Marty Bent, Host of Tales from the Crypt: The Mirage of Central Banking

Marty Bent is the man and legend behind Marty's Bent, a daily newsletter about Bitcoin, along with the host of Tales from the Crypt, one of the most popular Bitcoin podcasts. In this conversation, Marty and Anthony discuss the importance of freedom of speech, the mirage of central banking, why Bitcoin can change an individual's mindset, how relationship between technology and privacy is evolving, why it is difficult to live in a time where information can't be treated, what is going on with Coronavirus, and how the current political structure is not well suited for the modern world we live in. BLOCKFI-----BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. UNSTOPPABLE DOMAINS-----Make your crypto currency payments simple and build censorship resistant websites. Visit unstoppabledomains.com and purchase your blockchain domains today!

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.

• 0:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Marty Bent is the man and legend behind Marty's Bent, a daily newsletter about Bitcoin. He's also the host of Tales from the Crypt, one of the most popular Bitcoin podcasts. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of freedom of speech, the mirage of central banking, why Bitcoin can change an individual's mindset, how a relationship between technology and privacy is evolving, why it is difficult to live in a time where information can't be trusted, what is going on with coronavirus, and how the current political structure is not well-suited for the modern world we live in. As always, Marty was awesome. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I think you guys will as well. But before we get into

• 0:51Anthony Pompliano?

  the episode, let's talk about our two sponsors. The first is BlockFi. That's right, BlockFi, absolutely killing the game. As Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies continue to evolve, we're going to need a lot of infrastructure. These wealth management services help people do more with their Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies. That's exactly what BlockFi is doing. Many of you already know, I'm a huge fan of the company, and I even invested alongside with being a user. Today BlockFi offers three products. The first is giving US dollar loans against your crypto as collateral. The second is an interest-bearing account for your crypto deposits, and the third is allowing you to buy or trade cryptocurrencies. These three products are important in helping people do more with their Bitcoin, Ethereum, or

• 1:33Anthony Pompliano?

  GUSD. If you don't want to sell your crypto but you need US dollar liquidity, BlockFi can give you a loan. Or maybe you're a long-term holder like me, and want to earn some interest on your assets. Obviously rates vary, but right now BlockFi is paying high rates on Bitcoin and GUSD deposits. Unheard of interest rates in the legacy fiat world. As if these three products weren't enough, BlockFi also recently told their users that they will be launching a credit card in 2020 that pays their rewards in Bitcoin, rather than cash back or loyalty points. Sounds pretty dope. Go ahead and check out BlockFi, longtime supporters of this podcast and I'm a huge fan. Head on over to blockfi.com/pomp and check them out. Again, blockfi.com/pomp,

• 2:13Anthony Pompliano?

  blockfi.com/pomp, one more time, blockfi.com/pomp. Let them know I sent you. Now, next is unstoppable domains. Many of you have probably heard about YouTube taking down crypto-related content, or Metamask getting removed from the Google Play Store. Well, the decentralized web is going to make that kind of censorship impossible. So unstoppable domains is trying to solve this in a couple of different ways. The first is you can go to unstoppabledomains.com and buy a .crypto domain to build a decentralized website. That website is then controlled by you and you alone. It's done the same way you control your Bitcoin with your private key. If you get a website set up on decentralized storage, you're the only one who can take it down. You can host a podcast, a blog,

• 2:56Anthony Pompliano?

  or whatever else you want on the domain without worrying about censorship. And if that wasn't cool enough, you can also use your .crypto domain to get paid in Bitcoin directly on that domain. So you can head over to wallets such as Trust Wallet, Atomic Wallet, or Coinomi right now, type a .crypto domain into the send field and you can pay someone. But unstoppable domains is also attacking this problem in a different way. They've created a browser. The browser's pretty dope. It's basically a super user-friendly way for people to access the decentralized web. So you can go to unstoppabledomains.com/browser. Again, unstoppabledomains.com/browser and download it today and begin checking out the decentralized

• 3:39Anthony Pompliano?

  web. You don't have to have high technical knowledge. You don't have to be a nerd to use it. You can be an everyday person and head on over to unstoppabledomains.com/browser and use their user-friendly browser to enter into the decentralized world. Promise you, super dope. You don't have to be a nerd. Go check out unstoppable domains new browser. All right, let's get into this episode with Marty. He kills it like he always does.

• 4:04Speaker 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.

• 4:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Marty, that's where we're gonna make the title. Uncle Marty's here.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  Uncle Marnie. I don't know why I named myself that.

• 4:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Where did that name come from?

• 4:37Speaker 02

  I don't know. It's just a joke to lighten the mood in the newsletter.

• 4:43Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. You've been here before. For those who didn't listen to the first one, because they're dumb, start from, real quick, kind of two-minute recap, what you did pre-Bitcoin, pre-becoming the Bitcoiners everywhere.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  I don't know. Voice Bitcoiners everywhere is a little...

• 5:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Sup freaks.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  Sup freaks. Yeah, so I found Bitcoin in college. I was studying economics at DePaul University in Chicago. And while I was in college studying economics, I worked for a managed futures fund, and we were a fund of funds. So we indexed CTA traders predominantly into, in a suite of funds. And my job there was an analyst, and some of the markets that CTAs that were indexing traded were currency markets, and that meant I had to follow Fed T-Leafs and central bank in the world. And so, early on in college, I sort of found Bitcoin and was studying it, and at the same

• 5:46Speaker 02

  time, working at this fund, having to write commentaries on why our fund was performing against market movements. And so I had to know why currencies were moving the way they were, which meant reading a lot of Fed policy. And over the course of three years of working at this fund, I sort of realized that the Fed had no idea what it was doing. I was getting more down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and sort of found Bitcoin in that way. I decided to... Leave the fun about a year and a half after college to go learn about UX UI design. I was very infatuated with tech and the whole space. So I wanted to go learn how apps were made. So I decided to learn via design first. So I took a digital design

• 6:31Speaker 02

  bootcamp designation. I think they recently bought by Lambda School in Chicago and that was the summer 2014. And I moved here to New York in like late summer 2014 and I got a job at a software company, learn about the backend of app development and stuff like that. So I learned the whole code stack behind the design. And then after about two years there, I decided to quit because I thought I was going to be able to get a job as a product manager. But apparently if you haven't built anything, getting a job as a product manager is pretty hard. So I had a little stint of unemployment there, but

• 7:12Speaker 02

  at the whole time I was still learning about Bitcoin, studying Bitcoin. And then about a year in unemployment, year and a half in unemployment, decided to start the newsletter, The Bent. It was June 2017. Markets were going crazy as you quote unquote crypto markets were going crazy as we're running into the run up of the bull market then. So I had a bunch of friends, family reaching out, emailing, texting me.

• 7:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Hey, you're a psycho. Like, what do you know about this?

• 7:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. You're the Bitcoin guy. Like, what's going on? Like, should we buy all this? Should we buy Ripple? Should we buy Yoda? I was like, oh, God, no.

• 7:50Anthony Pompliano?

  My one claim to fame from 2017, I've never taken my victory lap, but I'm going to take it right now, is I'm the one, you ever seen the CNBC video of Brian Kelly on TV with $2.50 XRP being like, here's the order book, here's how easy it is?

• 8:05Speaker 02

  Going to Paul Aniacs, here's how you buy it.

• 8:07Anthony Pompliano?

  So I was sitting at my buddy's apartment in Raleigh, North Carolina, and we were drinking before we were about to go out. And I think he had it on like TiVo or like CNBC or whatever. And it played and I lost it. I was like, wait, what just happened? And I was like rewind, play that back. No way. I just saw what I think I just saw. Played it a second time. We were like crying in laughter. Rewind it a third time and I videoed it on my phone and I just couldn't help myself. I was like, this is absurd. I tweeted it and I woke up the next day and I was like, man, I really like Brian.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  Take that victory lap.

• 8:47Anthony Pompliano?

  No, but like every once in a while now, people will retweet it. And they're just like, dude, $2.50 was a while ago.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. What's it at now? Like 30 cents if that? I don't even know.

• 8:58Anthony Pompliano?

  We're not going to make this a XRP hate session. We're, we're, we're all friends on the internet today. Kinda. Alright, so.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  We're the first 33,000 blocks.

• 9:09Anthony Pompliano?

  What?

• 9:12Anthony Pompliano?

  What, what happened with the, what did you do at Barstool? What, what was that experience like?

• 9:19Speaker 02

  That was a crazy experience. It was a relatively short-lived experience, but a crazy.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Very grateful that I had the opportunity to work there, especially at the time that I did. Yeah. So I started the newsletter in June of 2017 and then noticed a person is, somebody who's a person non-grada at Barstool now. My buddy Louis was tweeting at Stoolies that they should be buying Ethereum and I DM'd him like, and this was when Ethereum was like approaching $1,200. And I was like kindly like, you should meet up, you shouldn't be pumping this stuff to, to the Stoolies, especially like at this point in the bull market. So we met up for some drinks, just to talk about the space and he's infinitely fascinated by it.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  And he convinced me to start the podcast. And so that summer we started brainstorming about the podcast and started recording at Barstool's offices. And this was before. I started working there. I'm still unemployed, looking for a job. And I was lucky to be able to do the content stuff while I was unemployed and sort of just, I was always hanging around the Barstool offices at that point. And Lewis needed a, an account manager on his podcast ad sales team. So I took that job. And basically, yeah, I was able to get a front row seat to the rocket ship growing and they're hitting a takeoff speed.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  And at the same time, Bitcoin and crypto markets were going crazy. So I was the Bitcoiner in the room telling everybody to stop. Don't buy one chain. Don't buy iota. And I was on the rundown a couple of times. It was a crazy

• 10:59Speaker 02

  fall, winter that I spent there. I was only at Barstool for like eight months, but it was incredible experience. And I really admire what they do and what Dave Portnoy in particular has done to slowly, but surely build a brand over time. And as you know, we were talking about it earlier. They were on the NASDAQ yesterday flexing. So.

• 11:17Anthony Pompliano?

  My favorite part of yesterday was probably Dave in the suit and tie and Big Cat in like his bomber jacket. And I was just like.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Just dabbing on the mall.

• 11:26Anthony Pompliano?

  But the crazy thing about Barstool, I think, is just they've done what a lot of people previously have tried to do. They never veered from, we're just going to tell you what we think. Right? Like a lot of people tried that. And then when they get the backlash, they kind of cave to it. They backtrack. They apologize, whatever. And like these guys, just they're like, look, no, this is what we believe.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  They lean into it, which works and has worked for them for some time. And then on top of that, again, we like to talk about time preference a lot in the Bitcoin world. And Dave is somebody I think exemplifies a low time preference, handing out papers, starting in 2014. Slowly building the blog over time. And now he just, company's worth half a billion dollars just from showing up every day.

• 12:11Anthony Pompliano?

  I went back.

• 12:14Anthony Pompliano?

  A couple of days ago and I looked for, I remember he tweeted at one point the, like a picture of the first newspaper. And I'd forgotten that the top half is, you know, Barstool spores and it says, for the common man, by the common man. So the motto stayed the same for 15 years, but the bottom half of the front page is a Hooters ad.

• 12:35Anthony Pompliano?

  I was like, man, this guy was really gunning for the ads on day one.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  And I think they got Hooters back as a sponsor this year too, or 2019.

• 12:43Anthony Pompliano?

  So that, and then the once I went down the like Dave rabbit hole, like historical tweets. I was like, what other ridiculous things? And I remembered he made the Bitcoin video.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:54Anthony Pompliano?

  So in 2017, there's a video of him and he's like, I don't know what this shit is. Bitcoin, Bitcoin, whatever. Like, I'm just all in though. Some guy told me this is how I get rich.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  Funny story. I literally set him up with a wallet right before he recorded that. So I walked out of the room, he shut the door and hit record on that video. And I like went downstairs and I was like, you should not be.

• 13:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  He was like holding his treasure up in the camera. I was like, oh my God.

• 13:19Anthony Pompliano?

  So the all, the first time I discovered that some of the guys at Barstool into Bitcoin was Nate. I think like Nate either like tweeted about it or, or maybe we were like DMs. I, I forget. But at some point like he revealed himself as being interested. And all of a sudden I was like, oh shit, like these dudes have a lot of influence. And if they position it as like gambling, this is going to get bad real fast. Cause like they got an army of people who are going to do what they say to do. And it was just kind of like, oh shit.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  I mean, that's why I was happy. I mean, not saying that any influence on any of these, any of the Barstool employees, but I was happy to potentially be a voice of reason in the background there. Like, all right, guys. Uh, stuff's blown up and crashed many times in the past. Yeah. It's, uh, slow and steady is the game here. Probably most likely. In my opinion, Bitcoin is the only one worth buying. Definitely is the only one worth buying, in my opinion. But yeah, no, I mean, they lean into everything. Like we were talking about, uh, Zillion beers. They, they know when to touch, when something's hot and when to lean in. And that's something that Dave's really, uh, honed in on, uh, is leaning in on stuff.

• 14:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. My favorite thing, um, that I've learned from Barstool, you don't even remember. saying this to me, but it's actually something you told me when you came to record the first podcast episode, I think I asked you something like as you're leaving. I was like, what'd you learn? And you were just like, show up every day.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And like, it's always stuck in my head from a, that's literally what that man did. He did this for 14, 15 years, showed up every day. And if you, I think Erica Nardini, the CEO, gave an interview and she was like, yeah, I got to the office and like, there's like uncashed checks lying everywhere. These guys had no clue what they were doing. And if you go back and look at like the old rundowns, it's Dave standing in the corporate office, which really looks like his like parents attic, basically.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  Rest in peace in the Milton office.

• 15:22Anthony Pompliano?

