Kamal Ravikant, Author & Investor: The Ultimate Self-Love Guide

Kamal Ravikant is the best selling author of the book Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It. He is also an Army veteran and an early stage technology investor. In this conversation, Kamal and Anthony discuss everything from his writing process, to what he looks for in early stage investments, and even spend time debating the current media landscape and how various technology platforms fit in. CRYPTO. COM-----The only all-in-one platform that allows you to BUY / SELL / STORE / EARN / LOAN / INVEST crypto all from one place. Join over 1 million users and download the Crypto.com app today to earn $50 USD using the code ‘pomp2020’ when you sign up for one of their MCO Visa Cards. TAXBIT-----Refund-maximizing, cryptocurrency tax software you can depend on. Visit taxbit.com/invite/pomp and receive 10% off your tax plan today by signing up for a free trial.

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

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off the Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Kamal Ravikant is the bestselling author of the book Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It. He is also an Army veteran and an early-stage technology investor, but most of all, he's one of the most kind and genuine humans that I know. In this conversation, we talk about everything from his writing process, to what he looks for in early-stage investments, and even spend time debating the current media landscape and how various technology platforms fit in. This episode covers a lot, and I really enjoyed talking to Kamal for such a long time, so I hope you enjoy it. But before we get into the episode, I want

• 0:41Anthony Pompliano?

  to talk about the two sponsors that made this episode possible. The first is Crypto.com. They've been longtime supporters of the podcast and are doing great work. They're a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. They have a vision to put cryptocurrency in every wallet, which is frankly why we're all here. The Crypto.com app offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well-designed user experience, and high security. It's the best place to buy, sell, and pay with crypto. They also have had an awesome marketing campaign going on in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Miami. I call it the Plan B Marketing

• 1:22Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:06Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:48Anthony Pompliano?

  This team of experts are on hand who have had experience facilitating thousands of crypto tax filings and IRS crypto tax audits. So TaxBit has built the most trusted cryptocurrency tax solution. You can head on over to taxbit.com/invite/pomp and you'll get 10% off your tax plan today with a free trial. Again, that's www.TaxBit.com/invite/pomp. Head on over, get 10% off, pay your taxes and let's keep going in the crypto world. Now lastly, don't forget, Off the Chain is not just a podcast. Every morning I wake my ass up and I write a daily newsletter for 40,000 investors analyzing Bitcoin, blockchain and cryptocurrency.

• 3:31Anthony Pompliano?

  If you want to subscribe and read what I'm thinking, head on over to offthechain.substack.com, offthechain.substack.com and you can subscribe today and join 40,000 other investors who read whatever's on my mind every morning. Again, offthechain.substack.com. Now let's get into this episode with Kamal. It's one of my favorites of all time and I hope you enjoy it.

• 3:53Speaker 01

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

• 4:20Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. Sitting here with Kamal. We got a whole bunch of stuff to talk about, but he's probably one of the more thoughtful, wide-ranging people that I know. We've known each other for, I don't know, a couple of years now. So I'm just excited to hang out and talk. Thanks for doing this.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me, man. How did we first meet?

• 4:39Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a great question.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  Because we're both, the connection was we were both in the Army.

• 4:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  And I remember joking at the time that you and I were probably the only people in the crypto investing space who were actually once in the military, who'd actually served, like, at our level. I'd never met anybody else.

• 4:55Anthony Pompliano?

  There's one other person who never talks about being in the military, who's a pretty decently well-known Silicon Valley investor, but I feel bad, I can't like out him.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  Been in the military.

• 5:08Anthony Pompliano?

  But, but it's somebody you wouldn't expect.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 5:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? So, all right, you've done a whole bunch of stuff. Let's just start from the very beginning, like, growing up, and then how do you get to the military?

• 5:20Speaker 02

  Simple, man. You walk in recruiter's office and they happily take you, man. That's how you get in the military.

• 5:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Sometimes they even pay you to do it.

• 5:28Anthony Pompliano?

  What, uh, no, but like, what's the process there? And kind of how do you, how do you grow up? And what's that story?

• 5:36Speaker 02

  Well, growing up was, you know, a single mom, two kids. My brother and I basically raised ourselves in libraries. And I graduated high school, got the hell out of there. It was in Jamaica, Queens, which is where rap came from. It kind of gives you an idea of the kind of place it was. You know, rap didn't come from joy and bliss, you know? And went to college for a year, had a full ride. After a year, I was like, this, uh, no. And I went, I walked in recruiter's office and I signed up. And I had just finished a year and I was, I think a week or two later, I was in a... Plane to Atlanta, Georgia, got to Atlanta, put me on a bus and took me to Fort Benning and shaved my head. And that was that story.

• 6:17Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, before we get into a good Fort Benning.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  In the summer, let me tell you.

• 6:23Anthony Pompliano?

  What was?

• 6:23Speaker 02

  In Georgia.

• 6:24Anthony Pompliano?

  What was the fascination with the library? Like, why, why that being a place where, when you look back, you say that's where you grew up?

• 6:32Speaker 02

  Well, that's where mom could leave us where we were safe. I also grew up on books, love books, you know, books were my refuge as a child. I always was, I was reading.

• 6:43Anthony Pompliano?

  And while you're in the library, are, I'm assuming that you're not like, hey, what book do they want us to read for school? It's much more, how do you want to spend your time and, and kind of read the things that you find interesting?

• 6:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think we, my brother and I grew up like reading everything we could. You know, that was just our thing.

• 6:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and it's fu- it's funny because so many parents try to get their kids, they try to force their kids to read. And then you're like, no, like, we enjoyed it, it sounds like, like you guys just wanted to go do that. How does that happen?

• 7:14Speaker 02

  Um, I don't know, you're in a library, what are you gonna do?

• 7:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  You know, you don't have the internet, you don't have video games, what are you gonna do?

• 7:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah, it, it, it wonder, it makes me wonder.

• 7:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Is there something about putting somebody in an environment where they only have one option, right? And is that different between a kid's kind of development and if you do the same thing with an adult? You know, do they just walk out? Like, did you guys, are you guys ever sitting there like, you know what? Not today, like, we're leaving. Or is it just, mom said to sit here and so we're gonna read, cause that's the thing to do here?

• 7:50Speaker 02

  I guess, I mean, it's worth a trying, you lock someone up in a room full of books, what are they gonna do eventually? You know?

• 7:57Speaker 02

  You know, you get bored, you'll, you'll find a way to pass the time.

• 8:00Anthony Pompliano?

  That's fair. Um, Fort Benning is not a place that many people would think, one, somebody who grew up around reading books in a library wants to go. And two, uh, most people don't want to voluntarily go in the heat, uh, in the infantry training, right?

• 8:18Speaker 02

  It was infantry, yeah, it wasn't the most thought out decision.

• 8:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  It was more like, I want to do this, I was in college for a year. Bored out of my mind. You know, the usual, like, like doing, I mean, I had a great GPA and everything, I was like, there's gotta be more than this. And also like. I wanted to, I felt like I wanted to serve my country. I had this thing. I was like, I just want to do this. And I went to all the diff- one day I just went to all the different recruiters and I knew I wanted to finish my education. That I knew, but I knew I didn't want to do it then. So the Army offered me the most for the GI Bill and then they were like, "Yeah, but if you join the infantry, the special ones, if you would really, oh yeah, you're gonna have a blast, you know, join the infantry. You know, we're gonna give you this much more." At that point,

• 9:06Speaker 02

  you're like, "Wow, that much more for college? Okay." So I signed up and then I was like, "And on top of it, if you join the mountain infantry for today, just, you know, today's sale, you'll get this much extra for college." I was like, "Sweet, sign me up." So I ended up in the 10th Mountain as an infantry soldier.

• 9:22Anthony Pompliano?

  So for those that don't understand military advertising, the military does a great job of having a very high correlation between, nobody wants to do a job, let's make it seem really, really exciting. And so the more exciting, the more they sell something, it's really just because they have quotas on the back end and not a lot of people want to go do that. And so they start with the commercials, the, "Hey, you can jump out of a plane. You can walk up the mountain. We'll teach you to shoot." All that kind of stuff. So then eventually when that doesn't work, then they just literally start, "Well, we'll pay for your college. We'll do that." And they start offering incentives. And then if it gets really, really bad, then they literally just say, "We'll give you a signing bonus."

• 10:02Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, I got a signing bonus too.

• 10:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Did you get one?

• 10:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I think there was some shortage or something at the time. Whatever. I don't remember.

• 10:10Anthony Pompliano?

  This was very popular. So when I signed up for the Army in March of 2006, was right around the whole surge and all this kind of stuff. And they were just like, literally, nobody wants to do this, right? So I remember talking to the recruiter and him being like, pretty much like, there's two lists. There's the list of like, you can go do this stuff. And it was all the like, really technical training, things that like, was very obvious. There's a job when you get out. So, "Hey, you want to be a UAV, you know, driver or pilot? Sure, we'll train you up how to do that. Very obvious when you leave the military, there's a job waiting for you at some private company." And there's another list. And it was all the dangerous shit that had no use in the civilian world.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  Like bomb defusal.

• 10:58Anthony Pompliano?

  And you want to know the one job that was on that list that actually had an application outside of the military that I just found at the time confused afterwards. I remember being like, wow, that makes a lot of sense. Truck driver because of all of the roadside bombs. And so people had realized, hey, if I sit inside of a base and I fly UAVs or I'm the accountant or I do all these other kind of jobs, I'm pretty safe. If I'm in the military, if I'm in the infantry or I'm defusing bombs or I'm driving the truck, like those all have like very similar kind of danger levels to them. And so it was a bunch of those kind of combat type roles and then truck driving.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  I wouldn't, you know, never would have thought of truck driving as a combat role. But I guess, yeah, but you got.

• 11:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Especially in Iraq, right?

• 11:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:45Anthony Pompliano?

  So, all right, so you get to 10th Mountain. For those that don't know, the word mountain means something. And so you guys are light infantry. What was that whole experience like? What'd you take away from the military?

• 11:58Speaker 02

  What did I take away from the military? Look, as an 18 year old kid, it was the best thing I could have done for myself. Yeah, like it was, you get challenged and you get, you realize you can pretty much step up to anything, you know, you don't get, you don't learn that in college. You know, you, you can drift to college and do just fine if you want to. You can't drift through boot camp, you know, you can't drift through infantry training, you know, you can't, you gotta step up. So for me, I think it was that training part, that transition from civilian to soldier that I, that I'm grateful for, you know, that I really look back and it was very, very formative. It

• 12:39Speaker 02

  was, I'm proud of it and I'm grateful for it. You know, it's, you, you think about tribal societies, right? And I've, I've talked about this before, like they have this thing where like when you go from become a boy to a man, you know, like there's, there's, there's almost like a rite of passage, a testing. So then you welcome back in the tribe. And there's something special there, you know, you step up and you realize like I'm okay, I'm going into a different phase in my life. I'm more required of me and I'm able to meet that challenge physically, mentally, emotionally. We don't have that in our society except for like the military, maybe some sports, you know, sports, yeah, military, yes. Outside of that,

• 13:19Speaker 02

  not, not much. Where you challenge, you come out, okay, I am different. Like I am, I have gone through that fire, right? And I have walked through that fire and I've come through it and I'm forged differently.

• 13:33Anthony Pompliano?

  How much of that's adversity versus training, right? Like, hey, you just went and did something that's hard. So not the actual like building back up, but the breaking down. Cause ultimately, what they do in basic training is they break you down and they build you back up, kind of how they want with certain disciplines, etc. I always think about, those are two different things, right? Now they string them together very nicely and as you come out of that process, all the benefits that you're talking about, but can you pinpoint whether it's the breaking down process or the building back up process that you think is more important there?

