Anthony Pompliano joins Flagrant to argue Bitcoin will hit $1,000,000 by challenging fiat inflation post-1971, citing the 21 million coin cap and mining security against quantum threats. They dissect NFTs as provenance stories rather than art, contrast blockchain's censorship resistance with China's DCEP surveillance, and debate Peter Schiff's gold advocacy versus digital sound money. Ultimately, the episode frames Bitcoin not just as an asset, but as a verification-based truth system essential for future financial sovereignty and automated cash flows. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trillion Dollar Bitcoin Stakes00:03:53
There's now a trillion dollars of value at stake.
I never actually says publicly, so here we go.
Uh, I think it's gonna be a million dollars by the end of 2026.
Why?
I just want to make sure Bitcoin isn't another Iraq war.
The fuck do you want me to buy?
I don't even know why I'm listening, this motherfucker.
I'm up 14% today, bro.
I'm actually a 0.14%.
What's up, everybody?
Yes, I'm wearing something different.
Don't worry about it.
Today, we have an incredible guest, okay?
Crypto expert, Twitter troll, Anthony Pomps Pompliano.
This guy's amazing.
The guy has 96% of his wealth in crypto, Bitcoin specifically.
So, who better to explain to us why it's the future than the guy who is betting his entire future on that coin?
This episode is about explaining what the fuck is going on in the crypto world.
Now, in order for me to understand that, I first got to understand what's going on in the non-crypto world.
I wanted to understand what money is, right?
What's the difference between money and currency and just basic economic information?
You might be way smarter than me and not need that, so you could jump to around, I don't know, like 28 minutes in where we start the crypto blockchain NFT conversation.
And, but if you're like me and you want to get a nice little background information on how an economy works, you can start listening right now.
All right, enjoy.
What's up, everybody?
And welcome to Flagrant 2.
It's your boy Schultzy.
We got Akash singing to Bill and Alex Media.
Mark Gagnon, the truffle is here.
Miles is even here.
We have a very special guest.
I should read all some credits.
You know, you're here for one reason.
I just want to let you know because I will not have my friends get rich without me.
That's the only reason we're having this conversation.
I could give a flying fuck about crypto, but all my friends are invested and they're invested early.
And I'm on this group chat.
And they, oh, I'm putting $200 in a week.
I'm putting $100 thing in this, that, the other.
What do you think about decentralized?
I don't even know these words.
And I'm getting so furious that I was the most wealthy of all my friends and now they're going to be richer than me without working at all.
Well, if you've got friends that only are putting $200 and we got to get you new friends, I need to get it.
But it's very, this is very important.
This is fantasy football for me.
So this is very important that I cannot let them get rich.
So it's not about the money.
It's about winning.
If it went to zero, I wouldn't care about it.
All right.
I hope it goes to zero because I haven't put any money in at all.
I swear to God, today I put $60,000 in a Coinbase account.
Okay.
You have until the end of this podcast to convince me to buy a whole Bitcoin.
I mean, by the time we're done, you're going to put $120,000 in the Coinbase account.
I'm just saying.
I'm just saying.
Okay, by the way, he just cucked you on yourself.
That's point one.
You get it from all hands here, dude.
Okay.
We have in the building, Anthony Pompliano.
Pomp, you talk a lot of shit on Twitter.
I absolutely love it.
I had a few people reach out to me about you.
A buddy of mine, Greg Norman Jr., I don't know if you know him personally, but he knows about you.
He's like, you got to get this guy Pomp on.
He's talking all this shit on Twitter.
He's calling his CNBC.
You got these fucking nerds, these finance nerds that are so upset about you.
I watched them interview and there was this finance dexter just going, but it's not worth anything today.
And you're just smiling with your perfectly framed eyebrows, just laughing at this guy as he blows a gasket.
What's the guy's name?
Which one of them is.
But it was so funny.
You're just sitting there smiling as Bitcoin is going to the moon and this guy's losing his fucking shit.
That's all you have to do to the haters.
If you just smile, they get real pissed off.
They get so pissed off.
And that was me.
I was him because I wanted to fail.
But here you are.
Okay.
I am an absolute crypto baboon.
Okay.
And I think that because of how fast crypto has taken off, there are people like you that know so much about it, my friends that know so much about it.
And then there's this massive wealth, not wealth, intelligence gap, if you will, between the people and soon-to-be wealth.
The Intelligence Wealth Gap00:11:10
Between the people who know nothing about it and the people who do.
All right.
So I'm hoping to actually learn some shit about it.
Okay.
So we're going to have no fun in all learning.
No fun all learning.
All right.
No fun.
Okay.
I'm sorry.
You can come back for a fun one after I make a lot of money.
Once I'm rich, like my friends, okay, then you can make a lot of money.
So here it is.
Number one, what is money?
That's actually a great question.
Yeah, that is actually the place to start.
So you're already ahead of most of the time.
I know what I'm doing.
I've listened to some Tim Ferriss.
So when you think about what is money today, most people think of the U.S. dollar, right?
But it's important to separate out a currency and money.
So first, a currency is two things, a medium of exchange and a store of value, meaning that I give it to you.
You give me good or service in exchange.
We both believe it has value.
That's medium of exchange.
And store of value means that I save in it and it's not going to disappear overnight.
Okay.
All right.
So I use the U.S. dollar as a currency because historically money has been sound money, which is outside of the system and it can't be created by any group of people, any individual, any organization, et cetera.
So give me an example of sound money.
Gold has served as sound money for thousands of years.
Gotcha.
And if you think about gold and the dollar's relationship, gold's hard as shit to use for anything, right?
It's heavy.
Got to break it up.
If I want to mail it to somebody, if I put it on the table, say how much is there?
You look at me like I'm crazy.
You get a scale.
It's all got all these issues in terms of medium of exchange.
But it served as a great store of value.
So over time, in a very overgeneralized way, the way that we started to use sound money easier was we created paper claims on top of the gold.
So gold was layer one.
We said, well, I'm not carrying around this fucking gold.
I'm going to go put it in the bank or a vault.
And they're going to give me a claim and say, hey, whenever you want the gold, come back, give me the paper.
Which group of people you think invented that?
That's why he's trying to talk on the podcast.
You already think that.
Okay.
I'm not going there.
You guys can cut to whatever you want.
So basically, people walk around with these paper claims, right?
And they would say, hey, we can now exchange the gold that's sitting in the vault, but we don't actually have to move the gold around.
So the idea was, I'm going to store my gold in the vault because it's too heavy for me to carry around.
And then the vault dude was like, hey, I got your stuff.
You want me to just give you some slips that prove how much stuff you got?
And then you can buy things with that.
And then if those people want to come collect the gold, they can just kill.
Yes.
So cash is really only form because it's convenient.
So that was like a very simplistic, overgeneralized way of looking at it.
Right.
In 1971, basically they decided the president of the United States was like, hey, temporarily, I think it would be a good idea where we're going to just create more of the dollars and we're not going to have it pegged to the gold anymore because you couldn't just create the paper without having the gold in the vault.
Well, as anything with the government, nothing's temporary.
We'll get to probably a lot of that later.
And so we just never went back.
So we removed the gold standard.
Who was that?
1971.
Yeah.
Nixon, right?
And so when you do that, now all of a sudden you don't have sound money.
So now the currency is viewed as money.
Right.
But the problem is that the government, every government around the world has this benefit or problem, depending on how you look at it, where they can just create as much as they want.
Right.
So literally, you and I, we can't go into our bank account.
If I'm like, shit, I got $100 and I need $150.
I can't just edit the shit and say, now I got $150.
Right.
The government can do that.
Right.
I could take a loan out for $50.
Yeah.
Right.
And then you'd have $150.
And then I have $100.
But you got to pay it back.
And technically, isn't that what the government do?
I don't want to get into too much nuance about like the Fed and stuff, but like, isn't that what they're doing?
Aren't they like taking a loan out?
There's a lot of nuance.
The big takeaway is that the government can create or contract the money supply as they want.
So expand or contract as they want.
So all of a sudden, what anything happens is like, if you give somebody a money printer, what are they going to do?
They're going to fucking print money.
This is the STEMI.
Of course.
So when you start to think about like, what is money, we all view the currency, the dollar, the Euro, the yen, whatever, as money, but it's not really sound money.
Right.
And so, what that ends up doing is- Can I be honest with you?
Yeah.
Are you confused already?
No, no, I don't view any other currency as money except the dollar.
That's probably and it's fun to hold the money.
Like, if I gave you Euros, what would you do with it?
If there's a girl on it, I don't believe in it.
Like, if the queen is on it, it's not real money.
Okay, it's worth at least 30% less.
But there's no way I'm actually believing in it.
I'll put this shit down on a monopoly board to buy Baltic Avenue.
Exactly.
This is for both.
Not even Boardwalk.
So, most of the world, to be fair, most of the world also feels very similar in that they want dollars.
They want the dollar is the global reserve currency.
Because it's kind of backed in a weird way, right?
Like, isn't it backed?
Yeah, like, like, there's other countries in the world that basically say, like, we have our own currency, but like, it's pegged to the dollar.
Right.
Or other current other countries around the world are like, yeah, what's the U.S. doing with their monetary policy?
Like, we're going to do something similar.
Because we got the boys, right?
Because it's backed by, you know, the guns and they don't carry gold AKs.
They, you know, drop big bombs and shit, right?
Yeah.
So, uh, and you know, also you could make an argument that's backed by like the purchase of gas, right?
Of oil.