  And he's standing there and he's somehow videoing himself. And then you got Big Cat and KFC, like sitting at their home, basically. And they're just talking shit to each other. But it's entertaining, it's funny, and that's how you build the audiences. Like people who want to watch that stuff come back every day, day after day for years. And then you get what they got today.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I mean, I was, I've been a stool stoolie since high school. So I was

• 15:46Anthony Pompliano?

  How old are you?

• 15:47Speaker 02

  Uh, 28.

• 15:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, you're younger. Yeah. So I was in college, first time I like, I was probably like a sophomore. I'm 31.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, he had a, they had Philly, I'm from Philly and Philly, the Philly Barstool outfit had a really good writer. He's not there anymore. Tall Maurice, Mo. And I really liked his takes on Philly sports and the culture around Philly.

• 16:06Anthony Pompliano?

  That is a Philly name. I've heard one.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  Think he's working at actually, uh, he's in New York somewhere now. But, um, yeah, I started reading in high school. And then when I was actually at DePaul in Chicago in college, Big Cat actually lived not too far from me. So I would see him walking Stella like every once in a while. And it's funny, like I've seen the brand grow and no, I'm just happy that they are where they are now. Cause I think they're a great example of show up, work hard, and it took a lot of hard work.

• 16:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, for sure.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  Which a lot of people take for granted these days. And like we were saying, a lot of media companies try to skirt that hard work with clickbait and other stuff like that.

• 16:45Anthony Pompliano?

  He also talked about like leaning in, um, he understands like the trends more than I think people give them credit for. Uh, my favorite is the recent, uh, hiring of Vin Dog.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  The meme lord Vin.

• 16:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Sixty-three-year-old man who, he literally just texts, he goes, "Hey, we got a meme war brewing over here. Are you ready?" And like, as much as it's comical and entertaining, whatever, like, that is where the world is today, right? If you overwhelm an opponent, you know, an insexual opponent on the internet with memes, like, you win internet points. And they understand that.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, they definitely understand that. And it, uh, now it highlights something we talk a lot about in Bitcoin too. Like, the sovereign individual thesis, like, it is, we talked about it in that book. Like, it's gonna be independent content traders that win the minds of the masses, especially as traditional media sort of gets too bloated and monolithic to move like a Barstool does. Like, nobody could be as brash as Barstool is because they have too much of a quote-unquote reputation that they're worried about tarnishing. And Dave just takes it the complete opposite way. And it's worked out for them, I mean.

• 17:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 17:55Speaker 02

  And the modern age of digital media, Barstool is obviously winning.

• 18:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What's your favorite segment that they do across the whole company?

• 18:03Speaker 02

  Uh, I'm a big fan of the Wanton Don, Donnie Does. I think he actually does a very good job of introducing the Barstool audience to other cultures. And he does, uh, it's not your average travel show, but it definitely is a unique way to get introduced to other cultures outside of America.

• 18:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I did not think you were gonna pick that one.

• 18:30Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I think that my favorite thing that's happened with the segment is now Dave's become a celebrity when he does the pizza reviews. Like, the fact that he walks out of a pizza store and all of a sudden there's like twenty, thirty people taking pictures of him? Like, what world do we live in?

• 18:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I'll be sitting at my desk at home and I'll just hear my wife laughing in the background. I'm like, "You watching the pizza review?" She's like, "Yeah." She loves it. No, that's some, that's another thing you lean into, right?

• 18:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  Just when they moved to New York, they did a few pizza reviews up in Boston, I think, like every once in a while. And then New York being the city of pizza, just lean into that. And it's become a, I've got a fucking app for it, a standalone app.

• 19:13Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm a, they probably, well, actually Dave probably wants this to be forgotten segment, but I'm gonna remind everyone, remember that Dave walks to work?

• 19:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:22Anthony Pompliano?

  And he would walk down the street and he was live streaming and then all of a sudden, people started to like recognize where he was. And I remember the one day that some guy, some stool, he saw him walking down and videoed and his bald spot. And it was like mass chaos for like three days. And all of a sudden, Dave walks to work, went away.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  On every, yeah, that was an incredible one. I mean, that's the beauty, that's another thing, that's the beauty of, of Dave, that's like interactive with the fans.

• 19:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  And that's something I try to do with our podcast, like sub freaks.

• 19:50Anthony Pompliano?

  What are you, what are you guys doing? Like walk us through kind of everything. So you started with the newsletter. Then you got the podcast.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's about it. So we have the newsletter, which is a daily newsletter, six days a week now.

• 20:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, because you added Saturday.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Sat standard.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  Trying to make SATS the standard. So we started the SATS standard.

• 20:12Anthony Pompliano?

  God, guy's so smart.

• 20:13Speaker 02

  It's like a weekly.

• 20:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Branding genius.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  That's Matt Odell. He named that. But yeah, I mean, I, then it all started organically. It's grown organically, which I'm very happy of. I don't think we forced too many things up to this point. And again, so the newsletter started as family and friends reaching out. And again, before even like reached out to Barstool or work there, I had the mentality of I want to bring a Barstool like voice to Bitcoin because it's so hard to approach for a lot of people. So I just tried to make it more approachable for it with my family and friends in mind. And then it's taken on a life of its own. Obviously, a lot of people are reading it now. And then the podcast was the next iteration of that. And it's, people are like, all right, I like your writing. Let's, let's do a podcast.

• 20:59Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the process for coming up with what to write every morning? I write every morning and I, I'm assuming we have the same process, but I want to hear yours first.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  I just wake up and see what I tweeted the day before and point at something like, all right, spend an hour writing on this.

• 21:14Anthony Pompliano?

  So

• 21:14Speaker 02

  Some days I have a better idea than others, but yeah, at some point you got to write and you just got to pick something around with it.

• 21:23Anthony Pompliano?

  I think we're very similar in the like, I gotta write something. So like, let me quickly search for inspiration, whether it's something I tweeted, something somebody else tweeted or like an article. And then just, what do I think about this? I don't know. Uh, yeah. And next thing you know, you hit publish and like you're done.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, obviously I try to give, I attempt to bring a good perspective on everything every day and be as factual and educational as possible. Like I was, I was happy with today's bent because it was more technically focused and something.

• 21:52Anthony Pompliano?

  You do do that more than most, I think, is that you, whenever there's updates or I remember when like it was the inflation bug and like, you're able to not only explain the technical aspects of it, but also then pull in all these different like, I probably have discovered more people in the Bitcoin, like hardcore technical community through you than anybody else.

• 22:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I don't know where you find them, but you're always like, oh, my friend. Uh, it's like some like random person. It's been, it's just being on Twitter for so long. I've been curating a Bitcoin list since like 2015, I think. That's like,

• 22:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Is it public or private?

• 22:27Speaker 02

  It's public. It's got like five, 500 followers now, which is pretty cool for a list. But, um, yeah, I, I feel like I've put my 10,000 hours in and know who to follow and where the good information comes in. Like again, go back to the sovereign individual, you have to create and filter your own news sources and find the signal yourself. It's not going to be brought to you. You got to really work hard for it. And over the last six, seven years, I've really been sort of filtering my information feeds and being here in New York, we're blessed to be able to go to meetups like Bit Devs where you have some of the core developers showing up and explaining what they're working on. Um, so that certainly helps. And yeah, I just feel like, again,

• 23:12Speaker 02

  I put a lot of time trying to understand how this all works and

• 23:17Speaker 02

  feel like I'm in a unique spot to sort of.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  Translate that for some people in a, in a, in a way which is more digestible than technical documents or something like that.

• 23:29Anthony Pompliano?

  At the end of every newsletter, you put your like, what do you call it, random thought?

• 23:32Speaker 02

  Final thought.

• 23:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Final thought.

• 23:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Where, where do they come from? Cause some of them are hysterical. You, the one, I think I told you just before, you hit us one time with like, uh, I like sitting in the shower.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  Now I was hungover and there's no, no worse feeling than being hungover, sitting in the shower.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it's literally a final thought. I think I had taken a shower before I wrote the bent that morning was like.

• 23:54Anthony Pompliano?

  And so you just whatever, whatever thought you have just randomly.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, like this morning, it was like a big, big shave day for me. I was like, I went and shit, like trimmed my beard up and that was it. Then cause at some point you gotta get it out and I don't, I'm gonna final thought. It's been a lot of music lately, like a song I'm listening to while I'm writing. I'll just link to that YouTube. Um, say I like this, I like this song.

• 24:15Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. And then the podcast, you do one to two interviews a week, plus you've got the rabbit hole recap. What, let's talk about the interviews first and then Matt Odell was like the MVP surprise out of nowhere one day, just like, oh, Matt Odell now is gonna do this every single week. I was like, these guys are fucking incredible. So where, what was the point of starting the podcast initially?

• 24:38Speaker 02

  People wanted more than the newsletter and they wanted to hear, uh, from the people I was writing about directly. And again, being in New York, that everybody comes through New York at some point or another. And there's a lot of Bitcoiners here in New York. So it was just easy. Having been gone to Bit Devs and, uh, meeting these developers and people working in the space. It was pretty easy. Once you develop a light, a level of trust, just to be like, hey, you want to come on and discuss this stuff on air? And so, yeah, that was the impetus for that. And it's been incredible. Forged some great friendships, learned a lot, uh, doing that alone. And then Matt and I started Rabbit Hole Recap in September of, or yeah, September of 2018.

• 25:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Did you know that you wanted to start like another type of show or did you guys just do one and then you're like, oh, let's do it again?

• 25:28Speaker 02

  No, we, I. Tap Matt on the shoulder intentionally being like, we need a weekly show.

• 25:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  I really love your shit. Matt had been on the podcast earlier that year. He's here in New York. And yeah, I never, I don't ever just want to put content out to put content out. Like, I want to make sure it's, has value. And so like, I got to a point where I thought like, I was forcing interviews. And something like a weekly news show, something with Matt, with something dependable, where you keep putting content out and it's not forced. It's, uh, it's actually got a legit, um, strategy and, and sort of, uh, like, what's the word I'm looking for? Cadence and, uh, structure, if you will.

• 26:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Makes sense. How do you think about, like, freedom of speech in today's world? Now that we've seen the great purge of Zero Hedge on Twitter?

• 26:24Speaker 02

  I think freedom of speech is, uh,

• 26:27Anthony Pompliano?

  I know you have a lot. So for those that don't know, uh, I've seen, I think you go on two tirades on Twitter over the last, like, maybe 12 months or so, that I can remember. And one of them was all around the Zero Hedge situation. So just like, it happened, Zero Hedge got banned. There's a whole bunch of controversy around who led to that banning? Who participated? Why they got banned? Was it doxing? Was it not? All this stuff. It's been a couple of weeks now. Like, what's your thoughts now?

• 26:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I don't think-

• 26:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Are you more fired up or less fired up?

• 27:00Speaker 02

  I mean, that's a, that's the thing, like, as time passes, there's, it feels like you're powerless. There's nothing you can do, like, I'm definitely-

• 27:07Anthony Pompliano?

  It kind of feels like it's over.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. I don't, I'm obviously not as fired up as, I think it was exactly three weeks ago at this point, as it was this time, three weeks ago. But I still think it's fucked up that Zero Hedge was banned. Like, I don't think they should have been. And Zero Hedge, for me personally, like, after 2008, 2009 crisis, like, they were actually a very good source of quality information. And yes, they've strayed away from that a bit with a lot of, uh, shittier pieces on their site. But there still is very good content on their site. You just have to, again, you have to know how to filter it. And I think their banning is an example of free speech being attacked in the modern age. Again, going back to, the onus is on the individual to filter information, in my opinion, these days. And to have, uh-

• 27:54Speaker 02

  Silicon Valley tech companies sort of dictating who they believe should be able to speak and not speak on their platforms. That just doesn't sit well with me.

• 28:05Anthony Pompliano?

  So like, I don't disagree with anything you just said. I always then jump to like, what is the answer? Or like, if I was Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, etc. I always struggle with, I don't know if there is an answer.

• 28:20Speaker 02

  Urbit, man.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  Pick one sign guy right here. Urbit, something like Urbit, maybe? I mean, owning your own data, right? Like, I think that may be the answer. Or what I say, been saying more recently is people just need to speak up. Like, a lot of, it shouldn't take people with tens of thousands of followers on Twitter to speak up on behalf of other people, like individuals. I believe there is a silent majority out there who does feel the same way that freedom of speech is being attacked and feel like they're powerless. I feel like more people need to speak up and demand that free speech be protected. And then you can roll that into privacy as well.

• 29:05Speaker 02

  You know, privacy is being eroded as, at the same time as free speech is.

• 29:11Speaker 02

  Hand in hand, especially with financial privacy. Like, money is dictated as free speech here in the United States and...

• 29:18Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, that makes me think, I think you're the one today who said, oh no, he said delete Coinbase about the Clearview stuff. I thought you said fuck Clearview, but no, you said delete Coinbase.

• 29:30Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think of privacy, how do you balance? Like, there's information, photos, etc., that's been put into the quote-unquote "public sphere" that some of it was done intentionally, right? You or I posted photos of ourselves five years ago on the internet and they're still out there somewhere. Some of it's unintentional. I have a photo with you from five years ago and I post it. You don't even know that I posted it, right? Somebody can come find it, etc. That type of information being used for facial recognition, things like that. Like, how do you think through the framework?

• 30:04Speaker 02

  It's inevitable, right? I mean, but...

• 30:07Anthony Pompliano?

  I would agree with that.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  It's inevitable, but like, we should have, again, constitutional protections in place where...

• 30:16Speaker 02

  It can't be used against you as aggressively as it is like I think we have two paths we can go down right now. Either get back towards the arc of freedom, freedom of speech, privacy, freedom to move money, or we export the Chinese surveillance social credit system to the rest of the world. And that's what I say in the newsletter a lot. We are erecting the digital panopticon and being cattle herded into it. While right now it's just credit scores and Instagram feeding you ads based off of what you talk about with your wife. But in a second, they can flip the switch and just be used against you. And one second, you're getting fed ads,

• 30:58Speaker 02

  the next you're not being allowed to buy plane tickets because you said something uncouth.