• 14:06Speaker 02

  I think it's honestly just the challenging every day. It was a breaking down and the building up. You don't have a day off. You know, there's no day that, boy, today's a good day.

• 14:15Anthony Pompliano?

  No load management that you see in professional sports today?

• 14:19Speaker 02

  No, but like, so I think it's more like the being challenged, you know, and you just learn that you just step up, step up. And they, it's not like they make the challenges easier. It's like they make them harder, right? And I think that's what it was.

• 14:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. One of the things that really sticks out in my head from basic training, did you guys ever, they would go in the mornings on these runs and they never told you how far you were gonna run, right? It would, for us at least, it was like there's an A group, a B group and a C group. And you generally knew like the A group was the fastest, B group was a little bit slower and C group was the slowest. And we would start running and it wasn't like, you know, we're not running 20 miles. We're either gonna run a mile, two miles, five miles, whatever it is. But the whole idea of like, you don't know how far you're gonna go and you're just with a bunch of people and there's some guy leading you and it's just go. I always thought like, It's so different than the way society runs because it's always, what's the task? Somebody tells you a task and then people go execute that one task.

• 15:18Anthony Pompliano?

  But you don't have to go past kind of the finish line that's already laid out in front of you. Whereas with this, it was completely blind to you. It's just, we're gonna run until we tell you to stop. And like, again, it wasn't crazy, but it was just the unknown ends up like hardening your mind of like,

• 15:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're right.

• 15:34Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm literally gonna run forever.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  You just do it. You kind of go in that zone. I'm just, whatever it is, I'm just gonna do it. You're right, I remember that. I'd forgotten about that. It's, that's very, very interesting, right? Cause then you do, you stop being task driven and you just become like, kind of like, okay, I'm just gonna do it.

• 15:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. The, the other thing in basic training to me that I walk away from, which seems to be a misconception. Is like, everyone's like, oh, the military, there's no ingenuity, there's no innovation, there's no, kind of you as an individual having to make your own decisions, etc. Everyone thinks the military is, Kamal, you're a private, you know, second class, I'm gonna tell you what to do today. And when I say move your right foot, you move your right foot. Okay, now move your left foot. And it's very kind of rigid. But actually, like, once you go through the process, you realize like, eh, it's really not true, right? There's structure, but within that structure, most of the best soldiers are people who are presented a problem

• 16:34Anthony Pompliano?

  and they can figure out how to solve that problem within the structure that they're given. Did you take any of that away?

• 16:40Speaker 02

  Well, look, look, problem solving on the fly is what building startups is. That's, you know, like, I mean, like, I, I don't think my, you know, the military trained me for building startups, but looking back, like, that kind of experience, you know, like, I always say, like, look, if I was to be hiring people, you know, I'd be hiring for veterans, especially like veterans who've been through shit because they're gonna, they're not gonna complain about the hours or this or that, like the stuff, you know, they're just used to solving problems. And building a startup is nothing but daily solving problems, you know?

• 17:13Anthony Pompliano?

  We're, we're gonna dig into this.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Now we can, we can jumping ahead, right?

• 17:16Anthony Pompliano?

  We can just, we can just jump right into this one.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:19Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the things that is funny to me is this whole concept of work-life balance. And it's not funny because it's wrong. It's just the society's approach to taking one solution and trying to say, this is the solution for everybody.

• 17:37Anthony Pompliano?

  It kind of makes more sense to me of like, why don't you just work as much as you need to, to accomplish what you want? And so for you, that's five hours a week? Great. For me, if that's 120 hours? Great. But the one size fits all type solution just doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  It doesn't. I mean, it doesn't work. You know, it's that's... You know what's interesting is I find, you know, I find some of my peers, you know, like who've done very, very well, talk about work-life balance and how you shouldn't work this much, whatever. But I also remember how they made their money. They're, you know, they didn't have work-life balance. They're really, the ones who've done very, very well, they've all been obsessed. I think it almost takes that level of obsession to do that well. You know, you can't, you have to sacrifice a lot. You know, you have to make choices, right? And I think work-life balance is almost like afterwards, okay, now I can sit back and,

• 18:36Speaker 02

  and kind of like ruminate and think, you know, think what's important. But work-life, it's, I don't know, I guess thrown around a lot. It's more of these days a corporate word than, than, you know, my world has always been startups, been like small teams, building stuff and working really hard to get stuff done.

• 18:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. You used the word obsession. We're recording this about a week after Kobe Bryant just died in a helicopter accident. And so Plin and I spent a bunch of time going back and kind of reading different things he had said. We watched a documentary that he made, et cetera. And one of the key themes throughout almost every single piece of content, interview, et cetera, that he did was talked about obsession.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  On that level, that level, you gotta be. You don't, you don't get there by accident. You don't get there by talent. Talent will only get you so far. Cause they're, you're gonna come against other opponents with talent. Obsession is what gets you greater, your craft.

• 19:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. In one of the interviews, I mean, it blew me away. He goes, "I had a 40-inch vertical. I didn't have 45, I had a 40-inch vertical." And he was saying it as if like 45-inch vertical was, you know, the standard and he had a, he couldn't jump very high. And I was sitting there thinking, I might know one person in the world who's got a 40-inch vertical, right? Like, an incredible athleticism, just as a kind of a standard or natural athleticism that he had. But he's looking at it ahead and saying, there's somebody in the world who could jump 45 inches. Right? And so since I can't do that, I have to be obsessed with all of these little details in the game so that I can compete against that person.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, you look at the greats in any field, man. Like, they, they have, it, it comes down to craft. It comes down to just hammering and chiseling your craft every day. You know, or at least like in, for peers at a time.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  And that's something I've seen people and, you know, people write to me about writing and this and that. And I'm like, well, write. How do you want to, you know, like, it's, you gotta be, you gotta really care about the craft. You gotta like, write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and edit and rewrite and write rewrite. That's where the real writing is, right? Same thing with him. Like, I think with Kobe, what, I remember reading a quote by him where he said, like, when he got to the NBA, he was really surprised to see that a lot of people there took it as a job. He was like, I thought they'd be like me, but that's all it was. That's all they had, right? And he's like, it was a job for them. And it really surprised me that it was an actual job.

• 21:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  You know? Well, that's why he got where he is.

• 21:11Anthony Pompliano?

  How much of that?

• 21:12Speaker 02

  Where he was.

• 21:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Cause what he said as part of that was, hey, that's when I decided I'm different than these guys, right? And I want to be one of the greatest ever. And what it makes you think is, do you have to have the aspirations of the greatest ever at whatever your craft is? And then it backs into, okay, now you're obsessed to get there, right? And so you have that obsessive nature? Or can you actually be obsessed with the craft and not have some kind of end goal in mind? Like, does the goal pull you to be obsessed and you're driving towards something?

• 21:47Speaker 02

  Oh, I see what you're saying.

• 21:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Or are you kind of blind and?

• 21:50Speaker 02

  No, I think you have to care about the thing. I mean, he loved the game. You gotta love the game, you know, like, I don't think you could get to that point and, like, he could get to that point if he didn't love playing. Right? So that's where, if you love something and that's your thing, you're gonna work hard to get better at it.

• 22:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  That's just the nature of the thing.

• 22:08Anthony Pompliano?

  How does that manifest in founders, right? Because founders are unique in that, if you're a basketball player, you play basketball, right? You gotta dribble, you gotta shoot, you gotta do all this kind of stuff. There's skills that go into performing in the game. When you're a founder, there's the business you're in, right? So you can learn more about the industry and kind of your competitors and kind of what you're doing there. But there's also skills as a founder, hiring, leading, writing, you know, all this kind of stuff. Where does that obsession manifest itself in the best founders that you've seen?

• 22:39Speaker 02

  Well, you know, a lot of that stuff, uh, no one's taught. You just kind of learn as you go along, right? It's not like, uh, you don't, you don't really learn that in school, you know, like

• 22:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Definitely not.

• 22:50Speaker 02

  You don't, you know, people think they can go to school and learn and start startups. Saying, I was like, I remember originally when I started, I would, I like some of the best people I worked for, I mean, worked with or had worked for me, never had the schooling, but man, were they talented. Were they stupidly talented.

• 23:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Where does that come from?

• 23:07Speaker 02

  They cared. They, I mean, like, you know, these are the guys like building computers when they were kids. You know, made their first video game when they were, you know, when they weren't even, they were in junior high. You know, the ones who fiddle around and have, and care, and they just get deeper and deeper into it. But for founders, um, what I've, they have, here's what I've found, the best ones are obsessed about a problem they want to solve. That's ultimately what it is. You, you, you care, not because it's the hot space. Not because that's where the money's, this, this year is investing. They genuinely care, like they're obsessed about it, you know, like those are always, um, usually been like the best investments.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  You know, if I talk amongst my peers and just look at my record, like some of my very best investments, you knew like this person was, I was thinking of one in particular, like I had my first meeting with this guy, I was like, man, he was born to build this.

• 24:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 24:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. He was like, this guy was at one point living out of his car, trying to, you know, trying to work on this and stuff like, it wasn't like because it was the cool thing to do, you know, or because like, hey, you know, this, there's an opportunity here. Like he was going to do it whether he made money on it or not. He just, this was a problem he wanted to solve. And sure enough, ended up doing very well, you know? I, I didn't think it would honestly, because it was such a long shot. But, you know, like because he cared so much, he got the right people involved. You know, it's, it's, uh, leadership is also about inspiring passion in others. And if you can inspire, inspire a passion in other talented people and they form around you, okay, that's something to watch out for.

• 24:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Right. So, so, okay. So you, you nailed on a couple of things and this idea of obsession being applied to building a company.

• 24:53Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the things that's been disappointing for me as I've invested in a hundred plus companies at this point, right?

• 24:59Speaker 02

  That's a lot.

• 25:00Anthony Pompliano?

  It's a lot, but the ones that don't work out, you usually find out pretty quickly.

• 25:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's that J curve.

• 25:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And the reason why you find out pretty quickly, in my experience, I don't want to say the founders quit, but that obsessive nature, that that passion for every single obstacle that gets in my way, I'm going to run through the wall and it's not going to matter. That wasn't there, right?

• 25:25Speaker 02

  That's what it takes. Yeah. You know, very, I mean, how many business success stories are really like start, boom, exit? You know, there, there's some, I actually know some, but even there, you, you find the, the crinkles in the path, right? It's literally what makes them get up every day and go face that beast, face that dragon.

• 25:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  Right? And so you have to care. You have to care at that, what's beyond that dragon. Eventually it tires you out otherwise.

• 25:51Anthony Pompliano?

  You also talked about, uh, the people who are most passionate and obsessed, get other people around them that talented, but also they elicit more passion out of those folks.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. That's what good leaders do.

• 26:03Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you think about the difference between the founder, right? So the person who this is my idea, I was born to build this, et cetera. And then those first couple of hires, right? And one of the things I've been thinking more about is a lot of times those first couple of hires, very fit in one of two categories. Either they're also missionaries, right? And so they're, hey, I believe just as much as you believe and I want to come help you build this, et cetera. Or they're very mercenary like, and meaning that I'm a gun for hire, right? And you tell me to run, I'm going to run. You tell me to shoot, I'm going to shoot. But when things get tough, they tend to be a little bit higher risk takers because they're willing to join and early stage, whatever.

• 26:42Anthony Pompliano?

  But it's still not that, that kind of missionary type thing like the founder. Is there any trends that you've seen in all the investments you've made of? Who, which bucket those kind of first hires tend to turn out better?

• 26:55Speaker 02

  Uh, honestly, no. Um, I'll tell you, I'll think of my experience and what I've built stuff.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  Not the mercenary ones.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  It's the ones that care.

• 27:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm just just going through experience and stuff I've built with companies, honestly, like if I invest, I don't get meddled that much in that, you know, I'll be like paying attention to who the hires are, you know, I just like, look, I'm here to help, call me when you need it, you know. So I don't really pay attention to it's it's the founders, a job who they want to build it with.