So oil is definitely a big piece of this.
So the whole idea is that oil is priced in dollars.
And I think purchased in dollars, right?
At least if you're buying it for a curve.
Cool.
Well, if you price it in dollars, you can't give them something else.
You got to purchase it in dollars, right?
So the whole idea is if it's priced in dollars, purchased in dollars, then the dollar is going to be the global reserve currency.
Oil runs the world.
There's been a couple of guys who have decided that they didn't want to price things in dollars anymore.
That's what happened to those cute puppies right there that tried to.
You're going to have to go six feet under to find them.
So now I'm trying to get cute.
So the whole idea of pricing oil not in dollars is not very sustainable idea for people.
But long story short, it's just like we took ourselves off this gold standard.
Everyone around the world did it.
Now you have governments that can create and contract the money supply.
The argument for doing it is that when bad things happen, we have a response.
We can act.
We can manipulate interest rates.
We can create money, do all this like super complex finance mumbo jumbo.
At the end of the day, what it does is it manipulates the market.
So let's use a real example of what's happened over the last 12 months.
In February, people heard about this coronavirus thing.
Most of us probably were like, the hell is this thing?
Like, I'm still going to the club.
I'm going to the bar.
I'm doing whatever.
March comes around in New York.
All of a sudden, they're like, yo, some dude from Rochester keeps coming in to Grand Central and he had coronavirus.
And I remember Googling like, oh, 750,000 people in Grand Central.
They're never going to control this thing.
Like this dude with coronavirus just came through Grand Central, the 750,000 people.
And they're like, all right, I don't know what happens next, but like something tells me it's not going to be good.
And within like a week, they were like, we're shutting everything down, yada, yada, whatever.
Everyone go home.
So literally, when you think about an economy, it's all about velocity of money, right?
It's just how much do we continue to do commerce with each other?
How much do you invest?
How much do I buy from you?
And as you have that velocity of money, that keeps an economy growing, keeps the economy going.
But if you tell everyone, yo, time out, go home and stop doing shit with each other, velocity goes down, right?
And bad stuff starts happening.
So when velocity...
Velocity, you mean like consumption, right?
We just need to keep on consumption, investment, just everything.
New York needs to swim to breathe and economy needs to spend in order to need to be velocity of money.
Exactly.
The only real transactions we increased were like Amazon.
That's pretty much it.
Digital businesses took off.
We're not eating out.
We're not traveling.
We're not doing, there's no transfers of money except Amazon.
That's it.
Right, right, right, right.
So basically, what happened?
I did it really well.
Not everybody.
Well, so here's what ends up happening is as soon as you get the lack of velocity of money, you basically expose all the problems in the system, right?
Because the velocity of money keeps things going.
So imagine if we just were, we're just passing money around to each other, right?
And I knew that I owe him money, but it's cool because you're going to give me the money.
And as long as we keep that game going, everything's good.
I'm always going to do it.
But what happens when you stop giving me the money?
Then I stop giving him the money.
Then he stops giving the next person the money.
The buff stops somewhere.
It just the whole thing starts to shake.
So, what ends up happening is in 2008 and last year, the government, elected officials, Federal Reserve, all the smart people in suits, ties, and cologne, they all get together and they basically are like, yo, we're going to save the day.
The problem is that when they step in to save the day, they only have two tools, right?
So, if you're a central banker or you're an elected official, you basically can manipulate interest rates.
Think of that as the incentive to borrow money, right?
So, if there's high, if you got to owe back a lot of money, you're not going to borrow a lot, right?
If you, if I owe you 10% of every dollar I borrow from you, I'm not borrowing money.
But if I owe you nothing, I'm going to borrow it all.
I'm going to borrow as much as I can.
They're literally going to give me free money.
Like, the fuck do you want me to buy?
Like, the money's good.
It's got, it's a US dollar.
It's not any other money.
Like, I'll borrow it all day long.
Exactly.
So, they literally in March of 2020, they did two emergency rate cuts.
So, this is when it started to get crazy because basically they have these periodic meetings, right?
And they come out and they have these press conferences.
And our entire monetary policy system is like the most dinosaur antiquated thing in the world.
They're literally out here saying, We're going to wait to watch what this guy says in the press conference.
If he uses the word dovish, then like we're going to do one thing.
If he says this other word in the press conference, we're going to go do this other thing.
It's nuts.
So, what ended up happening was they couldn't wait for the next meeting to go ahead and make these decisions.
So, twice at emergency rate cuts, meaning we're going to issue a press release, we're cutting the rate.
They did it twice, and they cut us to 0% free money.
Yeah, game on.
People went for it.
Well, it started that way, but that wasn't enough.
So, then what they said was, oh, on top of that, we're going to create a bunch more money and we're just going to start stuffing liquidity into the market.
So, they bought corporate debt.
Is that that's way later?
Okay.
Basically, all they said was we're going to create all this money.
At first, it was a couple hundred billion dollars, which doesn't sound too crazy today, but like that's a lot of money.
I don't have a couple hundred billion.
I don't think anybody else here does.
I don't know, you might.
And then all of a sudden, they did another trillion, but it was two trillion dollars.
Then they did more, then they did more, then more.
Now, to be fair, part of the problem and early on, I was saying things that people were literally laughing at me.
They were like, You're fucking crazy.
I wrote a piece in like maybe second, third week of March, and I said, We're going to have as bad as unemployment as the Great Depression here in the United States because of this.
And people were like, That's nuts.
So, I went back and I looked.
And it basically, the way that the Great Depression is a five-year period, we went from like historic low unemployment of two, three percent, whatever it was, up to 22, 23, 24 percent, right?
That took five years to play out.
And so, what you look at is the first year it was, you know, 3%, then the next year it was like 8%.
Then the next year was like 15%, and the next year was like 21%.
We went from fucking 2.5% or 3%, whatever we had in February of 2020 to over 12% unemployment in this country in a matter of weeks.
The most number of people who had ever filed for first-time unemployment claims in the United States before 2020 was like 820,000 people back in 1982, right?
Somewhere around 800,000 people.
Yeah.
There was 6.6 million people who filed for unemployment in a one week in March.
Hyperinflation And Rising Prices00:11:45
And the reason why I think it was 6.6 was literally because they couldn't process more than that.
Like, literally, there were multiple weeks where it was 6.6.
Like, how the fuck was it always 6.6?
I literally think that you couldn't process more unemployment claims that quickly.
Like, people were on the website, like, yo, process this shit.
And the website was like, we broke.
Like, we can't take any more people.
Wow.
So it was an extreme economic event.
So you're saying even the 12% unemployment or whatever might have been underselling it just because oh, that's the official numbers.
I mean, the unofficial numbers, like if you're a freelancer, if you're an Uber driver, whatever, like, you're not considering employees.
So like a lot of times, depending on how you count, all this shit, right?
So long story short, it's bad economic event.
Small businesses are in trouble, all this stuff.
And it was compounded because it wasn't just like, oh, there's a little bit of velocity of money that's slowing down.
Then they were like, it's illegal for you to run your business.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It is illegal.
Literally are going to come and find you, arrest you, like all this shit.
Yeah, like the out of here, it's illegal for me to run my business to make a living.
It is illegal.
We're gonna outlaw you making a living yeah, right.
And so remember, 55 of jobs in America are from small businesses.
Over half the jobs in America come from small business owners, and so when you look at that, you say, wait a second.
You're telling me that half the jobs in America.
Now you're telling the people who employ those jobs you're.
It's illegal, you cannot run your business.
You cannot have people come in person.
So, as you mentioned, if you're Amazon, if you're a digital business, you're good.
People are sitting at home.
They got all the time in the world.
That's great for you.
Podcasts downloads explode, like all this stuff right, yeah.
But if you're a restaurant and you got no technology to do online delivery yeah, you're screwed.
Yeah, right.
And so what ends up happening is the government stepped in.
When the government stepped in, they basically said, we're just gonna start handing money to everybody.
So they were doing PPP loans, they were handing out uh, doing bailouts, like all this crazy.
And the reason why myself and other people got so pissed off was.
You're looking at businesses.
Take the airline business, this is the wildest ever.
Yeah, for 10 years, the airline companies basically said, we got all these profits, we're making so much money, and they were taking their uh profits and, rather than saving it or investing it in r d to make their businesses better right, they were taking the dollars, they were buying back their stock.
R d is research and development.
Yes yeah, i'm just making sure people don't think it's a stock that they're like I got to get an all.
It is not a stocking.
Yeah, that's all right, i'm dumb too.
So we're all friends.
That's why we're talking about us.
This is, this is why we're all friends.
So, long story short is basically somebody like the airline company who had taken 80 90 of their free cash flow right, basically the money they made.
Yeah, they were buying back their stock and their executives were getting rich.
Then the second, this all happened.
Rather than say oh, we're gonna go bankrupt and we either have to go raise what they call equity capital meaning somebody's gonna invest in our business so we can pay our employees, do all this stuff or raise debt, they ran to the government begging for a bailout, and so it's like, wait a second, the government is the idiot in the room here, because there's no investor in the world who's going to give them the terms that the Us government gave them.
The U.s government gave these people hundreds of billions of dollars and said, by the way, a third of it, at a minimum, you don't have to pay us back free money.
Yeah, it's a good deal.
By the way, we should have been in the fucking airline business.
They would have given us hundreds of billions of dollars for free.
Like what the is going on here kind of a thing the banks proved in 08 though, where it's like kind of a leverage play.
Like what are you really gonna do with the airline?