• 31:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Or you went outside to another country and there's a virus. And now you can't fly back to the United States. Yeah. Right. Literally, I went to my cousin's wedding in Mexico and I think United Airlines literally emailed me four times before the flight being like, if you went to China in the last 14 days, don't show it to the airport. And I was like, well, thank God I didn't. But if I had, how do you get home?

• 31:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. And how do you? Yeah.

• 31:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Right. And that's for like a quote unquote, health related incident. You're basically saying, well, what if it was just because you posted a stupid picture? Right? Or you are friends with somebody?

• 31:41Speaker 02

  slippery slope. And that's why I mentioned Urbit, right? You want to build systems and Bitcoin falls into the sky to quarter two systems where it's just not possible to do stuff like that. Like Bitcoin being a distributed peer to peer cash system where if you are running your own full node and you have control of your UTXOs and you are broadcasting the transactions yourself, it's very hard for people to stop you from doing that.

• 32:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Do we get to a world where everyone does that?

• 32:08Speaker 02

  I hope so. I think it's an ideal we should strive for. I can't say that with any degree of certainty.

• 32:14Anthony Pompliano?

  You think that's a world we should go towards?

• 32:16Speaker 02

  Definitely, we should strive for it. Yeah. Because. Again, if not, we're getting, we're getting the social credit score system exported here and we're going to be subjected to that as well.

• 32:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 32:29Speaker 02

  It's like Minority Report.

• 32:31Anthony Pompliano?

  The part to me that is really interesting as you think through kind of how all this is happening is you have two competing forces. You've got probably people who like you and I who are more in the camp of, uh, we should protect freedoms and like not go down that rabbit hole. And then you've got people who, um, make an argument that the world would be better if we go into that, right? So like, when it comes to the privacy stuff, it's like, oh, we could, uh, stop crime if, uh, we have everyone's, you know, GPS on their phone and we know where they are. Like, well, yeah, okay, maybe, but like, we just took everyone else's freedom, right? And it's kind of like, do you look to protect people or do you look to

• 33:15Anthony Pompliano?

  actually protect the freedoms of people?

• 33:18Speaker 02

  I mean, I think we should do the latter and I think the former is being proven to be completely wrong. Like you are harming more people than helping more people KYC AML regulation, like.

• 33:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain that.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  Every time you have to give up your personal information, like a lot of the Bitcoin exchanges, including the one that sponsors my podcast, you.

• 33:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Which one is it? Go give them a shout out.

• 33:40Speaker 02

  Use the code stacking sats when you download the Cash App, you're going to get $10 and $10 is going to go to Al's lacrosse.

• 33:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you see the hard work it takes to clearly articulate the advertising off the dome? He didn't even have to read it.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  Shout out to Cash App, but when you do KYC AML, you have to give up your, a lot of times your driver's license, passport, home address, where you work, how you're receiving funds, and you give it to these companies and they hold it in databases that have proven to be completely insecure. Like we had the Equifax hacks, uh, Target hacks, hacks.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  Any hack you can think of.

• 34:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, those are the ones we know about.

• 34:19Speaker 02

  Well, the Department of Defense just got hacked like last year. They came out and announced that last week. Like, the people who are forcing these regulations on us can't even can't even protect their own systems. So.

• 34:29Anthony Pompliano?

  I think official recognition, wasn't there somebody that like Customs and Border Patrol or like a contractor or something? They got hacked. They had a bunch of images of everyone's like faces.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that or and I believe they had like the x-rays that could like see through.

• 34:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Crazy.

• 34:45Speaker 02

  See through clothes like that got hacked as well at some point. I think so. I'm not certain on that. But the point remains, a lot of these companies and government agencies that are forcing KYC on people are getting hacked. And then you have people's date of birth, social security number, home address, which freaks me the fuck out. Pictures of their driver's license, passport on the dark web is being sold to the to for it's not even bidding war. They just get sold at a certain price and your information's out there and you're vulnerable. And then what they are proclaiming to protect us from anti-money laundering laws.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  The banks that are supposed to basically enforce these laws become the biggest perpetrators of the money laundering. Like HSBC had bank teller windows purposely fitted for Mexican drug lords' suitcases, briefcases.

• 35:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, really? I didn't know that.

• 35:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:45Anthony Pompliano?

  That's wild.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Wells Fargo as well. Wells Fargo was a this is my big knock on on Warren Buffett is like, hey, man, you know, what do you say? Long suitcase or short suitcases? Like, dude, Wells Fargo is one of your biggest, you know, holdings or one of the holdings in your portfolio. And they they pleaded guilty. They didn't even fight it. It pled guilty to helping the Sinoa cartel launder millions of dollars like.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  Billions of dollars. So with HSBC was billions of dollars and they got slapped with a couple hundred million dollar fines. So it's just the cost of doing business at that point. So you're not really protecting anybody.

• 36:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Getting the bank teller window to be refitted for suitcases is an all time.

• 36:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. And that's like, and then they tell you that you you need to do this stuff for your protection and.

• 36:31Speaker 02

  Then behind your back, they're just like completely ignoring the laws and then not getting in trouble for it when they get caught. They're just get slapped with a fine. It's the cost of doing business where you fucking get caught selling a dime bag on the corner in Harlem. You're going to the fucking Rikers for years. It's fucked up.

• 36:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I, I, uh, one of the things that I think will definitely change over the next five years or so is it's not only going to see the decriminalization of all like the possession of small drugs and you know, that kind of stuff. It's going to actually become, uh, like the social pressures on anyone who feels differently. Can't believe that you think we should put humans in a cage because of it.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, that's a good point to bring up. Like the whole basis for anti-money laundering specifically is the drug war is like the number one justification. And the drug war is an abject failure. It's been going on for decades and people have not stopped doing drugs. People have not stopped selling drugs.

• 37:33Anthony Pompliano?

  They've actually made more money doing it now.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  They make more money doing it now. And then you push people towards you. So weed's a schedule one narcotic. Like you can't use that for medicinal purposes. It's becoming more commonplace now, but for the longest time you couldn't. And, uh, regulated opiates were pushed on the masses. We have an opiate crisis in the country.

• 37:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Did you watch the Netflix documentary?

• 37:57Speaker 02

  Pharmacist. Yeah.

• 37:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Incredible.

• 37:59Speaker 02

  Right?

• 38:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Like when they showed the video. So for those that don't know, uh, Netflix got a new documentary out called The Pharmacist and it's a gentleman, his son dies, um, buying drugs, gets murdered. Uh, and he goes basically on like a one man. It was kind of like, uh, Taken, you know, except for it was like an old white guy.

• 38:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it was, it's a crazy.

• 38:19Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm gonna fucking figure this out.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, he did hard, hard detective work, which. Which the powers that be don't want to do anymore. They just want to throw all these regulations on people and just throw people in cages in a lazy fashion. A pharmacist, I forget his name, but he did hard detective work and eventually found his child's killer, brought him to justice. And then like the rest of the documentary is he was a pharmacist.

• 38:47Anthony Pompliano?

  It opened his eyes.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  It opened his eyes and he noticed a bunch of people coming in, buying opiates from.

• 38:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Dr. Clegg.

• 38:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, from Dr. Clegg. And he's watched the opiate crisis destroy his community and.

• 39:00Anthony Pompliano?

  The video that shocked me was when he, so when you'd say hard detective work, he's literally like in his car, 2am, like videoing through the windshield with the lights off type shit.

• 39:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, calling people, going through the phone book and calling everybody within like a 10 block radius of where his son was murdered.

• 39:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but he, he shows a video where it's, I don't know, 10 o'clock, midnight, 2am, whatever. It's late at night and the doctor's office is open. And that's when she's actually giving out all of these prescriptions. And all of a sudden he goes, and then I couldn't believe it. There was a New Orleans police officer at the door and he wasn't there to bust them. He was there to run security.

• 39:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Like what?

• 39:41Speaker 02

  It's, I mean, that's a shining example, the two tiered system we're subjected to. And that's why, again, that's why I think more people need to speak up. Like it's fucked up. Like, and people just put up with it. And that's why I decide to dedicate my life to writing and talking about Bitcoin, because I think it is an imperative technology moving forward, because it allows us to sort of wrest control of our sovereignty, financial sovereignty particularly, away from these people who do not care about you and do not follow the laws that they want you to follow.

• 40:12Anthony Pompliano?

  So the, the event that recently happened that really opened my eyes to just like, no one is safe, is the Jeff Bezos dick pic situation, right? Like the richest dude in the world got hacked?

• 40:27Speaker 02

  And how about, how about them trying to blame it on the Saudis too? And it wound up being his side piece, just sending it to her brother.

• 40:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but like, here, but here's my whole point is like, I don't know what's true.

• 40:39Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 40:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Like, maybe he got hacked and the girlfriend's brother sold it for mon, like, who knows? But just the fact that the richest man in the world is even possible.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  Why are you sending dick pics Jeff?

• 40:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, that's a whole nother thing. I mean, come on.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  You got billions of dollars. Let that, let that flex for you. Stop sending dick pics if you're doing it out there. Happy to say I've never sent one in my life.

• 41:05Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm with you.

• 41:05Speaker 02

  It's probably because my wiener is not worth sending.

• 41:11Anthony Pompliano?

  No, but it's just this idea of like, the richest man in the world is not safe from the same things you and I aren't safe from. Right? And like in some triumphant way, we're smarter because we don't send dick pics. Right? But like, like dude, what? Everyone in the world that is an adversary of you is gunning for some sort of dirt, some sort of angle on you, whatever. And it could simply be if somebody sent you a video and you open it and bam, your phone's compromised.

• 41:36Speaker 02

  It's the information age. We all have access to the same powerful technology, encryption, encryption-based technology. Like it levels the playing field for this stuff. It doesn't matter how rich you are, how powerful you are. The internet has its ways to, to find it out. There's a bunch of people out there. Who are getting good at the internet and can bring you down pretty easily.

• 41:59Anthony Pompliano?

  The, so that's like a very targeted, I want to get Jeff Bezos, but um. The thing that scares the shit out of me. So do you have a Alexa or Google?

• 42:08Speaker 02

  Not allowed. Not allowed in our home.

• 42:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Same. So like, we don't have any of this stuff, right? But uh, I saw a clip of, uh, it was kind of like multiple versions where people have infiltrated, uh, the Ring internal cameras. And they, it's an audio and video. So they can see into your home where you set up the camera. And then they start speaking to like a dude on his couch eating popcorn or a little kid or whatever. And they're like, hey man, what are you watching? And the like, what the fuck? Right? And they're like, hey, you hear me over there? And you're like, dude, you literally put a camera for somebody to hack into in your home and gave them a microphone to scare the shit out of them.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. You run it on wifi. They can do that. And then if you have like Nest, they can literally fuck with the, the temperature of your house.

• 42:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh man. At some point, they'll be able to unlock your doors because it'll all be Bluetooth.

• 43:01Speaker 02

  Amazon's trying to get that to people with Ring. They're trying to make it so you can like have, when you're not home, Amazon can open your door and leave your package inside so they don't get stolen, but people are like, oh, that's convenient. Again, and that's the weird predicament we find ourselves in in the information age. A lot of people seeding freedoms and privacy for convenience. And that's, I mean, we're, we are still monkeys at the end of the day. We're still animals and we have animalistic tendencies and we have reptile brains that just over millions and millions of years of evolution still react in certain ways and will take convenience

• 43:40Speaker 02

  over privacy and safety just because it's easier, right? So that's one thing we do need to focus on in this day and age is you really have to think about what you're seeding when you, when you bring these technologies into your home. Like I, I have the little shield for my camera on my laptops, but like, yeah, my laptops can hear me. I don't have Alexa or Google Home, but I'm sure Apple's or somebody who's hacked. I just assume that everything you own's been hacked.

• 44:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 44:14Speaker 02

  I'm sure somebody's able to listen in some microphone in some capacity in my home.

• 44:17Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, look, it, it's exhausting. If you took a really hardcore privacy-first mindset, you would switch out devices. You would, you know, not bring certain device, like you wouldn't have a cellphone, right? I mean, like all this stuff and just life would suck. Right? So it's like, there's definitely a balance. But like, so I draw the line at the smart speakers for sure. So no Alexa, Google Homes, any of that. Anything else that you won't bring into your home? Ring cameras, obviously, right?

• 44:48Speaker 02

  No Ring. I live in an apartment building. My neighbor has Ring on his door. I'm like, what the fuck are you doing? We have cameras in here already.

• 44:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Because Amazon needs to drop a package off.

• 44:56Speaker 02

  That's what the front doors for, like the doorman. What else? That's, that's off the top of my head. That's all I can think of.

• 45:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 45:05Speaker 02

  Like, yeah, I try to be as low tech as possible. Only the bare necessities.

• 45:10Anthony Pompliano?

  It, it's also a thing where it's not only the decisions you make, though. In your home, you get to make the decisions, but when you walk outside, like... I forget, I think there was a study, maybe it was in London, a person who walked to work, the average walk to work, how many times a camera recorded them? And it was like 140 times, you know, I mean, some stupid number where you're just like, how's that even possible?

• 45:37Speaker 02

  There's dating app, Hinge is a dating app where it's like literally tracks you as you walk to work and tries to partner you with people who have a similar commute that you do.

• 45:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 45:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 45:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I mean, I'm not on it. Apparently that's what the kids are using. One of the, one of the things the kids are using.

• 45:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Are you on TikTok?

• 45:56Speaker 02

  God, no, that's a cursed app.

• 45:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Why? China?