• 27:33Anthony Pompliano?

  We were talking earlier about this idea of when people first start investing, I was culprit number one of this, you want to invest and then be helpful. And what you quickly realize is the companies that need all of your help are probably not the best companies, right? Like the founders who are going to be successful with or without you are actually the deals that you want to be in because they're going to be successful, right?

• 27:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, the only time I get really involved is if I'm advising a company, you know, that's different because that's a different role, right? But investment and like we said in the elevator, you know, investors don't build a company. Yeah, they don't.

• 28:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Elaborate on that.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  I mean, they just don't, I mean, I'm always laugh when I see investors take credit for, oh, you know, and I helps this company that's exited. You give them a check, a lot of people write checks, does not make you a company builder, makes you a check writer, you know, let's be honest, right? And a lot of it's luck, you got lucky with that check too, right?

• 28:28Anthony Pompliano?

  You ever seen anyone tweet about all the checks they wrote that didn't work out? Usually not, right?

• 28:33Speaker 02

  True. True. Yeah, yeah.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's it's the people, it's the founders, it's the team, it's the people in the, you know, in the trenches that build a company. It's not the ones that check in once a month, oh, tell me what's going on, let me give you some of my advice, let me give you some of my valuable advice on what to do and then run away. And, you know. Even if the advice is great, it's the people that are building that bill that are responsible for the success.

• 29:03Anthony Pompliano?

  It's um, this is applicable both in the situation you're talking about with investors and companies, but also in life more generally. I started to think about advice differently. When people ask for advice, most people will say, you should do X, right? And it's very kind of directive. And here's my personal opinion about your situation. Go do this. And what you find out again is that person that you're giving the advice to probably has more context. They may or may not agree with you and giving a directive type piece of advice doesn't allow them any leeway between making their own decisions, etc. And so they're not really invested in the decision many times.

• 29:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Instead, when people ask for advice, now what I say is, well, let me tell you people that I know who have been in that situation. Kind of the evaluation that they made, the decision they made, how it worked out. By the way, I don't know what you should do, but like, here's a bunch more data points, like, what do you want to do? And in the company side, they can go to a bunch of people and do that. But in life, what I found is like, people kind of already know the answers or know what they want to do. They're really looking for validation, right? It's not advice, it's validation that they're looking for.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm not much of a giving life advice guy, which is kind of interesting coming and giving the books I write. But the books I write are my experience. All I can do is share my experience. That's it. You know, life advice, we're looking at everyone through the filters of our perception, filters of our biases. So it's not really, I don't think there's ever great advice. There's just people's filters and um, yeah, I, I, I don't really ask people for advice.

• 30:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Uh, why'd you start writing the books?

• 30:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, what was the first book in terms of what was kind of the genesis of it?

• 30:50Speaker 02

  Well, you know, one thing I was doing when I was building startups was actually I was obsessively writing on the weekends and nights when I had time, when I, whenever I was free, I was training myself to write literary fiction. I wanted to write literary fiction novels.

• 31:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 31:06Speaker 02

  I just loved them. I did, I loved, I was a huge Hemingway fan and I just like wanted to write clear, simple stories. I just wanted to tell stories. So this wasn't like something that came out of nowhere.

• 31:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Lock a kid in the library and not only will he read, he might write too.

• 31:21Speaker 02

  He might write too, funny enough, right?

• 31:25Speaker 02

  And so like, I spent years doing it. You know, talk about obsession, right? And year and sending manuscripts and collecting rejection letters. Because I didn't study in college. College, I studied economics and biology. You know, I think, like, none of those teach you creative writing. And in some ways, I think that that actually turned out to be good. Because I didn't learn a style, you know, I didn't have training. So I could actually go and just break things and try things and come up with my own. And eventually found Hemingway, I fell in love with his clear, simple prose. And like, okay, this is the, I don't want to write like him, but I want to write what he was trying to do. Like, never a word that you can't understand, never a word that you have a problem spelling.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  And take a complex subject, take a complex emotion, but put it in a clear, simple sentence that it just makes you feel it. Then you've succeeded. Which is actually really, really, really hard. Simpler, you get something. You know, in any, in any craft, to get its simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, right? Who said that? Karl Lagerfeld. It's the hardest thing to do. And so, I worked for years in writing and sending in manuscripts and collecting rejection letters until it became better and better, until it became, you know, from, you know, basic forest standard to a hand note on the letter, to like a phone call, to in-person meetings, you know, to all that.

• 32:52Speaker 02

  And then, but the books I've gotten known for, the books I've written are now all the self-help genre, funny enough, you know. And I never set out to be that guy. I'm not a self-help guy. Like, look, we're doers, right? Like, I'm gonna sit around and, I mean, I sit around, I do think a lot about life. But I want practical stuff. I want things that work. You know, the whole startup mentality is give me something practical. I don't want theory, right?

• 33:18Anthony Pompliano?

  But those two ideas are connected, right? In terms of...

• 33:24Anthony Pompliano?

  I forget who says, "I would have made it shorter, but I ran out of time." Right? Kind of that obsession of how do you make it as clear as possible? And then the practical, actionable stuff on the building side. Actually, by having very clear, simple, practical language, that writing makes things actionable. Right? Like, there's a connection between those two ideas.

• 33:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, in fact, if you see a writer use a lot of big words, they're hiding. It's easier to do that. And it sounds smart, but you don't walk away changed. My thing is always like, "Okay, you read this book. A month later, what's the effect on you? Are you better? If not, it failed." You know, that's, that's, um, I hold these things to a high bar, right? And, uh, so the, the funny enough, I never set out to write these kind of books. I was gonna write, you know, literary novels and I was gonna win a national book award. That's what I wanted, right? And like those kind, that kind of stuff. And instead, um, I had built this company and, uh, fully funded it myself for years. And then I ran out of money, so I took funding.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  It was doing well and the whole thing blew up and I lost everything. And, like, everything. And, you know, it was, it was also very humiliating and I kind of fell apart along with it. And, and the depth of like, uh, um, like a really dark depression. Which I've met, you know, you lose everything, everything falls apart and everything. You know, it's kind of normal, looking back.

• 34:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Because your identity is tied to the company.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  Your identity is tied to what you were doing, right? And it's not that the company failed, you know, you failed. You know, ninety-something percent of startups fail, you know? But you forget that when you're in it, right? Uh, you, you'd go into these things, forgetting that the odds are significantly against you, you know?

• 35:15Anthony Pompliano?

  And math works.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  And math, and math does work. And especially because...

• 35:21Speaker 02

  And you are doing well and then the tide just turns, you know, and there's nothing you could do except just get swamped by it. And things happen in the market that we had no control over, you know, like market shift and that's, that's the way she wrote, right? But I fell apart with it and in that time period, I came, I decided, something in me was like, look, I'm going to get out of this and how am I going to get out of this? And I sat down, wrote a vow to myself and then I set out to live that vow. And that, and it was a vow about changing my internal, it was a vow to love myself, but really it was a vow by mindset, by changing my internal mindset. And then the practical side of me set out to how to do it. Didn't read any books on it, you know, didn't trust books on it.

• 36:05Speaker 02

  Cause you know, let's be honest, most of those books are just full of platitudes, you know, that maybe make you, give you panacea, make you feel better in the moment. But where's the practical thing that will actually shift me on the inside? And so set out to do it and, and kind of figured it out for myself, you know? I was the only subject, I was just working on myself and, and it worked. And, and it worked really well. And so I started sharing with friends, you know, like I was like, you know, I was kind of like a new convert, you know, like, and it worked for them because it was so simple and easy and practical. And it was all internal work that anyone can do. Cause we're all of the human mind.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  And so then some convinced me to actually write down a book, a little book. So I, so without thinking anything would come out of it, I wrote it down as a little book. Put it out on Amazon, self-published it because I'd committed I would. And the book was called Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It. And it took off and it became one of Amazon's success stories. And this was in 2012. So now here, let's, let's talk about a little bit about obsession and writing, right? So I did something that people weren't doing in about writing books. And the last chapter I put in, here's my email address. Feel free to send me an email because I didn't expect to sell any copies. I was basically, I'd written it and I was going to give it to friends to help them. And that was it, right?

• 37:32Speaker 02

  And literally self-published it, like no marketing, nothing, like nothing. I thought of, actually I thought it was going to be a big laughing stock in Silicon Valley, right? And Guess what? I started getting emails. I got a lot of emails. A lot of emails. And that book came out in 2012, and now it's 2020, but let's go back a year. So like seven years of emails, we're talking, I don't know, we're talking a lot, a lot of emails. And I've responded to basically most of them, unless people are like just rude or, you know, just wasting your time. If they're thoughtful, I'll always respond. And

• 38:11Anthony Pompliano?

  What are they writing about?

• 38:12Speaker 02

  It's amazing, like how, you know, sharing how the, like the book impacted them. Got lots of emails about how the book saved their life, saved the life of a loved one, how it's changing their lives for the first time. They have self-esteem, confidence, you know, because all this stuff comes from, from the same, same reservoir, from the same hole we're trying to fill. And, and also because I was just sharing my story, but what I wrote it was in a very practical way. I wrote that, and this is what I did step by step, and this is how to replicate it, you know, which no one had done in this space. At least that I'd come across. And, but so here we have these thousands of emails. Here's also another thing I would get cushions. I would, so over seven years, you start to see there's a pattern in the cushions.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  And you start to realize, yeah, you know what? I really held back. Because I didn't expect this to go anywhere. I was just writing like a brief, basically what I wrote was a primer, but not the full thing. And I was like, look, given the success of the book, and I realized I need to put this book out to the world in a bigger way because it's already getting, spreading all over the world, but it's only available in English on Amazon. People are translating it and just putting it online and putting their name on it. And it's like, Jesus.

• 39:21Anthony Pompliano?

  It's on Weibo all of a sudden, right?

• 39:23Speaker 02

  I'm like, but look, if the book's got to spread, then I, then I gotta give it the whole thing. So then I sat down and spent a year working on it. And the, the, all those years of, of starting to be a literary fiction writer, right? I never ended up writing literary fiction. I've written a novel since then, other books since then. But, but what it did was it taught me the craft, you know, it taught me the craft. So then, then life gave me this opportunity. I was able to apply the craft. If I didn't have the craft, I wouldn't have written a book that would have been this successful. You know, it's written to be so simple that any, anyone can apply it, right? And so

• 40:05Speaker 02

  I did the same. I sat down and spent about a year just going through the questions like, how do I answer these, but doing it where it's not just a Q and A, like write an actual book. And I worked very hard on it and gave it everything. And I mean, that's a level obsession that I didn't even know I had. And, you know, sold it to Harper One, who's, you know, like probably the top publisher in the self-help space. And, you know, because they, and I had choices of publishers of his meeting, and they got it. They were like, okay, we get what you're doing. We're not going to screw with it. You know, like, we're not going to try to make it like a regular self-help book. But they tried. Once I sold it to them, and I completely pushed back. I was like, no. I mean, I was like, I'm gonna call my attorney and like cancel this contract. But like, no, then when I pushed back, explained

• 40:50Speaker 02

  why, I was like, look, I had the benefit of something you don't. I have like tens of thou- what, 10,000 emails from readers telling me what worked for them. I have the data. You know, I know what they, what they're asking for. I know what they need. I know where I failed in the original book. I know where I need to step up. And so they trusted me, and I, I worked very hard on it. And that just came out a few weeks ago. And sure enough, I'm getting emails from people who had the original version. They're like, yeah, I needed this. You know, I didn't even know I needed this version, but like, I needed this. And so now the, now the questions are resolved. Like, I gave it all. So now I

• 41:28Speaker 02

  can say, okay, I've written this book. This, this book is done. It's been a long journey. But, you know, and it takes that kind of obsession, you know, because why expand on a book that's already successful? Because I knew that I hadn't given it my all. So I had to go back and do it.