You're just gonna let the airline industry shut down.
Government then what but?
But here's the whole thing.
Is, what we found is and this is a big misconception about bankruptcy everyone's like, oh my god, don't let them go into bankruptcy.
Like what are we gonna have no fucking planes?
Like no, when it goes into bankruptcy, it basically is somebody saying, yo, I need protection because all this is gonna go away.
What happens is, the assets don't go anywhere.
Right, the assets get bought by somebody else, capital is reallocated, somebody else comes in and runs an airline, they may change the name or do something else, but it's not like the airplanes fucking disappear, right.
It's not like all those employees all of a sudden they don't have jobs anymore, right.
There's there's uh reorganizations, they may go to a new airline whatever, and so basically just the government panicked, right and they just kept printing money.
They've done this three times now.
Six trillion dollars.
The Federal Reserve's Asset base has basically gone up over 100% now, I think, in the last 12 months.
So 40% of all dollars that exist have been printed in the last 12 months.
Yeah.
I think they printed more money than they collected in taxes last year.
You want to hear a fucking crazy stat?
Yeah.
Since 2011, the U.S. government, the U.S. government's collected more revenue from federal income tax every single year since 2011.
So it's like a business.
They're making more money every year.
But at the same time, every single year, what they call the intra-year deficit, basically, are you positive or negative on your balance sheet of the year has gotten bigger and bigger.
Meaning, although they're collecting more money every year, they're actually losing more money every year.
Still finding a way to lose money.
So guess what?
That's not a fucking income problem.
That's a spending problem.
Yes.
Yes.
But then you could go back to your earlier point, which is we need to spend.
We need the velocity.
So is that good?
But we don't need the government to spend.
We need you to spend.
We need you to spend.
We need me to spend.
If the government gives me money to spend or if the government spends it itself.
So here's the, here's, here's where all of this is frankly just bullshit.
Yeah.
Right.
And I don't want to get too much into my news of this because I do want to talk about crypto, but this is just to give us like a baseline.
This is the most important part of what I'm going to say.
It seems like, and I don't support the way the government spends its money, but it seems like they're in between a rock and a hard place.
You need the economy to speed up.
How the fuck else can we do it?
Basically, think of it as a short-term versus a long-term solution.
If you optimize for the long term, short-term pain.
If you're a politician, guess what happens?
You don't get paid for making good, sound, long-term decisions.
You get paid for fucking helping people today.
And guess what people love to hear?
I'm going to give you free money.
Yeah.
This is shout out to Andrew Yang.
This is, he's going to be the mayor of New York because he said, I'll give you $1,000.
So a term that we hear all-which, hold on.
Hold on, we got to get the most important part, which is this whole idea that they're giving you the free money.
So if I give you $5, right?
And I'm like, yo, buy that coffee.
Yeah.
And I'm going to give you the $5 to do it.
But all of a sudden, when I give you the $5, that coffee now costs $6.
Yeah.
I actually didn't help you.
I fucked you.
Yeah.
Right.
Because what I'm doing is the cost of goods are going up.
So here's the biggest sham of it all: is that there's something called official numbers of the government reports.
Government comes out and it's like, oh, look, inflation is this number.
Unemployment is this number.
And then everyone basically behind closed doors that's like in the know, they're like, yops.
But like the unofficial numbers.
So like, what the fuck is the unofficial inflation number?
The official number is like 1.4, but unofficial number.
The unofficial number is like five.
I don't see how technique can keep printing money without massive inflation.
So I guess my curiosity about inflation, again, I don't want to get too much into this.
I want to get to crypto.
Yeah, we're like talking about like super like serious shit.
You know what's coming to have fun.
This is good.
I like the fact this is serious.
Now, my curiosity about the inflation is my understanding about inflation is it's not about the printing of money.
You get inflation when there's more money than there are things to buy.
Kind of.
If we're making it in its most simplest term.
Yeah, yeah.
And because there wasn't that velocity of the economy earlier, the increase in money just has to match the velocity that the, I guess, the Fed want.
Here's a simpler way to think about it.
As you create more money, you devalue the thing you're creating, right?
So if something's scarce, there's less.
If something's plentiful, it's worth less.
If you take the U.S. stock market from 1971 and you denominate it in dollars, it looks like a perfect line up and to the right at a 45-degree angle, right?
There's dips along the way, whatever, but it's a 45-degree angle for decades.
If you denominate the same stock market in gold and sound money, the stock market's down since 1971.
So is it actually at the stock market's accruing value or is it the dollars being devalued?
Because it's a fraction, right?
A share versus a dollar.
That's a bar.
So here, you ready for this?
Yes.
That fucked me up, dude.
This is why the wealth inequality gap gets so bad, right?
So forget all Bitcoin forget all this stuff.
Number one thing people need to understand is the richest people in America know one secret, and it's don't hold cash, invest, hold investable assets.
That's all I do is hold cash.
Yeah, literally all I do.
For years, I've been telling you that.
Oh my God.
But you're still much richer than me, so don't worry about it.
But for years, I've been telling you.
I want to keep it that way.
That's why we have Anthony.
Yeah, yeah, 100%.
You have to tell me that you have almost one whole Bitcoin.
And I, I literally tell you something.
I listened to Tim Ferriss's podcast immediately.
I was like, I need to know what the fuck Akash knows that I don't know.
I was absolutely furious.
And then Mark reminded me.
He's like, yeah, dang, Akash is all in on Bitcoin.
I was like, it's $60,000.
What?
So this is actually maybe a good segue into Bitcoin.
Buy another shirt.
I can't.
All that money is in Bitcoin.
What do you want from me?
No, but literally, I'm such a fucking baboon with money.
I just, I keep it in my bank account.
I even tell my business manager, I was like, no, don't put it anywhere.
Yeah, but think about this, right?
You're financially incentivized not to hold cash.
So they're devaluing.
All I do is hold the cash.
They tell you, right?
The official numbers are, hey, we're going to devalue it on average about 2% a year.
Right.
So if you have $100, you're losing purchasing power every year.
If you hold it for five years, right, it's worth less.
And so the idea is that you have two options.
If you know the dollar, like think of it as a melting ice cube, right?
And you know your cash is losing its purchasing power.
You can either do one of two things.
You can exchange it for goods and services.
You can consume velocity of money.
Let's fucking roll.
Let's make the government happy.
Or you can invest.
I don't want to fucking just spend it and own some bullshit thing that's not going to be worth more money in the future.
I want to buy real estate, stocks, precious metals, Bitcoin, whatever.
So what ends up happening is that the bottom 45% of Americans have no investable assets.
They own nothing.
They are you.
You are the bottom 45% of Americans.
Maybe not net worth, but in mindset, right?
And education.
That's the most insulting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Keep going, Anthony.
So the bottom 45%, when this happens, basically the money's being devalued.
Literally, 45% of Americans are getting poorer and poorer over time because they're net worth.
They live paycheck to paycheck.
All their cash is in the bank.
It's losing value.
Rich people are sitting there.
Guess what happened when they were printing all this money?
The stock market went to the fucking moon.
Because people are like, I got to get my money out of cash.
Because they're just printing liquidity everywhere.
Guess what else went up?
Yeah.
Gold, Bitcoin, real estate, all investable assets go up because they're devaluing the dollar.
And so the other component of this that makes it even worse is that if you're in the bottom 40, 50% of Americans, the goods you consume, the things you buy are super inflationary.
You buy gas, you buy food, you buy all this stuff, right?
People at the top, on a percentage basis, the amount of money they spend on gas and food is like minuscule compared to the investing they do, right?
If you're rich, you do a lot more investing than you do consuming gas and food.
If you're not rich, you spend an inordinate amount of your income on rent, gas, food, et cetera.
So guess what's been happening?
Food prices have gone through the fucking roof.
Gas prices have gone through the roof, right?
All this stuff.
So literally the bottom half of America is being put in a worse situation than the top half.
Yeah.
They say, sorry to interrupt, but they say, I think I say like poor people spend, middle class people save, rich people invest.
That's a great way to think of that.
But it would seem the middle class people, as the dollar loses more and more value, like you said, it's a melting ice cube.
So their savings is worth less and less.
And that's how the wealth gap is.
So the most egregious example of this is in countries where there's hyperinflation, right?
We don't have hyperinflation in America.
I don't think hyperinflation is coming anytime soon, right?
But if you look at a hyperinflationary environment, let's say like Venezuela, Zimbabwe, et cetera, you could literally start the day off and you're like, you don't want that cup of coffee.
It costs the equivalent of $5.
And by nighttime, it costs $10.
Whoa.
And you're just like, yo, you're just watching this shit fall.
Like literally, they're changing the prices as it goes.
Why Governments Can't Stop It00:15:50
I have in my wallet right now.
Yeah.
I think it's a $50 million Boliviar bill.
And I think it's a $100 trillion or a $1 trillion Zimbabwe bill.
Wow.
Like they used to not have that.
Now they have that.
Why?
Because literally the dollar got devalued.
Those currencies got devalued so much that they literally had to create bigger and bigger denominations.
So you can actually carry it around.
You've heard the stories about this.
Like I think in the South during the Civil War, the South created their own currency and then people were like wheelbarrowing them down to the store to get.
Yeah.
Okay.
So a term you hear often when we're speaking about crypto, but also regular currency is a fiat currency.
What is a fiat?
You snapped in your face again when you said that.
No, no, no, yeah.
No, because the way you're saying it.
No, so fiat literally is just some smart term somebody made up.
