Ryan Leslie, CEO of Superphone: How a Grammy-Nominated Producer Became Hooked on Crypto

Ryan Leslie is the CEO of Superphone and a Grammy-nominated producer who has worked with the likes of Kanye West, Beyonce, Britney Spears, and more. In 2014, Leslie launched Superphone to help enterprise brands acquire, retain, and engage with mobile customers in a new and impactful way. Investors in Superphone include renowned VC Ben Horowitz, TechCrunch's Josh Constine, and Kanye West. In this episode with Anthony Pompliano, Leslie discusses his journey from attending Harvard at the age of 15 to becoming a world-renowned musical artist and entrepreneur. Pompliano and Leslie dive deep into their early Bitcoin stories, including how Leslie first heard about Bitcoin through Coinbase’s CEO, Brian Armstrong. 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. CRYPTO. COM-----Crypto.com is a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. With the vision of "cryptocurrency in every wallet", the Crypto.com App offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well designed UX and high security. It is the best place to buy, sell and pay with crypto. COINMINE-----The Coinmine One is like an Xbox that turns your electricity into Bitcoin. You just plug it in, connect to wifi, and tap on the crypto you want. It’s so easy anyone can do it. Everything is controlled from the Coinmine mobile app and the Coinmine keeps getting better with over the air updates that add new coins, features and services to your Coinmine. Visit coinmine.com/pomp to get a Coinmine and earn crypto for powering a new world. ETORO-----This episode of Off the Chain is sponsored by eToro, the smartest crypto trading platform, and one of the largest in the world. Join 11 million other traders and create an account at etoro.com and build your crypto portfolio the smart way.

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

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Whoa. Before we get started, I want to go over the four sponsors for this episode who make all this possible. They're fantastic, so go show them some love. The first is the best URL in the industry, crypto.com. They're a crypto platform with one goal: driving mass adoption. That's why we're all here, right? To get every human on earth a digital wallet and to get them using digital currencies. Crypto.com is helping people do that through buying, earning, lending, and a new card payment. Everything you could want is at crypto.com. They've been longtime supporters of Off the Chain and recently announced a new exchange, so go help them out, download their app from the App Store, or visit crypto.com and tell them POM sent you. There's nothing better in the world than a company helping to drive global adoption of this new technology.

• 0:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Another part of global adoption is making sure that we secure the various blockchains with computing power. CoinMine has built the best consumer experience in mining, hands down, no competition. If you want to help secure the blockchain and get started in mining, you can go to coinmine.com/pom, order a CoinMine, it'll arrive at your door, and you simply take it out of the box, plug it in, and connect to your Wi-Fi. You'll be mining your favorite crypto in five minutes or less. It is honestly magical. I have one running right now here in the office, and it's super quiet, it's got no heat, and every person that comes in the office asks, "What is that?" Every single person asks. It's a CoinMine. The best part to me is that the CoinMine comes with a mobile app that's super slick, and the company continues to push over-the-air updates to the device

• 1:25Anthony Pompliano?

  that add functionality, add tokens that can be mined, or increase the efficiency of the device. Similar to how Tesla does car software updates over the air, CoinMine is sending these passively to thousands of CoinMines around the world on a periodic basis. Pretty damn cool. When Farbood and the team pitched me on the idea of an Xbox or PlayStation-like box that could mine cryptocurrency in your home, I was immediately sold. I invested in the business, have a device personally, and keep telling people to go to coinmine.com/pom so they can save a lot of time if they want to get started mining today. CoinMine has a partnership with our third sponsor for this episode, BlockFi. BlockFi is one of my favorite companies in crypto because they allow users to deposit their assets in a deposit account and immediately start earning interest.

• 2:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Think about it, if you keep your digital assets on an exchange or in cold storage, you aren't benefiting from any yield on the asset. With BlockFi, they allow you to deposit crypto and then get paid interest on a monthly basis in crypto. Deposit Bitcoin and want to get your interest payment in ETH? You can do it. Deposit Bitcoin and want to get your interest payment in Bitcoin? You can do it. The rates at BlockFi are currently some of the best in the industry. You can earn 6% interest on Bitcoin and you can earn up to 8.6% APY on GUSD deposits. I'm an investor in the company and think BlockFi is building really important and compelling infrastructure. So go check them out at blockfi.com/pomp. Again, that's blockfi.com/pomp. And that brings us to the last advertiser of the episode, eToro.

• 2:51Anthony Pompliano?

  These guys have absolutely crushed it over the years. Their founder, Yoni, was one of the original Bitcoin OGs and has been ahead of almost every trend in crypto. He built eToro to help people buy, sell, and trade cryptocurrencies. But he added a few twists: social trading, copy trading, and virtual trading accounts. Social trading is a feature where every asset available on the platform has its own separate social feed where people talk about the asset, share trading ideas and analysis, and even include various charts or graphs. Virtual trading accounts is targeted at beginners. If you're just starting out and want to try trading with play money, eToro will give you a virtual account with $100,000 in it to test, learn, and get comfortable. And so, then that brings us to copy trading, which is by far the coolest feature. This allows you, as a user, to select any other user's portfolio to copy.

• 3:36Anthony Pompliano?

  If you see someone on the platform you like, you can set your account to mimic their trades. They buy Bitcoin with 5% of their portfolio? Your portfolio buys 5% Bitcoin. They sell 50% of their Ether position? Your portfolio does the same thing automatically. Copy trading is awesome, so go join the 10-plus million other traders on eToro and start trading all the most popular cryptocurrencies today. They're one of the largest companies in the space and you can get started by going to etoro.com. Again, that is etoro.com, where the entire team is ready to get you started in just a few clicks. And don't forget, go subscribe to the Off the Chain daily newsletter. You can go to offthechain.substack.com. I write a letter of news, analysis, and opinion every morning that goes out to more than 40,000 investors. See you there.

• 4:22Anthony 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.

• 4:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Ryan Leslie is an American recording artist and record producer from Washington DC. He has produced singles for a number of prominent artists in a variety of genres, ranging from R&B and hip-hop to pop and gospel. In 2011, he was nominated for a Grammy. Ryan graduated from Harvard University and has made a big push into entrepreneurship in the last few years, where he's the founder and CEO of Superphone and Next Selection Lifestyle Group. In this conversation, we discuss graduating from Harvard, what it is like producing music with Jay-Z and Kanye, how Ryan discovered entrepreneurship, what his big idea behind Superphone is, and then Ryan tells us a bunch of awesome behind-the-scenes stories that you don't want to miss. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well.

• 5:18Anthony Pompliano?

  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. Alright guys, bang, bang. I got Mr. Ryan Leslie here. This is gonna be too much fun, so we're gonna try to, uh, to keep this clean and try to keep it, uh, where we have not as much fun as everyone at home. So, thank you for coming on and doing this.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Oh, we're gonna have a great time, man. Thanks for having me.

• 6:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, let's get, first of all, let's just start with the music stuff. I think most people know you as a musician, uh, for all of your music. Uh, walk us through, how did you frankly just kill it in music for so long?