• 41:48Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the process, like, the difference in the process between writing it and self-publishing it on Amazon versus with the publisher? Like, not, not that like, oh, the publisher does a revision, right, or edits it, etc. But like, when you're approaching writing it, it's very different to write a book from the beginning, from scratch, where you're saying, I want to create a practical book that documents what I did. I want to share that with other people. Go, right? And you write it yourself, and you self-publish. It's a whole nother thing to say, okay, now I've got a publisher. They may or may not try to change what I want to write, etc. I also have a successful book, a very successful book, that's already been out there for a while, right? And so I've already put some of these ideas out in the world. And then I've got all these questions that people had, etc.

• 42:34Anthony Pompliano?

  And so you're almost like taking multiple different inputs to produce something. Did you find that?

• 42:40Speaker 02

  Actually, no. What I did was, I mean, I took all the questions because that's, in the end, you're writing for the reader, but I stuck to my vision. I used those to have a vision for what I was going to put out. And even with the publisher, which is why I went with Harper One.

• 42:55Speaker 02

  I was very clear when they sent me edits. And so I was like, Kamal would probably turn down 90% of those suggestions. And they would come back and they would agree. They're like, okay, now I see why. And I would explain to them why. Like, I'm like, look, you're used to people who, you're used to self-help people who write books. I'm a writer who's writing a self-help book. There's a big difference. Right? And it was very interesting. At the end, the editor told me she learned a lot by actually watching me go through the process and rewriting and rewriting this book she learned. You know, because like most self-help books aren't written by writers. People who are trained to be writers, they're written by people who want to be self-help people. You know, who are writing a book to get a brand out. Right? You know, like it's, so there's a difference, right?

• 43:39Anthony Pompliano?

  What you're describing is very similar in business as well. Right? There's a, there's kind of common knowledge or commonly accepted practices for building a company or writing a book. Right? They're two different industries, two different activities. But there's been a bunch of people who've written books, a bunch of people started companies. And if you go talk to 20 people in each industry, they'll tell you, well, you know, a self-help book is written A, B, C, D, E, F, whatever. Company, you know, first you gotta do this, then you do this, this, whatever. The people who don't follow those kind of well-worn paths, one of two things happens. You get greatness or you get complete failures.

• 44:14Speaker 02

  That's it. But that's, that's the game changers, right? And I like those odds. I like the binary odds, actually. And look, that's invest, venture investing in a nutshell, it's binary odds, right? They have, exit or go to zero. That's simple. Same thing here, you know, and, and you gotta really trust your gut. You really gotta believe in what you got, you know, you really gotta care. Otherwise, you're not gonna do that.

• 44:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I've talked about it on the podcast before, but when I went out to Silicon Valley in 2014, I knew one person, I'd met him on Twitter before. And I DM'd him and I said, hey, I'm here. You're the only person I know. Can I come see you? And I frankly didn't know. Anything really about him that much, other than we talked a couple of times. And I also didn't really know what I wanted to get out of the conversation. But as I was leaving, I said to him, I said, you know, I'm a young guy. What's your best advice for me? And without hesitation, as if he had told this to 10,000 people who'd come to his office before. He said, I've got two things for you. One, keep your personal burn rate as low as possible because it gives you the opportunity to take on high risk. Opportunities, right?

• 45:21Anthony Pompliano?

  So you can go join that startup and you don't need a $150,000 salary, etc. And two, he said, you will be more rewarded here in Silicon Valley by having massive, taking massive swings and failing than you will by having small success.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:36Anthony Pompliano?

  And I remember walking out and it was so counterintuitive. The first one made sense, but the second one was so counterintuitive.

• 45:42Speaker 02

  That's what makes Silicon Valley Silicon Valley, which is why you see other countries trying to recreate it. And I've, but they're, they don't have that mentality.

• 45:52Anthony Pompliano?

  You think it's a mentality?

• 45:54Speaker 02

  It's a culture, it's a mindset. It's been, been that way for decades, you know? So like even the investors think that way, then the new crop coming up think that way. So it just gets baked and baked more into it.

• 46:06Speaker 02

  Like most places, if you failed, you won't be able to raise money again. Silicon Valley, no, like, I mean, as long as like, you know, it was a good bet, you know?

• 46:14Anthony Pompliano?

  As long as you're not an idiot about it, yeah.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  Well, not an idiot, but like, you know, it didn't fail because of you. You know, things fail because of a billion reasons, right? Or succeed because of a billion reasons and it's.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, people, there's, you know, most biggest success stories are like multiple founders and it's usually like the second or third one.

• 46:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that true in writing? Where people write something and their first, second, third attempt at writing something is either not successful or doesn't have a lot of success. And then they produce a kind of a great hit later on?

• 46:49Speaker 02

  I don't know, man. It's, that's all over the map.

• 46:52Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know either.

• 46:52Speaker 02

  With art, it's different. You done, you know, something that could be your first.

• 46:57Speaker 02

  I don't know. I mean, because do you count all the countless hours, the 10,000 hours what they wrote, but didn't publish? You know, so it's harder to put it, say, there. I don't know. I think it's varied.

• 47:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 47:13Speaker 02

  You know, the Hemingway did say, like, the worst thing for a young writer was early success. Because then you get caught into, like, trying to recreate that in that way versus taking the risk, you know, like, that made you get that success.

• 47:30Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the things that you obviously write about in the books, but also you just described in your process, is this idea that, like, trusting your gut and having the self-confidence to say, "I don't know if I'm right or not, but I want to do what I want to do." And I always think of this principle as like, if I'm gonna fail, I want to fail my way, right? Because if I fail, then I know that, well, that's the way I wanted to do it. But if I do it some other way that somebody else tells you, etc., and I fail, now I'm gonna be left wondering, well, did I fail because I did the wrong thing? Or did I fail because I didn't do what I wanted to do? Like, how much of that process?

• 48:10Speaker 02

  Actually, I've noticed a lot of the best founders, they think they're right. They have that level, they have that vision. They may not be, but they think they're right and they're gonna work.

• 48:22Speaker 02

  So like, for example, with this book,

• 48:26Speaker 02

  you know, I could have gone many ways with the publisher, and I stuck with my vision, you know, and because I knew I was right. You know, and in the end, you, when you're creating something, when you're doing something, that's all you got, is your vision for it, you know, and all you can do is the best version of that.

• 48:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but it's a little different in building companies in the sense of, like, if I'm building a software product and you're writing a book, right? I can create a first version, I can show it to some people, I can iterate and kind of, over, let's say, a year, all of a sudden, I've pretty dialed it in in terms of, this is what the people, at least that I've shown it to, this is what they want, right? And I can do that from a data standpoint, I can do it from talking to the users, etc. Books are a little different in that you kinda write and write and write and then there's this big, you know, reveal.

• 49:16Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 49:17Anthony Pompliano?

  And it either works or it doesn't, right? There's not a lot of like iterations between the writer and the audience. So there's iterations in terms of the writer, the publisher, the editor, etc. But how do you think about like serving what that reader wants without necessarily having that iterative feedback from them in the process?

• 49:35Speaker 02

  That's where it comes, um, like in the end, you're writing for the reader, but you can't like go out and ask people, what do you want me to write about?

• 49:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 49:48Speaker 02

  You know, it's like the Homer Simpson, Carthia episode, right? And for the everyman, but if you get enough feedback, you start to listen to it, you know? Um, you know, in the end, you gotta have a vision for what, what is the best version of what you wanna put out, you know, you're like, uh, also you wanna write what you'd wanna read. I wrote what would help me. You know, I read my own book. It helps me, you know? Um, my book is a book I would read and I would pass along.

• 50:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 50:19Speaker 02

  You know, so that's another thing, you know?

• 50:22Anthony Pompliano?

  It gets at this idea of, um, you ever meet somebody and they're doing all the right things, but something tells you they're doing it because they think that's what they're supposed to be doing?

• 50:30Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 50:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? I, for whatever reason, when I see those people, I feel bad, right? And it's a thing where I'm like, you're going through the right motions, but it's very obvious that this is not necessarily contrived, but it's kinda orchestrated. And you, one, even if you are end up being successful, you're not gonna have the enjoyment of that process because you just did what you thought you were supposed to do, not because you wanted to do it. And two, if you don't actually kinda believe it, you're unlikely to be successful at the end. And I don't ever know how to handle the situation, cause you can't say you're doing the wrong thing, cause technically they are kinda doing the right stuff, but it's, it just feels very manipulated or orchestrated.

• 51:15Anthony Pompliano?

  And so it's, I don't know, it's just something that I've identified, but I don't know what to do with it when I see it. Any, any thoughts or ideas there?

• 51:21Speaker 02

  I mean, not much you can do. If you're gonna change the person, I mean, you really, you know, people are who they are.

• 51:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 51:30Speaker 02

  You roll with it. Yeah.

• 51:32Anthony Pompliano?

  It's true. What areas are you excited about on the technology side? Other than crypto?

• 51:38Speaker 02

  I'm not excited about crypto. I mean, like, look, you're talking about crypto, man. Most of it is, excuse my language, a shit show. You know, we knew that, most of us in it, right? But there's some great stuff in there that it reminded me, the whole, it reminded me of the dot com boom, right? It was like, most of the companies that came out were shit shows, should not have been public companies, right? Should not have raised the money they did, but there was a frenzy. Crypto, it was a global frenzy and there was, anyone could have put money in. So imagine what will happen. You'll get a lot of shysters, right?

• 52:12Speaker 02

  But in that, I mean, really, that's what happened.

• 52:15Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm laughing at your word, your use of the word shyster. You're being nice.

• 52:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:22Speaker 02

  And, but, you know, what happens is a new technology comes through and gets known in the mainstream. And then, when the bust happens, and these things are, these things always happen that way, you know? Then it's the ones who care who start building stuff, you know, the ones who care. Then when it's, when it's the, in the bear markets, the ones who build in the bear markets are the good ones, not in the bull markets. And you start seeing like the useful stuff start to come out, you know, and that's what's happening there. And that'll show up in time.

• 52:52Speaker 02

  As far as investing otherwise, I've taken a bit of a break, just for personal reasons. You know, my fund's fully deployed, I'm gonna raise another fund, but

• 53:03Speaker 02

  I just take a break. You know, now I'm just kind of like keeping an eye on things, watching what people are investing in. I'm advising some companies.

• 53:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Any areas from like the technology side that you think are interesting but don't see people talking about?

• 53:19Speaker 02

  It's a good question.

• 53:22Speaker 02

  Honestly, no, because I've pulled back. I'm just more like in observation mode. You know, it's more like learning, seeing what's going on, which I think is actually healthy. You know, because if you're deploying capital, you look at things differently. You look at opportunistically. Versus if you're not deploying capital, you're looking at observing and you're calmer about it. And you start to see the patterns and what you want to get involved in. That's the kind of phase I'm in right now.

• 53:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. One of the things I think you said to me previously, and you'll correct me if I'm misremembering this,

• 53:57Anthony Pompliano?

  is I think we were talking about, there's a lot of, not a lot, but there's some investors who are very prescriptive in their investing. So they say, here's an industry. I believe that this is a problem. Somebody's going to create X solution. I'm going to go find a company that's building X, right? And they go and they try to find that and invest. There's another strategy of, let me go find great founders. They'll tell me what they want to work on. They'll explain why it's important, etc., and then I'll back them. But they're the experts in that field. I don't necessarily have an opinion as to what they're doing. You fall more in the latter than the former. Why gravitate towards that and more kind of the founder being the expert, etc., versus, you know, you being the genius on the hill?

