them in the ocean. They bury them in landfills. They chop them up and they put them on the playground for children, little chips of rubber, right?

• 36:16Speaker 01

  Soccer fields.

• 36:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I mean, all this crazy stuff that's going on. And you had a technology that could essentially break the tire down using this thermal demanufacturing process that we'll get into. But the first problem you had to solve was basically where do we get the tires from? Right? I think that's what you're talking about now where not only can you get the tires, but they'll actually pay you to take the tires. So kind of describe why they're paying you to take them versus, you know, you have to pay for basically the supplies of your business.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so most, if not all municipal governments and counties will allow you to bring a used tire to a landfill and they'll take it for free as a service, as a taxpaying service. But then that landfill or municipality has to pay to have it disposed of. So there's a third party that's coming to transport, pick up and dispose of of those tires. So that's typically a landfill, a monofil or a shredding company that's making pelletized rubber or or shredding and burying. Does that make sense?

• 37:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  And that's really it. It's it's nothing more than that.

• 37:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. So so they will actually pay you to take the tires, bring them to the plant. And for those that are listening, the plant is an industrial plant, right? I mean, it's what, six, seven acres of land, 10 acres of land. There are huge concrete bays with, you know, piled high with tires. And there are big metal reactors, right? They kind of look like cylindrical kind of tubes, if you will. And then there's warehouse space, right? That has kind of offices and all kinds of stuff in there. So this is a very kind of not only asset heavy, but very industrial type business. Very, very different than sitting on your couch writing software.

• 38:01Anthony Pompliano?

  But as you figure out, okay, we can get paid to take these tires. What happens to the tire once you bring it on site?

• 38:07Speaker 01

  Well, one of the things that we found as we started to scale was that there was a number of tires that were coming out of the manufacturing site that were blemished, that weren't roadworthy and needed to be thoughtfully disposed of. And actually, you know, you had to provide a certificate of destruction to make absolutely sure they didn't get back on the road.

• 38:29Anthony Pompliano?

  And you're Why?

• 38:30Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, there was something wrong with the tire. I mean, it just came off of the the manufacturing line and it was messed up. And you'd be surprised at the the taller Of a loss yield here, it's about eight to 10%. So a typical Bridgestone plant makes 30,000 tires a day. 30,000 tires a day with a 10% loss yield. So what we calculated was 32 million additional tires a year. Are these blemished tires that need to be disposed of? I went directly to the tire manufacturer and contracted with them. So I don't even at this point deal with the municipal waste. The 300 million tires. All I'm disposing of are brand new tires that are coming out of the tire manufacturers.

• 39:13Anthony Pompliano?

  So these blemished tires have been going on for a while, right? There's been this this kind of loss yield.

• 39:22Anthony Pompliano?

  That business is very sketchy in the disposal of these tires, right? So the tires come off the manufacturing line. They, in many cases, look like good tires, right? There's some

• 39:35Speaker 01

  You can't tell. You can't tell what's wrong with them.

• 39:37Anthony Pompliano?

  There's some small blemish and they're handed over to somebody to destroy them. And so you said

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Before that, before they're loaded on a truck, a guy takes a knife and slashes the sidewall. Historically, before I got there, they would not always slash all the sidewalls. So there was another business going on where you could resell those tires. It's a huge business. So part of that waste disposal in the tire business is a reselling business where they find a dentified pearls, like if you were a golfer, you know, you're playing golf, but you're always kind of looking around for, you know, lost balls. That's what these guys were doing. They were finding like pearls like and reselling these tires. And, you know, we know that it could be a pretty big component of these tire disposal companies revenue.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  We don't do any reselling and and what we've been able to do by being present in the market is absolutely certify that these tires are being destroyed. They're not on the road. Those are dangerous.

• 40:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, and it's because what they're essentially doing is they're trying to find tires that, oh, maybe they don't meet the exact specification, but they're good enough. They turn around, they Basically.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  Pump, they don't know what's wrong with the tire. I'm just telling you, some random guy whose responsibility is to load the tire on a truck is deciding to not slash the sidewall because he's getting a brown bag. He's getting paid to do that. And then the guys who are unloading the tires are looking for the pearls, right? They're saying sidewall slash sidewall slash sidewall slash good tire.

• 41:08Anthony Pompliano?

  They put it to the side.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  Put it to the side.

• 41:10Anthony Pompliano?

  That tire ends up at the used tire dealership down the corner.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  To the side, to the side, to the side, right? Because think about how many, when I say 300 million tires a year, you have to put things in perspective. I can only process, and my plant runs 25 days a month, you know, all year, 24 hours a day. We process 1.5 million pounds of tires a month. 1.5 million pounds. Each tire is 28 pounds. So I may be around a million tires. You know, it's not a lot.

• 41:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  It's not a lot.

• 41:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and I bring this up because one, um, yeah, these are the little nooks and crannies of businesses where I think people don't really understand some of the stuff that goes on. But two is, uh, you know, one of the things that you and I have really spent a lot of time talking about, you know, as we've invested is finding businesses where people kind of just do the right thing. And when they do the right thing, what you actually end up doing is one, you set yourself up to be a sustainable business, right? You kind of don't have cobwebs in the corner that maybe one day can get exposed. But two is, uh, you actually can create market dynamics and market forces that put a lot of pressure on your competitors.

• 42:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And so when the manufacturers understand, hey, these guys are not going to play this game of reselling and not slashing the sidewalls and doing all of this. There's a little bit more trust and confidence that, hey, we should make sure that they get every tire that they can possibly take. Versus, you know, we know some shady stuff's going on over here. We can't necessarily stop it, but we're not happy about it and it's dangerous, right? People's lives are at risk if they're driving down the street with a tire that is, uh, doesn't meet the specifications necessary.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's so true. And, and most, if not all of the CEOs of these tire manufacturers have self mandated zero landfill policies. So they do not. Want those tires coming out of their their plant, ending up in a landfill. So it's it's super important to align with a company like PRTI that has this thermal demanufacturing technology and we're able to recover the tire. It's a green story. And if you if you start to contemplate the carbon footprint, the effect of of eliminating the waste stream and re reestablishing the constituent components of a tire back into the market, you really are doing something positive.

• 43:28Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. Let's dig into the technology. How thermal demanufacturing, big words essentially means that you're going to use a high degree of heat to burn the tire and break it down. He doesn't like that.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Nah, nah, nah, nah. So the the technology of pyrolysis, so pyrolysis is a reaction in the absence of oxygen. And that's what everyone's tried to do with tires for the last 40 years. So it's not a new technology. You're you're essentially taking some type of horizontally oriented vessel. You're filling it with tires, chipped tires. So you've shredded them and you've taken the steel out of them. And then you're externally heating that vessel and you're rotating it. So think of a rotisserie, like a chicken rotisserie. You're eliminating the oxygen inside of it, right? So you're not lighting anything on fire inside. You're just heating it, but you're heating it externally.

• 44:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  All right. So zero oxygen environment, heating it externally, and you're rolling it. You're using an auger inside of that horizontally oriented cylinder and you're driving the volatiles and the materials that you're demanufacturing are essentially

• 44:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Breaking.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  Breaking down, and you're pushing them out of the vessel. So it's a long process that requires a lot of external energy and usually breaks. That's why it hasn't worked historically. They've tried it when oil is $100 a barrel. It didn't work. They tried it when oil's $27 a barrel, didn't work. You know, it's highly dependent on the tipping fee. So if you're if you're coming into this market, you think, well, how do I disrupt it? If I can Build a business that can work on zero front end. So even though they're going to pay me to take the tire, if I'm not really dependent on that front end, I can disrupt them because they don't have a lot of alternatives, right?

• 45:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And what you mean there is basically although they're willing to pay me to take the tires, if I can build a business that is so profitable and sustainable that I can tell them I'll take the tires for free, then you get all the tires.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  And when I had that epiphany, like this is 2014 and that's why I was ready to leave FastMed. I was like, holy crap, man, these guys are going to pay me to take tires and I'm literally sitting on an energy company. I never looked at PRTI as a waste disposal company. I was watching like Tesla. Tesla to me is not a car company, it's a battery technology company. Why did Elon Musk buy SolarCity? Because he needed a place to actually make power, right? Why is he developing battery tech and that the home devices? Because he needs storage, right? So here you go. You've got solar energy, you can make power. You've got battery tech, I can store it. I can transact it into the grid, right?

• 46:15Speaker 01

  He's got a comprehensive energy thesis.

• 46:18Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's a privatized, somewhat decentralized energy infrastructure that he's building, right?

• 46:25Speaker 01

  It's huge. Think about that. Historically, you have to interface with whatever power company you're dealing with. They're going to tell you the rates, you're a price taker. You don't have a choice. If you want to buy alternative energy, you're not really buying it. He was building something quite interesting. And I looked at PRTI the same way. I've got tires. To me, it's a battery, it's a stored power source. They're going to pay me to take it. So I don't really have an input cost there. I have a technology that's quite different than what I just described to you with Pyralysis. And I'll explain to you how the tech works. And I can make power. I can sell to the grid or do something even more interesting.

• 47:06Anthony Pompliano?

  So before we get into the tech, the input is tires into the technology. The output is carbon, steel, syn gas and oil, right?

• 47:18Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 47:19Anthony Pompliano?

  And you're able to look at those commodities, sell some of them as commodities. Some of them you can do certain things to manipulate them into energy is what you're saying. Basically you get energy out of the backend.

• 47:31Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you go from a tire to those four outputs on the backend of that technology?

• 47:36Speaker 01

  Right, so when I explained pyralysis to you, I talked about the fact that it was a very labor-intensive and very cost-inefficient process where you have to use a lot of external energy to heat this. What we're doing with our technology is we have a vertically oriented chamber, not a horizontally oriented chamber. So the vertical orientation allows for gravity to affect the simple machine. What I do is I load whole car tires into this vertically-oriented cylinder. So they're not chipped. There's no pre-processing or pre-handling. As you know, because you've been out at the site, we grab the tires-

• 48:15Anthony Pompliano?

  We're gonna go through the process in a second.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  We take whole car tires and we fill the processing tower with them. It's about 6,000 pounds of whole tires. I close the lid mechanically and then I pull a vacuum on it. So we have vacuum pumps that are evacuating the atmosphere out of the chamber. Then I insert a torch into the bottom of the processing tower. And there's thermal concrete. I don't know if any of you barbecue, like use a green egg barbecue, but the reason it gets so hot is because the thermal concrete won't let the heat escape. It's actually all driven up through the food. We do the exact same thing. So I use a super-hot torch for 20

• 48:59Speaker 01

  minutes in the bottom of the processing tower, and I heat the tires that are down there violently for 20 minutes, and I turn them into coal. So superheated coal and steel at the bottom. After 20 minutes, I extract that torch, and then this is where the interesting tech happens. We use what I'll call a catalyst, which is just atmosphere. The atmosphere has 19% oxygen in it. I'm pulling oxygen over hot coals and then radiating that heat up a stack of whole tires, and I'm controlling the temperature zones up that 40-foot stack.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  So it's just a time and temperature process. A tire's a semi-solid. It turns into a vapor very quickly. So you just change the phase and our process takes about 10 hours to change 6,000 pounds of tires from semi-solid into liquids and gases.

• 49:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  And with only 20 minutes of energy input, 10 hours of energy output. Each processing tower creates 0.23 megawatts of power.

• 50:07Anthony Pompliano?

  It's crazy.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  It's wild. So then when you daisy chain these reactors together, you know, and our model is to have 16, you're talking about making like six, seven megawatts of base power that they paid me to take the input and.