All it means is it's a government-backed currency that they can create.
You can print as much as you want.
You can't get it.
Got you.
Okay.
Unlimited supply, government controls it.
U.S. dollar fiat currency.
Sound money.
Nobody controls limited supply.
Got you.
Okay.
Now, this is like a fucking spelling bee, right?
I know.
This is great.
So Bitcoin comes about.
Bitcoin is fueled by a technology called the blockchain or blockchain technology, whatever it is.
What the fuck is the blockchain?
I need to know what this is.
Let it go.
Let it go.
It's very simple.
So let's start with blockchain technology.
Blockchain technology was created to solve a problem called the double spend problem.
So you got to understand the problem to understand the solution.
If I create music and I put it out in a digital format, it's a music file, right?
You have the music file and you're listening to the show.
You're like, damn, Pop is a fucking banger.
Andrew wants it.
He's like, yo, send me the song.
You hit send.
When you hit send, the computer program creates a copy, sends him the song.
He's now listening to my song, but you still have my song as well.
You both can listen.
You're both happy.
You're like, yo, we can listen to the cool song, right?
But you and you don't know who has the original and who has the copy.
All you know is you got a file, you got a file.
That's fine when it's music.
That's fine when it's a photo.
That's fine when it's all these things that it doesn't matter about scarcity.
But with money, if I have a fucking digital dollar and you say, send me the dollar and I send you it and now you got it and I got it.
Well, who's got the dollar?
Who's got the real, who's got the counterfeit?
We don't know.
And so there's been a bunch of people over the years who have tried to create digital currency, but this has been the big problem is the file can be replicated easily and you can't prove what the original is.
So that's called a double spend problem.
He could send it to you and then send it to me and we both think we got the dollar, but actually we just got copies and he still has the dollar.
Seems like a problem.
Isn't this how banking works to a certain extent?
Let's not go there.
But I don't want to spend too much time, but isn't that the whole idea of like if the bank only needs to keep 10% of the reserves in the bank and there's $100,000, can't you lend out 90 to him?
And now you just made $190.
Well, you just made $80,000 out of nowhere.
So there's leverage.
There's all this complexity, but basically what they're doing in that situation is they're not creating new currency.
What they're doing is they're borrowing it or you're depositing it with them and they're lending it on the back end and they're doing all this stuff.
But technically is it your money?
Is it an IOU that they have?
But you've made more out of nowhere.
No, because you gave them some money.
Then there's leverage.
They can borrow.
They can do all this stuff.
The key to this is counterfeit versus original.
I understand that.
I understand.
I just think that the idea of like printing money isn't that novel because if you're Oh, banks want to be central banks.
We can get into that.
No, no, no, no.
Let's see if cryptic.
But like, let's say I give you $100,000 to keep in your bank, your Bank of America, and he wants a loan.
You could give him $90,000 of my $100,000, but I can get my $100,000 whenever I want.
And he can get his $90,000 whenever he wants.
You just made $90,000 out of nowhere.
So when you give me the money, a lot of people don't know this.
It's not your money anymore.
What?
When you deposit the money in the bank, it's not your money.
They have an IOU.
They owe you $100,000, but technically it's their money now.
Oh, shit.
All right, let's get back to blockchain.
Ready?
So that's a fact.
So you're ready?
Yeah, that's a fact.
So look, here's the whole idea of a blockchain: if we sit down and blockchain verifies the original at a very high level, but here's how it works.
Let's say we go to play Monopoly.
This is the best way not to describe it.
Four of us sit down to play Monopoly.
And with Monopoly, there's a bank, and then each of us have the money in the game, and we set it out in front of us, right?
And the way the reason why Monopoly works is because as we are doing transactions, you owe him money.
Bam, I see you hand him the $200.
He hands me the money, right?
All this stuff.
We don't need a fifth person to stand over us and act as the banker or the centralized entity who does all the transactions because there's full transparency, right?
If you ever play with a kid and they put the money under the table, you're like, yo, yo, yo, get that shit up.
You're like, I don't know what the fuck you're doing, but I don't trust you.
Right.
So when the money's transparently put on the table and then all the transactions happen in front of everybody, we all don't have to trust that it's being done correctly.
We can verify it.
I saw you give him the $200.
I know.
So a blockchain basically is if we were playing that game and we had a piece of paper and I wrote down every transaction, right?
I said, yo, I gave Andrew $200.
Right.
You here.
So it's a ledger.
Ledger.
But every 10 minutes, I ripped off the piece of paper and I put it to the side.
I said, all right, that was the first 10 minutes of the game.
That's all the transactions that happened.
And then all of a sudden, we say played for the next 10 minutes, started a new piece of paper, did it again.
Bam, done.
I rip off that piece.
I stack it on top of the first 10 minutes.
We keep playing.
We've been playing for 50 minutes.
Now there's five pieces of paper sitting over here.
And you go, you know what?
I think that you owe me $30.
I can say, no, actually, in minute 32, let me go back to the transactions and I can show you that I gave you that $30 already.
That's essentially what a blockchain does.
But rather than it be on paper, what it does is every 10 minutes, it takes all of the transactions that happen on the block on the Bitcoin network and it basically puts it into a block.
So it's literally, just think of it almost like in an overgeneralized way, a Excel file, right, of all the transactions.
And then there's people who run the network.
They validate, yep, looks good.
And as long as more than 51% of people validate it, they chain the block of transactions to the last one.
And it goes all the way back to the beginning.
So from January 3rd, 2009, you can go back on a blockchain and see every single transaction that's ever happened in this network.
So it's literally blocks of transactions that are chained together.
Bitcoin, block.
Potentially, really stupid question.
Is that hackable?
So can it ever be hacked?
Any computer network, quote unquote, could be hacked.
The probability that it gets hacked is near zero because it is the strongest computing network in the world.
And the whole idea behind the Bitcoin network is that it's decentralized.
Yes.
So when I'm talking about us playing Monopoly, if there was a fifth person who was like the boss of the game, then that would be like the centralized, that'd be like the bank, right?
And so today, if I want to send money to one of you through the U.S. system, a bank says, I'm going to debit Pomp's account and I'm going to credit Andrew's, right?
Yeah.
But what if we don't need them?
A peer-to-peer.
I just want to send it to you.
I don't want anyone else to fuck with it.
I want to just send it to you.
So decentralization means that there's nowhere to hack it.
There's 51% consensus in order to put it on the blockchain.
Yes.
What is that 51% of whom?
So the way that it works is there's miners around the world.
This goes to decentralization.
So if there's not a centralized company that owns this thing, who runs it?
Well, there's people running the software.
They have specialized computers.
They give it like a data center.
They plug them in.
And what they're doing is they're running all these computations.
Super complex process.
We don't need to go into what they're doing.
Solving problems.
They're rewarded for solving the problems.
There's a financial incentive.
So every 10 minutes in the beginning, 50 Bitcoin were given out to the network.
And if you were running computers, you had a chance to get some of those 50 Bitcoin every 10 minutes.
If you solve enough problems.
You get rewarded for the, you know, more than you're letting on.
As you're doing this, what ends up happening is that went on for four years.
10 minutes for four years, 50 Bitcoin.
After four years, programmatically, meaning it was written into the code, it cut from 50 to 25.
So, what happens if you have a fixed supply?
Yeah, yeah, and demand keeps going up and the supply, incoming supply drops.
The fucking price goes up.
Correct me if I'm wrong here.
Now that there's less, are there more problems that you essentially have to solve in order to access a new bit of coin?
In other words, does the processing go up to mine a new coin?
So along with the in a way, the better way I think people that are kind of learning about all this to think about it is the more competition there is for the Bitcoin reward, the more work you have to do.
The other thing is that there's less Bitcoin.
So it went from 50 to 25, 25 to 12 and a half, 12 and a half to now, 6.25.
Eventually, it'll get cut in half again in about three and a half years.
And this is to maintain value along with demand.
Think about Visa.
When Visa runs the transaction or the Visa network, we pay for it.
We and the merchants pay for it to use the system.
All of that revenue goes on to a centralized P ⁇ L, right?
Like into their bank account.
It sits there.
And if you're a Visa shareholder, that's part of your money.
Well, when you have a decentralized entity, where does that go?
The transaction fees plus this Bitcoin reward basically gets distributed across all these people running the network.
So you today could go become a quote unquote owner in a sense, right?
Of a portion of the revenue of the Bitcoin network.
You got to go get a computer, you plug it in, you point it to this network, you start running the software, and now all of a sudden you're one of millions of miners around the world.
And every time a new person joins to get part of this revenue, it becomes more and more decentralized, which means that whether it's the government, whether it's a hacker, whether it's whoever, they have to basically penetrate everybody.
They can't just, or 51% of people, right?
They can't just penetrate your computer or your computer.
They got to get more of the control of the network.
And that's what makes it so secure.
And my understanding is that it takes an immense amount of processing power to mine for this Bitcoin.
A ton.
A ton.
It's the strongest computing network in the world.
Meaning, if you take all the computing power that's pointed at this thing and running the software, it's by far the strongest network in the world.
Okay.
Now, what happens?
And this is not me trying to poke holes.
This is literally me just trying to understand it.
What happens?
I mean, the processing speed of computers has increased exponentially over the last decade, right?
What happens if you- You sound like a fucking technologist.
Go ahead.
Okay, now maybe I know something.
So what happens if we get a computer whose processing speed is faster than the inhibitor of the blockchain?
So in other words, it can mine so quickly that it can scoop out a bunch of Bitcoins that the program was not thinking we're going to get scooped out.