• 54:41Speaker 02

  Because I do seed. And seed, it's you betting on people. And also, but I don't do it across the board. I don't invest in like, you know, I'm not investing in farm product, farming technology, or agriculture, or because I know nothing about it, or oil wells, or even like pharma, whatever. I'm doing it in tech. I know tech. You know, I'm smart enough in tech that I can look at something and see what the opportunities. And if I don't know the tech part as well, I know enough people in tech who are the best at what they do that I can run it by. So I have that advantage there. So in seed, you're betting on people. You know, you're not betting on, it's like when someone tries to give me a projections, like, or like spreadsheets and a seed round,

• 55:26Speaker 02

  I'm like, what are you doing? It's a waste of your time, a waste of my time. These are all made up numbers. You know, just sit down and just, let's just have a, my favorite one is just conversations about what they're building, what they want to build. You know, that's it. That's why I end up writing, you know, sending a wire on. It's more fun that way, too, when you bet on people, you know?

• 55:48Speaker 02

  And industry... If I just do one industry alone, I guess I do tech, but tech is so big that you're covering a lot. Right? Because I've seen opportunities, you know, because if, let's say if I was thinking, at one point I was gonna do a fund that was focused on AR and VR.

• 56:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 56:05Speaker 02

  And there was a lot of interest in funding that fund, but I decided not to do it because I realized, first of all, VR, it was still far out. The tech needed more years. It wasn't the right time to be investing. And

• 56:18Anthony Pompliano?

  That's probably still true.

• 56:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:20Anthony Pompliano?

  It's getting better with things like Oculus, etc., but it still feels that at least five years.

• 56:28Speaker 02

  AR is what's gonna take off.

• 56:30Anthony Pompliano?

  You think, okay, so you're in the camp of AR comes before VR. I don't disagree, but that's

• 56:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, just because the technology is easier and it's so easy, like, and Apple, I think is gonna have something out with AR, maybe out in two years. Within two years, and that'll change the game, you know?

• 56:49Anthony Pompliano?

  So here's a theory that I have, which is

• 56:56Anthony Pompliano?

  you've seen all these photo editing applications, right?

• 57:01Anthony Pompliano?

  The ability to put stickers, the ability to put Photoshop-type items, etc., into them, is really kind of like static AR.

• 57:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 57:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:13Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, the things that kind of look like toys and play, etc., today, there's almost like this transition between, okay, we have reality, then you get kind of what that static AR, then you get more of like the AR where, hey, you can actually have a video and put stuff in. Then maybe you even get more like live, real AR, right? So like, I can actually have the Google Glass or whatever type thing. And then eventually you get the fully immersive VR-type stuff. But whether that's right or not, there's some transition from where we are today to like full VR. The thing I keep going back on is like, that stuff takes time. Like, I think people say like, oh, of course VR's gonna be a thing. But then they snap their fingers and like, why isn't it here yet?

• 57:56Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, the tech is actually hard because it's interesting with VR, it's actually the brain. The brain, like, most VR experiences, your mind, you kind of, your mind can't handle it more than 30 minutes. Like, there's something about the, it's your mind, it screws with your mind. Like, this is not reality. People get headaches and all these things. There's things they're working out. They're working out, and they will work them out. One of the things for the longest time was you couldn't see your hands, and your mind gets screwed up about that, right? So now they've overcome that, right?

• 58:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Now you just have two hands floating.

• 58:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, two floaty hands, you know, but the brain, you know, is like trying to process this, this version of reality. It knows it's not reality and trying to be, try to function in it. It's going to screw with it, right? So that takes time. They didn't expect that. But AR, you don't have that problem. But going back to the reason why I was talking about it was I decided not to do it because there were so much opportunity. Like crypto was happening and these other things were happening. If you just do a very focused fund, that better be your obsession. You better be obsessed about AR, VR, and I wasn't, right? I'm more about, it's more about, for me, it's like, look, I understand tech. I've been in it. I'm pretty smart about it.

• 59:06Speaker 02

  I know the right people. I can get in great deals. So I like betting on people, you know? It's, it's, it's a great thing to bet on people and they go on to build something that ends up being massive. It's kind of fun to watch. It's fun to when they call you for help and you help them, you know? And it's fun just to be, you know, that way to be involved. That's one of the reasons why I still, I'm not investing. I'm advising some companies because you, you know, when you have experience, you have a CEO calls you with the issue they're having, and you solve it for them in like a couple of minutes versus it would have taken them a month, right? That's fun, you know, but that comes from experience.

• 59:44Anthony Pompliano?

  You talked about knowing the right people, right? And this is something that we've never talked about, but I'm interested in your insight. I think it was either Brent Bishor or Patrick Rocha, and I see he was on Twitter and they were basically saying, look, one of the most defensible moats in business and investing is relationships, right? It's one of the things you can't automate away. You can't, you know, build some product, whatever. I know you really well. You trust me or you don't.

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. You and I have done deals together because we trust each other, actually. Like, hey, I'm doing this. You want to be here because, yeah.

• 1:00:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and so, but out of that, if you go into meeting somebody with like the intentionality of like, I want to establish a relationship because I'm going to come back and do a deal with you later. You end up not trusting that person. They can kind of see through it. You know what I mean? Like, it's very counterintuitive, I think, in the sense of you gotta genuinely care about people. Right? You gotta genuinely like somebody. You gotta genuinely want to spend time with people. You have to provide a lot of value in conversation that they have to provide back.

• 1:00:42Speaker 02

  I mean.

• 1:00:43Anthony Pompliano?

  It's a very kind of time intensive thing.

• 1:00:45Speaker 02

  That's a transactional relationship, right? And there are those in business. I usually shy away from them. I just want to invest in good people.

• 1:00:53Anthony Pompliano?

  It's funny, a lot of my friends tend to do that. I wonder. I think it's called self-selection.

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  But it's like, I want to invest in good people with good people, you know, like, that's it. It's very, it's simple. It's not rocket science, man. Investing is not rocket science.

• 1:01:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, and the other piece of investing, I think that often, especially early, like people who are just starting out investing, they have the idea that it's a binary outcome, right? And so what they go into it thinking is this is going to work or this is not going to work. But actually, the investment decision, many of the best investors I know, they're looking at it on a spectrum or a probability standpoint, right? So yes, there's a binary outcome, but when I invest, I don't want to invest in the person that's got a 5% chance of succeeding. I'd love to invest in somebody who's got a 20% chance of succeeding. And 5% to 20% both sound like, oh shit, that's probably not going to work, right? But that's a pretty big gap in the startup world because they've done it before

• 1:01:50Anthony Pompliano?

  or they've got some like deep industry knowledge. They've got a certain team. You know, there's always things that can kind of move that percentage or probability up. What I don't know is if there's actually a way to quantify it. Right, so I'm using numbers, but those are

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can't

• 1:02:07Anthony Pompliano?

  lick my fingers, stick it in the air, and I think those are the numbers.

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  Bingo, bingo.

• 1:02:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 1:02:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, like, there's criteria we all have, right? Like, you know, one of my key criteria is who the other backer, who the other investors? You know, I call them door openers. Are they who the door, not the door kickers, as you know in our previous lives, but the door openers, right? Because I've seen personally, like, hey, this guy's on the board of Facebook, and guess what? The company's invested, Facebook keeps them buying. Huh, go figure. You know, like, I've seen those patterns, right? So, like, I like to see, so I want to see who else is involved, and also know who's I, you know, I know who's helpful, who's not, and what their, what their real record is. So, I always, that's actually one of my main criteria is I look at who the other investors are.

• 1:02:52Speaker 02

  There's deals I'll pass on, I like, but I don't, if I don't know the investors, like, at least one of the investors well, and I trust their judgment, I won't invest in it.

• 1:03:01Anthony Pompliano?

  So, this brings up a very controversial topic. Because I think the consensus thought is, at least over the last 10 years, has been very founder-friendly. I don't care who else is in the deal, you know, I'm an original thinker. I don't need to wait on everybody else, I can just invest. Go through the whole list of, like, all the things that fall in the founder-friendly bucket. I think there's a resurgence coming back of the other type of buckets, right? And not necessarily being adversarial to founders, but this belief that, no, it actually does matter who else invests, right?

• 1:03:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:38Anthony Pompliano?

  What you're talking about here.

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, because just being early money is not founder-friendly. Because founder-friendly is someone who also helps the founders when things going up and when the thing's going down. Right? And those tend to be more, that's a specific kind of investor. I would rather, like, for me, it's always been like, look, I want to be the dumbest guy in the, in that group, putting a check in, really.

• 1:04:22Speaker 02

  Maybe we should use an iPhone.

• 1:04:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Are you sure?

• 1:04:37Speaker 02

  So I forgot where I was.

• 1:04:40Anthony Pompliano?

  You're talking about founder friendly goes up, goes down, still helping.

• 1:04:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, so I think it's actually, you know, you got, when you're an investor and entrepreneur, you put on very different hats. I've been in both, right? And you realize that you look at these things differently and you gotta, as an investor, you're trying to maximize your returns, right? And you may fall in love with the investment, you may love the founder, you may love what they're doing, but you may think this is not a good investment, so you won't invest. You know, so it's very, very different hats, and so you gotta have your criteria, right? Certain criteria, you gotta have certain criteria you stick to. And, you know, one of, so one of mine is actually I look at the other investors. And that's not the, I won't just go in because of certain other investors, but it's actually,

• 1:05:31Speaker 02

  but there's deals I will turn down because of the other investors.

• 1:05:34Anthony Pompliano?

  One way to think about it is the other people around the table on the investing side are part of the team, right? You're underwriting the team, and the team is not just the employees or the founders, it's those other people on the board or the other investors around, they're gonna make introductions, right? They're gonna open the doors, they're gonna help on acquisitions, they're gonna help in recruiting, right? All this kind of stuff.

• 1:05:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, but sometimes, you know, talented founders need none of that, right? So this is, this is like a weighing game, this is, there's no, it's an art. You know, I get these emails all the time, you know, "We've created an AI platform that'll, that'll, you know, simplify your investing decisions, you gotta sign up now." I'm like, "Okay, great, you know, if you got a massive fund that's algorithmically trading startup stuffs, maybe that would work." But this is, when you're betting on seed stage, you're literally betting on people. That's all it is.

• 1:06:23Anthony Pompliano?

  It's um, it's one of these things. That simple idea takes a really long time to understand.

• 1:06:31Speaker 02

  You think so?

• 1:06:33Anthony Pompliano?

  It's like Bitcoin. Ready? This is my whole theory on Bitcoin.

• 1:06:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, what is Bitcoin?

• 1:06:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Everyone is out overthinking it because it's so simple.

• 1:06:40Speaker 02

  Huh.

• 1:06:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Same thing with investing.

• 1:06:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Early stage investing comes down to backing the best people. Everything else is intellectual Olympics to make people feel like they're smarter.

• 1:06:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:54Anthony Pompliano?

  They're two and 20.

• 1:06:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? But at the end of the day, it's finding really talented people that are going to be successful without you. And convincing them that they should take your money over the next guy, right? Or a girl.

• 1:07:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Bitcoin is very similar in that it's such a simple idea. There's separation of state money and it has a very certain monetary policy. So either it works or it doesn't. Very binary outcome, in my opinion. Everything else is just noise around it because people are basically bored. Right? They're sitting there and they're analyzing this data point, that data point, this and that all.

• 1:07:29Anthony Pompliano?

  It doesn't matter. It either works or it doesn't. It's very binary. It's just like a venture investment. It happens to be liquid, but that doesn't matter. And all of the kind of people spinning their wheels around it are doing it out of bored more than anything else.

• 1:07:44Speaker 02

  Or, you know, trying to be smart.

• 1:07:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. They're like, if you believe that Bitcoin is going to be valuable in the future, it is likely to be much more valuable than it is today. Right? So kind of in that binary outcome, it's got very asymmetry on the upside.