• 50:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and to me, the part here that is so interesting is we talked a lot about these asset-heavy businesses, right? This industrial type business, there's a lot of technology that goes on in this, right? So for those that have never been to an industrial site or seen one of these businesses, when you walk in, there are screens everywhere, there's a control room, right? The towers themselves, the torch, all of this is automated in various ways to really allow for a relatively small team in terms of headcount to manage what ends up being tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of pounds every single day being taken from

• 51:08Anthony Pompliano?

  that semi-solid into the gas and the vapors.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we 98% of the process is automated. So the entrance, exit of those torches, the controls, we have programmable logic controllers. You know, that's where my coding experience came in. So, you know, we, we wrote all of that code to automate the process. And the only thing that's manual at this point is the unloading of the tires, the discharge of the material, and then we've got a pretty. Crude oil refinery on site two, when you were talking about the assets, it really is a waste receiving component on the front, the technology that processes the tires in

• 51:55Speaker 01

  the middle, steel sorting, carbon sorting, and oil refining.

• 51:58Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, so I want to pause on PRTI for a second, we'll come back to this for the fun part. I want to jump to how you and I met and kind of the early days of Full Tilt, and then it will become obvious why I want to pause on the PRTI conversation, we'll come back to that. But just your, your memory of how we met, kind of some of the early conversations, and then why we decided to start Full Tilt, which was the first thing that we did together.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I've made a few investments in companies that overlapped with Mark Cuban and a few people that we know. One of them was Undercover Colors, it was a date rape technology that came out of NC State. It was initially supposed to be a nail polish that detected six different typical types of date rape drugs. I also invested in a company called Penda Health, it was in Africa, in Kenya, that Mark Cuban was attempting to invest in, and we had a co, like a friend, a mutual friend, that was working in his firm, that introduced us. I think you had just, just left Facebook and left Snap. So you left Facebook, then you're at Snap, and you're moving back to Raleigh.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  I live in Raleigh, North Carolina, and they said, "Look, really interesting guy, you should meet." I think you and I met at morning times downtown Raleigh for 30 minutes, we had planned just to meet up, we ended up spending three hours or so together, it was really-

• 53:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Jason's wife was calling saying, "Where are you? Let's go."

• 53:24Speaker 01

  Please, Paulina, couple goals. So, yeah, so we, we literally just hit it off, you wanted to start like, I don't know, a hundred million dollar fund, I said, "Hey, why don't we, why don't we try to raise like, you know, 10 million?" And we decided to create Full Tilt, it really came out of like, almost our first meeting, it was wild.

• 53:47Anthony Pompliano?

  So, I'm going to tell two stories, one was in the first meeting, when we were talking-

• 53:54Anthony Pompliano?

  There was two strategies that we discussed, right? One was go raise a larger venture capital fund mainly from family offices and institutions, or raise a smaller, more micro VC fund. And Jason said to me, "I'm the king of the hundred thousand dollar check." And I'll never forget this guy said to him, "What the hell does that mean?" And he explained to me that the, you know, kind of the challenges when you're whale hunting and the time it takes versus being much more optimized on, "Look, just get started, build the momentum and really get kind of things going and starting to establish that track record," which is obviously what we ended up doing.

• 54:37Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, the second story is, the first meeting was at this bar and went very well, we kind of hit it off. And then Jason says to me, "Well, let's meet up again." I said, "All right, where you want to meet?" And he says to me, "Well, why don't you come out to the PRTI plant?" And when we, I said, "Okay." And he said, "But I'm gonna need you to help me with some stuff." And I don't remember the exact conversation, but it was basically like, "You're not coming here to sit in a conference room, so just be prepared." "Okay, that's fine." And when I showed up at PRTI, the car tires actually show up in 18-wheelers. And so, they pack, I don't know how many tires.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  Thousand.

• 55:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, a thousand. Okay, so a thousand tires into an 18-wheeler.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  And they're woven very tightly. It's not just thrown in, they're systematically woven into a 53-foot.

• 55:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Super efficient.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  Super efficient.

• 55:28Anthony Pompliano?

  And the only way to get them out, as of right now, is for somebody to jump in the back.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  The only way to get them out. There's no way you can grab them with some mechanical device. You'd blow the sides out of the trailer.

• 55:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Of the trailer. So, you gotta put a human in and literally grab each tire one by one and throw it out of the 18-wheeler, which when you're near the, when it's full and you're near the edge, doesn't sound like that big of a deal because you kind of just grab it and toss it, though they're 28 pounds each and there's a thousand of them. But as you get deeper and deeper into the 18-wheeler, 18-wheelers are pretty far.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  53 feet.

• 56:03Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, you You've got to literally grab the tire off the stack and then walk it to the end and then

• 56:08Speaker 01

  Throw it over a wall.

• 56:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Throw it over a wall into the bay where they sit. And so the second meeting Jason and I ever had was in the middle of the summer. It was July in North Carolina heat in the back of an 18 wheeler tossing a thousand tires out of this thing into the bay while we discussed, should we build an investment firm or not? And at the end, I remember us being like, well, if we're both willing to do this, we probably got a good shot of getting along and this might be something that we should go pursue together.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, man, I'll tell you, it meant a lot to me that you came out to do that because that's the kind of CEO I am and that's the kind of person I am. Like I don't want anything for free and I don't, I typically have to put my hands on things to truly understand them. And you even, you probably have seen that in the way I invest when we, when we do something together, like I try to buy the product, I try to use it, like, you know, I think somebody asked in your Twitter feed, has he run in a full node? Of course I'm running a full node. It's a dumb question.

• 57:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Run a full node. And I think that part of it was when we were there, it's not just, hey, you know, we're doing physical work to do this. And by the way, right, Jason and I both have done plenty of physical work in our life. It sucks. Right? Is the best way to put it. It just, you know, just absolutely sucks. But it was the fact that you were running the company, you had plenty of employees there that could have been doing that work, but you said, you know, look, there's better use of these employees' time when it comes to some of the more technical stuff or the mechanical stuff. This is just a pure grunt work type exercise. I'll go do it, right? Because I can free up my employees to go do more important things.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  Also, Pom, when I told you about culture, typically the hard parts in a business, executives avoid. They don't like the conflict. They don't like the points that hurt. I tend to go there to humanize them and to establish that's my base. You know, so the front end of the business, the manual part, the unloading of the trucks in July of North Carolina and the heat. I go out there and I do that because it is hard.

• 58:17Anthony Pompliano?

  It sets the tone.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 58:19Anthony Pompliano?

  It sets the tone. Everyone else is like, well, I can't complain. That dude's over there. And if he's willing to do that, not only do I need to do that, I gotta do everything else.

• 58:27Speaker 01

  And I require a lot of time to think anyway. So spending an hour unloading a truck like that helps the business. It helps me. It gets me out of the office, you know. Anyway, it's just important.

• 58:41Anthony Pompliano?

  For you mathematicians at home, a thousand tires in an hour, nobody is exactly doing it at a slow pace.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 58:48Anthony Pompliano?

  So we decide we're gonna go build Full Tilt. And the whole idea is basically to create a early-stage investment firm. And in hindsight, I don't think any of this was intentional, but correct me if you had some master plan. But in hindsight, looking back,

• 59:07Anthony Pompliano?

  there's a lot of things that we did that I think were counterintuitive to people. The first being, we didn't have a website for, I think, a year, pretty much the entire time.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  Do we now?

• 59:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, the very first investment firm we ran, I think we finally got a website.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  I mean, you'd call it a website?

• 59:26Anthony Pompliano?

  It was a WordPress landing page.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think that's a website.

• 59:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Because people were getting mad that there was no URL or anything. And then the second thing was, we didn't have an office. We used to work out of a Starbucks, right? And I bring those up because it's always been, what's the actual most important thing, right? Not what's the things that make us feel important, or what are the things that everyone else is doing, so we feel like we need to do it. But it, from very early on, has always been, what is actually the most important thing to get done today to help build this business? And I don't think there's a lot of people who do that, but across multiple businesses that you've built, right? And the ones we built together, I think that's always been one of these themes that's really important.

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  Pomp, we've seen those businesses that we've invested in that have have thought that those were mandatory requirements, like having palatial office space and comforts that you would typically see in the world that these entrepreneurs are working in. It is totally not, it's not my world. If you very kindly called me the king of the $100,000 check, I would take the title of king of the $9 a square foot office space.

• 1:00:43Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. I love it. All right. So we go and we start investing in all these companies. Maybe talk a little bit about some of the areas. This is all kind of pre-blockchain that we're doing this. Talk a little bit about some of the areas that you're interested outside of energy, obviously with PRTI and blockchain is what we're doing now, and just some of the businesses that you kind of have on top of your mind.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, so things that are interesting to me are technology, robotics, you said, energy, healthcare space. So healthcare innovation, service innovation. I'm fascinated with CBD, distillation, extraction, farming, if you can imagine. I think it's important. And then just hard sciences. So I tend to spend my free time and the time I'm educating myself on investment in that space. I've talked a little bit about quantum biology. I think it's an interesting science that's involving.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  It's an important one. And so those are the things I'm kind of focused on now. But again, all of that stuff, though, it probably lays into infrastructure. So I'm trying to find the gaps, you know, in where where something's going, whether it's an idea, a concept, a service, and how do we how do we get the tolling? Like, how do we get involved in the tolling of those concepts?

• 1:02:19Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And so as we're making these investments, we invested 62 companies in a year and a half. It was a pretty rapid pace. Obviously, it's gone very well. We were doing it at Starbucks, but I got to bring it up. You don't like Starbucks. You're a Dunkin' Donuts guy.

• 1:02:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, we ended up at Starbucks because it just had better Wi-Fi. And I think you like the iced coffee there better.

• 1:02:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Listen.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  But we're dunks guys. I mean, value play, $2 coffee. I mean, I'll stay there all day.

• 1:02:52Anthony Pompliano?

  I uh, I hate hot coffee. I hate it.

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:02:56Anthony Pompliano?

  I always get iced coffee. Jason always gets a hot coffee and there's been a couple of times where when we get to Starbucks, he panics and he orders these things off the menu and it's hilarious to hear him order, you know, the frappuccino.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  Nah, nah, nah, nah. White chocolate mocha, soy or something. Yeah, but I'm, yeah, I'm not, I'm not great at that.

• 1:03:19Anthony Pompliano?

  I want to go back to PRTI for a second because for a year and a half, we pretty much spent every single day together.

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:28Anthony Pompliano?

  And we'd invested in all these companies and one day we are driving to Charlotte and I remember.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were going to buy a laundromat, a McDonald's.

• 1:03:39Anthony Pompliano?

  A McDonald's.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:03:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Actually, shout out to the two you laundry guys, Dan and Alex, these two young founders. They're, they're just straight savages, right?

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 1:03:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Literally started a laundry business, grew very quickly in Charlotte, North Carolina. And they called us and said, hey, we want to build our own facility, right? Very similar to the kind of the FastMed playbook of kind of vertically integrate the actual physical infrastructure with the business on top of it. And so you and I were driving down there and we ended up buying a McDonald's to build this. But on the way, I remember it was the first time that I ever mentioned to you Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, Ethereum, et cetera. And so just, what do you remember about that conversation? Skrt, skrt. Want to know who has the best URL? Crypto.com. That's right. Crypto.com.

• 1:04:32Anthony Pompliano?

  They're a crypto platform with one goal, motherf***ing mass adoption. That's why we're all here. We're trying to get crypto in every wallet. Crypto.com is helping people do that through buying, earning, lending and card payment. Everything you could want at crypto.com. Go help your boy out. Tell him Pomp sent you. Download the app or visit crypto.com. Pomp's got you always. Ever wanted to get into mining and didn't know how? Don't worry. Your boy Pomp's got you. Everybody got some electricity and wifi. All you gotta do is go to coinmine.com, you buy a coin mine. It's like an Xbox or a Playstation that helps you turn your electricity into Bitcoin. That's right, you purchase it, it shows up at your doorstep, you pull it out of the box,

• 1:05:16Anthony Pompliano?

  you plug it in, connect to your wifi, five minutes or less, you're mining Bitcoin. All you have to do is control it from the mobile app they provide, and then you receive over-the-air updates that add new coins and new features on a consistent basis. Kinda like how Tesla does over-the-air updates and updates the car software. Just you're updating your coin mine. Consumer mining made easy. That's right, go to coinmine.com, tell them Pomp sent ya, and thank me later. I remember it was the first time that I ever mentioned to you Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, Ethereum, etc. And so just, what do you remember about that conversation?