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I moved to New York City on an unpaid internship in 2003. And this is five, six years after I got out of college. Told my, well, I went to Harvard, right, of all places to have a start in music. Harvard University, right? Told my dad I wanted to do music and, man, ended up back on his couch. And I graduated in 98, was on his couch in the fall of 2002. And called a little opportunity, unpaid internship in New York City, 2003. And 30 days into my internship, landed a meeting with Puffy. Puffy became my manager. He managed me from 2003 to 2005. I learned really everything I know about the music business, really from,

• 6:57Speaker 01

  A, reading a book called All You Need to Know About the Music Business. And then B, actually having two of probably the most polarizing and at the same time, most exciting executives and just personalities in the music business as mentors. And I was Sean "Diddy" Combs and Tommy Mottola, man. And so that first year or those first two years, I worked with everybody. My first record was a record for Beyonce on the Bad Boys 2 movie soundtrack called Keep Giving Your Love to Me. And then over those two years, just worked with everybody. Britney Spears, Snoop. And really, that was directly correlated to the fact that when you're working in Puffy's camp, you have access to every project.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  You can touch really any project that's happening. So that was really the, that was really my training ground. And then in 2005, I started to realize that the internet was going to drastically change the way music was both discovered and distributed. And a partner of mine by the name of Rashid Richmond introduced me to the MySpace music charts at the time. And he didn't just introduce me to the charts. He also... Came with a game plan and that game plan was that he actually was like, yo, I can control the MySpace keyword. And I said, well, what does that even mean? He said, well, look, MySpace isn't bidding on their own keyword because they're already the number one organic Google search result for the keyword MySpace. But we can own two through

• 8:23Speaker 01

  eight organic based on some SEO, SEM. And so, man, I took my girlfriend at the time, we made a MySpace profile for, I made a song for her. And over the next three months, she went from zero to 650,000 friends based on this little Google algorithm hack. And man, that song was called Me and You and it went on to be top 10 in eight different countries. And my previous mentor ended up signing Cassie. And she was the first artist to have a one-to-one correlation between social following and sales. So 650,000 friends

• 8:58Speaker 01

  on MySpace, 650,000 units sold. 650,000 friends on MySpace, 650,000 units sold. And that's when I really knew that that I had a real passion for disruption. And being able to sort of turn the entire model for the music business upside down was really kind of that first foray for me into just technology and the marriage of technology and creativity. And so I went on to consult Puffy on how to grow his MySpace profile. And then Puffy and Cassie fell in love and I never made a record with her again. And man, that was

• 9:43Speaker 01

  that was a great time because they say out of heartbreak is born, you know, great inspiration for art. I made two albums. And man, the second one was Grammy nominated, continued to produce for a bunch of folks. Worked on Kanye and Jay-Z's Watch the Throne, did a bunch of sessions with them. Man, you know, I just, I just still just been having a great time.

• 10:05Anthony Pompliano?

  I got a bunch of questions in here.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's go, let's go, let's go.

• 10:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's start with, what was the job that you were coming to unpaid internship? What were you supposed to be doing when you first came?

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so what was happening is that, you know, Puffy had a team of producers that was called The Hitmen, and Puffy's got a favorite line that says, "Take hits from the 80s and make it sound so crazy." The issue with taking hits from the 80s, making it sound so crazy is that when the song blows up, the people that produced the record only get a sliver of those earnings because the original copyright owners.

• 10:37Anthony Pompliano?

  They get such a lion's share.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Exactly, because they own the copyrights, right? So, the producer that I was working with, his name is Younglord, said, "Look, man, you know, can you actually play original chord progressions instead of me having to sample them?" And I said, "Yeah, sure, of course I can." And so that's what I did, that's what I, that's what I came to New York to do. He had drum beats and drum loops and was looking for dope chord progressions that he could place on top of them so that when a record hit, we could actually legitimately split the earnings instead of having to pay a third party. And so that's what I did, that's what I, that's what I came in and came to do.

• 11:13Anthony Pompliano?

  What's, uh, what's, uh, Puffy like?

• 11:16Speaker 01

  Oh, he's, he's, he's amazing, man, uh, he's amazing.

• 11:18Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the first thing you remember about him?

• 11:21Speaker 01

  Man, to be honest, the first thing I really remember about Puffy is that he had so much of a presence and influence on Harvard's campus, and I had never even met the guy, you know? And so, and the presence and influence that he had on Harvard's campus was that, you know, just, you know, an hour away in New York City was this music that was moving all the parties, moving all the social events. That was the soundtrack, really, you know, that Bad Boy era was really the soundtrack to my whole college career. So, meeting him finally was really just like, I really felt like I already knew him, and he really was everything, uh, he had every element that I expected him to have. You know, an incredible tenacity, an incredible work ethic, uh, and...

• 12:08Speaker 01

  Incredible sort of discernment for the kinds of people that he wanted to have around him. And a real love for music and a real love for entrepreneurship. And he really exemplified, I think, what, you know, my homie ASAP Ferg is continuing to bear the torch. For, and that is just like that Harlem hustler mentality, man. And so when I moved to New York, out of, when I, when I first came, I was in Young Lord's crib. So when I moved, I wanted to move to Harlem. Cause I wanted to move to that epicenter of what, you know, that hustle that I, that I'd always admired. And had had a chance to actually work closely with, in Puffy's camp.

• 12:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, there's a song, what is it, Bad Boys for Life, I think, where they have a music video, they're riding the bikes down the street and stuff. I remember that was just a hit.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 12:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Right, you're a little bit older than me, but I just remember listening to that over and over and over again.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  So inspirational, man. So you, you know, when you see, when you see everything that's been happening, for, for listeners, if you're unfamiliar, go, go back and check out those videos. And then for more modern day, just look at what the ASAP Mob is doing, ASAP Rocky, ASAP Ferg. And, you know, those kind of party starting records, you know, Dress and Fly, you know, Nice and Smooth with the Ladies, all of that. You know, that's, that's everything that, you know, Cameron, Jim Jones, all those guys, Harlem guys.

• 13:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Idea, like, music sets culture, right? And I think a lot of people, they're used to listening to music. A lot of times you actually listen to stuff, you don't even realize what it is. You just, you've heard the song before, you've heard the, you know, the beats, whatever. But music definitely sets culture. And I think now what we're starting to see is musicians that are realizing, whether it's Kanye or others, saying, look, I'm not just a musician. I'm not this one dimensional person. I can actually go and do other things, right? And because I think, there's a lot of people who are musicians who can do other things. There's not a lot of people who do other things that can be musicians, right? That creativity and that skillset is, could serve you really well when you break out of just music and go to other things, right?

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 14:05Anthony Pompliano?

  What, what, what's the one artist that you worked with that you got a great story for us that people probably haven't heard before?

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Man.

• 14:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, what's your favorite memory working with all these artists?

• 14:15Speaker 01

  Listen, I would have to say, working with Kanye and Hove on the Watch the Throne sessions was

• 14:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Legendary.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  Legendary, life-changing for me, just because, I mean, we started in Bath, England, at Peter Gabriel's studio, and, mind you, that studio already just looks like a spaceship, so you can imagine me pulling up and, you know, playing some beats for Kanye, and then, you know, having communal lunches or dinners with, you know, it's Hove, it's Beyonce, and this is all before the Watch the Throne album, so we just knew that something incredible was brewing, and just to be part of that process was incredible. But I remember one night in Australia, because we ended up doing, we did Bath, England, we did Paris, we did the Mercer, we did Sydney, Australia, and so there was this big mansion in Australia,

• 15:08Speaker 01

  I went out to check them, and at the time Oprah was broadcasting her show from, I think, the Sydney Opera House, and Jay-Z was a guest on the show, and, you know, I stay up really late. I taught myself sort of Daimaxian sleep when I was in college, just so I could add more hours to the day, and so one night, it really was just me, Jay-Z, and Engineer in the living room of this big mansion in Australia, and he said, you know, he looked over at me, and I don't drink, but he's, you know, having a drink, I had some ginger ale, probably something, and he says, "Look, you know, who's gonna catch up to me?" And I said, "What you mean?" And he said, "Look, I started my day, you know, I went out, I

• 15:50Speaker 01

  did the Oprah taping, you know, I spent some time with my lady on the boat, I went and did, I opened for U2, and now I'm at the studio, and everyone else is asleep except for you, and I am already where I am, so who's gonna be able to catch up to me?" And, man, that was just such an impactful moment for me, because that's the kind of work ethic to which I aspire, and, you know, I think there definitely is in everyone's pathway

• 16:21Speaker 01

  To success, there's always a sprinkle of luck. But I also believe that you can reduce dependency on luck by having a great work ethic and having a great amount of that work ethic being invested in building the right relationships.