• 45:59Speaker 02

  I think China's taken all that data and then it's making people do weird things.

• 46:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Like what? Like you think China's like secretly programming dance moves in America?

• 46:07Speaker 02

  No, I just, I just, yeah, I just don't think it incentivized towards anything productive.

• 46:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that's, that's true.

• 46:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:14Anthony Pompliano?

  The part that I think is crazy when it comes to all this stuff is we live in a world where if you went, you asked like 15 year old kids, would you rather be a professional athlete or like a TikTok star? It's like a growing percent of them, they'll say they want to be TikTok star.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And so they're like getting habitually addicted to this like feedback loop that's a screen and it kind of reminds me of the like Ready Player One type, you know, like there's the, the one world and you go into the portal of a different world. Like we're basically there already.

• 46:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I experienced this shit on Twitter. I'm not, I'd be lying to you if I didn't get dopamine hits from likes and retweets and shit like that.

• 46:56Speaker 02

  And I try to limit it to that and it's double edged sword because I use Twitter as a networking, networking platform.

• 47:04Anthony Pompliano?

  The, the better LinkedIn?

• 47:05Speaker 02

  Better, I deleted LinkedIn. LinkedIn's worthless in my mind.

• 47:09Anthony Pompliano?

  If you want, you can answer some of the LinkedIn messages I get from the, oh, we're software developers.

• 47:15Speaker 02

  I couldn't take anymore of the cheesy LinkedIn posts. One day I just rage quit. I was like, this is not worth my time.

• 47:20Anthony Pompliano?

  You, I don't think I ever told you this, but you'll love this. My dad is a LinkedIn savage.

• 47:29Anthony Pompliano?

  So he used to have Facebook. My mom was like, yeah, knock that shit out. You spend way too much time on it. Then he had Twitter for a little while and like quickly went down to like, I'm an old white Republican, you know, just saying all kinds of crazy shit. So like my brothers and I basically had the intervention like, hey, man, chill out. And so he's on LinkedIn because, you know, he, they're pretty much, no one's going to make the argument that he can't do business there. Right? So my friends, the new scheme is they will literally screenshot the, his post, he comments.

• 48:01Speaker 02

  Boss.

• 48:03Anthony Pompliano?

  And he rips people apart.

• 48:04Speaker 02

  Boss.

• 48:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Like those posts you're talking about where the like guys like, ah, you know, this year we grew our revenue 10% and we hired 20 people and like, and they're like super self congratulatory. The one I remember is I had like 16 friends, all screenshots sent to me. He like commented on some dude. He's like, you know, hey, Sam, I see you are really good at learning how to self congratulate yourself, but I never seem to see any of your businesses stick around for more than 12 months. Maybe you should like stop focusing on yourself and actually focus on building a business. Like, you know, the rest of us are tired of reading your bullshit or whatever. And I was just like, he's not wrong.

• 48:40Speaker 02

  Mr. Pompliano, the LinkedIn troll. I love.

• 48:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but like, you can't post that in 2020.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  We need more of him.

• 48:46Anthony Pompliano?

  It was like 2018.

• 48:47Speaker 02

  I'm going to come to the defense of your dad. We need more of him.

• 48:49Anthony Pompliano?

  We probably do.

• 48:51Speaker 02

  I was having this conversation earlier today. People are becoming more and more afraid to speak their minds, which is bad. Again, going back to free speech, people are self censoring, which is not good. I don't think.

• 49:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, here, here's my challenge to him. I said, look, two things. One, why the fuck are you friends with all my friends on LinkedIn? And then I realized that somebody discovered him commenting and it told everyone else and everyone.

• 49:13Speaker 02

  I started requesting him.

• 49:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course. Which like, you know, shout out to my friends. They're geniuses for that. And then two, I was like, dude, what do you get out of that? And he was like, no, that guy just need to learn his lesson. And I was like, hey, you got a point, but like.

• 49:27Speaker 02

  Right. I impersonated somebody over the weekend, a group of, group of dudes. We were in Brooklyn. My wife and I were

• 49:34Anthony Pompliano?

  What's going on over there in that country in Brooklyn?

• 49:36Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 49:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, a group of dudes.

• 49:38Speaker 02

  Too much cloud chasing. It's a, it's a cloud chasing nightmare over there. So there was a group of dudes cloud chasing, like taking pictures in front of a mural. I'm like, what? And like, you could tell they were just like about to post to the Instagram and I saw them from two blocks away. I'm like walking with my wife.

• 49:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Stroller?

• 49:54Speaker 02

  Stroller.

• 49:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, yes.

• 49:56Speaker 02

  And they, they walked by me and they're like looking at their pics. You tell like, which one should we post? I was like, God, did you get a good one? And they're like, you could tell they're like, ah, fuck.

• 50:05Anthony Pompliano?

  The dude with the stroller just strolled us.

• 50:09Speaker 02

  But it's like.

• 50:09Anthony Pompliano?

  To be honest though, once you get to like, young dad status, I mean, no one can touch you.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, what are they gonna do? Turn around, like, talk shit to you in front of your wife and your kid?

• 50:20Speaker 02

  No, I, I was hoping so. I was hoping they would have the balls to, but that's the thing. Like, everybody has this online persona, myself included. I'm guilty of it too, especially on Twitter. But, um.

• 50:30Anthony Pompliano?

  But isn't Twitter like the WWF?

• 50:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean Twitter, I think Twitter is more of a meritocracy. I believe they were trying to post to Instagram where it's a

• 50:39Anthony Pompliano?

  More of an art show?

• 50:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, more of like, make your life look better than it actually is.

• 50:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Have you seen the Instagram account that gets influencers in the wild?

• 50:46Speaker 02

  I've seen, um, I've seen, uh, people have, I've seen people share it on Twitter where I've seen it, yeah.

• 50:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And like

• 50:54Speaker 02

  It's just a bunch of dudes taking pictures of their girlfriends on, on the beach.

• 50:57Anthony Pompliano?

  And I, I was, uh, when I was at my cousin's wedding, uh, we were sitting on the beach the day before. And I kid you, Plena like hits me and is like, and I'm like, what? She hits me like two more times and she's like, points. And there's one girl standing, uh, 10 feet from the water. Another girl standing with her feet like barely in the water. And, uh, they're taking a picture of the girl in the water. She's posing, posing, posing. It goes on for like eight, nine, 10 minutes. And you're like, you gotta have a good, like, did you get a good one? Right? Like, exactly like you're a stroll, right? But I'd never seen this before. They both come together. They're looking like, hey, which one should we post? Is that what you just described? They go sit down. Five minutes later, Plena like punches me. Like, what? They're back.

• 51:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Same girl taking pictures of the same girl. Do the whole, you know, straight again. Go sit down. 20 minutes later, they're back a third time. I literally almost got up and was like, hey, y'all gotta chill. Like,

• 51:53Speaker 02

  What are you doing with your life?

• 51:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, just, you spent the last hour, I, I already know, trying to get one photo.

• 52:01Anthony Pompliano?

  And by the way, I don't think that the photo is gonna change anything about what's going on. You're already in Mexico. People know, I promise.

• 52:09Speaker 02

  Is a dopamine hit worth it?

• 52:11Anthony Pompliano?

  But a great test is, uh, is your wife on Twitter?

• 52:15Speaker 02

  She's not.

• 52:16Anthony Pompliano?

  She's not? Alright. So Polina's on Twitter. And one day I was driving. Polina, actually, when I first met her, she had more followers than I did. I had like 1500, she had like 4000, right? And she still gives me shit about it today. And so she's still got like a big, I don't know, she's got like 20 something thousand, almost 30,000 followers. So it's not like her Twitter is ghost town, right? She's got stuff, whatever. But I handed her my phone one day and I'd said something like controversial, people all freaking out. So again, go back to like, I'm addicted to the dopamine, just like everybody else. I was like, what are they saying? And she refreshed the notifications and notifications popped up. Refreshed it again, popped it again. She says to me, goes, this is fun. And she was just like, every time you just refresh, like, there's something

• 52:57Anthony Pompliano?

  there. And it hit me. I was like, holy shit, we're just rats and hamsters on the wheel, man.

• 53:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, and it feels, uh, it feels like we're, but it feels like we're becoming more cognizant of this too. Like,

• 53:10Anthony Pompliano?

  But does it matter?

• 53:11Speaker 02

  It's unhealthy.

• 53:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you change your behavior?

• 53:13Speaker 02

  I, now that I have a child, I try to. Um, there's, cause it makes you, it really puts in front of you that there's more important things in life. Um, but

• 53:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Do I want to go yell at the trolls? Or do I want to go hang out with my kid?

• 53:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I want to go actually live life. Um, and I'm still, I still have my moments where I'm on Twitter way too much. Like my wife would definitely say that I'm on Twitter way too much still. Um, it is an addiction and it's actually, there are studies coming out. Um, that's affecting the young people terribly. Like, it's creating terrible social hierarchies, particularly in middle school, particularly affecting the girls too. Like you have self harm and suicide rates for like 12 to 17 year olds spiking because of the, uh, sort of hierarchy that social media is causing for them.

• 54:07Anthony Pompliano?

  I was with a guy who's an eighth grade teacher, but I think he teach or I think he's a science teacher, maybe, but I couldn't resist asking like, what's going on in middle school? Right? Just like you're in it every day, man. You're doing hand to hand combat with, you know, 13 year olds. Like, what are they doing? And he told me that the biggest things are, one, they all know everything before the teachers, right? Cause they're always on their phones. Two is the things that they are consuming are like complete shit. It's all Tik Tok and like all this kind of stuff. And he goes, the third thing is, we don't know that the bullying's happening. And he goes, all the bullying that like you and I probably saw when we were in

• 54:49Anthony Pompliano?

  school where it was like physical, you know, bullying or like people would point, make fun, not sit with them at lunch, like all that shit. I'm sure some of it still goes on, but he's like, the bad shit all happens online and the teachers are completely removed from it. So what they actually have is like, basically like rats. They like develop sources and like, you know, little Johnny tells the teacher like, hey, man, like everybody's being really mean to Mary. And then the teacher's guy like trying to, I'm like, dude, we want you to teach, right? Like, but this is what you're spending your time on. He's like, yeah, we have to because the kids are freaking out about it.

• 55:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it's like, I talk about this a lot on the podcast too. Like we're just born at this inflection point and we don't know how this stuff's going to affect, again, being animals and monkeys that have an evolutionary process. Like this change is so drastic and so quick. We literally don't know how it's affecting, or beginning to find out how it's affecting our psyche and our social interactions, but it's playing with fire, right? Cause the change is so drastic. The information spread is so instantaneous and we're literally chemically trying to react to this change in real time. And it's very hard, if not impossible, because the pace of change we're living through right now is far greater than any pace of change we've ever lived through up to this point in history.

• 56:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Speaking of pace of change, the macro economy is on stilts. It is wobbling.

• 56:18Anthony Pompliano?

  And it feels like it's just waiting for someone to kick one of the legs out and this whole thing's gonna topple over.

• 56:23Speaker 02

  Feels like coronavirus might be that, that kick.

• 56:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I mean theoretically it would make sense that there's something that causes economic slowdown in activity and next thing you know, like you popped the pin.

• 56:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Right, or I guess the pin pops the bubble, right?

• 56:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:37Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you, what do you think's going on? Like, I'm literally staring at Twitter right now and hashtag stock market crash 2020 is the third top trending topic right now.

• 56:47Speaker 02

  Well, it's

• 56:48Anthony Pompliano?

  After number four, hashtag Trump crash.

• 56:53Speaker 02

  Well, it's the way we structure our economy. Like again, going back to time preference, we live in a very, I believe Pierre Rochard coined the term, the high velocity trash economy. We, the incentives of our economy are such that like we're forced to go after growth at all costs. And I think that's basically the main crux of the issue that we're experiencing right now. I read about this earlier in this week in the bent. There's a thought experiment, not a thought experiment, like a question posed by an economist, I forget his last name, Tomas something. He says, when you're thinking about economic growth and economies

• 57:36Speaker 02

  and how you want your economy to run, you gotta ask yourself the question, do you want to be a man on the bike or a man standing on his own two feet? And when you're a man on a bike, you have to keep going forward. If you stop momentum, you're gonna tip over and fall over and hurt yourself. Whereas if you're a man walking on your own two feet, you have the opportunity to stop, recalibrate, look around without falling over and hurting yourself. And the growth at all cost economy that we live in right now, we live in an economy on the bike, it's a debt fueled. We went off the gold standard in the seventies and since then, we've been printing a bunch of money and moving production. Or trying to stoke production in the present by taking money from the future and promising

• 58:21Speaker 02

  growth in the future, more importantly, and we're getting to the point, particularly with the way demographics are set up in a lot of these countries, America specifically, that it just doesn't make sense that we're going to be able to keep growing at the same pace. So macro trends right now, demographics are one of the biggest.

• 58:39Anthony Pompliano?

  It's the one thing that I didn't understand three or four years ago, that now it's like, whoa, stop, you know, stop the alarm, the whole nine yards is demographics lead, right? And if you watch the demographics, you can pretty much understand what's going to play out. Japan's a great example of, you know, how this happened a number of years ago. And the US is probably better because, well, at least there used to be such a high desire for immigration. So you kind of continue growth, not just by your own birth rates, but also kind of importing people from other countries. But when you start to look at

• 59:18Anthony Pompliano?

  that, there's this weird world of like, you or I can't stop kind of the train, right? And like, it's headed where it's headed. We can analyze it. We can talk about it. We can warn people, all this stuff, but like, that train's going. What we do have control over, though, is what we do, right? And I think this low time preference, when you start to like, not only do low time preference, but also the anti-consumerism, your life like drastically changed. Like, you really changed the decisions you make on a daily basis, what you buy, you know, all this kind of stuff. And it's very freeing. You're just like, I don't need all this shit.