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was the second time someone had pitched Bitcoin to me. So the first time was in 2012, it was one of our sales guys at FastMed came to me, but I didn't, I didn't do anything with it.

• 1:06:04Anthony Pompliano?

  You think it was crazy?

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I was, I was, this, this particular employee, I was working on focusing him. So for him to come with this magic internet money thing, it was like, it was the last thing I needed to hear at that point. I was in the car with you for six hours, though, as we were going from Raleigh to Charlotte. And, you know, I was just, at first I was very contrarian, very down on it. Again, I was, you know, I understood game transactions, so in-game transactions, because I played video games my whole life, still do. So I understood how to buy things and how digital money worked. But I just wasn't, I didn't have the level of conviction that you did.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  But by the time we had gotten back to Raleigh, you know, I pulled my typical move, right? Where I said like, I have to get my hands on it.

• 1:06:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, so the three hours on the way there, there was a lot of healthy banter about this can't be real. Yes, it is real. Here's how it works. What about this? And just kind of back and forth. And I remember you were asking questions that were very obvious. You understood enough to ask the right questions, right? Kind of the pointed, well, what if this happens? Or how does this work? Right? And it was, it was putting stress on my understanding, right?

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  All the questions that we were first going through were around, how do you hack it? Like, how does this thing fail? Like, we were really spending a lot of time on that 51% attack stuff.

• 1:07:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep. And so we had started to get into the mining. And I remember I revealed to you that I had bought some mining rigs.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was super pissed.

• 1:07:42Anthony Pompliano?

  And I hadn't told Jason that I did it. And usually, we do everything together. But I was scared he was gonna think I was way too crazy.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  You hear that, Paulina? You hear that, Paulina? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It's a birthday. Happy birthday, Paulina.

• 1:07:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Paulina is, is my girlfriend. And her and Jason compete over who, who actually is my partner in life.

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  It's Paulina.

• 1:08:05Anthony Pompliano?

  And, and so I remember I told you this, and you're like, well, what's mining? And I started explaining it. And we got there, and we did the whole real estate thing, and we spent time with the guys. And on the way back, it was almost like you had been like, thinking about the back of your head. And I'll never forget, you was like, dude, I have a power source. And I remember being like, wait, what? And you walked me through the idea that PRTI takes tires, puts it through the scientific process. And on the output, one of the outputs is commodities, and the other is a power source. And the business was supposed to sell it into the grid, and receive revenue for that. And you had this like, crazy look in

• 1:08:48Anthony Pompliano?

  your eye, like, what if we just use that power to mine cryptocurrency, rather than sell it into the grid?

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  I mean, that was it. I mean, that was the establishment of our investment into building the data center or the cryptocurrency mining component of PRTI, which, you know, we believe was the first waste-to-energy cryptocurrency mine of that type scale in the world. And so I'm very proud of that moment for us. And I mean, that was late 2015, early 16?

• 1:09:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Something like that.

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  Something like that?

• 1:09:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, I mean, we were very early, very fortunate. But if you can imagine, you know, I had spent about $19 million to build PRTI. So to build the mine and stuff, you know, I go all in. So, you know, we built a very, a very big, we were actually mining with GPUs at first, a large GPU miner, mine, and went through the full spectrum of education at that point, mining Ethereum, how to custody it, where do you exchange it, why do you exchange it, do you get into altcoins, what are the tax ramifications of all that, how

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  do you source ASIC miners, you know, learning, you know, just about power, and then trying to model out, what does this look like as you continue to invest? Does this act like a real estate investment? Does this act like Forex and currency exchange? You know, it was, it was complicated and fun.

• 1:10:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, the part that I specifically remember is when we were doing it, we understood how mining worked. We had a, somebody was helping us, JP Baric, who was able to

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  The miningstore.com?

• 1:10:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Was able to help us kind of quickly get up to speed on, you know, how do you source the hardware?

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  I mean, but we bought the rigs that he had under his dorm room.

• 1:10:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep. We were just

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  Out of NC State.

• 1:10:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Any hardware that we could find, right? And we were buying all this stuff.

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  And we put it together ourselves.

• 1:11:01Anthony Pompliano?

  And, well, and the part that I remember was I was driving there every day and we're doing all this and I remember saying to myself like how lucky we are that not only are we frankly crazy and convicted enough to do this, but we're doing it at a industrial site where there's engineers.

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, resources.

• 1:11:19Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, there was, there was guys-

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  PhD level engineers.

• 1:11:22Anthony Pompliano?

  That worked at PRTI who they loved it, right? And they were saying, okay, hold on a second, this is part of the business, this is part of my job now. How do I get airflow into the room? How do I get it out? Should we chill it with air conditioner? Should we build some sort of sucking mechanism where we basically suck air through the room to create chilled air? Should we just use fans? And you start getting into not just, hey, can I plug a miner into the wall? You really get into how do you build the infrastructure? How do you become energy efficient? How do you actually-

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  How do you take an ASIC miner and drop it from 1400 watts down to something sub that? You know, so all of this game is about low power cost, low power utilization and hash.

• 1:12:05Anthony Pompliano?

  And so today, you know, when I think of PRTI, I think of not a waste management business, which I think from day one you knew that's not the business. And I don't even think of it as an energy business anymore. I think of it as a fully integrated computing platform where you can basically now power, computing power with energy that is completely off the grid that you self-generate and you control. And I think that it is probably one of the most powerful things that somebody can create is that vertically integrated computing power that is self-sufficient.

• 1:12:41Speaker 01

  I mean, without a doubt, even if you develop decentralized power generation, you still need access to the grid, right? What I'm contemplating and what we've been able to do is create decentralized power generation with a parasitic-

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

  Partner in data center mining that we can co-gen for. So we don't even have to have an interconnect agreement. That's a fail safe in the event that I wanted to put power into the grid, but we don't need to. We can use that full load of seven to 10 megawatts of base power, continuous power and put it into compute. And here in the United States, the total available market's around 170 PRTI plants.

• 1:13:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow.

• 1:13:25Speaker 01

  So that's what we're chasing right now.

• 1:13:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. All right. And so as we're doing all this, we get pretty convicted on crypto and blockchain and Bitcoin. Before we get into all of that, I want to talk about some nutrition stuff because for those of you on Twitter who don't know, Jason eats at Waffle House every single day. And I'll call him and I'll literally hear him ordering at Waffle House while we're on the phone. Explain the Waffle House situation and what you get and why?

• 1:14:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I do this ketogenic diet. So I fast till like one o'clock every day. I don't eat after 8:00 PM. Drink black coffee usually in the morning and then I go to the Waffle House. I order six eggs, two slices of cheese, two sausage patties and three slices of bacon and sometimes a five ounce sirloin steak.

• 1:14:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Every day. This is what this man eats at one o'clock.

• 1:14:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, every day. So I went to my doctor to get an annual physical and she almost collapsed when she saw my cholesterol because it went from like 116 to like 240. She was super concerned. She's like, whatever you're doing, stop immediately. But then, you know, again, I practiced medicine for a long time. I said, well, you need to go through the total cholesterol panel and let's look at the indices. HDL through the roof, triglycerides low, total cholesterol, okay. So this made me think of a few things and I need to spend more time on it and I challenge your listeners to look at this, but I don't think we know shit about cholesterol.

• 1:15:09Anthony Pompliano?

  I think if you have- I don't think we know shit about anything with the body.

• 1:15:13Speaker 01

  Fair, fair point, but cholesterol in particular, I think we know if you have all of these things out of whack, like your triglycerides are high, your HDL is low, your LDL is high, your total cholesterol is high, you're probably predispositioned for heart disease, diabetes, you know, a lot of bad stuff, stroke, etc. But the nuances of cholesterol, I don't think we understand. I think ketogenic diet's real. I've noticed not only, you know, my ability to keep doing things that I want to do, you know, this bit of longevity is there, but in terms of my cognitive abilities, I've noticed some kind of clear, clearness of my thoughts.

• 1:15:55Speaker 01

  I also have lost kind of the, I don't know if any of you experienced like midday fatigue or anything, but I was getting that, like around 2 o'clock, I was like ready to pass out, all that's gone. So I quit sugar a long time ago, don't drink soda, ketogenic diet, Wim Hof breathing, and Waffle House, baby.

• 1:16:12Anthony Pompliano?

  So the nutrition is one piece of it, right? And we've had people come on before that talked about the ketogenic diet and I think that's generally understood, but it's not like, you're in your 40s and it's not like you're sitting at home, you know, saying, hey, I got some kids and, you know, where's the local barbecue this weekend? You're still playing competitive soccer, right? You're doing, you work out every day, you've got a lot of physical activity going on. So kind of describe like, what's the impact of all that physical activity plus building companies, investing? And is that a thing where you're doing the working out because it helps in that other stuff? Or is it a thing where it's just more enjoyable personally?

• 1:16:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think for me, I think balance is really important and I think working hard is important, like- I challenge people, they talk about work-life balance. I think working hard is good. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I don't want to shame anyone for doing that. I think taking vacations are good. But I think to really pull this off in a big way, you've got to eat right, you've got to get sleep, you've got to drink water. You know, I actually follow, I don't know if any of you follow, like it's just a reminder to drink water every day.

• 1:17:29Anthony Pompliano?

  It's my favorite account on Twitter.

• 1:17:30Speaker 01

  Yes, it's the greatest thing ever. It's like, "Drink water idiot, did you have water today?" And they just insult you into drinking water. Breathing, I mentioned Wim Hof. I think it's really interesting tapping into like your reptile brain, that autonomic, automatic nervous system. To be able to control that or call upon it in some instances is dope. So, the combination of all that, super important to me. You know, I'm 45, just turned 45. Tore my ACL. The last time I tore my ACL, I was 40, playing rugby, semi-pro rugby. You know, I still play competitive soccer, lift. You know, I'm just trying to keep going after it, you know.

• 1:18:15Speaker 01

  I'm not a big Bible guy, but there's a verse that I'm affected by. It says, "I want to master my body and make it my slave." I think it's really important because I've been in situations where my mind has betrayed me, where my body has betrayed me. And it's scary when that happens.

• 1:18:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and it's also a thing where you probably have more control of your body than you do your mind, right? And you can use your mind to control your body. So there's a...

• 1:18:46Speaker 01

  But when those things fail, I don't know if you've ever, you're a football player. I don't know if you've ever been in the air before and then been knocked out of position. So when you get in the air and you're turned... Something weird happens. One, you get the slowness of your autonomic nervous system. You're very hyper-aware of that rotation. But then it's scary. You don't know how to come out of it. So when you're flipping or turning, those are the type of situations I've unfortunately experienced five times. And the reason I'm saying five times is because I track them. Five times. I have nine lives. I've used five. And one recently again. No, the fifth one was recent.

• 1:19:27Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's talk about the... Jason was recently... I'm gonna call it a plane crash because it's pretty damn close. You just tell a story about what happened when you're on this plane.

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I was coming back from Turks and Caicos with my wife. I have three daughters, 16, 14, and 11-year-old. And someone who works in our home travels with us. We were all on this flight. I wasn't able to get seats together. So my wife and I were sitting together. One of my daughters was with our assistant, and the other two daughters were sitting together. We were 30 minutes into the flight, reached cruising altitude of 30,000 feet. They just turned the seatbelt lights off and said we could move around the cabin.

• 1:20:12Anthony Pompliano?

  You sound like a flight attendant.

• 1:20:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, this was serious stuff, man. I've flown all my life. And there was an explosion. And then this noise. It went

• 1:20:25Speaker 01

  and the plane turned to the right and started to drop. And I mean panic on the flight, like panic.

• 1:20:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's not like, hey, this is some turbulence and all of a sudden we're gonna get through it.