• 16:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Look, I talk about it all the time. There's people who are good at something and then there's the select few that are great, right? Whether it's a basketball player, a musician, entrepreneur, whatever.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:44Anthony Pompliano?

  You can be good by rolling out of bed, right? There's some people who just look, you got lucky, won the ovarian lottery, right? You're 6'5" and you got a 44-inch vertical. You should be able to dunk, right? You know, stuff like that. But Kobe Bryant, right, is notorious for, one of my favorite stories is he was at a pregame before the game, and he goes out on the court and Jay Williams, the famous Duke star, said that he was out there shooting and Kobe came out, went down the other end and they're on opposing teams. So Jay starts shooting and Kobe starts shooting. And Jay Williams is like, I'd already been out there for about an hour, so I did another 30 minutes, whatever, and I leave. And by the time I leave, Kobe Bryant's breaking a sweat and he's shooting, he's shooting, he's shooting.

• 17:27Anthony Pompliano?

  And I walk inside in the locker room, go out and play that game that night and Kobe, you know, put up 40 points or something. He walks up to me, like, "Man, Kobe, how'd you do that? You know, you spent an hour and a half before the game doing this or whatever." And he goes, "Man, I wasn't leaving that court till you left, just so you knew you were in my house." Right?

• 17:45Speaker 01

  That's what it takes, man.

• 17:46Anthony Pompliano?

  And it was just, he was playing a game before the game even started, right? And he was out there and he was working, he was doing all this stuff. And so it's that idea of you take somebody who even then Jay-Z had a pretty big lead on people in terms of what he was doing. And for him to say things like, "Who's gonna catch me?"

• 18:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:01Anthony Pompliano?

  We shouldn't be surprised by what he's doing now, right? And where he's gotten to because you, you know, you had a front row seat to some of that hard work and kind of seeing that path.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  No surprise, no surprise. And proud, proud, proud of it, man. You know, I feel like, especially for folks who really get it out the mud, as they say, right? So you really come from nothing. And when I say come from nothing, we're not even talking about starting with nothing, but we talk about generationally prior to when you arrived on the earth, you maybe Even had a negative.

• 18:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes, poverty cycle.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know what I mean? So to see that and to see that kind of success and to see that that that it can be replicated is really, I think, one of the greatest motivators for the work that I do every day.

• 18:44Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. What what's Kanye like?

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Oh, man, he's he's amazing as well.

• 18:48Anthony Pompliano?

  One of my favorite things he says is, tell me a genius, you know, that's not crazy.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree. I agree. I agree. And I think also, man, just from a taste level and just being a what I've observed just being around Kanye is just a voracious appetite for knowledge. And also, once he's formulated his perspective and point of view, he's very, very true to it as an artist. And I think that authenticity has served him extremely well across all the different platforms where he's been creative. And I think he's bred that in his camp. So when you look at what Virgil's been able to do at Louis Vuitton and Nike and everywhere else that he's actually been able to touch creatively, that's all from, I think, being fostered in that environment of just like creativity, artistic authenticity.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  And I think Kanye really was was a game changer and continues to be a game changer in that regard.

• 19:42Anthony Pompliano?

  He he fascinates me because I I was I was joking at first and then people started sending me articles that say it might be true that Kanye is a billionaire, right? And it's because he owns Yeezy. And my understanding, he owns 100% of it, but he's got some kind of rev share deal with Adidas on it. But on that, the dude sold over a billion dollars worth of gear.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Yeah, you could say Adidas helped him, whatever.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:07Anthony Pompliano?

  You don't do that by accident.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. No, it's true. It's true. It's true. It's true. It's true. So, yeah, I mean, listen, to be in the company of those greats, to work alongside, to be respected as a peer, to be respected as a co-creator, to be respected as someone who was valuable in the creative and business process is is is an accolade that I don't take lightly. I take that with a with a great deal of pride and responsibility. You know what I mean?

• 20:35Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. So we we met a couple of years ago and and I told you then and I reminded you today that the very first time I ever heard about you, knew about you, anything was I saw a video on YouTube of frankly, some some madman sitting in an apartment, right, in New York. And you had a cup of change, a little coins, and you were shaking it.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:56Anthony Pompliano?

  That turned into a part of a beat and then you went over and you started playing on a keyboard. That turned and it was literally you were making a song.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, what's the video called?

• 21:03Speaker 01

  The video is called Ryan Leslie, I Gets Money.

• 21:06Anthony Pompliano?

  I Gets Money.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  If you want to take a look at it, yeah, it's on YouTube. Just do the search. You'll find it.

• 21:11Anthony Pompliano?

  You're a Grammy nominated artist, all stuff, and I know you because of this viral YouTube video.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes. And I think that's really just a testament to the fact that you have to be an early mover on social channels in order to actually win in that arbitrage. And so for me, the minute I discovered that YouTube was available and it was free, I was one of the first guys on that

• 21:36Anthony Pompliano?

  To go there.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  platform, you know, to the point where they knew who I was. They were sending me T-shirts and all kind of other, you know, merch and gear and swag, just because I was one of those folks that not only was I using the platform, I was using that platform in a way that was disruptive, you know, so seeing the actual, how the actual beat is being made, I think really, uh, really fathered a lot of folks today who are doing that so that they can get some exposure for what they're doing.

• 22:07Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. So you've got a whole nother part of your life. But before we get to that, I've always wondered, somebody who's got the musical talent that you have, do you just walk down the street with beats in your head? Like, are you sitting there just thinking like, like, man, I heard that noise, you know, I heard that bus door close. That could be part of, you know, this beat or whatever. Or is it more of you've got to have a really concentrated focus? Let me go into a studio and that's where kind of all the magic happens?

• 22:28Speaker 01

  Listen, my dad told me a story that I don't even recall. He said, uh, when he was in college, uh, he brought

• 22:37Speaker 01

  I was already around when he was in college. So he and my, my mother were at actually the Salvation Army Training College.

• 22:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  In Atlanta, Georgia. And he says that he gave me a quarter or something to go get a soda. So mind your soda was only a quarter back then. And I didn't come back. And so he's wondering like, okay, what's going on with Ryan? Like the soda machine is right in the hallway, right down the hall. Where'd he go? He comes to the soda machine and I'm like, hey dad, the soda machine is making a beat because it, it had a rhythm to the whirring. So I'm sitting next to the machine just bobbing my head. Instead of getting a soda, I'm hearing music. And he said, look, you know, this, this kid is gonna have music in him. And so to that, to that end, um, fast forward to today, uh, my crew, you know, we ride around New York and I think one of the,

• 23:29Speaker 01

  one of the most fascinating idiosyncrasies is that I ride in silence. Other people listen to the radio, listen to podcasts, listen to music. So I ride in silence. And the reason I ride in silence is that when I'm in transit in that way, I actually hear music that's fully completed. So I don't just hear like, like you said, maybe a door closing or back when I was a little kid, maybe I heard the Coke machine whirring and I could hear a beat that way. Now I actually hear fully formed compositions. And so my process in the studio is really racing against my mind to, to actually bring to fruition the fully formed compositions that I hear in my head.