What is the protection for that?
So there's a couple of different things you're asking about.
One is there's still only a certain number of Bitcoin that are put out in a period of time.
So it's not like there's a honeypot and you can just go grab all the Bitcoin immediately from a conceptual standpoint.
The second thing is quantum computing, which would be a super complex, high-powered computer, whatever everyone's always talking about.
One is as the nefarious actors with technology increase, so does the defense, right?
Like technology is a cat and mouse game between bad actors and like law enforcement, for example.
So who's the first to adopt all this technology?
Porn.
Porn, criminals, right?
All these people who heard about Bitcoin because there was a drug dealer who was worth like hundreds of millions of dollars in Bitcoin.
Of course.
In 2010 or something.
Yeah.
So basically what ends up happening is as those quantum computers get created, there will be defense against them.
And the Bitcoin network continues to get upgraded to the software or whatever.
But more importantly is the game theory.
So what makes Bitcoin valuable?
There's 21 million.
Demand is increasing and no one's ever hacked it.
The second somebody hacks that Bitcoin network, most of the value is going to be lost or it's going to drastically be reduced.
So, if you go in and you steal all the Bitcoin, like you hacked the actual network, I don't hack your wallet, but I hacked the network.
All of a sudden, the economic value of the network drastically drops.
And so, I would have to be a non-economic actor, somebody who doesn't care about the money to do this.
And so, I would have to some other purpose for going to do it.
But if I had a quantum computer, I'm not fucking hacking that Bitcoin network.
There's a lot of other shit I'm going to hack because I'm going to actually get the money and the value that I can get rather than the Bitcoin network.
Right.
Okay.
So, let's say it's secure.
Sorry, let me say that.
So, let's say it's secure.
I assume it's secure.
That's totally fine.
The only other outside influence that I could see negatively affecting Bitcoin.
And I'm speaking about Bitcoin as if it's all crypto.
It's not.
I know it's not, but I'm just speaking about it in that way.
It's just easier, right?
But we can get to the, what do they call altcoins or something?
Let's just stick with Bitcoin.
Yeah, we'll stop with Bitcoin for now because you're more invested in Bitcoin, right?
What do you got?
90% of your wealth in Bitcoin?
95%.
95%.
Okay, so let's promote Bitcoin.
It's like 60K.
Okay.
If it's 60K, get the fuck out of my studio.
Okay.
I need multiple commas, buddy.
All right.
So let's say, for example, and I heard this is kind of happening in different parts of the world.
I think India, actually, there's legislation that might be passed where they're going to limit people from having Bitcoin, making people division.
They're trying to ban it.
They're trying to ban it.
Pakistan did ban it, but we don't talk about them.
That's true.
Nigeria, Pakistan, a number of other countries have all banned it.
India's talking about it now.
Basically, what ends up happening is you can't ban an inanimate object, right?
Like if you pick up that $100 billion, you start screaming at it, the dollar doesn't give a fuck.
What you can do is you can ban us from holding it, using it, transacting in it, trying to buy it, whatever.
So a key piece of regulation is the asset itself is unregulated, not in a negative sense, but it's just like the dollar is not regulated.
Bitcoin's not regulated.
It's the companies and the people who transact with it are the ones who have to follow the rules.
And by the way, guess what?
Governments have a monopoly on violence.
So if you don't follow the rules, they put you in jail.
That's their whole freaking game.
So the idea here is if they want to ban Bitcoin, they're going to say you can't own it.
You can't buy it.
You can't transact with it.
You can't mine it.
Right.
Those four things.
Well, guess what?
They've said that in some countries.
And guess what happened?
Adoption went through the roof.
Through the roof.
Yeah.
Because basically people said, okay, so it's illegal.
It's illegal for me to hold this.
All right.
Well, what are you going to do if I hold it?
You're going to come to all of our houses and take all of our Bitcoin off our computers.
Yeah.
It also makes you think like there must be something to this if you guys are trying to ban it.
Yes.
There must be some reason you're trying to ban it.
Well, and look at the countries in which they're doing this, right?
It's not exactly countries where people really think the government has their best interest at heart.
Right.
Right.
And also, it's not in countries exactly where the currency has been super stable and like they think that the currency is the best place to store their wealth either.
Okay.
So I don't think that India should ban it.
But if they do, adoption is going to go through the roof.
Right.
And so they're, again, caught in a rock in a hard place, right?
Between a rock and a hard place, which is if I ban it, I'm going to drive adoption.
If I don't ban it, adoption is still going to happen.
So what do I do?
They have this third option.
They all think that they're like, you know, galaxy brains.
They're like, yo, we're going to create our own.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We're going to create a digital dollar, a digital euro, a digital ruble.
Yes.
Only thing that's going to do is it's basically just going to make everyone go get digital wallets.
Yes.
So they're going to be like, yo, we want to give you a digital dollar.
All right, what do I need?
I need a digital wallet.
Cool.
I'm going to go get that.
But wait, this still gets devalued at the same rate.
Right.
Why don't I just click a button and change my dollars into Bitcoin?
So the one that doesn't get devalued.
Yeah, that sounds like a pretty good idea.
So let's assume.
Okay.
Let's assume it's not going to get hacked.
And let's assume that even if they do restrict it in any way, it just drives the value through the roof because people will be more interested.
Let's assume that.
And I'm not sure that that's 100% accurate, but let's just assume that I'm fine with that.
Central Bank Digital Currencies00:15:14
Are you trying to hedge it right now?
I'm not trying to hedge.
I'm just trying to understand everything that's going on.
You had Alex Jones on and you didn't hedge shit.
And then I come in here and you're hedging.
I'm just saying, bro.
Let me understand everything I'm getting into.
You know, I wasn't investing.
I had more Bitcoin than you, actually.
Dude, do you hear what happened with him?
Uh, my friend Max Kaiser gave him what is now like $600 million worth of Bitcoin, and he lost it.
He told that story on the podcast.
That's why I slapped him in the face.
I told him, I was like, dude, that's $510 million worth of Bitcoin.
He goes, You're going to slap me in my face right now.
Kaiser confirmed it.
Isn't that crazy?
What was 10,000 Bitcoin?
10,000 Bitcoin.
So the other 10,000 Bitcoin was used to buy these two pizzas on Pizza Day, May of like, I think 2010.
Somebody spent 10,000 Bitcoin to buy two fucking pizzas.
And they've asked the guy, and he's like, Yeah, it was worth it.
Yeah, I think so.
You have to say that so you don't fucking kill yourself.
Well, no, because he probably has like 200,000 Bitcoin that, you know, still sitting there.
Okay.
So I can't believe that.
So here's something that I curiosity to have.
Okay.
We're looking at Bitcoin as if it's currency, right?
But you told me that it takes immense processing power every time a transaction is made, or at least every 10 minutes.
Yep.
Is it functional to do that for a cup of coffee?
Is it functional to do that when you got to buy a new fucking pencil or something like that?
Buy a beer at a bar.
Is Bitcoin functional as a currency, or is it better to look at Bitcoin in the same way we looked at gold?
It's an asset.
Where it's, yeah, it's a store of value.
And then what we do is we add a currency on top of it that's maybe less secure, but let Bitcoin or these other cryptos be the store.
Is that you're heading in the right direction?
Okay.
So take me there.
Gold layer one.
We added paper claims on the gold as a layer two.
Yes, yes, yes.
Then we eventually created credit, electronic money, all this stuff on top of it.
But the whole idea was it was tied back to gold as the layer one.
Yes.
Right.
And that was the store of value.
And then we created these layers on top to make it easier to transact better medium of exchanges.
Yeah.
What's happening with Bitcoin is there's a direct trade-off between security and ease of use, speed, transactions, whatever this bullshit you want to describe.
Right.
And the mistake that many people are making outside of Bitcoin, you fucking are leading me right with the breadcrumbs.
So congratulations.
Is that Bitcoin says security is the most important thing?
Yes.
Right.
If it's secure, that means no one can hack it.
Yes.
Nobody can take us down.
Governments can't fuck with us.
21 million will only ever be the number, blah, blah, blah, whatever.
We're going to choose to do that.
We know that it will not be the fastest transactions.
We know that all these other things are direct trade-offs, but security is the number one thing.
If you don't choose security first, fuck you, you're wrong.
Right?
That's what Bitcoin's approaching.
To put that in perspective, is the reason why if you buy a coffee at Starbucks for $5, they don't ask to see your ID.
If you buy for $25, they're like, we need to see your ID.
And that's just because they're basically going, it's worth it for us to lose a couple $5 transactions for fraud so that we don't have to waste time making a signature every single time.
Starbucks asks you for your ID?
At $25.
I make big coffee purchases, buddy.
I don't know about you.
Okay.
I'm buying five people coffee over here.
It's big business.
All right.
So basically, what's happening now is the layer one, super secure, never been hacked, you know, working perfectly.
Now there's a layer two being built.
There's a whole bunch of innovation that's happening there, experimentation, et cetera.
So everything from the Lightning Network, RSK, Sovereign, IOV.
I mean, there's all kinds of stuff that's happening there.
This thing called Blockstack and Hero, right?
All this stuff is happening.
And I probably forgot a bunch of people are going to be mad at me.
But essentially, they're recognizing the limitations of Bitcoin as a currency.
So they're adding another layer where they can use it for other exchanges.
Well, remember, a currency is store of value and medium of exchange.
Doesn't mean it's a good medium of exchange or a fast medium of exchange.