• 1:20:38Speaker 01

  I'm talking about an explosion on the right side of the plane. And then we're listing and dropping.

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  My wife's freaking, like jumping out of her seat, trying to get someplace on the plane. I'm like trying to figure out instinctively like... So stupid, but I was like, I would be okay if I was by myself. But I had this dreadful feeling like I'm not gonna be okay because I can't save all these people. And then the next 20 minutes was just bananas.

• 1:21:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and just to remind everyone, you have three kids between the ages of 11 and 16.

• 1:21:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were freaking out. Everybody was freaking out. The stewardesses were freaking out. We were rotating down slowly. And, you know, on the back of the seat, there was the flight tracker. So I immediately put that on. I wanted to see how high we were and the speed we were going. So we were descending quickly. The plane was slowing down and we were way off course. So we were, we were between Turks and Caicos and Florida. And it looked like the pilot was trying to go to Miami. But then we were going the wrong direction. We turned, we were going back toward Nassau.

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  The pilot eventually gets on the, the, the, the mic and says, look, what you heard was the right engine. It's no longer functioning. The plane is still flying with one engine. There's a long runway in Nassau. We're headed there, but they're mobilizing to crash, fire everyone. And that's why we're turning above. I can only turn to the right. And we're just like getting prepared to crash, crash land. It was wild. But we safely landed. I mean, we safely landed with one engine. We're, the fire crews, everything checked out.

• 1:22:32Speaker 01

  And we waited in Nassau, got another plane, and that was it. Like, it was literally, we fell off the horse. No one wanted to get on another plane, but we couldn't, they, we weren't immigrated or we hadn't immigrated into the, the country, even though I think Nassau is still part. But we weren't even allowed to leave the room. We had to, yeah, we had to get on another plane, flew to Atlanta. And, and then.

• 1:22:59Anthony Pompliano?

  From there.

• 1:23:00Speaker 01

  From there, it's just regular flights and everything. But yeah, it was wild. It was wild.

• 1:23:05Anthony Pompliano?

  What, when they're like, hey, we're getting the crash landing people as precautionary, whatever, like, what are you thinking?

• 1:23:12Speaker 01

  I just put my thumb up to the kids. I said, it's gonna be okay. If, I said, if we go into the ocean, I'll just get on the wing, I'll paddle us back.

• 1:23:25Anthony Pompliano?

  I can imagine your wife and kids be like, ah, let's, why don't we land on the runway?

• 1:23:30Speaker 01

  You know, you know what? They're looking for any type of like, they smiled at me.

• 1:23:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:34Speaker 01

  Cause they were like, that's dad.

• 1:23:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, of course. That's awesome. Um, all right. So, uh, let's talk about Bitcoin blockchain crypto and, uh, and Morgan Creek. So we're doing all this mining stuff and, uh, we eventually realized like, hey, this stuff is, uh, is real. Um, and something we want to go focus on, kind of walk, uh, walk us through the, uh, the process from there to, uh, to Morgan Creek.

• 1:23:57Speaker 01

  Well, um, we construct the mine at PRTI. Uh, I jump on a plane with my COO, go to China, Hong Kong, uh, Malaysia. I meet with Israeli hackers. Uh, I'm sourcing ASIC miners and parts. I want to understand, um, you know, what they're seeing. Uh, return to the States. Um, you and I continue to, uh, deploy and close, uh, full tilt capital. I think in total, we put about 16 million to work, three million in early stage and the rest was in pre-IPO and late stage stuff.

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  You, uh, you get a call from Mark Yusko, uh, have a few meetings with him, bring me into a few meetings with him.

• 1:24:45Anthony Pompliano?

  We gotta, hold on, we gotta talk about the first meeting.

• 1:24:49Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm not letting you off the hook. So I'd met with Mark a couple of times for coffee and, uh, if you listen to the episode with him, he's kind of told that story. But, uh, I, I finally say, uh, all right, this is worth me and Jason both going and talking with Mark and, and trying to, uh, to, to see if there's something to do here. And, uh, Jason and I went to the meeting separately. Uh, Jason drove straight from the, uh, PRTI plant and, uh, for, you, you guys can't see him most likely, but, uh, he's got a very big beard. And, uh, he's got a baseball cap on at, at the time and, uh, he had a construction vest because you have to, uh, safety first on the plant. And obviously you gotta have your reflective vest.

• 1:25:32Anthony Pompliano?

  The way Mark tells the story is he's sitting in the room waiting for us to show up and Jason walks in with a beard, a baseball hat cap and a construction vest. And Mark literally says to himself, I really hope that this guy didn't bring some psycho in here.

• 1:25:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, literally, I mean, Mark has a traditional palatial office. It's beautifully done. I think he built, you know, a, an office environment that represented, you know, the things that were important to him and it's a professional to a T, you know, and, and that's Mark anyway. And I show up in construction boots, reflective vest, baseball hat, beard, you know, tatted up, like, what, what's up?

• 1:26:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Ready to make money. Let's go.

• 1:26:16Speaker 01

  Let's go. Let's go.

• 1:26:18Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So we ended up deciding that we're going to, to do this with, with Mark and Morgan Creek. What was kind of the reasoning why you were bullish or a proponent of it?

• 1:26:29Speaker 01

  You know, I think, I think you and I, as CEOs, as people running a small venture fund, realized both the advantages and disadvantages of that world. Well, I don't think we could raise institutional money. I thought we had a very pure and convincing thesis. We understood the infrastructure around crypto. We navigated the world of ICOs well.

• 1:27:05Speaker 01

  And I think Mark brought gray hair and, and institutional experience that we just didn't have. Plus 40 FTEs, plus 15 years of investment experience. So he normalized us in a number of ways that we would never been able to do. I mean, Nuriel Rabin, you know, his favorite go to slam when he was trolling us is, oh, these two are working out of a Starbucks bathroom.

• 1:27:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Shout out, Norio. What's up?

• 1:27:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. Where are you? I'm still here.

• 1:27:40Anthony Pompliano?

  $3,000 Bitcoin looks pretty good now.

• 1:27:43Speaker 01

  How many years to get a four year degree at NYU?

• 1:27:47Anthony Pompliano?

  So, alright, so we do this, and I think people who have watched this or listened to this-

• 1:27:54Speaker 01

  5.5.

• 1:27:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Jason and Noriel have a great relationship because Noriel really went hard at the Starbucks start of Jason and I's investing career. And what Noriel doesn't understand is that we wear that as a badge of honor, and if we could, we would still be in Starbucks. Whereas I think Noriel thinks it's a negative. So you're actually just making our day when you say that. Alright, I want to switch to, as we start investing, you are one of the only people that I know that has dealt with the dark side of crypto and Bitcoin. And I will let you tell the story, but essentially, you went through a number of security and

• 1:28:43Anthony Pompliano?

  hacking incidents that were pretty scary, right? So maybe kind of just tell some of that story and then kind of how it all played out.

• 1:28:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, so those events were all precluded by another major event, which was, I think, September 2017. I'm at PRTI. My wife answers the door. There are two FBI agents that have come to my house and they want to meet with me. My wife texts me and says, "Hey, this is what's going on." I ask them, I get on the phone with them, I say, "Hey, what's up?" They won't tell me, but they want to meet with me. So I tell them, "We'll meet in Wakefield at the Dunkin' Donuts." So on the way there, I'm trying to call my attorney, because I'm like, "Dude, you're not supposed to meet with the FBI." Like, I know that this is not going to be good, but my attorney's at lunch.

• 1:29:33Anthony Pompliano?

  That's why you invited him to your Dunkin'.

• 1:29:35Speaker 01

  To Dunk's, yeah. I knew I could escape if I needed to. But the only thing that gave me kind of comfort as I walked into the Dunk's was, "Look, if you always tell the truth, you don't have to remember what you said." So I try to do that. So I sit down, I've got a camo hat on, Ray-Bans, beard, reflective vest, you know, my normal look. And I'm sitting in the back of Dunk's.

• 1:30:03Speaker 01

  Dude, it's like, like right out of a movie. Guys drive a black truck, two guys in suits. Beeline, right to me. Like, I don't even know who I am. They've got a manila folder with them and they sit down.

• 1:30:15Anthony Pompliano?

  The beard, the Ray Bans and the hat didn't, uh, it didn't work to keep them from knowing who you were.

• 1:30:22Speaker 01

  So anyway, they, they sit down, they're like, hey, I'm whatever. And this is whoever. We want to talk to you about certain things, but they first want to go through my background, like who, what, where, when, why, and how. They know about my cars. They know about my patents. They know about my education.

• 1:30:44Speaker 01

  They apparently had my bank account records, which was concerning, like the, you know, so I don't think you can just get that information. So they were looking for something. They asked me about foreign travel, all this stuff. Well, it came down to mining. Apparently the FBI had been looking at mining since the beginning. And this was a special dark web task force that was based in Charlotte, North Carolina. That was looking for bad actors in the space, but also looking for information in the space. And

• 1:31:19Speaker 01

  you know, I, I told them what I was doing. I told them why I was doing it. They came out to PRTI and took a look at it.

• 1:31:26Anthony Pompliano?

  And ultimately that's what the thing was. They, they were essentially, if I remember correctly, they were basically saying, look, you've bought a lot of these.

• 1:31:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, they knew. I spent millions of dollars, millions of dollars that I sent to China. I imported these computers. They were just like, why are you buying all this compute? What are you doing? You know, so it was, I think it was difficult for them to understand that I was also running my own power company. So they weren't necessarily seeing the power on the grid. You know, like if you were running a math lab, the reason they find you is because of the power consumption. They weren't seeing it. It was like all this compute's disappearing.

• 1:32:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Same thing in Venezuela, right? How did the police figure out who's mining cryptocurrency even though it's outlawed? They look and see there's a spike in the energy consumption in a single home, right? That's way too big of a spike. There's got to be something.

• 1:32:12Speaker 01

  Same thing's happening in Malaysia right now, too. They're busting these clandestine mines that are running. So anyway.

• 1:32:19Anthony Pompliano?

  And just so people remember, the reason why they couldn't see the, there was no spike in energy consumption was because it's all off the grid. It's self-generated power.

• 1:32:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. So imagine if someone's importing, because I mean, this is me getting wrecked, but I bought ASIC miners for $2,800 a rig. So a small ASIC mine for me is 500 rigs. So you're talking 1.4 million dollars worth of computers that I'm bringing in. You've got aluminum extrusion issues at the border, so they're getting stuck there. Palates of ASIC miners. Like, I'm not off the grid. Like, everybody's looking, saying, what are you doing? But anyway, so that's it. I have access to the FBI by text message because they've made themselves available to me now. They're like, yo, you're legit. If you find anyone doing some crazy stuff, tell us.

• 1:33:08Speaker 01

  And will you come and speak to our officers about Monero, crypto, you know, privacy tokens?

• 1:33:15Anthony Pompliano?

  They come and they do their work. And I think that, one, they're like, oh, okay, like, we understand. Now it all makes sense why there's no easily visible, yeah, traceable energy consumption. We understand the computers. We've seen the site, you know, all the stuff like this is actually pretty cool, right? We would love to stay close as you kind of continue learning and building stuff. But also, you know, please let us know if we could ever do anything to help or if there's things that, you know, we may ask you to come educate, etc. Right? So it went from a, hey, what the hell is this guy doing to a, oh, this is actually pretty cool and let's keep a relationship.

• 1:33:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, again, my attorney says you never know who the target of an FBI investigation is. So, you know, whatever that means, that made me feel better.

• 1:33:59Speaker 01

  So, but then all hell breaks loose in November. So, you know, I can't recall exactly where I was. But I'll tell you retrospectively, this was always happening on a Saturday night or Sunday.