• 1:08:01Anthony Pompliano?

  But you, as an investor, then have to do the one thing that humans suck at doing, which is have patience.

• 1:08:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Because it's just going to take time. And so what do these people do? They sit there and they, well, what about this? What about that? Well, here's the latest, you know, fear mongering. Here's the latest bullish case, whatever. And they just spin their wheels over and over and over again. And when people ask me, what's the most important thing for Bitcoin to be successful? I always just say time. Just let it ride. It's done fine for 11 years. Let it keep going. Early-stage investing, same thing. And I think this all goes back to what you said earlier about the way that you write. It's when people have an idea in order to put it into a book, if they don't really understand it, they use big words because they think those big words lead to the reader thinking they're smart.

• 1:08:50Anthony Pompliano?

  But what ends up happening is the reader very quickly can tell if they're sophisticated. The person who writes with the simplest language and is kind of the most blunt about the idea, one has mastery. But two, that's where the most value comes from. And so that's true in writing, that's true in investing, and that's true in Bitcoin as well.

• 1:09:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, good parallels.

• 1:09:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? What um, what's the thing?

• 1:09:14Speaker 02

  I mean, like, look, any, um, the best, um, best people make it look easy. You know, when you're watching a truly great athlete, you're watching, you know, they make it look easy, they make it look so natural, you know? You're watching a great fighter, they make it look easy, they make it look natural. Yeah, um, but that's the ultimate, uh, you know, that is the ultimate expression of all the hard work and all the sophistication is to get to a point where it looks easy.

• 1:09:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Is there one writer and one investor that you think is one of those greats that make it look easy? But you or we all know that there's a bunch of hard work that goes into it? That when you think of like, hey, here's one of the greats, that come to mind?

• 1:09:58Speaker 02

  Well, look, Hemingway, but he doesn't make it look easy. You know, like, holy shit, that man could write, but he was a, he was a craftsman, man. Poetry, you know, you look at poetry, that's, real poetry is, is, is now talking about distillation of ideas and concepts, human truths, down to just few words. You know, that's, that's real. Look, investors, I don't know how to say they make it look easy. Like, uh, I mean, I know investors with amazing track records.

• 1:10:37Speaker 02

  They just find, you know, after a while, they find their, um, what they're, what they're good at. And they just stick with that and just get better and better at it. Like some might be good at people, some might be good at this, some might be good at that, some might be good at sniffing out tech. You know, they find what their thing is and then they just like focus on that. Not all of them are just betting on people. Some are like, we'll find the right tech and then the people will all be there, you know?

• 1:10:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, um, I forget the exact numbers, uh, so somebody on Twitter will correct me. Um, but it's like, I think it's Sequoia's first fund, they had like nine investments in it. And I don't know, 70, 80, 90% of the capital that came back, that made it a very well performing fund, were based on two companies. Those two companies, they incubated internally.

• 1:11:23Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:11:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And so this whole idea of venture capital, right? They were one of the earliest venture capital funds, but actually they incubated two of the companies.

• 1:11:31Speaker 02

  That's interesting.

• 1:11:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Now, there's two pieces of that. One, the companies were successful, so obviously that, you know, kudos to them. But two is they most likely, I'm assuming, owned a bigger portion.

• 1:11:42Speaker 02

  Larger portion of it, yeah, yeah. Disproportionate portion of it, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:45Anthony Pompliano?

  And so it, it's, I bring that up because, uh, not everyone does it the same way. Right? And if you compare the very best, like true venture capital firms where they're just investing regardless of the stage, and somebody like a YC, right, who, two different models, but they both can be successful. And it really is just like people doing what they think is the right thing to do.

• 1:12:08Speaker 02

  It really is, man. It really, really is. You have your thing, you stick, you know, you go at it, give it your best and you iterate, you know? Um, in anything, um, as you said, I've been writing, right? You don't publish your first draft. People don't see all the drafts you go through. You iterate the hell out of it, you know, until you get to a point, okay, this is the product I'm putting out.

• 1:12:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. How do you think about, um, I'll, I'll say media, but maybe that's not the, the correct term, but just...

• 1:12:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Society's moving into this like more shorter term attention span. You've got Twitter, you've got things like TikTok, etc. Now you've got books that are becoming more popular as audiobooks than written books.

• 1:12:50Speaker 02

  Oh, audiobooks are saving publishing, like for love.

• 1:12:53Anthony Pompliano?

  You think that they're saving publishing?

• 1:12:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, publishers tell me that. Like audiobooks are doing so well. And think about the marginal cost of an audiobook versus, you know, digital download versus, you know, a paper book, right? They make more, they charge just as much, right? And audiobooks are a resurgence actually in publishing. And I had my publisher tell me that they can tell a book is really hitting it with their, with the audience when the audiobook does better than all the other editions. And they call me and they said like, look, we have good news. Your audiobook is really outperforming other editions and that's actually good news.

• 1:13:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Because of the profit margin associated with it or because of something else?

• 1:13:34Speaker 02

  It's a trend they've noticed in the ones that end up doing well over time that the audiobook leads.

• 1:13:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 1:13:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was interesting to me.

• 1:13:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I would not, I would not guess that.

• 1:13:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:45Anthony Pompliano?

  It's, um,

• 1:13:48Anthony Pompliano?

  it's interesting to think about because do you think that changes the way that people write?

• 1:13:55Speaker 02

  Depends. The way I write is my own unique style. I write almost like you would hear me speaking, like my cadence and my sentence structure is written that way. So for me to read was, I mean, doing an audiobook is actually really hard to read your own book.

• 1:14:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 1:14:12Speaker 02

  Because it's not like you just sit here and like a podcast and you talk. You're going sentence by sentence. There's a producer there, there's an engineer there, there's probably like another producer there. And they stop, you make and go repeat this, that, you know? You'll add ums and this and that, or there'll be pauses, there'll be like little sounds. So, you know, to read a book, well, you'll be in the studio for days, morning till evening, reading and your mouth gets really dry and you're just like, what about your cadence? You can't just read fast at one point and slow on the other point. And you gotta have emotion and rhythm, you know, and you've really gotta feel it.

• 1:14:47Speaker 02

  I, you know, it's, but people love it, man. I'm getting like, like really great messages about the audiobook.

• 1:14:56Anthony Pompliano?

  You just made me think.

• 1:14:59Anthony Pompliano?

  If your unique style is writing the way you talk, do you sit down and write and what you're actually typing or writing is the first creation? Or do you actually talk and do a recording?

• 1:15:12Speaker 02

  No, no, no. When I say that, I write like I talk. It's not that. It's like there's a rhythm to it. There's a rhythm of speech to it. I don't do, I, I write. I sit in front of a blank page and I write.

• 1:15:22Anthony Pompliano?

  So Kevin Hart has a documentary on Netflix. Plin is sitting here in the room with us and chill. Correct me. And if I remember, it was a book where he started to write the book, but he would, whenever he had an idea, he would record on his phone on voice notes?

• 1:15:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was in Joe Rogan and he shared that too.

• 1:15:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, is that where he said, okay, yeah. So, so basically he would record the voice notes and then like, I'm assuming he didn't write the book, right? Like it got turned into a book later. But it was really interesting that I always thought of, you write a book, then you go in the, and through the process you described of like then you record the audiobook. It's almost actually like he recorded the audio, it got turned into a book, and then maybe even got turned into an audiobook afterwards.

• 1:16:07Speaker 02

  Well, I think he recorded the thoughts.

• 1:16:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, the ideation of it.

• 1:16:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, the thoughts don't equal the, the product. The thoughts are the, the theme, but then you gotta write the thing. Right? Which is different. How do you write it in a way that it's succinct? It gets across. It's easy to read. It's easy to, you know, take in. That's still the work.

• 1:16:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you find that's the hardest part?

• 1:16:29Speaker 02

  It's just a part of it. It's a part of doing it.

• 1:16:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Just one part.

• 1:16:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Um, I've played around with recording, um, thoughts, uh, but because I'm a writer, I've trained myself enough that I can sit in front of a blank page and my, you know, like it's actually easy for me to bang them out there and then play with it. I can move things around. I can edit. I can write pages and just take one line and create something out of that one line.

• 1:16:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I, um, I think a lot, we were talking a little bit before about this like, uh, passive listening, um, that's going on. And I think AirPods have had a huge part of that, et cetera. But the content that people create. I don't think we'll identify that it's changing, but it starts to change.

• 1:17:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, as you were talking, well, you were talking about like the tension span, right? Like the everything is getting shorter and shorter, which I'm finding really interesting. Like, for example, when the first version came out, right? I got so many emails, like right away. This one came out, I'm getting the emails, but I'm getting more significantly more is Instagram stories. People like reaching out to me using Instagram stories about how much the book means to them or how it's changing their lives and this one, which is really, I find kind of interesting, but also bizarre because the Instagram story disappears, right? So if I didn't like open Instagram that day, I wouldn't have seen it, right? So they come, I see a lot in my, a lot in my Instagram box. There's like primary, general, and then I think the other.

• 1:17:53Speaker 02

  And other, I'll open it and they'll be like, all these people, you know, mentioning your story. But when I click on it, it's expired. So I can't see what they said to me because then, you know, unless I get to it in time.

• 1:18:03Anthony Pompliano?

  You mean you don't walk around with your phone glued to your, to your hand?

• 1:18:08Speaker 02

  I do, but like I try, social media such as suck, you know, time suck. They're trying not to, I had someone reach out to me, this guy.

• 1:18:17Speaker 02

  And he was like, hey, your book, you know, really helped me. I read it twice. I was like, hey, thank you, whatever. And started hammering me that he's following me, why am I not following him? And like really started hammering me like I was, it's some, the guy had a lot of, he was like something like, I don't know, 90,000 followers and I don't know, I don't know why, I think he was insulting. I was like, look, man, I just, it's not my thing, man. Look, I follow only my friends, you know, or maybe except for a couple of people I really admire. Right? And I don't want to say I don't admire you, I just don't know you, man. Like, but he was like really just going back and forth. And then I could see he unfollowed me because, you know, I was like, I actually took the time to explain him. Look, man, I only follow close friends. That's what, um, one thing I do do is when people follow me, I go check out their page.

• 1:19:01Speaker 02

  I'm always very curious who these human beings are, you know, the people are who follow, because they're following me because of my books, right? But I found that really strange, an adult. This wasn't like a millennial, you know, like a teenager or whatever. This was an adult getting really upset that I kept on hammering Abby, like to not to follow him.

• 1:19:20Anthony Pompliano?

  So probably about to get myself in trouble here, uh, but.

• 1:19:25Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a, um, there's a group of people who, uh, they usually come out of like the consulting, marketing type world where it's not authentic. Remember, remember what I told you about, uh, people going through motions because they feel like they're orchestrating, like that's what they're supposed to do. So there's a couple of people I'm thinking of immediately. For obvious reasons, I'm not gonna say who they are, but.

• 1:19:49Speaker 02

  Oh, come on, say who they are.

• 1:19:51Anthony Pompliano?

  They, they do a lot of different things and they're the ones who they've got the 50 hashtags and they've got, you know, I mean, they're doing all this stuff and it's all the things that they're supposed to do. If they want to grow an online audience, they want to, you know, build a follow, all this kind of stuff. But because either it's the motions that they're focused on and not the quality of the content, or there's a lack of authenticity, they usually have no, I mean, it's like ghost town. And it's a reminder to me, like even with the podcast, right? I do a podcast. I want as many people to listen as possible. And we can do all sorts of things to try to in, uh, increase the visibility or, uh, listeners, all kinds of stuff.

• 1:20:36Anthony Pompliano?

  You know what the number one thing to do? Record quality conversations.