• 59:54Speaker 02

  That, and then it's an important step towards fixing the problems. We need to invert the way things work right now. Everything across sectors, across.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  Across life is very top down. Government, obviously, the federal government here in the United States makes a lot of decisions for everybody in the United States. I think that needs to change drastically and it starts individually by maybe turning away from a consumer's lifestyle, trying to save more, get your own balance sheet in order. But I think we do really need to get back towards localism because what you have, Fed is a perfect example of this, is people who think they know better than everybody else trying to micromanage complex systems. And that's impossible. I think one of the biggest causes of sort of the troubles we find ourselves in today is people fundamentally misunderstand complex systems or aren't even aware that they exist

• 1:00:51Speaker 02

  and we live in them. So the Fed trying to manipulate the economy of 320 million people with interest rates of expansion and contraction of the monetary base, in my opinion, is very top down. And you have 12 people trying to micromanage a complex system and that's just not possible. This stuff has to be emergent and emerges from the bottom up, from you making personal decisions to save more instead of spend more and then you move that up to the local level or your township, your town, and you guys make decisions for what you need at that level. You stand on your own two feet, you're not on a bike, you don't have to go growth at all costs at the city level.

• 1:01:31Speaker 02

  You can decide as a small community what is best for you at that given point in time, where right now it's the complete opposite.

• 1:01:39Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's kind of like the false promise of like, oh, well, of course, we're going to listen to the government, right? Like, how could they not have our best interests in heart? How are they not smarter than us? And then once you understand, no, they're just people. And like, by the way, the people who are running those organizations usually have done nothing else other than optimize their life to get to that role.

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:04Anthony Pompliano?

  And that's the scary part to me.

• 1:02:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. A lot of them never run businesses, a lot of them are psychopaths, sociopathic, just want power. And yeah, they really don't understand, they're completely...

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  Dislocated from the people they're representing. I mean, that's why Trump's president, right? Like.

• 1:02:24Anthony Pompliano?

  I actually think that his rise to the presidency is going to go down as a like the most obvious thing in hindsight, you know, 10 years from now, people look back and be like, of course, that was gonna happen. But we've almost forgot, like, you know, when he first got elected, people were like, what the fuck just happened?

• 1:02:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was people, the little man, far away from the coastal elites, saying, we need to change. I will do anything to get change. I'm not saying Trump being president is good. I don't, I think.

• 1:02:55Anthony Pompliano?

  He somehow convinced people he was the common man.

• 1:02:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, or that he was gonna fight for the.

• 1:02:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Or at least gonna fight for him. Yeah.

• 1:03:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. And whether or not he's followed through on those promises, a lot of people will debate. I tend not to pay attention to the politics as much as possible because I do think, like, we're gonna look back in retrospect in this time, like, you never know that, that the empire is crumbling in real time. You only look back in retrospect and are able to say, oh, it was obvious that the decline had set in and we were in the middle of it. I think we may be in the midst of a huge decline that in retrospect, people look back and be like, holy shit, like.

• 1:03:33Anthony Pompliano?

  And you're talking about not like a, in 2020, you're talking about like over a decade or something, or maybe even longer than that.

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, not this single point in time, but yeah, I mean, you can go back, I mean, 2008 might be like the, what historians point out and be like, oh, that was.

• 1:03:51Anthony Pompliano?

  That was the first crack in the armor.

• 1:03:52Speaker 02

  That was, yeah, I mean, that was basically when you can point to and be like, all right, legitimacy of the system is gone.

• 1:04:01Anthony Pompliano?

  How much of that, so like, you and I are close in age and I always describe 2008 as like the time where people around our age were old enough to pay attention and kind of like realize something was happening, but not old enough to have enough assets to really like be hurt by it, right? If you were 30 in 2008, you pretty much got like either wiped out or kind of, you know, you get knocked off the feet a little bit. If you're older than that, some people were well protected, some weren't. But if you're 16 to 22 years old, like you knew what was going on, especially if you were studying economics, you know, which we both did.

• 1:04:41Anthony Pompliano?

  But you didn't get hurt by it and so you almost like grew up seeing what could happen, but didn't have the negative effect of it and so you just don't trust the system?

• 1:04:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I mean, I was 17 in the fall of 2008, again, taking a just happen chance, taking an elective economics class in high school. And so we, I was, fall quarter, I was in that class and my teacher is very astute, like, gentlemen, this is not good, you should be paying attention to this. We went through the TARP bill and even then, like a 17 year old going through the TARP bill, like, the clauses that politicians snuck in just to get it passed as the country was in quote unquote dire straits, like, it just smelled of bullshit, reeked of bullshit. And so I definitely went into college with a no, your enemy mentality with all this stuff. And yeah, I'm, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't scarred by that, that happening at that particular point in time. And yeah, I don't trust it at all.

• 1:05:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Have you seen the, I think it's an HBO documentary, Panic? And it's where they bring together all of the major players.

• 1:05:42Speaker 02

  I haven't seen, I've seen like,

• 1:05:43Anthony Pompliano?

  And they do interviews with them?

• 1:05:44Speaker 02

  I've seen like clips of it, I haven't watched the whole thing yet.

• 1:05:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so there's, the most telling thing of anything I've ever watched, read, anything about the global financial crisis is in there. They've got, who's the Goldman guy, a big, tall, bald guy?

• 1:06:01Speaker 02

  Paulson?

• 1:06:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Paulson, yeah. And at one point, they're going through this story where he's about to go in front of the government and ask for money. And he's like, I knew that we needed, you know, 700 billion, but I knew I couldn't ask him for that. So, what'd I do?

• 1:06:16Speaker 02

  Too trill, baby.

• 1:06:18Anthony Pompliano?

  No, he's like, so what did I do? I answered the questions, right? And they then like basically show him the hearing and they're like, so Mr. Paulson, like, how much money are you gonna need here? And he's like, well, you know, we don't know exactly, blah, blah, blah. And he's like, basically bullshit. And they cut back to him and he's just like cackling laughing. And you're just like, don't tell me these people didn't know what they were doing.

• 1:06:40Speaker 02

  Ah, they, I mean,

• 1:06:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, he is telling you that he knew what he needed to do, went in front of Congress or Senator, whatever, answered questions and did not say the answer.

• 1:06:51Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you ever trust that system again?

• 1:06:54Speaker 02

  You can't.

• 1:06:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Where literally he gets to laugh about it 10 years later.

• 1:06:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, him, Geithner, all those guys. There's like a, there's a, there's like a meme. I think it's Timothy Geithner. I think he's at Davis or something is on stage. It's him and Paulson and they're like cackling. It's not this interview, but they're cackling about like how they saved the world. Rudy Havenstein posts this every once in a while and it's.

• 1:07:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Great account.

• 1:07:16Speaker 02

  It's, uh, no, these people just, they think they live on a different tier and that. They, again, it's their power hunger. The incentives of the system, the way they're currently set up. Allow those people to get to those points and control the system and, uh, they get, they get a lot of, uh, power from that and that power corrupts, right? And they don't care about the little man. They didn't care about saving the country. Everybody got, the little man got fucked. All their houses got possessed.

• 1:07:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Here's the crazy part about the whole thing is I would actually make the argument, the actions they took, prevented further damage in that short period of time.

• 1:07:54Anthony Pompliano?

  But what I try to explain to people is it's like saying to your kid, hey, I'm gonna teach you how to swim. And they start swimming and you're walking next to them in the pool. And the second that they start to drown, you save them. And then they now think because you continue to let them swim, that they know how to swim. And when you're not there later, they jump in the pool and they drown. Cause literally you've like tricked them into thinking it's okay. Well, that's basically what's happening in the financial system in the sense of, hey, we'll do this quantitative easing thing. And like, we'll kind of like inflate away the problems. But at some point you gotta pay for the sins. Like that's what I like, whether it's over leveraged, unprofitable companies in the public markets, whether it's central banking bullshit, like whatever.

• 1:08:39Anthony Pompliano?

  You eventually have to pay for your sins and I think that's the scariest thing that we could face is it all happening at once.

• 1:08:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, well. Now it's gonna be worse, right? Than if we just let it, the companies fail that should have failed in 2008 now. I mean, with the overnight repo operations, like the BIS came out and said there would have been multiple LTCM, long-term capital management, like blowups if the Fed didn't step in and do overnight repo like these. And it became apparent that the people in need of that repo liquidity were hedge funds doing leveraged trades. So the Fed is now stepping in and helping leveraged hedge funds maintain their margin positions. Like it's, it, they're, it was taboo to say 10 years ago, but they're propping up the markets, quite literally.

• 1:09:27Anthony Pompliano?

  It's why the short squeezes like we saw with Tesla make me laugh.

• 1:09:32Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:09:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Right. Cause it's just like, look, you guys are all so fucking smart. And here's a dude who literally, you guys just hammer on all day long. You call him a fraud, an idiot, whatever. And by the way, all of that may be true.

• 1:09:44Anthony Pompliano?

  But then you get short squeezed and literally they're doing repo operations, half of Wall Street's crying. And literally he's like, dude, I just built a fucking cool car. And you like, watch this play out. And it's like, that's like a very salacious, everyone wants to talk about that one. But this happens quite often where you see all sorts of volatility. Like I pulled up a chart of the VIX. It's like literally skyrocketing.

• 1:10:09Speaker 02

  So above 20 right now?

• 1:10:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, it was something like that. Well, I basically was just like, hey guys, uh, there are a lot of traditional investors who are like, ah, Bitcoin's too volatile. I was like, I went to check out the VIX lately, right? And over the last three days, it's just like fucking up and to the right. And so you look at it and you're like, every asset has its time. And the nice thing about the traditional market is just lots of liquidity. And so usually the swings are, you know, gold's down three, three and a half percent today. And of course, you know, hey, Peter Schiff, dude, your, your rocks are becoming less valuable.

• 1:10:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Now granted, in the grand scheme of things, if you actually look at it rationally, it's 3% is nothing. That. Up or down in a Bitcoin day, nobody blinks.

• 1:10:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:51Anthony Pompliano?

  It's just that the markets have gotten so conditioned for non volatile days and kind of just a smooth up into the right, but that's not how markets work if you don't manipulate them.

• 1:11:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's, again, it's a product of the short term, high velocity trash economy we live in, right? Like, these intraday movements, people pay so much attention to, and really, people should be taking a step back and looking and thinking about longer term. And again, it's like clickbait media has been brought to the financial world as well. People reacting to these quick movements and, um, in stock prices and, again, like, I think people need to lower their time preference and it's, uh, it'll be interesting to see. Like, we, again, well, it's consensus out there right now that the Fed is going to step in and prop up markets. Like, again, that was taboo, not even a decade ago, maybe three years

• 1:11:48Speaker 02

  ago, that was taboo. And now everybody is expecting it. And me, I said this on Rabbit Hole Recap yesterday, just heuristically, the fact that everybody expects, expects the Fed to step in, which they may try to step in.

• 1:12:00Anthony Pompliano?

  But the fact that we, we, we think it's going to happen, like, everyone is consensus thought, is the problem.

• 1:12:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, and, and I'm just not convinced it's going to work this time.

• 1:12:11Anthony Pompliano?

  But do you think that it's almost not even that we think it's going to happen, we want it to happen? Like, if everyone thinks it's going to happen?

• 1:12:16Speaker 02

  People know, like,

• 1:12:17Anthony Pompliano?

  They need it to happen.

• 1:12:18Speaker 02

  People need it to happen. Yeah. If people were ever over leveraged in the traditional system, uh, they definitely need it to happen. And again, like, in my theory of why the Fed stepped in and sort of provided liquidity to these hedge funds, because probably a lot of pensions have money in the hedge funds. And again, going back to demographics, you have all the boomers retiring right now. And as they're retiring, if you have the system implode, there's going to be chaos, like.

• 1:12:45Anthony Pompliano?

  So here's my hot take when it comes to the pension. I knew, again, nothing about the pension world four years ago. I've gone and now met with a number of public pensions, corporate pensions, et cetera, and really started to unpack, like, their challenges from like the investor seat, from the CIO seats.

• 1:13:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Impossible job because it's a combination of pressure of what we're investing in. Everyone's got some fucking scheme, right? It's like Chamath going on CNBC and be like, ESG is a fraud. Like, look, whether you agree with him or not, like, good for him for saying it.

• 1:13:19Speaker 02

  And then the pensions become a just bait for people looking for 2 and 20.

• 1:13:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so in the greatest bull market in history, like, I don't know, 80% of pensions underperformed their benchmarks.

• 1:13:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:13:33Anthony Pompliano?

  How the fuck does that happen?

• 1:13:34Speaker 02

  Well, the benchmarks are what, like 7% a year?

• 1:13:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, like, how does that happen? How do you fucking underperform 7% a year?

• 1:13:39Speaker 02

  Fees.

• 1:13:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Even if there's fees, how do you fucking still underperform? The market was up 30%. You didn't beat 7.

• 1:13:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:48Anthony Pompliano?

  It's because we live in a society where, um, one of my partners, Mark, always says, he goes, uh, numbers aren't going to be exactly correct, but directionally correct. For every one computer scientist that we graduate here in, uh, South Korea graduates like 14. For every one lawyer they graduate, we graduate 40. And it's this whole idea of like, they're a country of wealth creation, we're a country of wealth redistribution. And so if you're a pension investor, what are you doing? You're fucking scared shitless. You're gonna get sued every time we make any investments. What do you do? You just diversify as much as possible and you become super, super risk averse. But like, that's not how you make money investing.

• 1:14:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:31Anthony Pompliano?

  And part of that is what you're talking about, which is, oh, by the way, we're not gonna do the work ourselves. We're gonna hand the money to a bunch of managers because if they fuck up, we can fire them.