Just the fact that you can exchange it for goods and services.
Great stat for you is that Bitcoin's annual transaction volume, the amount of transactions actually on chain, not traded on these exchanges, actually on-chain, is more.
People did more transaction volume last year than Apple Pay, Venmo, or PayPal, or PayPal.
And it was still able to manage and did it perfectly fine.
That doesn't mean we don't need to build layer two.
People are going to build layer two, so they're working on that.
I'm an investor in a business called Strike that literally can send a Bitcoin from the United States anywhere in the world in a split second, less than one second, completely for free.
And they're using something called Lightning Network.
Gotcha.
And so all of a sudden, what happens is they can literally send value around the world faster and cheaper than Visa, MasterCard, Square, all these other guys.
I love all this.
I love all this.
And again, I'm not, this is not got you journalistic.
No, no, of course.
I'm just trying to understand it.
The way I understand things is I ask the things that make me insecure about it.
And then you just kind of fill those holes.
Where now you had 60,000 in your head, you're at like 80,000.
Oh, I'm all in.
I'm all in.
Oh, so you have a million dollars there by the end of this.
Let's go.
You know, who knows?
You know what I mean?
Thanks, Netflix.
Appreciate you.
Netflix should actually pay you in Bitcoin.
We'll talk about that later.
Go ahead.
Dude, like that basketball player, Russell Okong.
Well, he's a football player, but yeah.
I thought Spencer Dinwiddie.
Spencer Dinwiddie.
He's been super into it.
I don't think he got paid in Bitcoin.
Oh, no, maybe he did NFTs or something like that.
He did a bubble gut.
Yeah, yeah.
What was that?
A bond.
He did a bond.
He basically said, like, yo, do you want part of my contract?
Like, give me money up front.
And then over time, you can earn more.
Gotcha.
Russell Okong's got like a $13 million rate.
And now it's double or something like that.
Okay.
All right.
My brother just went viral tweeting about it.
So you should give a shout out.
Joe, what's your brother's name?
Joe Pompliano.
Oh, it was your brother that tweeted then.
Yeah.
Okay.
You know, like we give him a shout out, then he thinks I'm a good brother.
So how does it feel to be number two?
He's actually number four because there's other brothers.
He's the Ethereum of the Pompliano family.
Oh, chain like ass.
Is Andrew Schultz giving us crypto jokes?
Okay.
Okay.
Well, another question I have about Bitcoin, right?
Is there anything proprietary about Bitcoin?
Well, it's open source software and technology.
So Bitcoin essentially, not only can it not be hacked and all these things, but it is branding, right?
Yeah, of course.
Arguably first to market.
You got the Winklevoss twins behind it.
Everybody's talking about it.
It's very exciting.
But outside of its security, there's nothing that is.
You could take the code base and create.
Andrew Coin.
Andrew Coin.
And by the way, if you do it, nobody's going to fucking buy it, right?
Because it doesn't have the story.
It doesn't have the market adoption.
It doesn't have the hash power and mining behind it.
And it doesn't have the mind share.
So if you go back to a currency, we joke and we're like, oh, the US dollar is backed by the U.S. government, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff, the military.
Sure.
But ultimately, it's just a belief system.
Yes.
The only reason why that piece of paper has money and that piece of paper somewhere over there doesn't is because we all agree that that has money.
That has value.
The second we all stop believing that it has value, the game's over.
Yes.
And then we just move on to the next thing.
100%.
I'm just trying to understand what I would want it.
It's just open source code.
You could copy it, but that's not going to lie.
Here's the tricky thing for me.
Well, no, no, no.
This is the tricky thing for me.
I believe in blockchain.
If I could invest in blockchain, I would.
But to me, it seems like investing in blockchain is like investing in algebra.
Like, it's just math.
You can't really invest in math.
Math just is.
So because I know that this technology is going to change not only the financial market, maybe the verification of all goods in general, I think people are jumping at the idea of a verified society, right?
Especially in something that is as manipulatable as a currency is.
So they're like, okay, Bitcoin's the one, or Ethereum's the one, or Litecoin's the one.
Okay, let's do it.
This works for me because it's money and I understand what money is.
Okay, I'll get in.
But to me, I'm going, the tech behind it is the real thing I'd like to put money in, but there's no company that owns the tech, right?
It's open sourced or whatever you said.
So is the closest thing that I can do to invest in Bitcoin?
So again, it's a decentralized network, meaning they how much of what I said made sense and how much of it was dumb?
Like 80%.
Dude, I Alex Jones it.
I'll take 80 all day.
B minus.
Let's go.
All right.
So if I want to own Google's search algorithm, I buy Google stock, right?
If I want to own Facebook social network, I buy Facebook stock.
If I want to own the AWS product, I buy Amazon stock.
I want to own Bitcoin, the payment system.
What do I do?
I can't.
There's no stock to buy.
Nobody owns it.
So that's my point.
So you can do one of two things.
Either you can go plug a machine in and go contribute to the network, contribute computing power, and you will get paid some percentage by the revenue or you buy the coin.
And there's a really interesting concept.
My buddy Jonathan Geller just started talking about this.
He's like, Bitcoiners may be holding some Bitcoin for themselves and some they're holding for the network.
Because 60% of Bitcoin has not moved.
They have not been bought or sold in the last 12 months.
So there's 18.6 million Bitcoin in circulation.
60% haven't moved.
That includes hundreds of percent of appreciation.
That includes a single day in March 2020 where it dropped 50% in a day.
These people have ironclad hands.
They're not selling.
I don't care what you do.
They just, they believe.
They are strong hodlers.
Yeah.
And so when you do that, six do you call them?
Hodlers.
Oh, dude, that's my new name for you, Dove.
Fucking hodler.
Listen, there is no community in the world, but on the internet that believes in something as strong as Bitcoiners believe in this.
And that's the most defendable thing.
Have you heard of QAnon?
QAnon?
Yeah.
Listen, they don't stand a chance against Bitcoiners, I promise you.
You are not getting devalued at all.
They still think Trump is president.
Dude, well, listen, you can't pick stupid.
Okay, I'm with you.
I like the consumer confidence.
I'm with you.
So the whole, but the whole idea is that that belief system around 21 million and the fact that they won't sell at any price.
Yep.
Now, this is why you're seeing all the price appreciation because now banks are showing up.
Now corporations are showing up.
It's great.
And they're like, yo, Andrew, sell me the Bitcoin that you don't have.
Right.
And you're like, oh, I only have one.
And you're like, okay, well, when it was $10,000, I'll buy it for $12,000.
The banks are still showing up saying, sell it to me for $60,000.
And literally, Bitcoiners are throwing the middle finger up and saying, I'm not selling.
And so when you have a fixed supply asset and demand is increasing, the US dollar price continues to go up.
But the US dollar price doesn't actually matter at the end of the day because most Bitcoiners aren't thinking of this as I took dollars.
I bought Bitcoin.
I'm going to wait for it to go up a bunch in dollar terms and I'm going to go back into dollars.
It's not a trade.
They're playing long like Bitcoin is going to be the future of currency.
They don't even care about the US dollar.
Bitcoin is going to be the global reserve currency, right?
And the reason why it's going to be the global reserve currency is because every human around the world, 7.6 billion people, whatever we're at now, is going to choose sound money over unsound money.
Gold was the analog application of sound money.
The concept, nobody owns it, nobody controls it.
Nobody can create more of it in a physical form was gold.
Bitcoin is the digital application of this.
And so why would I use that, which over the last year, literally some dudes, mostly white men, went into a room and they just said, you know what?
Eh, we're going to create more.
I didn't get a vote.
Did you guys get a vote?
No, we didn't have any say in this.
And so they did it in a way.
I don't know what data they looked at.
I think he just made money racist.
Did you see who was dead right there?
He's like mostly white man.
I think he just got all the black chicks down with the page.
Otherwise, that was smart.
Is that what you were trying to say?
Some hobblers went in the room and started hobbling?
Jesus, Bob Leano.
Joe, get your brother.
Joe, get over here.
So what essentially happens is you have currencies that are being manipulated.
Yeah.
But we don't have a say.
And again, 45% of Americans are getting crushed by this.
And the wealth inequality gap's getting worse and worse.
Well, guess what?
Now you have an exit strategy.
And the exit strategy is literally you take the unsound money, the money that is literally so worthless that they are giving it away for free to people, and you convert it into the sound money and you just simply hold the sound money.
And the purchasing power of Bitcoin continues to grow while the purchasing power of dollar continues to crash.
I mean, I just can't fathom that the United States government is not in some way protecting themselves.
Second largest holder of Bitcoin is the United States government.
Somebody told me that, so I'm going to trust it.
Is that true?
Who told you that?
Brian.
Shout out to Brian.
Is that true?
I don't know who Brian is.
He's a chef.
He's a chef?
I don't know if you want to verify, but you might want to Google it.
Do you know anything about that?
Is that true?
So I don't know what they've sold.
That would make me have it incredibly comfortable.
I would double-check it.
They have absolutely confiscated Bitcoin from people before, right?
So Silk Road, a bunch of times.
I haven't done the math in terms of what they confiscated and what they auctioned off.
In some cases, they've literally taken Bitcoin from people and then they've gone ahead and auctioned it off.
That's a great movie.
This is a brilliant long-term strategy.
You let all the people that are selling human beings, selling drugs, selling guns in Bitcoin around the world, let them use Bitcoin as the currency.
Let it build to a premium.
But nobody's doing that.
What does me?
They're all using dollars.