• 24:08Anthony Pompliano?

  That, that's crazy that you basically, you come up with the music in your mind and then the challenge is actually trying to get it from your mind into the audio file.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Right before you forget it or you, you know, mess something up or whatever.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think there are a lot of parallels between that and product designers, right? So just the idea or app developers or startup founders, right? Is that they have this concept, they, and not only do they have a concept of a solution, they actually are envisioning a future for the world and how their solution actually fits into the way the world will work in the future. And so for me, uh, as well with music, man, you know, when I'm, When I make a record, I'm making a record looking towards timelessness, right? So when I made that record with Cassie, that record still lives to this day. We still get sample requests and clearance requests on that record to this day. It's 13 years old, right? And so I always look at that.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  I always have an eye towards sort of the timelessness. And being timeless means you have to have some sensibility of what you believe the future will be.

• 25:13Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. So the music career is pretty well documented, right? If you're a Grammy nominated artist, you can't hide.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Can't hide.

• 25:21Anthony Pompliano?

  But you got this whole other side of your life, which is as a tech entrepreneur, right? An investor. Maybe tell us a little bit about what you've been doing on that side for the last decade or so.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, it's really related. So like I said, we built a very huge social following for Cassie. And then all of a sudden, all those followers just migrated away. And I thought to myself, man, you know, we invested so much to earn the equity in that social platform. And then it just disappeared as people migrated off. So we used to be able to send a bulletin to 650,000 people. And there was conversion and there was, you know, there was engagement. And now because those people have migrated to another platform, we send a bulletin and there's crickets. And so I thought to myself, man, it would have been so much more prudent for me to collect phone numbers. Because even though that's a retro social handle, it can be retrofitted with modern technology.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  And so that's an experiment that I embarked on in 2013. I gave my phone number out to 550,000 people on Twitter. And man, it really was the birth of the platform, which is Superphone today. And so what I really wanted to do was, anyone who sent me a text, I wanted to know who they were. Because obviously I didn't want to have just a feed of unknown numbers. So I built a simple automation chain that says, look, somebody sends a text. You don't recognize the number? Just hit that person back, say, hey, I don't recognize this number. I'd love to stay in touch. Please add your information to my phone. Second, I was doing a lot of business on Shopify. So I wanted to check whether they had purchased.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  And in the event that they still had yet to purchase, send them a recommendation to do so. And then also trigger, at the time of purchase, trigger a thank you. And so that was a simple automation chain. Step one, two, three. Number one, put your info in my phone. Number two, once I have your info, check and see if you've bought. Recommend that you buy and then third, thank folks and man, it the results of that sort of experiment were staggering. Thirty five thousand of my 550,000 people actually texted me.

• 27:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  Every single one of them because of the automation chain that was built, received a reply which said, hey, put your info on my phone. Thirty three thousand of the thirty five thousand opted in by entering their info on my phone and the sales conversion was just literally just unbelievable, right? Fifty percent, seventeen thousand of the thirty three thousand who received a link to purchase actually bought and then I basically had my most financially lucrative album cycle run straight off the iPhone, straight off of text.

• 27:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 27:59Speaker 01

  And so I knew at that juncture that I was on to some future way of engaging an audience and that led to an audience of one, Ben Horowitz, who went on to be the first investor in Superphone and that really was because Tristan Walker was an entrepreneur in residence at Andreessen at the time and set up the meeting and man.

• 28:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Tristan's from Atlanta too?

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Tristan is actually from out here.

• 28:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, really?

• 28:26Speaker 01

  He's in Atlanta now.

• 28:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, he's in Atlanta now, okay.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, he sold his company, Walker and Company. I was an investor.

• 28:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Ah, congratulations.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, sold it to Procter and Gamble and now he's in Atlanta, you know, continuing to, you know, just keep it, keep it hot down there. He was just on the cover of Fast Company. They did a whole, they did a whole, you know, special article, series of articles on Atlanta, Paul Judge. They featured, he's also an investor, angel investor in Superphone. So man, I like that, I like that Atlanta crew.

• 28:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so Superphone essentially, you know, when I first saw it, the first thing that jumps to my mind is you're building a CRM tool, right?

• 29:02Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 29:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Which essentially allows you to put people in, they can kind of self-qualify themselves, right? They can give you whatever information they want.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:10Anthony Pompliano?

  And then what it allows you to do is know who they are. When you're communicating with them and really break down the friction to communicating with these people. Uh, and over time, it's really evolved into, uh, the ability to set reminders, right? Do kind of all these more, what I consider like two, uh, 200 level or 300 level type, um, actions. But at the end of the day, we have CRMs or other tools from almost every other communication platform. Email, social, right? All this other stuff. Text message is still incredibly powerful and there was nothing like this.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  There was nothing like it and trust me, I had the money, I could have just paid for it. And so the absence of a solution, even, you know, with the amount that I was willing to pay. And the absence of that solution really created the need and the necessity for me as an innovator to bring this to life. And man, listen, I started out with giving my phone number out to 550,000 people. Just this summer, Miley Cyrus gave her super phone number out to 95 million Instagram followers. And listen, the fun of building a platform that you could watch to sit back and scale and watching all those phone calls come in and all those texts go out and zero downtime and, you know, high fiving with the developers that we could have done 10 of these concurrently.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  Was just, you know, an exhilarating feeling. And so I think Ben really was the first. I mean, I had never started a business or, I mean, outside of a music business, I wasn't a startup founder at all.

• 30:33Anthony Pompliano?

  But you were an entrepreneur. Hold on, we, we, I'm not gonna let you off the hook. Come on. Being a musician, a producer, all stuff, right? You were an entrepreneur. It might not have been in a for-profit corporate environment, like a, like a true startup. But you're an entrepreneur.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. And I think Ben really is an oracle in that. I mean, listen, he's on a Forbes Midas list for a reason. And he basically said, look, Ryan, what I see in this, and really our exchange was pretty simple. I just gave him my phone number, put my phone on the table and said, look, send me a text and I'll sell you my album. I won't touch my phone. And it was pay what you want. The album was only $12 and he, you know, he paid $50 for it. So I was like, oh, I'm already up in this meeting, right? And then he went on to say, look, I, I love the, I love founders that solve their own problem. And you should really, really consider productizing this because you have a deep knowledge. And sort of unique and the moat around this business will be that you are

• 31:30Speaker 01

  a founder who is building a product that you have very, very specific knowledge on how to solve this challenge. And so, man, he was right. You know, he was absolutely right. And so, yeah, shout out to Ben Orwitz for being the first to invest.

• 31:43Anthony Pompliano?

  That's awesome. All right, we got to talk about Bitcoin.

• 31:48Anthony Pompliano?

  You were early, man. You were super early.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 31:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Right. When's the first time you heard about Bitcoin?

• 31:54Speaker 01

  I heard about it really in like 2012, 2011, and really it might have just been just an article I'd seen in passing. I maybe read some article about some engineers buying pizza or something like that. I thought, yeah, that's funny. And really didn't pay much attention to it. Ben actually was the one that introduced me to Brian Armstrong and Fred, who were the founders of Coinbase. And I was sitting at one of Ben's barbecues and Brian, you know, says, look, you know, you should take this seriously. And just to get you on your way, I'll send you some Bitcoin. So he sent me some Bitcoin and Coinbase. And there I was, you know, with my first cryptocurrency holding.