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:14:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And so you get into this weird, weird world, which by the way, the fee thing to me is hysterical because Mark told me a story, um, that when he got to, I think it was UNC, uh, and I might fuck up the details a little bit, but when he got to UNC, everyone was like, we don't pay, uh, like 3 and 30 or something, you know? All these hedge funds were coming out of these crazy fee schedules. And he goes, guys, I don't care if I pay 1 and 10, 2 and 20, 3 and 30, or fucking 10 and 100, you know, 80%. If the return we make is the is still better than all the other managers, the fee schedule doesn't matter, right? So like Jim Simons, they've charged like five and 50.

• 1:15:21Speaker 02

  Holy shit.

• 1:15:21Anthony Pompliano?

  For like 25 years, but his average annualized return over that span is 66%. Net of fees.

• 1:15:31Speaker 02

  Pretty bang up.

• 1:15:32Anthony Pompliano?

  So you're like, hey dude, I'll pay you whatever you want if you give me 66%, right? And so it's just like, by the way, that's one guy who can't be replicated, right? I mean, he's, he's far and away the best, whatever, and what he does. But when you start to look at this, the problem isn't quote unquote fees. It's the manager who makes 10% a year and then charges fees and then turns around and hands the pension 3% annualized returns. You're like, dude, these people aren't going to get what they were promised.

• 1:16:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. And on top of that, you have the, the passive investing mindset, right? Where you have all these funds sort of moving in lockstep in the same direction. Again, demographics come into play. Everybody goes to liquidate those passive funds that are in the same markets. Like just the math is pretty straightforward. You're going to pull out all that value from, from those funds and things are going to fall in price.

• 1:16:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Have you heard of, I think it's Nevada or Utah, the, the state pension manager? Have you heard what he did?

• 1:16:28Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:16:29Anthony Pompliano?

  He went in, he gets hired, fires like literally everyone. I think he kept like one person, took all of the capital back and put it all in like low cost passive indexes and was outperforming all of his peers. And everyone was like, what the fuck? And he was like, basically we're in a bull market. It's going to go up. You guys are all going to have to pay fees, plus your managers can't outperform, whatever.

• 1:16:52Anthony Pompliano?

  This profile I was reading was, they were basically like, what the fuck do you do every day?

• 1:16:57Anthony Pompliano?

  And they had a picture and he's like sitting at his desk reading.

• 1:17:01Anthony Pompliano?

  And I just remember being like, that dude's a boss.

• 1:17:03Speaker 02

  It's like Michael Berry, just waiting.

• 1:17:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Like whether you think he's right or not, what, you know, whatever. It's just the fact that like obvious has a very low time preference, doesn't think he's got to be the smartest guy in the room. And he just looks at kind of like a Warren Buffett. Like, why are you guys paying all these hedge fund managers just by indexes, whatever? And like, maybe he's right, maybe he's not, but you got to respect somebody who has the intellectual courage to still have independent thought in today's day and age when everyone is rushing to passive funds, or to the, you know, herd mentality, all going 2 and 20, etc.

• 1:17:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. That's so, again, I think it's.

• 1:17:38Speaker 02

  It's a weird predicament we find ourselves in. Like, I think

• 1:17:44Speaker 02

  the financialization of the world, to a certain extent, has created a lot of passivity in decision-making from individuals, right? Like, financial literacy is something that should be more of a priority for individuals. Taking care of your... Bitcoin is a huge driver of this for me personally. Like, I feel more confident in my personal decisions. I control my money. And it's worked out up to this point because I feel like I'm better educated and making more educated decisions as an individual, instead of allocating that to somebody else who has maybe perverse incentives to to push you into something with higher fees, or just go along with the crowd and maybe they get lazy at their job.

• 1:18:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Murad told me this, and Masir was the one, really, his brother hammered it home for me, which was this idea of like, that teacher, that firefighter, that mid-level manager, whoever, we, as a society, want them to be great at their job. And then we also require them, through financial incentives, to be professional investors as well.

• 1:18:46Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:18:47Anthony Pompliano?

  And that's really hard, one. And two, is a non-realistic expectation we have. So, something like a Bitcoin where it's disinflationary monetary schedule, deflationary, supply-demand economics, you know, are applied, etc. If all of a sudden you can have an asset where somebody simply be good at their job, and there's this quote-unquote "savings" technology, it really does change the way the relationship people can have with their wealth or their money, without having to revamp the education system.

• 1:19:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, the chase for yield is forcing people, again, to reallocate their money to others, right? Like, if you have a sound currency, like, basically a savings technology where peoples are able to save their purchasing power over time, instead of having to chase that yield in the stock markets, via fund managers, and what have you, pension funds, you basically

• 1:19:46Speaker 02

  Decrease the amount of decision making and stress, right? It'd be so incredible if people would just, I mean, this is what Messir touches on. If they could just have their time valued in a hard currency that preserves purchasing power over time.

• 1:20:02Anthony Pompliano?

  So my favorite meme on the internet is, uh, it's a tweet that's screenshotted. And it says CNN just said the world is in $217 trillion debt. Who the fuck do we owe money to? The Decepticons?

• 1:20:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Like, the world is in debt? And it's just this, like, incestuous, I owe you money, you owe me money. You know, the guy down the street owes me money.

• 1:20:25Speaker 02

  We don't.

• 1:20:26Anthony Pompliano?

  What's going on?

• 1:20:27Speaker 02

  I mean, the future generations owe that money, right? It's future production that we're promising. And this is what, I mean, MMT, uh...

• 1:20:37Anthony Pompliano?

  It's gonna happen.

• 1:20:37Speaker 02

  Proponents, they'll say, yeah, that's their exact argument. Who we owe it to? We owe it to ourselves. Like, we can just print into oblivion.

• 1:20:44Anthony Pompliano?

  So I talked to Robert Breedlove about this, uh, in the last episode. Uh, Hong Kong, essentially doing helicopter money.

• 1:20:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? They literally, the part that cracked me up is, uh, the US-based media, mainstream media, is usually using the word, uh, the phrase, "cash giveaway" in their coverage of this. Like, what the fuck is going on?

• 1:21:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're giving each citizen 10,000 Hong Kong dollars, like 1,200 US dollars equivalent.

• 1:21:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Seven million people.

• 1:21:13Speaker 02

  I mean...

• 1:21:13Anthony Pompliano?

  By the way, great for the people, right? CZ said this to me, he was like, usually the people don't get it. Usually the government would print the money and, like, inject it into the financial system and somehow the people would never see the benefit. If you're a Hong Kong citizen and you get 10,000 Hong Kong dollars, like, that's food, right? Or that, you know, that's something that you can actually do, but it's not sustainable.

• 1:21:32Speaker 02

  No, not at all. But given the, like, in 2008, given the choice to, if you were only given two choices, bail out the banks or give money to the people, I would take the latter, give it to the people, because it's proved. I mean, again, in the last 12 years, it's just been... Hijacking of wealth and a reallocation of wealth from the poorest to the richest. And it's just pure asset flows from the spigot of money creation to financial assets and real estate.

• 1:22:02Anthony Pompliano?

  My, my, uh, big thing lately is I didn't understand how many leaders in the financial world have been charged with crimes. Like Jamie Dimon, right? Christine Lagarde.

• 1:22:15Speaker 02

  Christine Lagarde. She was found guilty and didn't serve any time. Yeah. She was at the IMF.

• 1:22:20Anthony Pompliano?

  What is the, uh, what was she charged with? So she was, uh, convicted, this is a 2016 article, the International Monetary Fund chief at the time, Christine Lagarde has been convicted over a role in a controversial 400 million pound payment to a businessman. They found her guilty of negligence for failing to challenge the state arbitration payout to the friend of the former French, was this the former, uh, French president?

• 1:22:50Speaker 02

  And now she's the chairwoman of the ECB, like.

• 1:22:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:54Speaker 02

  She's one of the most important central bankers in the world now. She was when she was at the IMF too, but again, we live in a two-tiered justice system. These people live above the law and then they try to lecture to everybody below them on how they should live their lives. I mean, it's, it's right in plain sight and for some, for some reason, we still pay credence to these people when they are criminals at the end of the day.

• 1:23:19Anthony Pompliano?

  This is the reason why I think Bitcoin is such a no-brainer. I'm trying to pull up this, uh, this photo.

• 1:23:26Speaker 02

  Her signing the dollar?

• 1:23:28Anthony Pompliano?

  No, I've seen that one too, but she, uh, she went to dinner, I think it's back in December, let me see if I can find it real quick. But basically she went to dinner and, uh, oh, here it is. So, uh, the tweet says, "I was pleased to invite my new governing council colleagues to join me at an off-site retreat yesterday. We discussed in an open and informal setting the running of the governing council." And it's accompanied by this photo and there's like 24, 25 people in the photo. There's not a person under the age of what looks like 45 or 50. Every single person's white. The people who still have hair have white hair. She's the only woman at the table. And it literally looks like if you just put them in like a villain movie.

• 1:24:11Speaker 02

  It looks like, it looks like Austin Powers. Dr. Evil has his round table.

• 1:24:17Anthony Pompliano?

  And they're in a, for those that don't see the photo, they're in this like very magnificent, old school, literally gold trimmed photo, uh, you know, uh, on the wall, uh, big drapes, a big chandelier at the table, et cetera.

• 1:24:34Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's just like, I think I might even tweeted this photo. I've been like, do you trust these people or do you trust math?

• 1:24:40Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:24:42Anthony Pompliano?

  And like, that's fine. There's plenty of people who say like, oh, I still trust these people. They're human, whatever.

• 1:24:48Anthony Pompliano?

  But over a long period of time, more people will trust math than any group of humans. Right? But this photo just to me like hits home so much.

• 1:24:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, again, going back to the comments on a few people trying to micromanage a complex system. Bitcoin fixes this is a huge meme and I believe Bitcoin will fix a lot of things. It's definitely not a panacea, but again, it provides the opportunity to develop a new financial system in an emergent fashion. Like anybody can buy hardware, plug in a miner, uh, mine Bitcoin directly. They can work for Bitcoin directly. Uh, and when they're doing that, they're buying into a system that is not controlled in that fashion, is bottom up, has been bottom up for the first 11 years of its existence. And I, I would bargain,

• 1:25:37Speaker 02

  or excuse me, I would argue that it'll stay that way, uh, for quite some time, forever, hopefully. Um, and again, it's completely, it's an affront to the way things are done now. And we're going to look back and it's going to be obvious that, uh, it was stupid to have, uh, to think that 12 men and women in a room, speaking of the Fed particularly, and then, uh, Christine Lagarde at the ECB as well, and that group of 25 people to think that they can micromanage a global economy. Like it's asinine. It doesn't make any sense. And Bitcoin provides the opportunity to opt out of that and say, hey,

• 1:26:16Anthony Pompliano?

  It doesn't seem crazy if you don't know there's another way. Once you realize there's another way and you understand how the other way works, then it seems insane.

• 1:26:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it takes a lot. It's the thing with Bitcoin. It's a mindfuck. It takes a while to understand. And that's the, going back to financial literacy. People don't know what money is or how the financial system works today. So I think there's a concerted effort to make it that way. And, but once like nine people out of 10, I don't do it that often anymore. When I would ask like, is the dollar backed by gold? They'd be like, yes, like people, a lot of people still think the dollar is backed by gold.

• 1:26:49Anthony Pompliano?

  My question is always, uh, do you, do you understand that the dot, like your money gets less valuable every year? But dollar backed by gold would seem like that's an even easier layup question. And if nine out of 10 are getting that wrong, Jesus.

• 1:27:04Speaker 02

  And that's the thing, people do know they.

• 1:27:07Anthony Pompliano?

  They know it because prices of the goods go up.

• 1:27:09Speaker 02

  They don't feel it. They can feel it. They don't, and they experience it. They just don't know what the cause is. They think corporations are paying them less and.

• 1:27:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Joe, are you, did you pull up the buy Bitcoin? Let's go. I don't know how you just did that. By the way, hold on, timeout for a second. Joe has figured out the live streaming and he's figured out how to put graphics. And now obviously we just figured out that Joe knows how to put images. I feel like this is going to go real bad, real fast. And he's going to start throwing up things on the screen that we're not paying attention to.

• 1:27:46Speaker 02

  Joe, can you pull up a picture of the Mexican central banker, Carstens? He's now the head of the BIS. There's a picture of him eating a sandwich at some point. Pull that up. It's the epitome of, uh, of the central banking system we.

• 1:28:01Anthony Pompliano?

  I know exactly, Augustine, Carson or whatever.

• 1:28:04Speaker 02

  Carsten.

• 1:28:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I don't know what photo you're talking about, but that I do know.

• 1:28:08Speaker 02

  You'll see.

• 1:28:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you, do you think that Bitcoin is such a big idea? That's why the quote unquote intelligent people like reject the truth, right? And the truth being Bitcoin is based on verifiable information, right? And what I was saying to Breedlove is like.

• 1:28:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Most of these people, especially in finance, they try to find truth or find facts or data in every aspect of their life and all of their work that they do in investing. And then when it comes to Bitcoin, you're like, hey, man, you don't have to look very far. Like, here's all the information.

• 1:28:46Speaker 02

  Here's the math.

• 1:28:47Anthony Pompliano?

  And they're just like, nah, no way, that doesn't work. Which makes me believe like, no, they do understand the value of it. It's just threatens the status quo and therefore they don't want to.

• 1:28:57Speaker 02

  I think that's definitely, that's definitely the case. And then on top of that, it's so much sunk intellectual and financial cost into their careers up to this point. It's hard, and it's the saying, it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks. And again, the sunk cost of reputation and capital into the incumbent system is such that if, it is hard for them to admit that something new is here and it may be better.