• 1:34:13Speaker 01

  My, uh, I think I was in Jamaica, maybe, maybe I was, I, I forget, but I was definitely overseas. It's about 12 o'clock at night, 12, 12 a.m. And my SIM card goes off. And I immediately, because I've been, you know, reading about this stuff, I'm, you know, I understand enough, I'm like, oh crap, I'm being SIM swapped. So, phone goes off, I grab my computer. By the time I get to log in, they've already changed my passwords. So I've not, in my email. So now they're going through the process of changing my, my passwords, banking, etc. And, uh, and unfortunately, this goes on for a long time.

• 1:34:57Speaker 01

  I've, uh, I've had a lot of money stolen from me.

• 1:35:03Speaker 01

  Death threats.

• 1:35:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, well, so, all right, so the first time it happens, it is, uh, they essentially get in, they SIM swap you, right? They're able to change passwords and, and kind of, um, do what I would consider is, uh, everyone's greatest fear, right? Which is they get control.

• 1:35:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And once they get control, they can do all kinds of crazy stuff. You being in the position of, uh, I've now lost control of my phone number, right? And some of my accounts, there's not a lot you can do, other than you start calling people and trying to get back control and doing all this stuff.

• 1:35:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you can't call anyone. See, this, this is the thing, most people carry one cellphone. Now, if I take your cellphone out, you lose cell service, you have wifi, so you can still receive texts, but for the most part, you're out. And this is happening Saturday night and Sundays. So the fraud prevention departments of AT&T are closed on Sundays. So the hackers know that if they're gonna SIM swap you, it's gonna be on a, probably a Sunday. Once that goes down, they can communicate to you by text. And they have a mirror image of your phone. So any apps you have, they now know where to go. Coinbase, Gemini, Slushpool, so they know, oh, you're a miner. And they immediately can do things.

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  So I've had to learn super hard lessons, Pomp, in regards to... All of these things, whether it's hot wallets, cold wallets, exchanges, mining. You know, for example, one of the hard lessons was if you're mining on Slushpool, you can permanently place an address for your deposits of your mine and lock it forever. And once you do that, it cannot be changed. I didn't know that. The hackers did. So, once they hacked into my Slushpool account, they were able to change that destination and steal the mine. And if you're overseas or someplace, I mean, you're just screwed.

• 1:37:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and to me, the part that was crazy was when it happened, it was like, whoa, we just gotta crash course, right? Because not just you, it's everyone around you. And I was like, whoa, what just happened? How did that work? Right? And it forced everyone kind of in our circle to really look at security and all this stuff. The second incident, right, which was where I think kind of the FBI and more comes in, is I remember all of a sudden, you started frantically texting me saying like, like, they're trying to hack me again, right?

• 1:37:38Speaker 01

  Right, because I could recognize when it was happening. I would start getting pinged like my passwords were being changed. And I could defend it. So, now I have three cell phones and two computers, multiple services that I'm using, and I can defend myself a little bit here. So, I could rapidly change passwords. I've locked some things down. I've got dummy apps on my phone to put people off. So, I may not have a Binance account, but they may think I do, you know? So, they're wasting time going after that. There's nothing there.

• 1:38:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and so what they did is you'd basically put defense in place. And then what they started to do was rather than spend the time to hack into all this, just directly threaten you and get you to engage in giving them Bitcoin, right?

• 1:38:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they would directly, you know, they would attack everything. So your Dropbox accounts, you know, everything, your social media accounts, they would solicit investment deals through my contacts, ask for money. I think they did that with you as well, right? Hey, can you send me a few Bitcoin? There were other things that, that we were really concerned about, SWAT attacks. So a SWAT attack is where they'll say, Jason has shot his wife.

• 1:39:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Here's the address.

• 1:39:03Speaker 01

  This, yeah, he's, there's an active shooter at his home address. The SWAT team shows up, imagine in the middle of the night, and then you're responding to that. So you have this fog of war thing going on, and people get hurt. They do that to your work as well. So imagine my industrial plant, a SWAT attack. So we're worried about that. They've, they threatened to kidnap my, my middle daughter. And the unfortunate thing about that, when people make threats, it's like, whatever. But they had specific information that was really concerning. So when I contacted the local police department, they, they thought I was crazy.

• 1:39:42Anthony Pompliano?

  They're not prepared to deal with this.

• 1:39:44Speaker 01

  They showed up to my house, but they wouldn't even come in. But I said, look, this is what's going on. Here's the FBI's phone number, because the FBI was on this. They contacted the FBI agents and came in my house. At that point, they were like this, I'm way outclassed, this is above my pay grade. You can hire me and my buddies to help give you some protection. We'll increase coverage in the area, put more patrols here. Do you have a gun? Can you protect yourself? I mean, it was literally like I had to turn into some type of person I'm not. Like, look, I, you know, I told you, I like to eat right and breathe, but I'm not like the Terminator, you know, so. But that's what they were expecting. They were like, we're not, the, the police are not there, they can't protect you. Like, they show up once the bad stuff happens.

• 1:40:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Or while, either while it's going on or after it's over.

• 1:40:30Speaker 01

  And believe me, I love the police, thank you for all you do. But, you know, you're not standing next to me when someone tries to abduct my daughter, you know, and that's really what they asked me to do, is like, hunker down and, and.

• 1:40:44Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's scary.

• 1:40:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's scary, because again, it's like, my kid's on that plane. Like, what do I do, Pom? Do I sit down with the family and say, this is probably not real, but someone's trying to kidnap you, Molly? I mean, I don't think that you do that, but I don't know what to do.

• 1:40:59Anthony Pompliano?

  To a 13-year-old.

• 1:41:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I don't think you do that, but I don't know what to do. You know, I just don't have, as a parent, I don't have the rulebook. I don't have the guide for that. So, you know, I did the best I could. It's frightening. I know that they've doxed and stolen all our demographic information, the whole families. They have all my personal information. So, you know, at this point, my mother's maiden name, you know, all the things that you think are like, you're going through a process to validate who you are. I just think it's a joke. I mean, I literally was supposed to be on like a celebrity level protection inside my phone carrier and they failed. I mean, they failed.

• 1:41:43Speaker 01

  It's a bad situation. It's scary how fast someone can steal all of your information from a phone carrier, how easy it is to do.

• 1:41:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I think a lot of people at this point, you just have to operate as if you're guaranteed that your information's out there because if someone's got some money, got access to the dark web, they're likely to be able to go buy personal information on almost anybody, right? There's been so many hacks at this point of major, you know, internet services or insurance companies.

• 1:42:15Speaker 01

  Equifax, whatever.

• 1:42:16Anthony Pompliano?

  All these guys. That it's just, it's out there, right? And so, you know, it's a really unfortunate scenario. One, thankfully, that there was, you know, a little bit more bark than bite when it came to a lot of the threats and things like that. But, you know, the reason why I wanted to tell the story.

• 1:42:33Speaker 01

  I think they arrested the kid. I got information from the FBI that they made an arrest. So, we'll see what comes out of that, but they found the person, it was a group, but they got one of them so far.

• 1:42:45Anthony Pompliano?

  And the reason why I wanted to tell the story is...

• 1:42:48Speaker 01

  Which is really interesting, right? Hackers? Make note. Yeah, you got caught.

• 1:42:55Anthony Pompliano?

  That they can, exactly.

• 1:42:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can't wait to meet you.

• 1:43:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, so I want to go from hackers to Twitter. Jason, I endearingly call the GIF god, which that's G I F for those of you at home who don't know what a GIF is. They are the little animated videos that people post. What's the Twitter strategy? What's going on there?

• 1:43:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, you know, Pom is a, he's a great speaker, as Mark is. And they're both great writers. It's, I'm very envious of that. I've worked hard to try to speak clearly in my life and convey messages as clearly as possible. Writing them down's a little more difficult. Twitter makes it really hard, right? To convey a message concisely without losing the essence of what you're trying to say on Twitter. It's an art. It really is. But even better than writing is a GIF. It's like the best thing ever.

• 1:44:00Speaker 01

  I literally just have millions of options to convey my exact feelings in a GIF.

• 1:44:07Anthony Pompliano?

  You have a skill. My favorite thing that you do is when the haters come out, and they, they always self-select, they make it very obvious that they are upset. You use the clams. Where did this come from? So you send GIFs.

• 1:44:26Speaker 01

  Clams, marinara. I don't know, I just love to, like, clams, salty clams, that they're clammy, just chattering clams, man. That's just, I love it.

• 1:44:36Anthony Pompliano?

  And unlike Mark and I-

• 1:44:39Speaker 01

  How did you even notice that?

• 1:44:40Anthony Pompliano?

  When you, when you hit somebody with six clam GIFs in a row, I'm like, what is he doing? And then I'm like, oh, he's calling you clam, he's calling you salty, I got it. But you don't block anybody. You don't mute anybody. Mark and I are both now in the camp of block early and often and just stop the madness. But you engage with them all.

• 1:45:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, those that are persistent and stable, they get the clam.

• 1:45:08Speaker 01

  But I really tapped into something, a nuance that I missed when I was younger, when I was your age. When I dropped out of Yale and started FastMed, you know, I was working for an orthopedic surgical practice, because that was really my training. I was doing that nights and weekends to raise money, to make all this work. And I had a really dear friend there. His name was Eric Carlson. He was a 39-year-old orthopedic surgeon, and recently married, had like a two-year-old daughter. And we played golf together. He was like, just a great guy. And he put a shotgun in his mouth and blew himself away on his 40th birthday. And the suicide letter said he didn't have any friends, essentially.

• 1:45:52Speaker 01

  And I was like, what? Like, I was hurt by that. But I also really started to think, man, I'm a selfish bastard. Like, I didn't recognize that this guy needed me, in some way. I wasn't paying attention. I'm always focused on me, me, me, me, me. And I know that a lot of times, that impulsive move, the suicide move, can be circumvented by a moment of question, or some person reaching out or doing something, pal. That's kind of resonated with me at this point in my life. So, being a human, when someone's coming

• 1:46:36Speaker 01

  at me, I'm really just trying to find, are you just a jerk off? Or is there something wrong? Because a lot of these people are kids, that they're listening to a lot of information, their whole lives are focused on themselves, you know, so...

• 1:46:49Anthony Pompliano?

  It's very easy to get sucked into depression, all this stuff on social media.

• 1:46:54Speaker 01

  Big time. People are living their best life, but 99% of it is nonsense. So for me, before you get to clam, you're gonna get a moment of humanity. And all I'm doing is, it's so easy. I'm not gonna block you, but I am gonna treat you like a human. Until you get the sauce.

• 1:47:17Anthony Pompliano?

  The contrast between the humanity and the clam is amazing.

• 1:47:22Speaker 01

  Special if you get clammed up.

• 1:47:25Anthony Pompliano?

  People are gonna go find the clam gif now, they're like, "Ah, that's what he's been doing."

• 1:47:28Speaker 01

  There's a bunch of them, man.

• 1:47:29Anthony Pompliano?

  I know there are.

• 1:47:30Speaker 01

  They're so good.

• 1:47:31Anthony Pompliano?

  A lot of times, somebody will troll me, I'll block them, and next thing I know, I'm getting notifications that you're sending clam gifs, which I appreciate.

• 1:47:38Speaker 01

  I try to defend you guys. You and Mark deserve it.

• 1:47:42Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, one of the ideas that you have, that I think is pretty cool, is this idea around quantum computing. And I think that quantum computing a lot of times gets associated with Bitcoin and blockchains, and you'll see the people on Twitter who literally say, "Ah, when quantum computing comes, this is all over," right?

• 1:48:03Anthony Pompliano?

  You have a very interesting view of, we already have quantum computing. Maybe describe a little about what you mean by that.

• 1:48:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, a long time ago, I was very, very interested in quantum physics. So, if you've studied quantum physics, it lays into Buddhism and the philosophies around there. So, any of these unmeasurable or very difficult things to measure were really interesting to me. Quantum computing, some would say exists today, and it exists in the form of quantum biology. So, biologic processes that are at such a small level, it's like if you typed a zero on a page, so you have the type set and size of a typical zero. If you

• 1:48:55Speaker 01

  fit the whole United States in that zero, that's the level that I'm talking about of size. These things happen. Like, I believe, and through kind of my own studies, that...