• 32:36Anthony Pompliano?

  And you're up in that meeting as well now, right?

• 32:41Anthony Pompliano?

  We got to figure out what this is. You go to meetings with people and all of a sudden they're giving you money every time.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right. At the time, it was like $5 worth of Bitcoin. But I mean, you know, that's definitely grown over time. And so, man, for me, I'm always interested in really any project or any interest that I have, I really throw myself into it, right? So when I decided I wanted to do music or I wanted to learn piano, I was practicing six, seven hours a day to the point where my little sister was complaining to my parents, hey, Ryan's hogging the piano. Not only is he hogging the piano, he's terrible at it, right? And he's playing that thing for six, seven hours a day. So when I really decided like, okay, look, you know, I believe that, you know, maybe it's the universe or some cosmic, whatever it is that's saying like, I should really pay attention to this.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  I said, look, let me try and experiment and what's the best way for me to amass as much of this cryptocurrency as possible? So one of the first forays was just adding

• 33:41Speaker 01

  Some way that people could actually buy my digital album with Bitcoin. And so there was a plugin at the time for Shopify, so I did that. And I think if you look at the headlines, even 50 Cent, you know, I probably put him on to that as well. I mean, I put a lot of folks on to this. Jeezy 50, you know, Nipsey Hussle, the late great Nipsey Hussle, talked to them about cryptocurrency. So

• 34:03Anthony Pompliano?

  And what's their reactions, right? I mean, these guys are titans of the music industry.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Even today, right? And you come to them, you're like, hey, man, there's this new currency, right? This thing called Bitcoin.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Are they like, hey, Ryan, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever? Or is it like, tell me more about it?

• 34:18Speaker 01

  No, I think, I think the, the real marker of any great entrepreneur is the tolerance for risk, you know? And so for me, and you know, it's actually a little crazy when you think about the tolerance for risk is that for me, betting on myself, I feel like it's a very low risk proposition just because I believe that I'm built for whatever I need to do to be successful. I'm built for whatever critical and crucial elements are necessary for me to be successful. And that's because I keep the promises I make to myself. That's how my confidence has been built. I make little promises to myself. I keep those promises. I build confidence.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  And so I believe that the real marker of any great entrepreneur is the fact that they have that kind of risk tolerance. And when they feel that gut, they bet on it. And so for me, when I talk to those folks about it, they never really gave me the kind of pushback of like, ah, you know, I'm not interested, let's try this, right? And maybe they just dipped their toe in the water right before jumping in. I'm the kind of person that really jumps in so that my story can have some real credence and gravitas and validation. So I can't just say, hey, you should try this because I think it's cool. You should try this because I've actually gone through the entire process. I've learned and you can learn from my learnings and actually accelerate your ROI

• 35:42Speaker 01

  based on my learnings, right? So that's why I try to share as much as possible. I believe that my knowledge should create a runway so other people can have an even more explosive liftoff.

• 35:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Skrt, skrt. Want to know who has the best URL? Crypto.com. That's right. Crypto.com. They're a crypto platform with one goal. Motherf***ing mass adoption. That's why we're all here. We're trying to get crypto in every wallet. Crypto.com is helping people do that through buying, earning, lending and card payment. Everything you could want at Crypto.com. Go help your boy out. Tell him POM sent you. Download the app or visit Crypto.com. POM's got you, always. Ever wanted to get into mining and didn't know how? Don't worry, your boy POM's got you. Everybody got some electricity and wifi. All you gotta do is go to CoinMine.com, you buy

• 36:33Anthony Pompliano?

  a coin mine. It's like an Xbox or a Playstation that helps you turn your electricity into Bitcoin. That's right. You purchase it, it shows up at your doorstep, you pull it out of the box, you plug it in, connect to your wifi, five minutes or less, you're mining Bitcoin. All you have to do is control it from the mobile app they provide, and then you receive over the air updates that add new coins and new features on a consistent basis. Kind of like how Tesla does over the air updates and updates the car software. Just your update in your coin mine. Consumer mining made easy. That's right. Go to CoinMine.com, tell them POM sent you, and thank me later. One more word from our sponsor BlockFi. Their new interest account allows you to securely

• 37:15Anthony Pompliano?

  deposit your Bitcoin or Ether at BlockFi and receive 6% annual interest paid monthly in cryptocurrency. This rate actually compounds, so you receive a 6.2% APY, which is very attractive given the alternatives. So you can actually take your Bitcoin, you can deposit it with BlockFi and get paid an interest rate of 6% in return. Go check out BlockFi.com/POM, again BlockFi.com/POM, to sign up and start earning interest on your crypto today. You nailed it, man. I've never met a successful person that doesn't believe in betting on themselves. Yeah. Right? I mean, again, you can go any industry, whether it's business, athlete, musician,

• 37:55Anthony Pompliano?

  whatever. The common theme across everyone is, listen, I know it's gonna be hard, I know it might actually even be pretty close to impossible. Yeah. But it's me. For sure. Right? If I bet on me, then we'll see what happens. We're going all the way. And I think part of it is, actually, in one of my partners I talked to before, it's not so much an arrogance of, hey, I'm betting on me. Because I think I'm better than everybody. It's the exact opposite, actually. It's the I'm betting on me because if this doesn't work, I only want one person to blame.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 38:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And it's I don't want to count on somebody else to be the person that something I'm doing fails. I want to be able to count on myself.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Being the reason why we win or lose, right? And I think, again, you see, you know, the stories of these athletes who get in the huddle and say, hey, give me the ball.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:41Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, a player running, we're running the play, give me the ball.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. And so I would say the biggest bet that I met, that I made was to introduce Bitcoin or the concept of Bitcoin to folks that were actually paying me for my services. So at the time, those services were, you know, whether I was doing hostings or doing concerts, et cetera. I wanted all my advances to be paid in Bitcoin.

• 39:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And you just go to them and just say, hey, I don't want dollars. I want Bitcoin.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:11Anthony Pompliano?

  What do they say?

• 39:12Speaker 01

  Man, I got screenshots on WhatsApp where people are like, what are you even talking about? Like, what is, what is this? Like, you know, you don't want dollars? And so, yeah, man, it's so much easier to just make you a wire. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, I was very, very clear. I said, look, this is, this is how I want to get paid. And so, yeah, I had a great deal of shows and, and appearances and all kinds of experiences for which I was paid in Bitcoin. And it was a very significant amount in those early days, and I've just held since then.

• 39:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that's awesome. Why hold? Like, what would just deep conviction, hey, this is gonna be worth more in the future? Did you forget about it? What was kind of the thought process behind holding?

• 39:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think really, first and foremost, I think just the culture of, of what I've observed and sort of just watching folks online that are excited. I mean.

• 40:07Anthony Pompliano?

  It's wild, man. It's a combat zone out there.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  It's total, you know what I mean?