• 1:29:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. It also leads me to think about, I don't know, do we know what the youngest president ever was in the US?

• 1:29:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:32Anthony Pompliano?

  So JFK or Obama, I imagine, right? Let's see, real quick, hold on. The youngest person to assume the presidency was Theodore Roosevelt. He's exceeded to the office at the age of 42 years and 320, so basically 43 years old. The reason why I immediately thought of that is if you look at the election now, like everyone's 60 plus years old. It's pretty crazy. And one of my big themes over the next few years is like, there's this rage against not only institutions, but also the belief that like, you need 40 years of experience in order to do a job. And I think we saw this a little bit with like congressmen and congresswomen being elected

• 1:30:16Anthony Pompliano?

  that were in their 30s and much earlier. I'm waiting though for like, the 35 year old presidential candidate to like, show up and just be like, fuck all you guys.

• 1:30:26Speaker 02

  President's a dying breed, I think.

• 1:30:29Anthony Pompliano?

  I think The Rock's gonna be the president one day. Only because it is official that the presidency is a popularity contest and he's the most recognized person. He's got charisma and he's so physically intimidating that if you put him on a debate stage, like, Mike Bloomberg, what does Mike Bloomberg say to him? He's literally just looking up at a 6'5" guy, right? Even Trump, Trump I think is 6'4", right? The Rock would just dwarf him.

• 1:30:53Speaker 02

  But it's...

• 1:30:56Speaker 02

  So again, going back to like inflection points, like the

• 1:31:00Speaker 02

  structure of our government was put in place in 1776, like 200 almost 50 years away from that. It's just the structure of our government is not built for, again, the way things work today, how fast information moves and what, what is the function of a congressman, a representative? Why were they created in the first place? They were created because they would show up in a local, or excuse me, a centralized place, DC, Philadelphia at one point, New York at one point, and basically speak on behalf of their constituents. They acted as a voice for their constituents because their constituents were not physically able to show up and speak.

• 1:31:43Speaker 02

  Now that we have the internet, that's not the case anymore. People can speak for themselves immediately and have their voices heard online. Like the, the actual mechanics of

• 1:31:56Speaker 02

  of the government officials, I think, and their reason for for being like are made moot today because, because of technology. Like, we don't need to allocate our voices to politicians. And that's why I think we should

• 1:32:11Anthony Pompliano?

  How does it change?

• 1:32:14Speaker 02

  You're gonna have to have like a balkanization, right? Where things get more localized. I think, I think we need to go more local. We need to, we can't have the federal government dictating in large swaths what everybody across the country and every jurisdiction should do. It just doesn't work that way. It shouldn't work that way. We need to get, we need to make the federal government smaller and give states' rights

• 1:32:43Speaker 02

  more of a try. The state level and then from the state level down to the city level and township level.

• 1:32:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Is part of this that if you go with that message, it just doesn't happen? Like, if you, if you basically ask for permission to some degree, it's really hard to accomplish it, but something like Bitcoin and other pieces of technology that In a nonviolent way, just simply give the power back? Like, the technology is the solution, rather than trying to operate within the box of, like, let's go debate, you know, at the town hall?

• 1:33:15Speaker 02

  No, exactly. Like, that's why I focus on Bitcoin. I don't watch the debates or anything like that. Like, I think, in the long run of my life, at least, it's gonna be more worthwhile to focus on Bitcoin. Because, again, people call it "fuck you" money, because you have it, and you can say, "Fuck you, I'm gonna do what I want," and that'll enable that localism that I was just talking about, right? People deciding for themselves to invest in their local economies. And, again, being ground up. And a book I just have been reading, finished, and have been, like, re-skimming, Strong Towns.

• 1:33:51Speaker 02

  It's a book written by a man named Charles Marone. He's from Minneapolis, and it's an incredible book. And, again, it goes back to time preference and the hasty decisions made for growth at all costs. And, basically, after World War II, we went out and built...

• 1:34:11Speaker 02

  People got away from cities, built suburbs, and infrastructure outside of cities. And we basically turned our backs on hundreds of... or thousands of years of

• 1:34:23Speaker 02

  humanity figuring out how to build sustainable cities by trial and error slowly over time. And after World War II, we had a bunch of money, we had... the dollar was the reserve currency, and we just wanted to experiment with expanding into suburbs and into... away from cities. And when we did that, we didn't realize we were creating, like, in software, people talk about tech debt. Like, if you have too much tech debt, you can, basically,

• 1:34:54Speaker 02

  hurt your product in the future, because you have so many things you have to fix as you try to scale, and it can curb scaling at a certain point. We have that in America in the form of infrastructure debt. Like, we've expanded our infrastructure, specifically after World War II in the 60s, 70s. And so you have roads, pipes.

• 1:35:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Dude, the subway.

• 1:35:14Speaker 02

  Subway.

• 1:35:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Shout out to the L not getting shut down after the, somebody got paid off somewhere, right? But like, compare the subway to Japan.

• 1:35:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, but we, and but outside of the cities, it's even worse. Where you have like towns just being deserted and as soon as one house, uh, one homeowner decides not to keep up, uh, the facade of their house and it goes, it goes sort of rotten. It sort of decays the, the value of the houses around it and neighborhoods die quickly. And you have basically a generation's worth of, uh, the ability to live in these, these towns. And then after 30 years, we're finding that a lot of middle America and suburbs are decaying. And that's why you're seeing a lot of people come back to cities and stuff like that.

• 1:36:01Speaker 02

  And again, going back to time preference, uh, it was decision made in haste. Cause we thought it was a cool idea at the time, but we weren't thinking about generations ahead of what we would have to do to sort of service, uh, and maintenance, maintain all, everything that we built. And so that's why, and that was allowed to happen basically after we went off the gold standard too.

• 1:36:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, at some point, the incentives get so screwed up that people who are sitting in the seat are acting rationally, but the long-term impact, they don't care about cause they're not going to be there.

• 1:36:41Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:36:41Anthony Pompliano?

  They don't, they don't answer the, the bell, if you will, right?

• 1:36:44Speaker 02

  No, that's, uh, I get cheesy with it every once in a while, but like, I do think we should adopt what's called like a seven generations mentality, the Iroquois Nation. It's debatable whether, whether they specifically said seven generations, um, but still, I think the concept is good. We should have a seven generation mindset where you think about the seventh generation ahead of you, like, do something today, do something today that would benefit them. And sprawling into like an urban landscape or suburban landscape like we did after World War II, proved to only think one generation had. And we're, we're going to pay the price for that.

• 1:37:25Speaker 02

  Especially with demographics turning as well, pretty, pretty, it's gonna be a hard price to pay. And again, we're gonna look back in retrospect like, oh, we were going through this right now. Yeah, it's happening. Like, I interviewed a guy on the podcast, Chris Arnade.

• 1:37:44Speaker 02

  And he wrote a book called Dignity, where he was a Wall Street trader at Citi. And after 08, he decided to become a photojournalist and basically go to middle America where people were voting for Trump and find out why they were voting for Trump. And it's basically the reason they voted for Trump was because their towns are decaying. All their jobs are shipped away.

• 1:38:08Anthony Pompliano?

  It's the pharmacist. It's exactly what you see in the documentary. They're just getting fucking ravaged.

• 1:38:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. And this is a serious conversation we need to have as a country. Like, where the fuck do we want to go? We're on a bike right now. That's the thing. Like, you gotta keep going the way it's structured right now. And I think we need to have hard conversations of, hey, let's get off the bike. Growth at all costs doesn't make sense. It's not worthwhile. And we need to recalibrate our mindset. I think Bitcoin, again, I say this a lot, Bitcoin's gonna change us more than we change Bitcoin, the protocol. It's gonna change our mindset and our time preference. And that's why I focus on it, because I think it forces people to think seven generations ahead and lower their time preference.

• 1:38:50Anthony Pompliano?

  It's kind of like Amazon, right? Where Amazon had this like really, really incredible growth mindset. They basically ran a break even operation, never made money, get as big as they possibly could. And once you hit some kind of growth milestone, it's not that they plateau, but now they're optimizing changes. Now they're creating incredible amount of cash, right?

• 1:39:15Anthony Pompliano?

  It's not so much like growth at all costs is bad. It's growth at all costs at certain times is good. Once you hit some inflection point, though, you can't do it forever. And I think we see this with companies right in the public markets. I think we see it definitely with private companies that are just burning cash. But we see with the economy as well. And it's so it's kind of like, at some point, you go from, we gotta get from not established to established. Once we're established, then it's all about this long term. How do we stay here forever?

• 1:39:46Speaker 02

  It's knowing when growth is worthwhile and when to put your foot on the brakes, say, hey, we don't need to

• 1:39:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, be irrational. Oh, Jesus, that would be a fucking wild idea.

• 1:39:55Speaker 02

  We don't need to go into debt. And that's the thing Chuck talks about in the book, Strong Towns a lot, is a lot of these towns are just going into debt to keep up maintenance costs, to keep up maintenance of the things they've already built. And then they want to be able to show their constituents that they're growing. So they'll try and expand cities and towns. And they're just adding to that infrastructure deck slowly over time.

• 1:40:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Joe, you got the photo?

• 1:40:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's see.

• 1:40:22Anthony Pompliano?

  He's gonna show us this photo and then

• 1:40:26Anthony Pompliano?

  we're, is this the one? Let's see.

• 1:40:29Speaker 02

  I'm confident.

• 1:40:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Joe is currently pulling up Augustine Carson's eating a sandwich, which we're gonna see.

• 1:40:39Speaker 02

  It's a personification of

• 1:40:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Central banking.

• 1:40:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's see. What a

• 1:40:48Anthony Pompliano?

  what's your new favorite book? You can't say what you said last time while we're waiting. Oh, wait.

• 1:40:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Is this it? Is this a meme?

• 1:40:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, you're gonna pull multiple ones? Oh, there was multiple ones.

• 1:41:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Man, there's sandwiches everywhere in that photo. I like, by the way, how you said to Joe, hey, pull up a picture of him eating a sandwich. And Joe pulled up a meme.

• 1:41:14Anthony Pompliano?

  The, the fact that he pulled up a meme is the personification of this whole fucking operation.

• 1:41:19Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:41:21Anthony Pompliano?

  What, uh, and I appreciate you putting them over my face in the, uh, video too. And that, you know, what would be a great segment is to, uh, do this and then we could talk like, uh, we were central bankers.

• 1:41:35Speaker 02

  Hey, man, you hungry?

• 1:41:37Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm starving. Want to print some money? What, uh, what's your new favorite book, uh, other than Strong Towns?

• 1:41:44Speaker 02

  It's an old book. I'm reading Human Action right now by Ludwig von Mises. Mises, excuse me. Mises. I always fuck that up.

• 1:41:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Is it Mises?

• 1:41:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, pretty sure. I've, I've been corrected in the past.

• 1:41:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I will take your word for it.

• 1:41:59Speaker 02

  I could be wrong. I could be wrong. Uh, I'm reading that right now. Favorite book. I think I'm going to go back and read Inserto. Um, I actually had that on my mind. Shower thoughts recently, like I should go back, read Full by Randomness and Black Swan. Skin in the Game.

• 1:42:14Anthony Pompliano?

  He's incredible.

• 1:42:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, uh.

• 1:42:17Anthony Pompliano?

  You want to know what I would love to see? I would love to see.

• 1:42:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Naval. Talib. Kathy Wood. And like, I don't know, I'd have to come up with a fourth person. Not even weekly, monthly. And people get a write-in and there's some sort of like voting system of like, here's the most popular questions.

• 1:42:44Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's almost kind of like the, at least with Naval and Talib for sure. And Kathy, I think she has a very different mindset, uh, female perspective, et cetera. They're like the modern day philosophers. Right? And you basically are like, what do you guys think? Just see like, cause I'm, cause they have such different perspectives than like the everyday person.

• 1:43:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean. I'm just fascinated by Nassim Taleb, like, very, like, I think his writing is so lucid and so clear in the way he explains everything, especially asymmetry and probabilistic nature of the world and the randomness of the world. And he does a very good job of explaining emergent systems too in his series of books via languages and stuff like that and how languages have emerged. I would love to pick his brain particularly about what's going on right now, like seeing him talk about the coronavirus more recently.

• 1:43:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Balaji could be another one.

• 1:43:42Speaker 02

  Balaji, yeah.

• 1:43:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Scott Adams, another one that could go up there.

• 1:43:46Speaker 02

  Scott, Scott, is that the Dobrik? Yeah.

• 1:43:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Did you read, uh, Win Bigly?

• 1:43:54Speaker 02

  I don't, I don't know.

• 1:43:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, you gotta read. Okay, so this is the one book, uh, somebody, I won't say who told me to read it, but somebody in like the investing world told me to read this. And I was like, dude, I'm good because I think it literally has a picture of Trump on it. And I just thought it was gonna be like a super politicized book. But basically what he does is he talks all about like weapons-grade persuasion and how Trump, very early on, he knew, hey, this guy's gonna win the presidency. And what he, like, one of the examples he gives is Hillary Clinton had a whole data-driven team around like what their slogan was gonna be. So they came up with, you know, 80 slogans, Ray Allen's test, Trump walked in a room, they're like, we need this slogan. It's like, make America great again. Right? And then like, it works.

• 1:44:37Speaker 02

  Again, he, like, like Dave Portnoy, he, Trump knows how to lean in when, when it's the right time. And that's actually nothing of somebody you want to hear speak and somebody

• 1:44:48Speaker 02

  who's, uh, very controversial. And after watching a lot of his talks, I sort of don't understand why. Steve Bannon, like, I would, like, he, he is a very lucid thinker and very lucid explainer of his view of the world. That is somebody I would love to sit down and talk with as well because I think that was like a, the media portrayed him as some like devil.

• 1:45:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Psychopath. Yeah. Can I make a guess right now?