• 1:49:11Speaker 01

  That quantum biology and the processes that are going on at that level are realer than people think, so quantum computing is probably not fiction, but something that is there. And that computer will look like some type of chemical soup versus its form factor that you see today. There are amazing scientific discoveries that are happening now, in the last two decades, that are absolutely incredible. There are some cool books, Life on the Edge, you gotta check out that book.

• 1:49:54Speaker 01

  What's that one about? It's a book on quantum biology. So essentially, the beginning of the book talks about the migratory patterns of a European robin, which lots of animals migrate. But what is so interesting about the migratory pattern of the European robin is it's not driven by sight, or smell, or a repetitive migration. These birds can sense the magnetic fields of the earth. Now, for something to chemically engage, or biologically engage with a magnetic field,

• 1:50:38Speaker 01

  isn't necessarily uncommon. That's just an MRI, right? What I do with an MRI is I hit you with a magnet, I grab onto molecules, I orient them in a way, and then I drop that magnetic field, and it takes an amazing picture. So we know how this stuff kinda works, right? Again, that, an MRI is quantum mechanics, or quantum machine, it's an example of it. Well, these birds can actually see the magnetic field?

• 1:51:08Speaker 01

  Which is crazy, right? Now I'm talking about being able to see magnetic fields. They think it's coming through like blue light spectrum, photons in their eyes. Rods and cones can actually see that. And I can't remember the scientists who identified it, but this is all recent stuff. I think it's absolutely amazing. You know, and it's a part of the thing that's always been inspiring to me and why I'm into robotics. It's, we have those same kind of mechanisms and machines that are going on in our body right now. Again, just the fact of us seeing pump is miraculous, right?

• 1:51:49Speaker 01

  When you step back and you think lights going into my eye, it's, there's an explosion of chemicals that are engaging my optic nerve. That optic nerve is transmitting an electric signal into my brain. And then it's mashing up into chemicals again, right? The most powerful computer ever. Human brain.

• 1:52:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Completely agree. And it's one of these things where I actually believe a lot of technologists could benefit greatly from better understanding the science of a lot of this stuff, right? If you really look at even just something simple like the social platforms that we have, the way that information is consumed, the way that information is passed through societies, etc. And if you overlap that with the scientific understanding of a brain, how a brain consumes information, how it processes it, what side of the brain, how does it engage images versus not images, right? When you really start to look at the, the science behind this stuff, it's powerful information.

• 1:52:54Anthony Pompliano?

  It can be used for good or bad, right? So if I really understand how to make an image or a statement resonate inside of your brain, because I understand the science of what goes on and somebody else doesn't, I actually have an advantage to bend the way that you think, right? And influence the way that you think. And so I think that a lot of folks are naive and that we don't understand that stuff or they don't take the time. To really learn because the people who do have that significant advantage.

• 1:53:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we've had to face this as investors and as humans on this planet, you and I in particular. You know, we invested in a company that was one of the world's first to make a complete glass representation down to the to the neuron of a brain, mammalian brain. Their pursuit is, one, for better imaging techniques, but really what they want to do is preserve grandma after she passes away and connect her brain to a computer and store her memories and harness the the computing capacity of a brain.

• 1:54:01Speaker 01

  Now, you pitch that to someone in a Starbucks, 90% of people are going to have an ethical issue with that. The other 9% are going to say, is this going to be used for evil, I would think. And then some will be compelled to continue to develop the science. You know, would you go and get Neuralink, Pop? Would you have that implanted capability?

• 1:54:30Anthony Pompliano?

  So I am convinced that humanity will all have implants at some point. I think that it's less of a question of like, hey, if it was fully functioning, you know, a medical device that was tested and approved and safe and all of that. I think people are all, you know, either lying or tricking themselves as they say they wouldn't go get it.

• 1:54:53Speaker 01

  Right, because isn't it just the next level biometric device, right? Are you wearing an Apple Watch?

• 1:54:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you're monitoring some.

• 1:55:01Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the difference between it being on my wrist and under my skin?

• 1:55:04Speaker 01

  Well, I would say it'd be more advantageous for it to be implanted.

• 1:55:08Anthony Pompliano?

  And if I didn't have to charge it.

• 1:55:09Speaker 01

  You don't have to do anything.

• 1:55:11Anthony Pompliano?

  You just go through all this stuff, right?

• 1:55:12Speaker 01

  Right. How about if you could recall the internet? All that's on the internet, just by thinking about it? Not wearing some device, but actually engaging it? So we don't have to remember what scientist.

• 1:55:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What do you think an AirPods doing? Right? It's getting closer and closer to an embeddable device. And if you didn't have to put headphones in and take them out, it would essentially be the experience of, you know, when somebody has like a little earpiece in and they're able to hear talking, whether it's on television or at a show or whatever, that you're able to process information in a different form factor, a different mechanism that's super, super powerful. But I think the bigger question is not will you do it? It's what is the milestone that needs to be hit? Until you and I say, okay, I'm ready to do this. And then what is the milestone that needs to be hit for the mainstream audience to say,

• 1:56:08Anthony Pompliano?

  okay, now this is a consumer, you know, device, just like getting glasses is a medical situation. Okay, now we're all going to go get implants, right? Or I'm going to do it to my kid, right? And do that. I think that.

• 1:56:21Speaker 01

  Those are the ethical dilemmas that I'm struggling with today. Like, you know, one of the things that's most intriguing to me recently is genomics and blockchain, right? So genomics and blockchain. There's a bunch of companies, Nebula, one of them. And the reason I bring that up.

• 1:56:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, there's a bunch of.

• 1:56:38Speaker 01

  Right. This guy Church is a savage in the space who is behind that. But, you know, I worry about protected healthcare information. Like, how do you protect? Not just my, what I did the last time I went to a doctor, but my genetic information? Like, how do you really protect that?

• 1:56:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, what you're highlighting, right? I think is. Today, the world really revolves on passwords, right? So how do I permission myself or others into all kinds of different software? And even physical locations, right? It's passwords. Now, yeah, I may type a password into my computer. I may punch in a, you know, four-digit code to get in a door, to access my money, right? All this, there's pins and passwords, basically. We are moving towards a biometric type situation where the recognition of my face, the recognition of my voice, the recognition of my fingertips, right? Or my fingerprints.

• 1:57:42Anthony Pompliano?

  That stuff is much more secure than the passwords.

• 1:57:47Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 1:57:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Unless it gets stolen, right? Or-

• 1:57:52Speaker 01

  AI gets so good.

• 1:57:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's easy to basically manipulate it. And so I think that we're headed towards a world where most likely, the most secure information in order to unlock things is going to be some sort of genetic predisposition, information, you know, something around those genetics. There's a lot of work to be done on identifying what that stuff is, how it works, how do you surface it, how do you keep it secure, all that kind of stuff. But if all of a sudden genetics goes from like a, hey, you know, do a 23 and me and I can tell you where, what countries your ancestors come from, to you can access your money with that genetic code and that genetic information, it becomes a lot more important.

• 1:58:35Anthony Pompliano?

  And I don't think that people are kind of looking around the corner and realizing how important it can become over time.

• 1:58:41Speaker 01

  Have you ever participated in sharing your DNA with anyone?

• 1:58:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Nah.

• 1:58:45Speaker 01

  See, I won't do it either. I mean, I'm sure it's out there somewhere, but I just won't do it for that reason. It's like the ultimate identifier. Like you can go through a multi, multi-stage, multifactorial biometric screen, eyes, fingerprint, facial recognition, voice, tone, intonation.

• 1:59:05Speaker 01

  But the DNA is probably the only way to do it, right? It's, that's the foolproof way, but can you copy someone's DNA?

• 1:59:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and for me, so I can't say I had some master plan as to why I didn't do the DNA stuff. I'm just cheap, right? It's like 300 bucks and I'm not paying 300, I don't care where my ancestors came from. I'm Italian. I've been a Italian my whole life. I was gonna say. If I find out anything different, I'm gonna be mad.

• 1:59:33Anthony Pompliano?

  So that was really why I didn't do it at first. But eventually, when I started to hear the stories of, you know, hey, look, is this DNA information being sold to companies? Is it being given and processed in other countries?

• 1:59:43Speaker 01

  I mean, look what happened recently where one of those companies that does like ancestry, I think it may be called Living Tree or something, they turned over their files to the FBI, who then went through it looking for criminals. I don't, regardless of whether you're a criminal or not, I don't think that's why those people shared their DNA.

• 2:00:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 2:00:04Speaker 01

  With that company.

• 2:00:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, and it brings a bigger question, right? Is not only what companies get your DNA information, but what information should these companies have on you at all? Right? And it's the genetic data is kind of the most sensitive, probably the most valuable, because it is impossible to replicate for you, right? And the kind of genetic signature, if you will.

• 2:00:29Anthony Pompliano?

  But there's other information, right, that we give very easily. And I continue to just think, just your location data, right? Just giving that to services because it makes it more convenient, has ramifications that I recently saw, uh, somebody was tracked down. So I don't remember exactly how it works, but basically there's a shadow GPS essentially on your cell phone. The cell phone company has that information. It's kind of like the last tower, you ping type thing. They sell that data. I believe it's anonymized, but they sell that data to other companies. There's a woman who is suing one of the, I think it's a cell phone company,

• 2:01:11Anthony Pompliano?

  because somebody bought the data and was able to track her down or use it to locate her. Supposed to be anonymized, supposed to be all stuff. All she did was have a cell phone, right? She's not thinking about can somebody who's a bad actor, you know, I don't remember all the details, but. By getting this cellphone, I didn't know that I was gonna put myself in physical safety risk. But that's what she did, right? And it's pretty scary when you start to think of all the data that you generate that we just hand over to other companies because we don't even realize it.

• 2:01:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think that the cellphone companies understood the level of security that they really needed to put in place when they did what they did, which is they have all your financial data, they have all of your demographic information, and then the cellphone is essentially your mobile wallet. At that point, it's such a point vector of attack, like an issue that you have to resolve. You almost have to go through a regression of technology back to analog to protect yourself. Flip phone, pager, smartphone needs to be airlocked or airgapped.

• 2:02:23Speaker 01

  And you, and I, you know, you know, that's what I kinda do, the airplane mode.

• 2:02:28Anthony Pompliano?

  And part of it too is, what happens-

• 2:02:32Speaker 01

  Do you answer your phone?

• 2:02:33Anthony Pompliano?

  If it's a number I don't know, no.

• 2:02:35Speaker 01

  Never?

• 2:02:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Never.

• 2:02:36Speaker 01

  Never?

• 2:02:36Anthony Pompliano?

  And part of it's robo-calling, some of it's because I don't wanna deal with it.

• 2:02:40Speaker 01

  Never, never. Unless it comes up as someone that I know, I never answer the phone.

• 2:02:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, same. And I don't have a voicemail set up.

• 2:02:46Speaker 01

  No voicemail.

• 2:02:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Right, it's just, look, if you need me, you'll figure it out. The other thing too is, as these devices become more and more embeddable, or get closer to being embedded, I think a lot about what happens when the digital wallet is embedded in our body, right? Or you've got some sort of embeddable in your brain, and there is that security component of, well, could it get hacked, right? And I remember as a kid, I wish I remembered the movie, but there's a movie and the vice president has a pacemaker. And basically, yeah, the plot is, somebody gets into the office and they go and they find the box that the pacemaker came out of, and they get the serial number, somebody hacks the pacemaker and they basically kill the vice president, right?

• 2:03:33Speaker 01

  You know, that hack has happened, but not with pacemakers, it was with insulin pumps.

• 2:03:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 2:03:38Speaker 01

  You should read about that, they've hacked insulin pumps, and as you can imagine, that can be-

• 2:03:43Anthony Pompliano?

  And just start jacking up the insulin that's injected.