• 40:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Twitter is wild. These people who believe, right? And you see it every day. They just, they really, really believe.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And I mean, honestly, you know, there are definitely opposing and polarizing viewpoints on cryptocurrency.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  And Bitcoin particularly because it's the most prevalently sort of widespread widely recognized currency. But I think really, I think there are there are a few indicators to me which definitely gave me the confidence to just hold on. One of them was the Overstock deal, right? So the fact that you can buy anything on Overstock with Bitcoin. And then also just the fact that, you know, I'm really just fascinated with just this concept of of value exchange and value exchange that's trustless. And I believe that, you know, beyond just the concept of Bitcoin itself, just the fact that you can assign value based

• 41:11Speaker 01

  on its its appearance on a ledger, right? And that people are willing to exchange goods and other currency for that. I think that, you know, at some point, the dust will settle, and there will be some value as long as people assign the value to it. And I think we saw this pretty rampantly in all of the ICOs that that were happening, right? You know, everybody had a coin, right? And for me, I just kind of like watched from the sidelines because I've I was holding the, you know, the the the main, you know, the early, yeah, the king, right? So for me, I think it's just about I'm just very, very curious about the

• 41:51Speaker 01

  about where it will all pan out, if you will. And at least for me as well, in all of my other investments. I was early in Google, Apple, Amazon, Starbucks since 2007, 2008, right? And so and I just held, right? And so I think that I I think that Warren Buffett would disagree with me on Bitcoin, and he has, I think, very vocally disagreed that there is any value there. But I think at the end of the day, for me, value is what people assign. And so to the extent that there are, I mean, literally, I had a phone call the other day, somebody like, man, I want to buy $400,000 with the Bitcoin, you know, and they were looking to say, what exchange could I do this on? You know what I mean? So

• 42:36Anthony Pompliano?

  You can't say that it's worth Zero.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:39Anthony Pompliano?

  If somebody's willing to give four hundred thousand dollars for some amount of them.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Right. And so to your point, it's, uh, there's a marketplace.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:46Anthony Pompliano?

  That marketplace determines the price.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, you can argue that, uh, the price doesn't match the ultimate value of the asset, right? But you just can't argue with that. Yes, there's a price assigned to this that's, uh, being set by a marketplace that has pretty good liquidity.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:02Anthony Pompliano?

  And it is what it is.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  And when you think about, you know, just the, the, the thesis behind Bitcoin and just the fact that there is a restricted volume of the currency, that's really where I think, uh, folks are really looking at this as sort of a stored value digital asset, right? And so to the extent that Bitcoin eventually, you know, and I've heard people talk about this, uh, at various conventions and conferences. To the extent that it, it has the scarcity associated with Bitcoin as the same scarcity has been associated with, let's, let's say, gold, for example. Then really the price of a Bitcoin could really, you know, right now it's hovering at somewhere at ten, eleven thousand.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Could easily, you know, my price target was always twenty five thousand, right? And then, you know, there are folks who have predicted that it could get to, you know, a hundred thousand a coin, a million dollars a coin. Should it actually reach the kind of stored value assigned to it that gold has assigned to it? And so, you know, for me, I'm just, I'm just watching, man. I'm just watching. I'm enjoying the, I'm, I'm enjoying the, uh, the gains that I've already realized and, uh, and I'm just holding, man, you know?

• 44:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, you, you told, uh, Jeezy about, uh, Bitcoin. Tell us that story.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did. So Ludacris was having his birthday party, fortieth birthday party, Chateau in Paris. And well, kind of the outskirts of Paris and Jeezy and I wanted to stay close to the city, the metropolitan city of lights, Paris. You know, shopping, whatever it was.

• 44:36Anthony Pompliano?

  You and Jeezy going to the Eiffel Tower together?

• 44:37Speaker 01

  Nah, nah, it's not a tower, but maybe, you know, the Cavalli store, you know what I'm saying? Uh, because, you know, yeah, one of the freshest guys I know, man, Snow, you know? Ice cold. So bottom line, I said, look, man, you know, one of my favorite restaurants is this uh this Chinese restaurant called Diap. And so I said, look, why don't we, you know, invite some folks come and just chop it up, have a meal. And literally for like an hour and a half, just sat down, talked to him about it, showed him kind of the growth of of um my holdings. And just talked to him about just having some diversity in his investment portfolio. Uh that included, you know, what some may consider a risky investment, but which has, you know, over time.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  I mean, returned to uh

• 45:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Data speaks for itself.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  Had a beautiful return. Yeah.

• 45:27Anthony Pompliano?

  It's it's pretty cool that you get the opportunity to talk to people who uh have so much influence, right?

• 45:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:31Anthony Pompliano?

  You've got kind of your sphere of influence and then the people that you work with on a daily basis in the music side, uh same thing. So you uh you you've been beating the beat uh the Bitcoin drum for a while now. So thank you from all of us.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, no. And just totally excited about it, man. Just totally excited about. And for me, uh blockchain as well, right? So blockchain as well. I mean, right now at Superphone, uh the thesis for me is uh really about trust and transparency. And so, you know, I it's pretty polarizing, right? Because when you put this in a romantic context, right? How many, how many girls go through their guys' phones, right? And how many are like, okay, nothing's going on. Show me your conversation with her. You know, show me your DMs, right? And trust me, I've had my share, right? And so with Superphone, what I'm what I'm building and potentially there could be a really beautiful blockchain component to this.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  Is the fact that every message could be stored on the blockchain and eventually you'll be able to build a relationship graph. That tells you how close you are to someone because every message, the interval between messages, every phone call, the duration of phone calls, the interval between phone calls, that will all be logged on a blockchain. And then, you know, you don't have to trust. If, you know, hey, does Pump know Ben Horowitz? I'm looking for an intro. Well, just show me the relationship graph. And if everything is actually logged on this ledger, which is kind of a Applying the blockchain to a data set, which I think is really, really overlooked, which is our our communication health, right? We already have, I would say, services and apps which track our

• 47:10Speaker 01

  health in terms of how many steps we take, or you know, how many calories we burned, right? To be able to actually track that on a conversational level, I think is really going to help to accelerate success. Whether you're a sale, we're all salespeople in some way, right? So if you're trying to get, you know, this girl to go with you to the prom, then you, you know, or get this girl to go on a date with you, or whatever it is you're selling at some point. And so the strength of relationships and the ability, I think, to put some truth and transparency to the point where you can have a trustless system around how close people are. I think LinkedIn has tried to, up to this point, do it. I think is really powerful. And also from a music standpoint, Benji Rogers, who's also an angel investor in Superphone,

• 47:55Speaker 01

  started Pledge Music and, you know, came up with this concept, this concept of dot blockchain, where the music file type, like MP3 or WAV, is very, very antiquated. And so there's so much more information that can be stored around my latest recording. And so, once again, that also, I think there are blockchain applications for storing that data, the transfer of digital assets, etc. There's so much there that's really exciting to me around the blockchain.

• 48:24Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. This is part of the automation series we're doing. What's, what's going on with automation? What do you see in there? What's got you excited?

• 48:31Speaker 01

  Oh, for me, a man, so much, so much. So automating relationships, very polarizing, very, very polarizing topic. So Superphone has a, has a feature called Never Lose Touch. And for me, I utilize that feature to make sure that anytime, whatever interval of time goes by, that I

• 48:54Speaker 01

  Lose the ball or drop the ball with staying in touch with someone, Superphone just jumps in and sends a message. Now, I've had some people that are just like, yo, this is totally disingenuous. If you were really thinking about me, then you would actually open your phone, unlock it, search for my name, type a text, hit the send button because you're really thinking about me. Sounds inefficient. Right, totally inefficient. And so, I'll be honest with you, you know, uh, some of the most valuable relationships in my life have been enriched by putting this layer of automation that even though I might get busy, I might be in my own world, I might be working on music, I might be working on Superphone. It's tracking these time lapses and is initiating conversations with me. And the people that really care to be in touch with me, they always respond.