• 1:20:39Speaker 02

  You know, content is, in the end, it's the content is king, you know, like, um, I was talking with my brother about it. He's like, look, when he did, I think Tim Ferriss's original, you know, people worry about the right mic and this and when he did his, when he was in Tim Ferriss's pocket, he said, he goes, I was in my AirPods, you know, just online on my AirPods. He said like, look, and I was like, yeah, content. And it's a very well downloaded episode and it's just content is king. In the end, people forget that, right?

• 1:21:05Anthony Pompliano?

  It's true.

• 1:21:06Speaker 02

  But that's actually something I've been noticing and it's, I'm like, it's really interesting. So people contacting me are talking about the book by Instagram stories, which are ephemeral, which disappear. That's something I haven't seen before, right? And I wonder.

• 1:21:20Anthony Pompliano?

  These are, these are more like adults or?

• 1:21:22Speaker 02

  These are all adults.

• 1:21:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:21:24Speaker 02

  Yes, which is really interesting, right? So I wonder where that's going. There's this content that comes and disappears, right? I was talking to this one guy, um, Who runs an agency in LA. He represents TikTok stars. So now, this is, you could say like, the guy spends time, he's talking about, yeah, you know, and the talent this and the talent that. Dude, your talent's a 15 year old who poses in their underwear and dances with bears, you know, with teddy bears.

• 1:21:51Anthony Pompliano?

  You're not talking about The Rock.

• 1:21:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, but like, how he calls, like, yeah, and the talent will do this, and then that talent will do that. I'm, you know, like, it's, it's a-

• 1:21:58Anthony Pompliano?

  So my nieces.

• 1:22:00Speaker 02

  No, but like, but then, this is, then he's referring to people who are like, 11 million, 16 million followers on TikTok. You know, and you go look at their account and what they're doing, it's like this short content that doesn't, that's brief moments of dopamine hits that doesn't do anything for you. And I wonder where this is going. This has got to evolve, all these things do. But like, these nonstop dopamine hits, but that don't give you, usually in life, the way dopamine hits were structured. There's growth that comes from it. There's, there's something involved in growth. There's no growth, there's no learning that's happening here. That's what I wonder about. So you get these dopamine hits without the learning, so then you're just gonna be addicted to dopamine hits. That's what you're gonna need.

• 1:22:43Anthony Pompliano?

  But, okay, so two things on this. One is, I've got a brother who's 23. Conversations throughout his friends and now my brothers and I texting group chat.

• 1:22:58Anthony Pompliano?

  The memes drive the conversation. So all of the short videos, the viral stuff, like all this kind of stuff, that is the culture. And it took me a while to understand, but like, what is it? Marshall McLuhan, who says, "The medium is the message." Like, the meme's the message. And I didn't fully appreciate this until the recent, what we call it? Disagreement with Iran. So, we kill somebody, they shoot rockets, right? All this, like, serious stuff's going on. If you went on Instagram, on pretty much anyone under the age of, I don't know, 35, right? Every single account was posting, "We're going to World War III."

• 1:23:43Anthony Pompliano?

  But they weren't like, "Hey, the President of the United States on this date has declared we're going to World War III." It wasn't like a, like a news broadcast. It was meme after meme after meme of when World War III draft happens. And it's a guy like, you know, "Nope," turning and running away, right? And like all these like stupid little memes. To the point where, uh, Paulina has a cousin who lives in Bulgaria. And he DM'd us and he says, "Why is my Instagram filled with World War III memes?" Right? He's not, he didn't know, he's, you know, 17 years old, whatever he is. And what I started to understand is like, that's how these kids communicate. Right? Is they, they don't write, they don't chat.

• 1:24:25Anthony Pompliano?

  It's all through this like very kind of, um, visual, audio and video based, uh, kind of short content. And so like, if you asked a kid right now, it is actually an exercise, uh, I did with my brother, which was, he'll be embarrassed by this. I said, "Do you know how to write? Not like, write a book, but like, take a pen and physically write." And I was giving him a hard time. And he was like, "Yeah, I do, but my hand gets tired." Think about that for a second.

• 1:24:55Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:24:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Literally, he doesn't write ever. I don't ever write.

• 1:24:59Speaker 02

  Actually, we didn't, none of us do it really, do we?

• 1:25:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And so he was like, "Yeah, but if I write for two, like, my hand gets tired." And you start to think about like, society's changing. Right? And that doesn't matter for six months or a year or five years, but over 50 years.

• 1:25:13Speaker 02

  I mean, look, it's not a, there's, you know, humans evolve. So it's not a bad thing. They'll, they'll figure things out. I just, this ephemeral content though, I wonder, with these dopamine hits, um, that without the growth involved, what does, what does that lead to?

• 1:25:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:25:29Speaker 02

  Right? That's where I think is going to be interesting.

• 1:25:35Speaker 02

  So I don't know.

• 1:25:37Anthony Pompliano?

  One other trend for you that you reminded me of, that I'm still trying to understand, but right now I'm fascinated by. So you mentioned TikTok stars. There's two exactly what you described. There are two girls that are sisters that are probably 13 and 15 that went viral on TikTok. And I don't have TikTok, so I could care less, didn't know, whatever. All of a sudden, I see an older guy who's a dad on Instagram. Somebody DM'd me a photo he posted. And he's got a lot of followers. Who's this guy? Come to find out, he's the father of the two girls.

• 1:26:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And so when the girls went viral on TikTok at 13 and 15, they then told their parents to get TikTok accounts. So the mom and dad have TikTok accounts. And then they would bring the parents into their videos and tag their parents. The dad has 1 million followers on TikTok. On Instagram, he's got a couple hundred thousand, right? And you start to realize, and he's like into it, right? I mean, he's, he like is enjoying the fact that like it's like a family affair. But you start to realize like, that's basically what the Kardashians did with their TV show. Now you're just getting a replay of it on TikTok or Instagram or wherever. But now you're gonna have these like famous social media families, not just, you know, you go viral, now you're famous.

• 1:27:04Anthony Pompliano?

  The kids are telling their parents to get on the platforms. And it's just this weird thing that I don't fully understand yet.

• 1:27:10Speaker 02

  What do you think is gonna, I mean, like TikTok's a phenomenon, right? What do you think's gonna happen there? Because like Instagram, you can understand that like, I mean, in the end, these are companies, they're built by companies. These are not built by, you know, nonprofit, well-meaning socialist people, you know, who want good for the world. They're built by hardcore capitalists, right? And so how does something like TikTok, Instagram, you can understand that people will, you can, it's easy to create a following and then sell from there, you know? If you make whatever you're known for, you can just, people make good livings off Instagram. And it was always known that would happen. It was always, it was easy to make that, that leap. What do you think about TikTok though? I've been trying to figure that out. Like, how do you, how will that monet?

• 1:27:55Speaker 02

  One of the ways they're monetizing is, for example, like this guy I met, he's a talent agent. So people pay. The talent, you know, a lot of the content actually turns out with people with big followings is paid for.

• 1:28:08Anthony Pompliano?

  So I can't, I can't say what the product is because I think they'd be upset, but there's a well-known game. That is popular in the younger demographic. And recently I sat down with one of the guys and he said, they saw this huge spike, like a very obvious something happened. They went to all the platforms, they couldn't find, couldn't figure it out, couldn't figure it out, right? And they're, you know, early 30s or so. Somebody that knows somebody knows somebody says, oh, there was a kid who made a TikTok.

• 1:28:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Getting in the car, walking in the store, going to the aisle, grabbing the game, going to the register at home, playing the game. How many followers? That one viral video on TikTok, there was no link to click on, there was no, you know, click here to buy, none of that stuff. But the association and the awareness of the product, people then went that followed that person online and sales spiked. And so it's like, very hard to engineer, very, very hard to measure.

• 1:29:20Speaker 02

  Not hard to engineer, hard to measure, no, because as I learned from this guy, people pay for this.

• 1:29:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, if you pay, yeah, if you pay, if you just go to somebody who's got a big audience, say, I'll pay you money, go do this.

• 1:29:30Speaker 02

  They have, they have, they have people representing them, it turns out, all these kids.

• 1:29:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:29:35Speaker 02

  With big, have a big followings.

• 1:29:37Anthony Pompliano?

  They, so here's a, here's an idea for you.

• 1:29:41Anthony Pompliano?

  The sports stars of tomorrow are actually going to be the social media stars. So take the top, I don't know, 20 recruits coming out in basketball this year. I don't know the exact numbers. I bet you five to 10 of them went viral at some point in their high school career. And that's what built the buzz. And it translates into they'll go to the best schools, etc. And so if you're a parent, right, I play college football. What you would do is you would basically hope to God that the high school had a video of the games. Then they would either just give you the game tapes and you could just mail them to schools, or you

• 1:30:25Anthony Pompliano?

  would basically sit down and try to cut them up into a highlight tape. Right? This is before all these online platforms and everything, right? Literally, they were recording on VHSs.

• 1:30:34Anthony Pompliano?

  But you would send it directly to that one school and hope that school liked it and they call you and you kind of go through this process. Now, there's a kid in the stands who's got a camera who takes a video of some kid dunking or running for a touchdown or whatever. Next you know it goes viral. They tag the kid and that's how these kids are getting discovered is they're becoming social media phenomenons that translates into success.

• 1:30:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:56Anthony Pompliano?

  In sports.

• 1:30:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, TikTok's fascinating, man. It's because it is a new, just this growth.

• 1:31:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you have one?

• 1:31:06Speaker 02

  I mean, I open, I look, I'm in tech, you know, I, if something's taking off, I always go check it out. I have an account, you know, played around with it, more like seeing what the, I want to understand the product.

• 1:31:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think it's sustainable? Like as a platform? Meaning, we've seen a lot of platforms come, there's hype, and they dissipate. You think that this one is, it becomes the Facebooks, Twitters, Instagrams that are around 10 years.

• 1:31:32Speaker 02

  I don't think, I don't think that's the right analogy. I think this is something different.

• 1:31:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 1:31:37Speaker 02

  Facebook is still, it was a social network, but it was still more of an existing paradigm, right? And, and even Instagram was a social network built around photos. Instagram was the only real threat to Facebook, which is why Facebook bought them. Right? Seriously, it was the only real social, social network that was becoming a threat. And one of the smartest decisions they ever made.

• 1:32:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Mark's the greatest M and A.

• 1:32:05Speaker 02

  He really is, man. It's impressive. That's when you have, when you have a founder of a vision who owns and who has control. They will go do make WhatsApp, what he gave up for that, which seems brilliant now, right?

• 1:32:17Anthony Pompliano?

  At the time, $20 billion or whatever it was, that seemed insane.

• 1:32:21Speaker 02

  Look, at the time from Instagram, a billion dollars seemed insane, right?

• 1:32:25Anthony Pompliano?

  He bought both of those for 21 billion. That's it?

• 1:32:28Speaker 02

  That's it. Funny, right?

• 1:32:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Like compared to what they're worth today.

• 1:32:32Speaker 02

  It's funny money. Yeah. So I don't know, but TikTok, I think it's a different paradigm. I don't know. I haven't spent enough time. I know Gary Vee's really bullish on it and that guy's got a good nose for stuff.

• 1:32:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Underrated. As for as much, I think shit as people give him because of he's so out there and, you know, creates all his content, et cetera. If you look at his track record, he's one of the real legitimate guys.

• 1:32:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's got a very good nose for what the, where things are going.

• 1:33:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Trends and stuff.

• 1:33:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. He's got a very sharp nose for that.

• 1:33:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. How do you evaluate something like a TikTok when you're looking at it from a, is it real? Is it not? Like, just like, what's that process? So you get an account, you kind of play around with it, whatever. And then do you spend more time thinking, like introvertedly, or do you go and talk to a bunch of people?