• 1:45:14Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm gonna cheat a little. I have one piece of information about you, but I'm gonna guess that the video you watched that changed your mind on him was the Real Vision interview with Kyle Bass and Steve Bannon?

• 1:45:26Speaker 02

  That wasn't, I mean, I watched that. Um, he actually, there's a...

• 1:45:31Anthony Pompliano?

  But that wasn't the one that changed your mind?

• 1:45:32Speaker 02

  That wasn't the one that changed my, I've seen that, but I've been on a Steve Bannon binge um, the last few months because again, like I was, I caught that he's an alt-right white supremacist.

• 1:45:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, when I watched the Kyle Ba, the one that I just told you, that's the one that changed my mind, cuz I was like, holy shit, this dude is fucking smart.

• 1:45:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:49Anthony Pompliano?

  And he is nothing like what he was being portrayed as.

• 1:45:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, and if you're out there listening, you think Steve Bannon's the devil, I would, I would highly recommend you go watch, he's, he's got, that's the thing, he's got a plethora of hour to two-hour-long videos out there where he just explains his view of the world very clearly, and it makes sense to me, like, in the last election, and since Trump's been in office, Russia's been the boogeyman, he makes a very compelling case that we should be focused more on China.

• 1:46:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so this is, um, alright, this last thing we'll talk about, and then we'll get the hell out of here, you gotta go home, so do I, um, is this model, this media model of long-form conversations, right, similar to the podcasts that you or I would do, I didn't understand the power of it until I saw Bernie Sanders go on Joe Rogan. I don't agree with anything Bernie Sanders says, at least I thought, before he went on this podcast. I still don't agree with 99% of what Bernie Sanders says for the most part, but I was shocked at the contrast between the way he's portrayed by the media, even though I get

• 1:47:03Anthony Pompliano?

  to see him do a debate, an interview, a speech, whatever. And the guy who was answering the questions with Joe for two hours. He was way more intelligent. He was way less crazy. He had thought out his ideas way more than I'd ever thought. You know what I mean? Like all of these things. And it was, damn, we as a society could benefit. One, from just talking to people who we disagree with, etc., because we, obviously that's helpful. But two, the media format's changing. And like, rather than have all these candidates go on stage and just yell and scream at each other and like, try to get headlines and dunk on each other. Like, basically, it's like a virtual dunk on each other, right? Have them just go do like a three-hour segment. And they had to be with a rogue. It could literally just be with somebody from the political media.

• 1:47:47Anthony Pompliano?

  And just ask them all of the questions and let them talk. And then provide that to people. I bet you that those videos would be the most popular videos this, the networks ever played. And the people would actually be more educated about the candidates.

• 1:47:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I don't think the networks want that to happen, right? I think they're trying to push.

• 1:48:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course, you can't, how do you sell ads?

• 1:48:05Speaker 02

  Right, that, and then, I do think there's like, Bernie got fucked over in the last election at the DNC.

• 1:48:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I mean, that's pretty well, like, accepted.

• 1:48:14Speaker 02

  It seems like they're trying to do it again. And I'm like you, like, I'm, I don't agree with Bernie's policies at all, but it does seem like the, uh, the populist movement on the left is behind him. And for some reason, the Democratic Party doesn't want him to be, uh, on the stage.

• 1:48:30Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I was listening to, uh, uh, New York Times, The Daily. Um, uh, somebody had told me, you know, go check this out. Uh, I didn't realize how popular it was. So I was, the only episode I ever listened to, uh, was the other day. Um, and they, they brought a reporter and he was talking about Bernie Sanders got, uh, a visit from the FBI basically saying, hey, like Russia's trying to help your campaign. And I guess, uh, at least what the reporter said is Bernie didn't disclose, they didn't have to, but, but just didn't disclose that. And then it came out, uh, that the FBI went and talked to some other campaigns, etc. Uh, and so somehow in there it got leaked that they went and saw Bernie Sanders a month before. And his whole thing was basically like.

• 1:49:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course it got leaked, you know, like a day before the caucus or whatever. And at one point, the host of the podcast asked the guy, he goes, well, why does Trump seem to congratulate Bernie Sanders? And he's like, well, because Trump probably thinks he's the weakest candidate.

• 1:49:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:49:27Anthony Pompliano?

  But like, then you go and you see Trump is literally tweeting like, congratulations Bernie, good job. It's like, what world do we live in?

• 1:49:34Speaker 02

  I don't know, man. It's fucking, we live in a weird world. And then going back to like what we said earlier, as individuals, like you really need to critically think for yourself. Like that is going to be imperative moving forward and.

• 1:49:46Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you, how do you filter information? Like you probably more than most I know do a good job, it seems. Like what's your strategy for filtering information? So you read good, high quality stuff? Other than subscribing to your newsletter?

• 1:50:01Speaker 02

  You, I put a lot of competing views on the same list. I use TweetDeck. TweetDeck is the only way to consume Twitter in a, in a good way in my mind. You create lists, you throw them up on TweetDeck. And then within TweetDeck, you put competing views on these lists and over time, you basically see what people say, how it lines up with what actually happens, what has happened in the past. And then you just develop trust with some people you follow.

• 1:50:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you curate them? Like you're on a list for me and then all of a sudden you say something stupid and you kick people off the list? Or do you pretty much keep them?

• 1:50:35Speaker 02

  I keep them on, just because again, like I know echo chambers are like a big thing and Bitcoin, Twitter and stuff like that. But just to stay honest, I think you gotta, you gotta know how the other, not even the other side. You gotta know everybody's thinking and then develop your mindset based on your experiences from that. And it takes time, like the filtering, my filtering process took years of building lists and sort of understanding the people on that list and how they react to certain events and how correct they were over time. It's just not going to happen overnight. It takes time.

• 1:51:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Makes sense. Still believe in aliens?

• 1:51:14Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah.

• 1:51:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Just checking. All right. What one question you have for me that we could finish this up?

• 1:51:21Anthony Pompliano?

  But by the way, top trending now on Twitter, oh, it's promoted is this is how we Sonic. I feel like you gotta throw a final thought about your favorite drive in fast food sometime next week. But go ahead. What's your question?

• 1:51:33Speaker 02

  Chick-fil-A and question, you always put me on the spot with this. Hey, you were talking about like the trend, what are your, what are your thoughts on the trends and like independent media going forward?

• 1:51:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, I think game over for the big guys other than the one controversial thought I think I have. David Perel came in here and David, he showed me a study and I'll caveat this because people will freak the fuck out. The data that he showed me says what I'm about to say, but I didn't go see how they calculated it, whatever. But it looked at the New York Times and since they installed the hard paywall, the use of very left leaning language, woke, all of these terms and words, et cetera, has exploded.

• 1:52:26Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't think that they're going into an editorial room and being like, hey, we should, you know, lean into this, right? But one of the things that he really pushed me to think about is like, look, like take paywalls at the major media corporations. We can say that it's still the New York Times or whatever, but they kind of become these very ideological things. Because if you're now the paying person, you're not, advertisers don't pay, you pay. How many people have the intellectual honesty to keep paying for something they don't agree with? Not that many. So you almost be like, the publisher now is writing for the audience. And so what do they do? They lean into, well, we know the audience likes this, so they start to move more in that direction. And this was over a couple of months.

• 1:53:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And just the language you use, right? You start talking about certain topics and it kind of pulls the thing there. And so I think that one, that means the traditional large publishers are going to become looking more like blogger style, opinionated.

• 1:53:24Speaker 02

  You're gonna try and mimic it.

• 1:53:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, like independent type publishers, but they'll still be the large guys. Two is you'll see an explosion, like, you know, Substack, obviously, I think is those types of tools that will allow people to kind of build their own things, etc. Three, podcasts. I actually think American citizens are really bad at writing in a highly overgeneralized way. It's much easier to just talk. And so I think you'll continue to see that explosion. But then the other piece is this idea of like citizen journalism, kind of like what Balaji's done with the coronavirus stuff. People now realize there's a social reward for being the best voice on something,

• 1:54:05Anthony Pompliano?

  regardless of your position in society. And so you've seen this now with like, Tim Poole became super popular with all of the like riots and protests and stuff with like the civil rights type stuff. Balaji's done a great job with coronavirus. I think you're starting to see people say like, I'm personally interested in a topic. And there's a social reward. Like the guy, you see the guy on the Japanese ship that wouldn't leave?

• 1:54:34Speaker 02

  I hadn't, was there somebody reporting from there?

• 1:54:37Anthony Pompliano?

  So dudes on a cruise.

• 1:54:39Speaker 02

  Off that ship.

• 1:54:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Dudes on a cruise, everyone gets coronavirus, like 600 people got infected or whatever.

• 1:54:44Speaker 02

  It's a terrible quarantine strategy.

• 1:54:46Anthony Pompliano?

  And he started tweeting or posting or whatever, and started to gain a little bit of fame from it and following. And they came and tried to get everyone who hadn't contracted it yet off the ship. And he wouldn't leave and wouldn't let his wife leave.

• 1:55:00Speaker 02

  So he got addicted to the fame?

• 1:55:01Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know really what was going on.

• 1:55:03Speaker 02

  Stockholm syndrome.

• 1:55:04Anthony Pompliano?

  But literally, like, he was like, I'm not leaving. Like, I got a job to do. Like, I'm about to livestream the coronavirus.

• 1:55:11Speaker 02

  It's not worth it, son.

• 1:55:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And so it's just like, now, that's like an extreme, you know, example, but like, you almost get this world where like, People feel an obligation and they have the tools. You see Hong Kong protests, you see people stepping up.

• 1:55:26Speaker 02

  The doctor died in China, like he felt compelled and

• 1:55:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Crazy.

• 1:55:30Speaker 02

  He's actually started, I mean, rest in peace, him stepping up and then being correct. The CCP making him come out with a statement against what he originally reported and then dying. Uh, when he probably was correct, uh, warning everybody of coronavirus in December. Um, is really igniting, from what I understand, uh, animal spirits within China. People are pissed off that this man who may have been able to not prevent, but

• 1:56:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Alert at least.

• 1:56:01Speaker 02

  Alert and contain, and may have been able to contain the virus. Obviously more than they have now at this point. And that's a citizen journalist, a doctor who just felt like he needed to stand up for what he thought was right.

• 1:56:15Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the things that I've started to push myself, and I think I'm going to start challenging people with is when you read the news, meaning not the individual citizen journalist stuff, right? Mainstream media, whatever terminology you want to use. Historically, we've lived our lives, default, it's true.

• 1:56:35Anthony Pompliano?

  If you switch that, not to default, it's law, it's untrue, but default, this is an opinion. I need to investigate true or not true, right? So kind of like default, uh, neutral. The way you think about the information you consume completely changes.

• 1:56:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, this, this really hit home for me with the coronavirus particularly. Like I was out there.

• 1:57:00Speaker 02

  Like I, I was out there speaking more confidently, uh, three weeks ago than I have. I'm comfortable speaking now. I honestly like.

• 1:57:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Wait, why? Like because like.

• 1:57:09Speaker 02

  Cause you don't know.

• 1:57:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:10Speaker 02

  I don't know. I honestly don't know what's going on on the ground. Like the videos of the people welding the door shut, like I don't, I can't corroborate them. I haven't been able to find, it seems like it may be.

• 1:57:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And there's contradicting, like, people are like, oh, that's my neighborhood. And they both say two different things.

• 1:57:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then I have Bitcoin friends in and around China who have said, maybe, uh, the Chinese government's overreacting and then you.

• 1:57:36Speaker 02

  Then you listen to people saying that the numbers being reported are far under what's actually happening. It's just, again, in the sovereign, excuse me, in the information age, confusion is going to reign supreme. And with coronavirus, I'm very confused.

• 1:57:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and this last thing I'll leave you with is, this is all just the actual facts of the information. We're not even talking about doctoring videos or audio, you know what I mean? Where it's like, now it goes from confusion to like, active disinformation. We're still just in the confusion phase. And I don't fucking know what's going on. You don't know what's going on. Like, I don't think anybody listening to this knows what's going on. So what happens when then we enter a world where people are actively trying to give you false information?

• 1:58:20Speaker 02

  Deep fix.

• 1:58:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, like, fuck that.

• 1:58:22Speaker 02

  That's what makes me want to go move to the woods, get a farm, just chill.

• 1:58:26Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. How can people subscribe to the newsletter?

• 1:58:30Speaker 02

  Uh, tftc.io.

• 1:58:33Anthony Pompliano?

  You can also buy merch there.

• 1:58:36Speaker 02

  Dot io slash merch.

• 1:58:37Anthony Pompliano?

  For those that don't know, he has his sup freaks hat on. And when we were checking in with security, the security guy downstairs immediately, eyes wide, sup freaks?

• 1:58:47Speaker 02

  It's a great conversation starter. Best way to subscribe newsletter, find me on Twitter, at Marty Bent. I have my pinned tweet there, a link to subscribe. You don't have to subscribe, it's just my weird thoughts on Bitcoin and macro and philosophy. With a final thought at the end.

• 1:59:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Joe is a fucking expert. Look, you got Tales from the Crypt logo in the top right.

• 1:59:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:59:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And then the podcast, Tales from the Crypt.

• 1:59:13Speaker 02

  Thank you, Joe. I've been crushing it.

• 1:59:14Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm telling you, man, he's about to be dangerous. So he's literally got your photo up here. He's got all the fucking information. If, uh, if he has another three days with this, I feel like I'm gonna come in here and he's gonna have a green screen. We're gonna be at the beach. So, all right, man, listen, thanks so much for coming to do this. I know we spent a lot of time talking, but, uh, hopefully all of you freaks in Marty's world enjoyed this.

• 1:59:38Speaker 02

  No, thank you for having me. It's always a pleasure.

• 1:59:42Anthony 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.