• 49:38Speaker 01

  And then folks that are skeptical, uh, they block me. They say, hey, look, you know, I don't even want to be in touch, you put a robot on me. And so I think, you know, yeah, seriously, yeah, seriously. And so I think that, um... Does that make you the Robot King? The Robot King. I will say, you know, world's most connected, you know? Because once I meet someone and they get into my Superphone, I'm immediately tracking everything that I just discussed. So, how long does it take for Pomp to respond to me? How often do we have phone calls? What's the interval between phone calls? Does he, does he use emojis? How much, uh, how many MMS does he actually send? Does MMS actually equate to, you know, some larger event that's happening in his life? After an MMS, does it immediately upswing to a telephone call?

• 50:22Speaker 01

  So, all of those data points are now in a platform where you can't do this on iMessage, right? So now, all these data points are in a, in a platform that makes that data actionable. And so, for me, automation is, is key because of the scale at which I'm texting. I got 98,000 text conversations in my Superphone. I try to, um, I try to do as little bot.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  Work in there as as as little as possible, right? Because that that communication channel is so sacred. It's the most important real estate that's in our phones.

• 51:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 51:02Speaker 01

  So the minute somebody feels like a robot is in there, they check out, right? And so to the point that to the extent that people understand that I'm building and I'm testing, I've had folks that have I've built really beautiful relationships. And to be honest, my relationship with my mother has even improved just because I know she's driving home from church on Sundays. So literally every Sunday at 1:30 her time, Arizona time, that phone call happens and it looks like my mom is calling me. Doesn't matter what meeting I'm in. I say, hey, look, I gotta take this call as my mom, just to check in. And our relationship has improved because of that. So listen, maybe I'm living in the future, right? And maybe in the future, everyone will just accept this as a common practice. But for right now, it's pretty polarizing.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  I am automating those portions and I'm automating conversation initiation as opposed to conversation responses, so to speak.

• 51:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and I guess part of this too is, you know, some of the sensitivities probably around text messages are the highest signal communication channel most of us have, right? Maybe phone calls are a little bit higher, but even with robo calls now.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 52:08Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't answer a single call if I don't know the number.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 52:10Anthony Pompliano?

  And so if somebody texts me, I see it, right? And I think that what you're getting at here is, you know, this idea that if you automate the initiation of the conversation, really all it's doing is basically serving as an alarm.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  It is, it is.

• 52:26Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's saying, hey, you know, you should be talking to this person. And I think that there's this this study that shows 150 people is kind of like your circle, right?

• 52:35Speaker 01

  Dunbar's number.

• 52:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but with something like this, right? You're able to actually expand that number.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:39Anthony Pompliano?

  And stay connected to a whole bunch more people. And again, it's just, you don't actually have to communicate, you know, groundbreaking ideas to people, right? Just a simple, hey, thinking about you.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 52:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Good to go, right?

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And also, you know, I am interested in automating mundane requests. So if you were to text me right now, what's your email is gonna hit you right? What's best email for you is just gonna hit you right back.

• 53:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  If you were to text me right now, hey, where can I get your latest music? It'll hit you right back because I believe that there should be some value delivery of convenience. So. If there is a data repository that's just gonna give you the answer that you need immediately, I shouldn't have to actually, you know, I mean, I think it was Elon Musk, who says that we're limited by our thumbs, the speed of our thumbs, right?

• 53:24Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm gonna hit you with a wild idea.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  Let's go.

• 53:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Humans are actually inefficient machines.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 53:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 53:30Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 53:30Anthony Pompliano?

  And all you're doing is you're taking one machine yourself, then you're replacing it with a more efficient, more intelligent machine.

• 53:37Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 53:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? When you look at it that way, actually what you're doing is you're improving.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  Scaling my own intent. I'm scaling my own intent, right? And so, uh, man, I'm running a lot of businesses on Superphone. I'm running a lot of businesses on Superphone, whether it's for my clients and customers, or whether it's for me. So like, right now, I'm running a, an interactive wealth building club.

• 54:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  Newsletter. It's called Wealth Plan. And listen, you know, there's a price point because I need people to value what I'm offering to them. And it's really just runs, I already basically created the entire brain trust. It's 12 different lessons. It's delivered every month. And over the next year, when you subscribe to Wealth Plan, you will get to follow my financial moves, mirror my financial moves. A little bit of crypto, a little bit of real estate investing. It's not a solicitation at all. It's just a revelation of what I'm doing to the extent that you'd like to mirror it, right? And so that is being done at scale over Superphone, right? And, uh, folks, if they wanna text back, cause they have questions,

• 54:42Speaker 01

  I can differentiate in my text feed, who's actually a subscriber, who's not. And I can give priority, uh, to the folks that are actually members of this interactive club. And so, there are so many applications for automation in, like I said, I believe that the cell phone number is our most powerful social handle. I think that Instagram has been trying to definitely follow in that same pathway by allowing folks to make phone calls straight out of their DMs, video calls straight out of their DMs. As an influencer, so to speak, with 330,000 Instagram followers, that feature is not available to me because they haven't built the kind of management tools

• 55:27Speaker 01

  that would be necessary for the amount of phone calls and video calls that I would be receiving. So people can't call me, I can't call them. With Superphone, though, all the management tools are built. And so only people that I want can ring through. Only people that I want can actually, you know, receive responses organically from me. But everyone else that wants to be directly in touch with me can do so. So I think it's very much in the same vein of what you're talking about where I know the machine that I would like to be and I've attached technology to support that kind of scaled intent that I'm looking to deliver.

• 56:02Anthony Pompliano?

  And part of this too, I think, is we don't change our phone numbers that much, right? So not only is it kind of the most intimate social handle, but it also is

• 56:12Speaker 01

  Long-lasting.

• 56:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Almost every single one of my friends still got the same number from high school.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, or college.

• 56:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, first time they got a cell phone, right? So most of your friends probably got it when they were in college, my friend in high school. They never changed.

• 56:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it becomes a part of someone's identity, right? And so, yeah, I mean, listen, I've always said this, you know, when you get somebody on text, you're in touch with them as long as you keep the conversation current, until they either block you, change their number, or die.

• 56:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  You know?

• 56:41Anthony Pompliano?

  You making any music still?

• 56:43Speaker 01

  Hey, man, I'm always making music. You know, I really went from doing like 150 shows a year to just doing three, four, or five shows a year. I'm really a full-time

• 56:52Anthony Pompliano?

  150 shows per year?

• 56:54Speaker 01

  Trust me, when you love what you do, it's not even work.

• 56:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Listen, we recorded 150 podcast episodes in the last 12 months.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 57:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Exactly to the week, right? And that was hard. And all I had to do was walk in this room and just talk in this microphone and leave and there's no audience.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Doing 150 shows, that is wild.

• 57:12Speaker 01

  Listen, add the audience, add, you know, screaming girls in the front row, add wild after-parties.

• 57:17Anthony Pompliano?

  You don't like screaming girls, or that's a bonus?

• 57:20Speaker 01

  Add all of it, I'm telling you, it'd be a lot more exciting, right? It'd be a lot more fun, a lot more fun, a lot more exciting. And so that was Trust me, I I never felt like it was working. Never felt, never for a moment felt like it was work. I was exhausted, sometimes I had to have doctors come give me a shot in my back, all that kind of stuff. But I had a blast. And now, you know, that that focus, that energy, that passion, that excitement is is really 100% invested into Superphone. I really believe that the work that I'm doing, and I'm seeing competitors come out and and clone what we're doing as well. And I think that's just validation that the work that we're doing is extremely valuable, it's extremely important. And for first movers, just like I was a first mover on YouTube,

• 58:04Speaker 01

  the arbitrage opportunity is now. So you sign up for Superphone, you have the ability to be ahead of the curve in terms of communication intimately at scale and the kind of personalization that the data from the context of a conversation provides. I mean, it's very, very powerful.