• 2:03:45Speaker 01

  I don't know what they did, but I know that there was a vulnerability in insulin pumps for hacks, so these are really relevant discussions.

• 2:03:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's scary.

• 2:03:54Speaker 01

  Super scary.

• 2:03:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? You know, and I always go to like, forget yourself, like, what if your child, right? Or your father, or your mother, or somebody you love? That happens to them, right? Because to yourself, you're kind of like, look, you know, you have the bias of believing that it won't happen to you. Right? But it's what if it happens to somebody that you know? And all of a sudden, the insulin just gets jacked up and ends up, you know, killing them.

• 2:04:18Speaker 01

  No, it's crazy. And it's not acceptable. So we have to come up with with solutions to this stuff. We have to come up with solutions.

• 2:04:25Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. One of the last things I want to talk about is universal healthcare. Because you've got this this deep background in healthcare and understand what I would consider more kind of boots on the ground view of how healthcare in America works today. I will caveat the question with, I was listening to Joe Rogan's recent podcast with Bernie Sanders, right? And admittedly, my my view of a lot of the rhetoric and kind of the ideas was was not super positive. Right? From what he did, but in listening to it, it was very interesting to hear him talk about US healthcare versus Canadian healthcare, the cost, the quality,

• 2:05:05Anthony Pompliano?

  who pays the cost, etc. And it reminded me a lot of the universal healthcare conversation here in the United States. What's kind of your take on the US healthcare system? Is things like universal healthcare possible? Are they net benefit, net negative? How do we compare to other countries? Just kind of like, how do you think about this, like, on a more structural, you know, kind of platform for US healthcare?

• 2:05:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I'll start the the kind of discussion that I think healthcare is a right, a human right, not a privilege. I'm also going to say that in the United States, we actually do a fantastic job of providing healthcare to people. And I will always defend my position by doing this. If you feel right now you're having some type of medical issue, emergency, what have you, if you call 911, someone will come and provide you with the basis, basic healthcare. They will triage you and potentially transport you to a US emergency department, where they're obligated to provide you treatment without proving a source of pay.

• 2:06:16Speaker 01

  So, right there, you're so far ahead of most countries that don't have a universal healthcare system. All right. On top of that, the United States really expedites procedures. Like, we're super good at getting things done. If you need an MRI, you can pretty much get an MRI. Whereas if you travel around the world, it becomes less obvious, less available. Canada, you know, you're gonna be in a queue. In Europe, you're in a queue. Procedures, joint replacement, it's not gonna happen, you're gonna be put in a queue. In the United States, you're gonna get access to it.

• 2:07:01Speaker 01

  But you're gonna need health insurance for that. So, my general feeling is, healthcare is a right, not a privilege. Can we do universal healthcare? We've got a really good system in place now. It could be made better. We need to figure out a way to not exclude people with pre-existing conditions. That is just a non-starter. You gotta be able to provide an insurance program for everyone. That being said, the healthy of us have to pay, you know? So, I'm not one that is afraid to pay taxes. And I would go so far as to say, put a healthcare tax in place. I'm okay with that.

• 2:07:46Speaker 01

  And provide some basic level of healthcare to every US citizen? I don't think that's undoable. I don't think that's undoable.

• 2:07:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think that the quality of care that is provided today is too expensive?

• 2:08:02Speaker 01

  No, it's fraught with too many errors.

• 2:08:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 2:08:05Speaker 01

  So there's a tremendous amount of wasted dollars in healthcare due to medical errors. And the number is extraordinary. I don't want to misquote it. It's greater than 20%. It may even be 30, 40% of US healthcare dollars are spent on issues, fraud, mistakes, medical mismanagement. It's just a mess, Pomp. When I started in healthcare, we were working with paper systems. It moved on to something called a T chart, which was essentially a humongous man, where we pulled a piece of paper that was specific to the disease process in the area of the disease. And now we have electronic medical records, patient portals,

• 2:08:50Speaker 01

  integrated healthcare systems, bidirectional interfaces around technology. But it's still a mess because one hospital system can't talk to the next. One private physician who's outside of that healthcare organism can't communicate with it. So they're still faxing paper around. So that's what we're dealing with today. So the potential of blockchain technology enhancing this healthcare system and decreasing fraud, decreasing pharmaceutical issues, decreasing miscommunication of medical errors could be a boom for healthcare.

• 2:09:33Speaker 01

  And find dollars that were already in the system. Use them appropriately.

• 2:09:40Anthony Pompliano?

  And do you feel like when you say errors, is that fraudulent stuff? Where people are basically lying and there's money changing hands, etc.? Or is that more a structural issue where? One of the things that Bernie Sanders talked about in the podcast that I did not know is a lot of the drug companies are able to manipulate the prices and raise prices without competition and also without warning. Right? So today you can go and you can buy a drug and come back three weeks later.

• 2:10:10Speaker 01

  It's worse than that. It's worse than that. I wish I could sit down with Bernie and really tell him about what PBMs do. So when you go to the pharmacy and you present your, uh, your insurance card for a certain drug, whether it's brand or generic, if it's a brand name drug, there are tiers, tier one, two, three, four, etc. Um, that PBM was supposed to find you the lowest cost for that drug. It's not. It actually does the reverse. It gives that particular retail pharmacy the highest price that they can bill the insurance company for, for the drug. Um, for example, I picked up a prescription recently for, uh, for something and the price of it, because it was out, it was

• 2:10:53Speaker 01

  outside of my insurance was $300. The, the pharmacy tech goes, hold on a second. I think I have a coupon for that. And she goes, yeah, we do. Uh, 30 bucks. And I go, okay, stop. You know, that's, that's amazing. I have to get this every month. You're telling me you just took a, a prescription. I have to pay 30, $300 a month for down to 30? What is this? It's a program called Good RX. Um, I think that's the name of it. Good RX. Uh, it's essentially, uh, someone very smart went into the PBM and helps you find the correct lowest price for that particular drug and they print it out as a coupon.

• 2:11:37Anthony Pompliano?

  So 90% discount simply because somebody actually looked at the right price?

• 2:11:41Speaker 01

  The price that didn't, it wasn't incentivized in the wrong way. Profit over healthcare, profit over integrity, profit over morality, profit over everything good about healthcare. No, it's about profit. On top of that, CVS can sell liquor and candy and bullshit. You know, well, the, the regular doctor or me that was competing against retail, retail pharmacies that had urgent cares inside of them. I don't sell Kit Kats.

• 2:12:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 2:12:10Speaker 01

  How can you even do that?

• 2:12:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, it goes this idea of-

• 2:12:13Speaker 01

  Oh, and they used to sell cigarettes too.

• 2:12:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Do they sell Juul?

• 2:12:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Should we talk about Juul?

• 2:12:19Speaker 01

  Nah.

• 2:12:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Are you sure?

• 2:12:22Speaker 01

  Can if you want.

• 2:12:23Anthony Pompliano?

  So, we looked at the Juul investment and we passed. Jason is two for two on passing on multi-billion dollar companies that are in and around healthcare and science, both of which ended up having issues. We'll start with the first one, which is Theranos. Maybe tell that story real quick.

• 2:12:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is 2012, 2011, 2012. Blue Cross Blue Shield actually asked me to do diligence on Theranos. Flew out, met with, I think his name is Balaji. It was the COO who was eventually dating Elizabeth, which I didn't know at the time. Went through the full, full business. I was intrigued with her claims that they could do 2,000 laboratory tests from a finger stick. You know, I'd been practicing medicine for a long time and, you know, this was one of two things, either a miracle invention where she had a box that could do this off a finger stick, or they were, they were using mass spectrophotometry or gas chromatography.

• 2:13:35Speaker 01

  There had to be some real science behind it to, to do this. And I didn't think you could get the results from a finger stick. So I flew out to the West Coast to, to meet with them and they wouldn't show me the technology. I mean, it was that simple, pump. Again, it's what I said to you before, I have to touch things, see them, interface with them. If you want me to invest in a jacket company, well, get me the jacket. You know, let's see what this thing looks like. They wouldn't show it to me. And let me tell you, there were some heavy hitters that had already invested at that point. I mean, you had just major people on their board, etc. And Elizabeth was a very compelling, a very compelling and convincing young woman. I went back, we passed on the investment.

• 2:14:18Anthony Pompliano?

  And then the second is Juul. And when we looked at that, it was almost an immediate, these guys are going to get in trouble with regulators. You can't sell this to kids.

• 2:14:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I looked at the packaging. You know, when you're talking about flavored tobacco, you know, it just reminded me of when I was a kid in Queens, you know, I'd go to the corner store and you'd buy like candy cigarettes. I mean, just the fact of me saying you could buy candy cigarettes is ridiculous. Candy cigarettes, come on. You can't do that. And I mean, they spanked the cigarette companies hard.

• 2:14:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 2:14:49Speaker 01

  I mean, they're crushing them out of business right now with Golden Leaf, etc. The penalties are extraordinary. Juul will, if not has, face the same demise. I mean, it's just, and I don't know, it's just not the right thing.

• 2:15:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, absolutely. Well, and it brings me to this point of holistic healthcare, right? Where if you really look at, I do it all the time. I've got a bunch of friends now that are having kids and they're kind of, you know, I'll say newborn to five, maybe some, we have six, seven year olds, right, that I'm close with. And you see the photos and their kids are, you know, they're not grossly obese, but they're not skinny, right? And there's a couple of these photos you look at and you're like, actually that kid, every time I see a picture of him, he's got ice cream in his hand, right? Or he's got, you know, candy or he's got something on his mouth that's green and blue and red and doesn't look like natural food, right?

• 2:15:49Anthony Pompliano?

  And you kind of start to realize like, would we be better off simply going to your point of like, maybe we don't sell the candy and all this other stuff in the same place where we sell the medicine to then cure the stuff that came from the candy, right? Would we be better off teaching people from a very young age that, look, sugar can absolutely ravage your health over a long period of time, right? The things that you put in your body are important and they have, you know, an impact. And not even just saying like, hey, don't eat candy, but actually explaining, this is what is scientifically happening in your body when you eat this, right? And could we educate people into being healthier? Because frankly, I never got any of that education, right? In the traditional schooling system, you just... What's two plus two, right? How do you write? And how do you do this?

• 2:16:33Anthony Pompliano?

  But never anything that actually could have a massive impact on a national scale if everyone was educated about things we were putting in our bodies.

• 2:16:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I have the most hope than I ever have around this call for transparency with your generation. You've had access to more information than any person that's ever walked the planet. And I think you all have figured out some legacy problems that my generation and those before didn't understand. You're marrying differently. You're not getting divorced as frequently. I think you will be a healthier population. I think you're incredibly ambitious and you're incredibly smart and have created amazing

• 2:17:24Speaker 01

  businesses. But this is about transparency. And there's some really cool science out there now about adding energy to food and bioavailability. I mean, at another time, I'd love to talk about that. If you charge or reorient molecules correctly, they become more bioavailable. And our food has been so processed and so denatured that you just don't get the power that it used to give you when you eat it. If you can replace that power, which I think there are technologies that can do that now, we're kind of back in the quantum science, quantum biology world, things change.

• 2:18:06Speaker 01

  The effectiveness of drugs, you can decrease the dosage, increase the bioavailability. You can do that with food. You can do that with a number of things. So I think it's an amazing time to be alive. You've said that a number of times. I think Bitcoin is real. And I think some of the issues that we're facing right now as a population on this planet are real. And I hope we take them seriously.

• 2:18:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Before I do the rapid fire, many don't know, but your favorite music group, Wu-Tang Clan. Where did the obsession come from? Wu-Tang?

• 2:18:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. No, thanks for finally giving a shout out to Wu-Tang Clan.

• 2:18:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Much more NWA over Wu-Tang?

• 2:18:55Speaker 01

  No, I love it, man. No, Wu-Tang Clan. So coming out of high school in Florida, we were listening to like Miami bass. So I got to my freshman year at Methodist. My roommate was a soccer player from Edison, New Jersey. And he literally had like Dos Efects, Onyx, and Wu-Tang Clan. I'd never heard it before. And so as soon as I heard it, it was it was over. Like Method Man, Raekwon the Chef, Ghostface Killer. You know, it was just too much, man. And that's 25 years.