But I thought Bitcoin is the best way to get around the system now.
Early on, I think it was.
I think I saw one of your interviews where you said there's less fraudulent activity with Bitcoin than dollars by far.
Yeah, there's more dollars that are laundered every year.
Just money laundering.
$2 trillion are laundered every year.
The Bitcoin market cap, like all Bitcoin in circulation is only $1 trillion.
So there's literally more illegal use of the dollar than the entire size of the Bitcoin market today.
Yeah, but there's way more dollars than there are Bitcoins.
Of course, yeah.
But even on a percentage basis.
It's like 0.4% of Bitcoin.
0.4% of all Bitcoin transactions are illegal.
It's like 2% of U.S. dollar transactions.
And the Bitcoin illicit transactions are going down because remember, all of the transactions are written on a public ledger.
So like if you there's fucking proof.
So Leah, if you send him Bitcoin and then they're like, yo, what'd you do?
Like, what happened?
Like, oh, you were like a scumbag terrorist?
They're like, idiots.
Like, you literally send them the money.
Like, here's the transaction.
Yeah.
So, like, but they're not writing details on the transaction.
Like, you could have bought lollipops with Bitcoin.
Yeah, but they obviously figure out like, hey, the same guy who sent this Bitcoin also sent it over here and bought that AK-47.
Right, right, right.
Gotcha.
Okay.
So there's a little bit of proof and that scares the people that are doing illegal activities.
Well, people didn't know that at first.
They thought it was, oh, nobody's going to be able to track me.
And then the government kept showing up and like arresting all of them.
And they're like, oh, hey, tell your friends, like, don't use this.
Is there any proof that the IMF isn't in control of this, that the IMF isn't part of the 51% or the 51%?
The IMF isn't doing all the mining.
Like, where's the proof that they're not?
IMF Control Over Mining00:05:23
Here's what I think is going to happen, right?
Motherfuckers die over money, bro.
Like you said, the United States government will kill a million brown people if one brown guy says we're going to sell oil in Euros.
We're willing to throw the entirety of the United States military force to crush countries that go against the US dollar as the currency of the world.
And they're just letting Bitcoin go while willy-nilly.
I can't buy that.
So you just highlighted Bitcoin's core strength.
Great.
You want to shut down Bitcoin.
What do you do?
Who do you arrest?
What computer do you shut down?
There's a million Bitcoin miners or whatever.
Even if you go to every country in the world and you say, yo, let's all work together, which never will happen.
But if you say, well, let's all work together and we're going to shut down every single computer running this.
And I'm just sitting in my closet and I plug the computer in and I run the software, Bitcoin's still alive.
You cannot kill the network.
There's been congressmen who have literally gone in and on the Congress floor said, we cannot kill this, so we should not even try.
And so what ends up happening is, and there's people inside the government now, reports are coming out where people have been on calls behind closed doors.
Treasury Secretary and others have said they know this is inevitable.
They're just holding on for as long as they can.
And so what I personally believe they should do, and I think that any country in the world that wants to be a leader in this space, they should embrace it.
Because here's what happens is Bitcoin is ultimately just an open decentralized protocol.
The internet is an open, decentralized protocol.
And so what happens to the countries that decided not to participate in the fucking internet?
It's like North Korea.
Like didn't work out so hot for the citizens.
It hasn't worked out so hot for us.
I wouldn't argue that the internet is doing great for America.
I mean, it only tore us in half the last election, right?
We won't go there.
I'm just saying.
The open decentralized protocols are out there.
People are going to adopt it.
So even though Pakistan, Nigeria, et cetera, ban it, people can still access it even if their government doesn't want them to.
And so if anyone is going to benefit from this, the United States should say, we are going to benefit more than anybody.
I like that strategy.
Let's go buy Bitcoin.
Let's actually start to use this as a payment rail.
Let's figure out how to incorporate this into all these various things that we do.
And because whoever the first country is that does it, game over, game set, match, they win.
They will be the most economically prosperous country in the world.
Unless it's hackable.
And if it is hackable and that country goes all in on Bitcoin, they're the country that gets fucked the most.
You have to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it's not hackable.
And that's what I was also going to say.
You said, whoa, whoa, whoa, what?
It has been hacked.
Bitcoin's never been hacked.
Well, the other coins have been hacked.
Plenty of blockchains have.
So I assume his point about Bitcoin being different than other crypto.
Hold on, I want to hear this out.
What is it?
Well, my thing is it can be stopped because couldn't all the countries just come together and be like, mining is illegal.
If you get caught mining, you're penalized and charged or get thrown into jail.
So they've done that in Pakistan and Nigeria and mining went up.
In those countries?
In those countries.
Yeah.
And to the point, Pakistan.
You can't literally trace where somebody's mining from.
So in Venezuela, here's what the crazy thing is.
In Venezuela, they said mining is illegal.
Right.
And what they would do is governments aren't idiots, right?
They said it takes a ton of power.
So we're just going to look at the power bills.
And if your power bill spikes, we know that you're going to be like, you're not fucking playing Xbox.
Right.
So like, we're going to come to your house and be like, yo, give us the miner.
And then what did they do when they took the miners?
The government went and plugged them in, right?
Because they get paid for mining.
So it's a financial incentive for now the government just confiscated your equipment and then they just went and used it themselves.
So what ends up happening is the financial incentive is too strong, right?
Like in this crazy, crazy way, like it takes years literally for me to wrap my head around this.
The financial incentive is too strong.
So in Pakistan, even crazier was they said, yo, this is illegal.
You can't mine, yada, yada, whatever.
One of the four provinces or whatever in Pakistan all of a sudden was like, yo, why don't we do this?
And then the province went against the national law and they started mining themselves.
In Iran, what they do, Iran, Venezuela, all these places, they have sanctions.
The U.S. government runs around the world and they say, we have two things.
We're going to drop bombs, kill people, do all this stuff.
And we're going to sanction you.
We're going to cut you off from the global financial system.
We have the global reserve currency.
Screw you.
Well, now all these countries are like, wait a second, like Venezuela is like, yo, nobody could shut this shit down.
And we don't need permission from anybody.
We just plug some machines in and then we get currency.
In Iran, what'd they do?
They literally said to people, hey, we'll give you a license and you could go and you can mine Bitcoin.
And then a couple of months later, they were like, oh, by the way, a new rule, you have to sell us all your Bitcoin, right?
We're going to give you our local currency.
We're going to give it to you.
And so, what ends up happening is, again, it's just a game theory.
And people hate thinking this way because it's so counterintuitive to what we're used to in the world.
It's just like, yo, the government always wins.
The banks always win, right?
Like, that's our mindset.
But the financial incentive here is way too strong.
And so, whether you're a nefarious country, right, in terms of North Korea or some of these guys, or you're a legitimate country, the financial incentive is the exact same.
And so, I actually think what's happening in like Kentucky right now is fascinating.
Kentucky just started to say, yo, you know what?
If you're going to mine Bitcoin, we're going to give you tax breaks.
We're literally going to make it easier for you to mine here because we want this infrastructure to be built out here.
It's going to bring jobs.
It's going to bring all this investment into our local economy.
Bitcoin Is The King00:14:44
And we'll actually not tax you as much on it as we would have now that this new law is passed.
And so, what you start to see is like, again, it's just like this big game theory of profit off of that.
Well, if more people get jobs, right?
There's still income tax.
There's like all these things that they can basically benefit from as there's more economic activity in their country or in their economy or their state.
But what they're not going to do is they're not going to tax you maybe as much at the entity level on, let's say, buying the electricity or, you know, whatever.
Okay.
There are all these other coins that exist, right?
Ethereum being the second most popular one.
And Ethereum is having a little moment right now because Ethereum, okay, if we're looking at Bitcoin like a ledger that is, I guess, decentralized or anybody can use the ledger, open source ledger.
Ethereum, my understanding, is kind of like an open source computer in that yeah, it's in the apps can be added to it, and then you can find ways to monetize those apps.
This is what people are doing with NFTs.
So is Ethereum?
I have twofold question.
One, what the fuck is an NFT?
But two, is Ethereum a next level cryptocurrency?
Is it taking it beyond what this store of value, which is Bitcoin?
And is Bitcoin going to have to play catch up to Ethereum?
Ethereum isn't necessarily trying to be a currency, right?
What they basically are saying is something completely different.
They're saying, look, we're going to rebuild the internet.
We're going to build this world computer and we're going to be decentralized.
We're going to have something called smart contracts, which is really just automation, right?
And we're going to build this and anyone in the world can come here.
They can build it.
It'll be decentralized.
It'd be amazing, you know, utopia vision.
What ends up happening is if you build the internet, the internet's not really that valuable, you know, the traditional internet, unless there's companies, products, and applications built on top of it, right?
So if I just said to you, hey, yo, here's the internet, you could use it, but you didn't have Google, like the internet might not be as valuable, or there wasn't Facebook or Twitter or whatever.
So Ethereum was built.
Now people are going in and they're trying to build all this stuff on top of it.
Everything from decentralized financial applications to this NFT stuff to all kinds of stuff.
And so what ends up happening and where there's tons and tons of controversy and debate is ultimately two key things.
One is the Bitcoin community believes security, number one most important thing, proof of work.
If you don't have that, you're screwed.
And the Bitcoin community.
Question about that.
By having more access to or like openings to the blockchain through Ethereum's, I guess, way of working, do you create more liability for hacking?
We're going to get super in the weeds.
Basically, Ethereum launched a couple of years ago with a very similar way of doing security compared to Bitcoin.