• 1:33:22Speaker 02

  I'll talk to people. Like I went and talked to this guy who runs a marketing agency for actually some of the big accounts, like the Super Bowl or whatever, when they, when they're doing stuff on TikTok, you know, I'm like, what are they doing? And so forth to understand what's going on and what the growth is. And he's like, look, man, engagement and all this stuff on Instagram is going down. TikTok is just going up, you know? So it's a different kind of engagement. It's a very, very different. So you can't compare apples to oranges there. It's a very different kind of engagement that, you know, you know, the founder of Vine, you know, that Twitter bought, which Twitter's just great at destroying products, you know? And they had a real chance with Vine to create

• 1:34:02Speaker 02

  something, like the original TikTok there on top of the Twitter platform and users, right? That's what they had. That guy's come out with a new version of Vine, which is what, like five second or 12 second loops or whatever?

• 1:34:14Anthony Pompliano?

  You're talking about Byte and I think it's six seconds, if I remember correctly. Cause TikTok I think is one minute and Byte is six. We sound like we're like, like old people. Oh, did you hear about this TikTok thing that the kids are playing with?

• 1:34:28Speaker 02

  Well, at some point.

• 1:34:28Anthony Pompliano?

  I think it's one minute and six seconds is the difference between the two.

• 1:34:31Speaker 02

  At some point, you know, you want to be on top of everything that's going on if you're an investor, right? And also I'm fascinated by it. And, but I'm not someone who like spends a lot of time like building a social media following. I'm terrible at it, you know, people find me like, I don't like. Our friend of mine is like, oh yeah, I'll get you in this group and all of us are, you know, like we, we push each other's things up. And we've gotten like now hundreds of thousands of followers. I'm like, no, that's a lot of work to get followers, you know, like I'd rather just people find me. If they're interested, they'll find me.

• 1:34:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Quality wins.

• 1:35:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then you look at my engagement versus theirs. It's funny, they may have like 10x as many followers as I have or 100x. Engagement is similar.

• 1:35:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's kind of funny, right? And you'd rather have those, what was it?

• 1:35:15Speaker 02

  Who's Kelly, something Kelly said, you need a thousand true fans? Kevin Kelly?

• 1:35:22Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know who that is, but Paul Graham says you need a hundred people who love your product or company. Not a thousand people who kind of like you. So similar sentiments.

• 1:35:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. You need true fans. You'd rather have true fans, right? Who'll spread your word.

• 1:35:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Especially how the social platforms are built, right? Is the engagement drives the virality of something. And so that's really important.

• 1:35:45Anthony Pompliano?

  What, um, what's the biggest thing that you're excited about over the next 12 months? Tech, writing, anything?

• 1:35:54Speaker 02

  Honestly, that's a great question and the answer is I don't know. I'm kind of in an observation phase, observing myself, observing life.

• 1:36:01Anthony Pompliano?

  That's actually a fantastic answer.

• 1:36:03Speaker 02

  It is?

• 1:36:04Anthony Pompliano?

  It's honest.

• 1:36:07Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, when people come in, if I ask them that question, they bullshit me.

• 1:36:12Speaker 02

  That's funny.

• 1:36:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Like you genuinely don't know, right?

• 1:36:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, genuinely don't know.

• 1:36:18Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, before we finish up, I talked to everyone about aliens.

• 1:36:21Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 1:36:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Believer or non believer?

• 1:36:24Speaker 02

  Not, I'm agnostic. And it's, look.

• 1:36:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, why?

• 1:36:29Speaker 02

  Well, I kind of don't care.

• 1:36:32Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a very unique position to take. So why don't you care?

• 1:36:36Speaker 02

  Because does it affect my life? If the alien show my doorstep tomorrow affects my life, then I will care.

• 1:36:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:36:43Speaker 02

  You know, but until they do, it's fun. Like that Bob Lazar thing was fun to watch.

• 1:36:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Unbelievable.

• 1:36:50Speaker 02

  And that Joe Rogan episode and just that documentary was fun. Makes you go, huh? That sounds pretty credible. Wouldn't that be cool? That's my response is like, wouldn't that be cool? But I'm not going to sit there bet either way.

• 1:37:04Anthony Pompliano?

  So, uh, there's this guy who, um, had come on the podcast. He's like one of these like ancient alien guys. So like I always described the ancient alien theory as like, I buy the science of like the first 80% and then they describe, well, that's scientific anomaly that occurred. Aliens did it. Eh, they lose me on that part, but he came on the podcast and he, and, uh, one thing he said to me, that's just seared in my brain and probably will never leave. It's kind of like a good book. You take it away and you never forget. He said, humans, every human has the same two questions at some point in their life. Are we here alone? And what happens when I die?

• 1:37:44Anthony Pompliano?

  And I thought that was a really interesting way to frame.

• 1:37:46Speaker 02

  There's another one. Why am I here?

• 1:37:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Why am I here?

• 1:37:50Speaker 02

  That's, I would say we all go through that.

• 1:37:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you have an answer?

• 1:37:55Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:37:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think?

• 1:37:58Speaker 02

  I've had different answers, different points in my life.

• 1:37:59Anthony Pompliano?

  I was gonna ask, do you think it's possible to get one answer?

• 1:38:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't, I mean, look, people find faith. A lot of people do it through faith, you know?

• 1:38:09Speaker 02

  Some people, there is no purpose. You know, some people do this, the whole thing is an illusion. I've studied with mystics. I, um, I was in Nepal last year, uh, in Mustang Valley, which was this part of Nepal was just opened up. And studied with the Bhan, who are the mystics of Tibetan Buddhism. I mean, the OGs, they've been around for 16,000 years. They were there before Buddhism got to Tibet. And their whole thing is awakening from the illusion. And I studied with them, their practices. And they literally believe like this, you know, one of them looked me straight in the eyes. I was asking why he was gonna go in a cave and I went and saw the cave literally in a cliff in the Himalayas, but nothing. In darkness for like months, we're bailing

• 1:38:50Speaker 02

  food and just meditate in a wall. And I'm like, why are you gonna do it? And he looked me in the eyes and he said, uh, because dreams are illusion and this is an illusion and I want to break free. You know?

• 1:39:03Anthony Pompliano?

  It's fucking crazy.

• 1:39:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, but that's their thing, right? Not ours, but that's their thing.

• 1:39:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And by the way, I mean crazy in a positive way.

• 1:39:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Like that he's so smart in order to like-

• 1:39:12Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, he was brilliant. He was, um, his title was Geishy, which is professor. So like very well trained in their monasteries and, uh, but this is part of the training, right? And so for them, it's, it's like this whole thing's a dream. This whole thing doesn't exist. There's only consciousness. This is just consciousness experiencing itself. You know, and you look at the other mystics, you look at Christian mystics, Sufi mystics, you look at Jewish mystics, you look at any tradition. You go to the mystics, which are, which are always the ones that they're nut jobs, the outsiders, but they're the ones they end up like then kinda co-opting their, what they say and making mainstream and that becomes religion often. Um, they all say the same thing. They literally all say the same thing that I've come across, which is like this whole thing's, this whole thing's

• 1:39:57Speaker 02

  an illusion. It's the matrix.

• 1:39:59Anthony Pompliano?

  They're, I was gonna say, they're like the, uh, the non-tech version of the simulation theory.

• 1:40:03Speaker 02

  Oh. The simulation, the hologram theory, everything. That's just, that's been around forever, man. Like that's been around for as long as man's been around. Like that, like that they're like, this, this thing's an illusion and the mind is, um, the mind is the thing that generates it. And, and different philosophies try to approach it differently. And, and the East, they want to break free of it, right? And the Western, or like you go down to more like the Judea Christian, whatever, they're, they're like, how can I use this to make my life better? But the underlying theory is the same. This whole thing's an illusion. So that's a very, very interesting one. Like what is this whole thing? It was just like waves off the ocean that come and go, but the ocean's still there, but the wave's gone, but the waves, has it really gone?

• 1:40:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, it, it brings the whole conversation full circle in that-

• 1:40:50Speaker 02

  It does?

• 1:40:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Whether it's, well- Whether it's the military, whether it's you sitting in a library as a kid, right? Whether it's building companies, writing, whatever, it's all mindset. I mean, ultimately, just what you described in the East versus the West perspective on the same theory or the same like application, it's just mindset. What are you optimizing for, right? And the way that I think about this is it goes back to the idea that every, your mind is more powerful than you'll ever understand. Right? And I tweeted earlier this week, there's a, I think it was an article, and in the article,

• 1:41:32Anthony Pompliano?

  the cover photo was one part of a fruit fly's brain, and they have successfully mapped, not the whole brain, one part of a fruit fly's brain. They have all the connections, all this stuff. It is the most complex thing you've ever seen. And they're talking about a fruit fly. And it's, you know, 20% of the brain, whatever. Well, when you move up to a human brain, there's zero chance during our lifetime we'll ever understand it. And so it's just, what do you want to, like, what mindset do you want to put your brain into? Your body follows, your actions follow, right? All of these things follow that, but like, you're ultimately in control, which probably

• 1:42:17Anthony Pompliano?

  scares the shit out of people.

• 1:42:18Speaker 02

  Hey, what do you think, where, like, you answer that question. Why are we here?

• 1:42:25Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't think that there's an answer. Like, in the sense of, if you ask the same person five times, different-

• 1:42:33Speaker 02

  Points in a life?

• 1:42:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, they all have different answers. And also, if you take, I got four brothers, five kids who all grew up in the same environment, very similar, did things on a daily basis, whatever, and you all ask us, we would all have different answers. And so it's not a, what were you taught type thing, etc. I really think it is, what's the answer for me today?

• 1:42:57Speaker 02

  There's also another question many people have asked at some point in their lifetime. You know, Shakespeare, was the one who put it really well, to be or not to be. You know, people when they go through shit, you know, people have, a lot of people have been at that point. Some people have actually gone beyond that point, you know, right? I'm sure you have friends, I have friends, you know, who've, that's another one, that's a very human one. May not phrase it that way, but.

• 1:43:24Anthony Pompliano?

  I tend to find, um, you ever go to a store and, uh, when you there and you look at a product? And there's all the shiny ones and then there's the one that obviously spent through some shit, got dropped it, you know, whatever. Like you can just tell it's different, right? I always think about that with people. A lot of times when you meet people, the people that stick out to me are the people that they don't tell you and you don't know, but you can tell they've been through shit. Because they tend to be calmer, they tend to be more rational. A lot of times they tend to be happier, actually, right? Like they have all of these things that it's not taught in a school, whatever. It's just they've been through challenges and they come out stronger because of it.

• 1:44:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, and the end ends up being a choice, you know, who are you going to be through that? You know, and I talked about that a lot in the book and when I share my own experience, it's like, you know, we have a two, we have, and look, I've been guilty of it, so I can speak for it. Like you have two choices as an adult in situations, you're either going to be the victim of this story, you're going to be the hero of this story. Same story, your choice, and that creates the narrative. And that actually is what creates the lead, the resulting story. That's a choice, that's a mindset and, you know, people, one can choose to do either.

• 1:44:44Anthony Pompliano?

  We're ending on that.

• 1:44:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Where, uh, where can people find the book?

• 1:44:50Speaker 02

  Oh, it's, um, you know, Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On, it's a really special book. I hope you get it. It's on any bookstore, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, independent bookstores, wherever fine books are sold, Audible, you name it.

• 1:45:02Anthony Pompliano?

  I've had a lot of people come on here and talk about their books. And I've never said this, but I actually highly recommend people go get this book.

• 1:45:10Speaker 02

  Thank you, man.

• 1:45:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course, that doesn't actually mean shit in the world, but legitimately, I think it's a good book. Um, people should go get it. So, all right, guys, thanks so much for listening to this. Thank you so much for your time and we'll have to do this again for sure.

• 1:45:22Speaker 02

  I would love it, this was fun.

• 1:45:25Anthony 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.