• 58:25Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. What uh, what do you think of future cryptos? Bitcoin?

• 58:29Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 58:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Where where do you think we're headed?

• 58:31Speaker 01

  Man, uh.

• 58:34Speaker 01

  Where are we headed? Man.

• 58:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, anything that you think a lot about uh, in the space, or is this more passive, hey, I I kind of made my uh, my investment and I'm just gonna let it ride?

• 58:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, no. I think really for me, I I I think, like I said, and we talked about it, I I think a lot more uh, about uh, blockchain. And uh, just the ability to have that ledger and to to have a trustless system. And I think a trustless system, uh, that's uh, that's Yeah, I think a trustless system is is really just, uh, there's, there's a, there's a there's an invaluable

• 59:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's very, it's very, very tough to place a value on how powerful a trustless system is, right? I think that right now, so much is manipulated by emotion, so much is manipulated by folks who have the gift of gab, so much is manipulated by headlines, and so that trustless system that gives the kind of truth and transparency that allows us to make more efficient decisions about where we want to go in life, that's really the piece about crypto and blockchain that excites me the most. And like I said, I'm looking to integrate it eventually into Superphone as well.

• 1:00:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I love it. Before I finish up, I let people ask me a question, but first we talk aliens.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:00:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Believer, non-believer?

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  Man, I have faith. I have faith.

• 1:00:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Same.

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  I have faith.

• 1:00:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. You think they exist and we just never came in contact? Or you think that somehow somebody along the way came in contact and Area 51 and all this crazy stuff is true?

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  I mean, I would have to dig deeper. I would have to delve deeper to formulate my own opinion on this. I can't say that I've been wildly entertained by Star Trek growing up, just because that's my mom used to love to watch that.

• 1:00:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Ryan Leslie's never met aliens before.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  No. Even though...

• 1:00:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Just make sure.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  Listen, there have been some people I have met that I'm like, man, you know, they're out of this world. They're otherworldly, you know?

• 1:00:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Look, some people say Jay-Z, Kanye, all, they're aliens, right?

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, listen, listen, yeah, true, true. So, a question for you, man, a question for you, where do you believe that crypto is going? What's the future? Give me more of a shorter, a nearer term.

• 1:01:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, look, I have two core thesis, right? This kind of short, medium, and long term, which is just Bitcoin is real because it's people are going to trust algorithms to store their wealth, right? Just like you trust algor- rhythms with Google Maps for directions or music recommendations, all this stuff, right? So it makes sense to me that eventually it'll permeate into our financial lives. Yeah. And the other is that every stock, bond, currency and commodity eventually gets digitized. Right? Yeah. Now, in the short term, I'm really, really paying attention to a lot of these currency wars that are playing out and kind of the more like global macro stuff. And the thought process there is just, we're literally seeing the perfect movie script play out for why Bitcoin is important. Yeah. Right?

• 1:01:58Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, you, uh, forget all the politics, whether you like the president, you don't like the president, whatever. When they're tweeting about how monetary policy should be implemented and, you know, we're going to have a trade war and this person or that person also. Which you realize is a bunch of chaos. Yeah. Right? And so you may like the chaos, you may not like the chaos, doesn't really matter, it's hard to argue there's not chaos. Yeah. And I really like it's a Chamath, the, uh, social capital says, you know, Bitcoin's just like schmuck insurance, right? Or kind of chaos hedge. Yeah. And so the more chaotic the world gets, there are some people who just say, I want some percentage of my wealth to be stored somewhere. That's super transparent, that's trustless, that doesn't have the chaos, right? And again, I don't think that's going to be a hundred percent of every single person on the planet's wealth.

• 1:02:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Um, especially not in the short term, but I think that kind of paradigm comparison between the chaotic world and the non chaotic world. To me, it's just, it's fascinating. Yeah. Right? And it's something that previously wasn't really available to people. Now it's here, it seems to be working, it seems to be getting adopted and. Yeah. I've now shifted to, I don't try to convince people that it's real, right? Here's what I say to them. How sure or how confident are you that it's not going to work? Yeah. Are you a hundred percent confident? Hmm. Cause if you're just 99% confident, probably should get 1%, right? You, you know, you should line up how you think about your wealth and your assets with your confidence level. Yeah, for sure.

• 1:03:26Anthony Pompliano?

  And so if you want to be a hundred percent committed to the fiat kind of traditional legacy world. And you're a hundred percent confident that this other stuff's not going to work, go ahead. I find it really, you know, few and far between the people who think that they're 100% confident. And so it leads to, you know, kind of these bigger conversations that I think are more important.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I will say this as well. I'm, I'm all about speed and efficiency and I'll just, I'll just be real. What's important to me is, uh, speed and efficiency. So, let's give you a case in point. I went to the bank. I wanted to, you know, give somebody $20,000, right? They don't have the same bank as me. So, I go to the teller. I say, "Look, you know, I wanna, you know, I wanna give somebody $20,000. What's the easiest way to do it?" They say, "Okay, well, there's two ways. You can do a cashier's check, or you could try to do a wire." But it's after 5:00 PM, so, you know, it's after 4:30. The other bank is open, but we can't guarantee the wire still goes out today. I'm just like, "Man,

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  that's my bread, and I should be able to move it instantly if I wanted to." Let me be real with you. Literally, two different financial institutions. I did a cashier's check, and because it was after 4:30, they were like, "Look, it's not gonna clear the same day. It was a Friday. It wasn't gonna clear till Monday." I went back to the other financial institution, took out 20 bands in cash, went to the other financial institution. They said, "Hey, look, you know, it's too much money. You can't deposit that in cash to somebody else's account." So I had to go and put the cash back in my account, and I'm just like, "Look, to the extent that you were just talking about the kind of efficiency, look, look how much time I just wasted." And because I care about that person, I did everything that I could do to make that happen.

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  But at the size of that transaction, you know, $20,000, the rings and hoops that I had to jump through and AML questionnaires and passports, et cetera, like, I'm just about efficiency, man. I worked for that money. I should be able to redistribute it as instantly as, you know, the IRS will come in and seize it. You know what I mean?

• 1:05:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, look, you, you store your money in a place that's closed more hours a week than it is open.

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Pretty crazy to think about that, you know, when you need it, you may or may not be able to access it.

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:39Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, man, listen, you've been killing the game for a long time. I appreciate you coming in and talking about all this stuff.

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Hopefully, people will start to kind of be warmed up to the idea of how long you've been in Bitcoin.

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  Hey.

• 1:05:52Anthony Pompliano?

  And you're one of the leaders there. So thank you from all of us for pushing that narrative with a lot of people, with a lot of influence.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  For sure. And anybody that, you know, has unanswered questions, wants to reach me directly, I have a URL, you can leave your number, I'll text you right back. It's textryan.com. Very simple. Just visit that on your mobile browser, leave your number. I don't have to give you my number, you just have to know yours. You drop it in there, I'll text you right back. And so, yeah, just hit me.

• 1:06:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Textryan.com.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  Textryan.com.

• 1:06:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Man, you made it super easy.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  Super easy. Just leave your number, I'll text you back. Thanks, Pop.

• 1:06:21Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, thank you.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  Appreciate you.

• 1:06:23Anthony 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.