• 2:19:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Crazy.

• 2:19:27Speaker 01

  25 years. If you get a chance to watch the Showtime,

• 2:19:33Speaker 01

  there's four episodes of, I think it's of Mikes and Men. It really is great. It's fantastic.

• 2:19:39Anthony Pompliano?

  It's all about Wu-Tang?

• 2:19:40Speaker 01

  It's about Wu-Tang Clan and they're just the way they approached music and they're still relevant today. I mean, I just heard a new Wu-Tang song yesterday with the Jizza and some new relevant guys. I mean, it's incredible.

• 2:19:53Anthony Pompliano?

  It's crazy.

• 2:19:54Speaker 01

  It's crazy. It's absolutely crazy. So yeah, Wu-Tang.

• 2:20:00Anthony Pompliano?

  For the rapid fire, most important company in crypto or Bitcoin?

• 2:20:04Speaker 01

  The most important company in crypto and Bitcoin? I've answered that before. It's Bitcoin. It's Bitcoin.

• 2:20:12Anthony Pompliano?

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

• 2:20:15Speaker 01

  Man, I'd get rid of qualified purchaser, accredited investor. I absolutely hate it. I just think it's wrong. I think it's wrong.

• 2:20:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 2:20:23Speaker 01

  I mean, look, I'm doing this stuff today, this whole fund business, investing and working to help my friends and and people who believe in this thesis to gain access into venture and private equity. Because their only options were to have a job, to become self-employed, to make, you know, to become a business owner, or to potentially make enough money to invest. And I think those are all okay. But they're not the same as the returns that these venture guys are getting. And I couldn't get access to to that. You know, now I can, but you you get there by being successful. I don't think that's fair. I think anyone should have the chance to look across the room and say,

• 2:21:08Speaker 01

  you know what, I think, I think Lyft is a good investment. Like, I like using it. I'd like to own that company. And they should be allowed to buy that, you know? They should be able to buy it on the pre-IPO. Should have access to it.

• 2:21:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and they can own it in the public market only after the largest returns have already been captured.

• 2:21:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, of all the values been extracted prior to it going into the public market. And you're seeing that now.

• 2:21:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Especially as companies stay private later.

• 2:21:37Speaker 01

  Stay private. Yeah, you're seeing that now. So it's just not fair. Yeah, it's not fair. I'd change that.

• 2:21:44Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the most controversial thing you'll say in crypto or Bitcoin? So when people hear it, they will disagree with you.

• 2:21:50Speaker 01

  Most controversial thing that I say in crypto that people disagree with me?

• 2:21:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, like what's the most controversial thought you have?

• 2:22:02Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 2:22:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Are you like a Bitcoin SV guy?

• 2:22:05Speaker 01

  No, not at all. Not at all. My most controversial thought? Yeah, I don't, I don't know if I have a real controversial position in Bitcoin. You know, the, the thing that happens to us unfortunately is we're kind of like in this micro environment where it's a big world for us. Like, so, you know, I'm always sorting out everything, but it's really small still. You know, it's really small. You know, it, the most controversial thing for me is probably where I think it's going. You know, and I, I try to tell people, this is one of those moments that you should, you should go all in on. And I think that's what's controversial. They just don't see it.

• 2:22:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Most important book you've ever read?

• 2:22:50Speaker 01

  You know, it's probably, this is a great question, actually. This is a great question. It's probably a culmination of a number of books. So when I was a little kid, and I don't even know what the title of these books are, Pom, but there were books that while you read them, you could be on like page 30 and it would give you a choice.

• 2:23:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, man. The choose your own adventure books.

• 2:23:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, it would say like, if you choose A, go to page 50. If you choose B, I loved it. It was like I could change the scope. I could change the, the path of what was happening. So I used to read those books all the time. And then it's like The Road Less Traveled, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I think it's like Covey and Peck.

• 2:23:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and those books really kinda framed my perspective.

• 2:23:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

• 2:23:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love all that stuff.

• 2:23:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Aliens.

• 2:23:39Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 2:23:40Anthony Pompliano?

  I, uh, aliens in the moon.

• 2:23:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, let's, like, aliens, I think, are totally there. Like, I mean, if we spent more time together, you'd understand, like, my whole feelings about life. Like, the only reason, like, one of the things that we haven't been able to do is make life from rocks. But life is rocks, right? The same parts and components that are in a rock are life. We just haven't figured out what drives that life force, right? But you have things like organelles in your body right now that are bacteria, that weren't parts of you, like a mitochondria. A mitochondria has its own shit. Like, it's its own powerhouse, it's got its own kinda DNA. It's a bacteria, but it's inside your cells.

• 2:24:28Speaker 01

  So you've, you've brought that in, so it can make you live and be the person you are. So aliens don't look like, I think we think they look, but they're everywhere. So they're here, they're here on the planet, they're everywhere, they're in every, every part of the universe, you know? And when the fourth nation, India, lands their rover on the moon on September 7th, you know, I'll, I hope they find life. You know, I'm so excited for them that, that they're doing that.

• 2:25:01Anthony Pompliano?

  It's coming up.

• 2:25:02Speaker 01

  It's September 7th, you know, India. That's pretty awesome. You know, I think they may be in orbit around the moon right now, but it's, it's amazing. You know?

• 2:25:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think it's a thing where there's life on other planets and out in the solar system? And we either haven't seen it yet, or we don't have the tools to actually identify it? Or do you think it's something where we have the tools and we're looking, but it's probably not in the solar system, it's in a different solar system?

• 2:25:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think it's beyond our technology at this point. I think we are still struggling with, with space travel. I mean, I, I think this, please correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought this was ridiculous. The, the spaceship that's going from India to the moon, it's taking 20 days for them to get there. And I, I think that's right.

• 2:25:57Speaker 01

  But in 1969, when the US landed on the moon with people, it took four days.

• 2:26:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Allegedly.

• 2:26:03Speaker 01

  Four days. I don't understand why we were able to do it so much more rapidly and why we were able to land on the moon with humans with very limited technology as compared to India launching today and not putting a person on the moon. They're literally going into a low orbit and landing, I think, a rover on the moon. You know, I don't think that our instrumentation is subtle enough to pick up life. Maybe that, like, life in the way you're asking me the question. But I think we found water and I think bacteria are everywhere.

• 2:26:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Area 51, you think there's anything there?

• 2:26:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely, but I would not storm it. I think that is just a mistake. Like, please don't do that. I mean, the guy who's dressed like a wizard, he's amazing, but he's gonna get a clam gif. Yeah, don't do that. But yeah, Area 51.

• 2:27:06Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think's there?

• 2:27:08Speaker 01

  I think there's advanced propulsion. I mean, when you think about, you served in which war?

• 2:27:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Iraq.

• 2:27:14Speaker 01

  Iraq. What year?

• 2:27:16Anthony Pompliano?

  2008, 2009.

• 2:27:17Speaker 01

  Right. So, the first Gulf War, that's when we put stealth technology out. That technology was from 1970. We showed it in Gulf One. That's when we first showed the technology.

• 2:27:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that 20-something years later, right?

• 2:27:33Speaker 01

  Stealth technology, right? Stealth bomber, stealth fighter, what have you. There is absolutely no way we don't have aircraft that can go up, down, left and right using different types of propulsion systems, magnetics, etc. So, you know, that's what's out in those testing grounds. Those are, those are advanced warfare technology. I don't know if there are aliens there, so.

• 2:28:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, the thing that-

• 2:28:07Speaker 01

  I think there are spacecraft that are there that may have crashed that nobody needs to see.

• 2:28:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I mean, look, there's also-

• 2:28:13Speaker 01

  But there are human pilots on that.

• 2:28:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and to me, the thing that is so interesting is everyone is focused on the warfare. Everyone is focused on the aliens and kind of all of these, like, frankly, things that are really cool to think about, right? But what about like, you know, I don't know, CRISPR technology and genetic editing and things that it's not, hey, I can fly something over your country, right? I'm talking about changing the human population at birth in a way that could be very drastic and create an inflection point either for positive or negative. Where is that research happening?

• 2:28:58Speaker 01

  It is happening. Nanotechnology, embeddables, these like shrink you down to some type of device and embed that. It's all here. It's all here. You know, I think it was Meltem that was watching The Matrix recently and saying like, how forward-thinking and powerful that movie is. Because it really is. I would challenge you to watch The Matrix again and the series.

• 2:29:26Speaker 01

  That stuff is more real than it's not.

• 2:29:29Anthony Pompliano?

  They nailed it.

• 2:29:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely.

• 2:29:31Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, we're coming up on two and a half hours. What one question do you have for me?

• 2:29:37Speaker 01

  I want to ask the real one. So no, no, I'm going to ask, no, I'm going to ask. So first, I have two questions. I have two questions.

• 2:29:44Anthony Pompliano?

  We might have to cut off the podcast.

• 2:29:46Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, no. So one, what did you get Polina for her birthday?

• 2:29:50Anthony Pompliano?

  I haven't given it to her yet, so I'll wait till I give it to her.

• 2:29:56Speaker 01

  All right. I'm going to let you off the hook.

• 2:29:58Anthony Pompliano?

  We're recording this and I haven't gotten Polina her gift yet. So I actually have no answer.

• 2:30:03Speaker 01

  Nah, it's just priorities, man. Like, Paulina is super important. I want her to be happy. That's important, person.

• 2:30:09Anthony Pompliano?

  She appreciates you.

• 2:30:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. I want to be invited to the wedding.

• 2:30:12Anthony Pompliano?

  She's also gonna now tell me, "Oh, it's so nice of Jason to talk about me on the podcast." So, perfect.

• 2:30:17Speaker 01

  Nah, Paulina's, she's sharp. She's sharp. You're a lucky guy.

• 2:30:21Anthony Pompliano?

  I appreciate it. I'll make sure that she knows that. She'll probably listen to this twice now and cut up the audio and then play it back for me to remind me at times.

• 2:30:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, she's something else, man.

• 2:30:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, great. Great podcast. Jason wants to ask when I'm getting married. That's his big question.

• 2:30:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. That's right. I just want to go to the wedding. I think it'd be fun.

• 2:30:43Anthony Pompliano?

  So, I've actually never talked about this on here, but I'll say, I don't believe in big weddings. I don't think that that's like a thing.

• 2:30:51Speaker 01

  It doesn't have to be big, man. I just want to be there.

• 2:30:53Anthony Pompliano?

  I kinda think that when I get married, I might just get married with nobody there.

• 2:30:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Why not?

• 2:30:59Speaker 01

  I did.

• 2:31:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so I just want to be like you. Perfect.

• 2:31:04Speaker 01

  I mean, I did. My wife and I got married in Kauai. It was just her and I.

• 2:31:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah? Would you do it again?

• 2:31:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:31:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Without anybody there?

• 2:31:11Speaker 01

  No hassle.

• 2:31:11Anthony Pompliano?

  That's what I'm saying. No hassle, no pressures. There's no anything. It's just, you're there with the person that it's all, it's between you and them.

• 2:31:17Speaker 01

  That was nice. We had a real ceremony and everything, but it was just, it was just two of us.

• 2:31:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Why not?

• 2:31:22Speaker 01

  I just want to be there, man.

• 2:31:24Anthony Pompliano?

  We'll FaceTime you in.

• 2:31:28Anthony Pompliano?

  We're gonna do it from Mars.

• 2:31:29Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh.

• 2:31:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, listen, I appreciate you coming and doing this. I think people will enjoy it. So, thanks so much for everyone to listen to this. I know it's a long one, but hopefully you enjoyed it.

• 2:31:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks very much.

• 2:31:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Hey, everyone. Pop here. If you liked this episode of Off the Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, Spotify, and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review, and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off the Chain.