The big change was in a very generalized manner with the smart contracts, basically this ability to write on top of it in a much easier way.
So Vitalik Buterin and a couple of these other folks basically, they wanted to do it on Bitcoin.
They felt like they couldn't.
So they went and created this new thing.
They are now switching from a proof of work, which is all the computers, to something called proof of stake.
This is like level 401 in the college course, but basically rather than use the computers, you have a economic position.
You stake it.
You basically say, I'm going to put this here.
And because of that, I'm not going to be a nefarious actor because if I'm a nefarious actor, then I will lose the value, right?
My economic stake will go down.
And so therefore, my vote should count.
I'm not expending energy.
I'm not expending the computing power, though, economically incentivized.
You can imagine there's a bunch of smart people that get in a room and it's like, forget intellectual Olympics.
It's like intellectual gladiator type stuff in the arena where they're all going nuts.
We will see.
I always say like my opinion doesn't matter.
Your opinion doesn't matter.
The market will decide.
There is two schools of thought.
One is that this Ethereum kind of world computer and the gazillion of copycats that have come along from it are going to end up being successful.
So they'll have a decentralized thing.
You'll build applications on top of it.
We'll go.
The other school of thought is that the Bitcoin network, which optimized for security first, eventually will add layer two, layer three, et cetera.
And you'll have all of that composability, smart contracts, et cetera.
A lot of that is there today.
It's also there around Ethereum.
And so what's going to be very interesting to watch play out is how important is security?
How important is true decentralization, right?
And there's questions on some of this other stuff.
And what I think ends up happening is like some of this gets religious, like kind of tribal wars.
Like it's almost like people have like sports teams.
Like, you know, go Bitcoin, fuck Ethereum type stuff.
If I was 95% invested in one of the coins like yourself, I would definitely be rooting for it.
Well, I'm 100%.
You're 100%.
You don't have any cash.
Huh?
No, Like I have 100% Bitcoin, nothing else.
Oh, I meant like coin-wise.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, 96%.
96%.
Okay.
So like some people basically split.
Some people add all this other stuff.
But what you find is like the further you get from Bitcoin, the more people are speculators.
So what are they doing?
They're basically saying like, oh, look at this like early stage technology product, right?
I can't go invest in a private technology company.
So I'm going to instead buy this coin that's like two cents and I think it's going to go to four cents.
I'm going to double my money.
Yeah.
Then I think it's going to go to 10 cents, 20 cents, right?
And sometimes they do.
But that's not really the same thing as what Bitcoin's doing, right?
Like you're gambling, which by the way, you're doing the stock market too, but it's just like, that's what you're doing.
You're not doing what Bitcoin's doing.
That's what it feels like right now.
The Coinbase account is basically the stock market.
Like I look at that the way I look at the stock app on Apple.
It's just a bunch of different coins you invest in and then it goes up or down.
And you think at the end of the day, there will likely just be one, which is Bitcoin, like Highlander, like there can only be one?
I think that, and I caveat all this with like, nobody actually knows what's going to happen.
Like I can't see that in the future, right?
But the way that I do think things will play out is Bitcoin is the king.
Bitcoin will be the digital currency.
Other countries will go around the world and they'll create these digital currencies, digital dollars, all this stuff.
There will be private corporations that try to do the same thing.
You'll get no competition at the technology layer.
They'll all be digital.
The competition will be at the monetary policy layer.
All fiat currencies have the exact same monetary policy.
It's inflationary, right?
There's unlimited supply.
Bitcoin is digital sound money.
So all of the capital and value will flow to Bitcoin from a currency perspective.
When it comes to all of the other stuff outside of currency, it's a freaking wild, wild west.
I mean, I literally see people who start something and next thing you know, it's worth billions of dollars from these market caps.
People are creating tokens.
It's like, you know, just put a dot-com, all of a sudden, you got a token next thing, you know, it goes up in value and stuff.
And so, what I think is going to be very interesting to watch is two things.
One, where do the developers go?
If the developers all go to Ethereum and stay there, then there's going to be a bunch of economic activity that happens there, right?
Because naturally, that's where everything's going to get built, all the innovation, experimentation, whatever.
If all of the developers go to Bitcoin over time, then there'll be economic innovation and all that kind of stuff there.
What I think people have to be very, very careful about, though, is as this progresses, you have to understand like, what are you trying to accomplish, right?
So, there's a lot of people you mentioned like Coinbase looks like at the stock market.
There's plenty of people who look at crypto and they're just like, yo, the use case is not store of value, medium of exchange, it's speculation.
And so, if you want to speculate, sure, you can speculate in the stock market, in crypto, at the casino, like you can do all that stuff, right?
But you're not doing what most people would consider your saving in what is going to become the next global reserve currency, right?
You're just literally putting stuff on black, and whatever happens, happens.
By the way, if you find that entertaining or you think you're going to make money, knock yourself out.
Like, you're a free choice, go do whatever you want.
But I think that the Bitcoiner position is what Bitcoin is going after is the largest opportunity, right?
We're basically trying to disrupt central banks.
We're trying to disrupt global reserve currency, et cetera.
And so, we're talking about basically the global money supply right now is like 80, 90 trillion.
If Bitcoin is successful, it's likely to be like $150 to $200 trillion in size, which means it'll literally steal economic value back from other store of wealth assets.
So, the gold market cap's actually been going down.
Yeah.
Because as Bitcoin's going up, people are literally selling their gold to go buy Bitcoin.
What happens if real estate, art, like all these other store-value assets start to contract and it flows into Bitcoin?
Bitcoin's price goes up.
Because those other store-value assets are all based in verification, right?
Like a piece of art.
There's this documentary I just watched called Made You Look on Netflix.
Have you seen it?
No, I have not.
It's really interesting.
Made you look?
Made you look.
They basically just forged $80 million worth of art and sold them through like one of the most respected galleries in all of New York, the Nuebler Gallery or whatever like that.
It's like Sour Grapes or whatever, the wine movie where they make the fake wine bottles.
And people lose their shit over it.
Yeah, well, the guy like, yeah, he made millions and millions of dollars.
Exactly.
So, but it just proves to me, I'm watching this and I'm going, oh, this is why Bitcoin is the future, or this is why blockchain is the future, right?
It's because these people are dying to get their hands on this piece of wealth that's just going to increase in value and is verifiable, real, 100% non-fungible, if you will.
That's the term that NFTs are using all the time.
So I see this as proof of concept for storing wealth in the future.
Explain to me what the fuck NFTs are, why this artist can sell them for $69 million.
People, I think, sold for $69 million.
A buddy of ours, Logan Paul, put out these fucking Pokemon cards of himself.
He made a few million dollars.
What is happening?
What is an NFT?
What is happening?
And how long does this NFT bubble exist?
So fungibility, again, just some fucking fancy world somebody made up, right?
But basically, fungibility means if I take that $100 and I put it in a pile with 10 other $100 bills and we mix them all up and I just grab $100 back, it doesn't matter if I got the one I put in or I got a different one.
I got still $100.
I go, I can use it at the store, whatever.
If I have art, though, and I have a Picasso and I put it in a pile with three fake Picas and we mix them all up and I go to grab a Picasso, if I don't grab the original, I'm screwed.
So when the dollars all can get mixed up, I can take whatever back.
That's called something that's fungible.
It doesn't matter which one you have as long as you have a $100 bill.
You got $100 bill as long as it's real, right?
With the art, you need something that's non-fungible, meaning if you don't have the original, then you got a fraud and it's not, it doesn't have any of its value.
So what ends up happening with Bitcoin is Bitcoin is fungible, right?
If I have a Bitcoin and you have a Bitcoin and we basically send them back and forth a bunch of times and we don't know, do I have my original one or your original one?
Doesn't matter.
I got a Bitcoin, you got Bitcoin, we're good.
What people started to realize was, wait a second, a blockchain, a key piece to it is remember when we talked about the blocks of transactions?
Yeah, it's immutable.
All that means is no one can change it.
So once it like gets stamped on the blockchain, nobody can change it.
So you can imagine all kinds of crazy stuff.
So early on, somebody on Ethereum said, yo, in China, they don't want to let me say something.
You know what?
I'm going to write it to the blockchain because the Chinese government can't take it down.
Oh, okay.
Like, that's interesting.
Right.
So, wait a minute.
You mean you can't censor an immutable thing?
So that was a pretty aggressive use of it.
People started to say, well, where else is non-fungibility important?
So anything that's scarce, go back to that piece of music.
If you can copy music over and over and over again, then basically there's no scarcity to it.
Right?
Art, the whole value of art is scarcity.
So you can think of it two ways.
And I forget who wrote this.
So I apologize.
I'm not going to give them credit for it.
But basically, think of it like a serial number.
So if I said to you, the example that I was reading about is somebody said, think of it like the Eiffel Tower.
Eiffel Tower 001 is the real valuable one.
But every copy, no matter how big it is, how small it is, where it is, if it's in Vegas, if it's, you know, Eiffel Tower number 47036, it could be the exact same way.
Exactly.
No value.
If it's not in Paris, if it's not serial number one, no value.
So what ends up happening is in a digital world, this shit's hard.
Like it's hard to rebuild the Eiffel Tower.
It's hard to put it in a different place and people are like, oh, that's the original, right?
It's physical world.
In the digital world, it's much easier to do this stuff.
So when you basically stamp it onto a blockchain and you say, this is serial number one of this item, everyone can see it.
And then everyone can see who's owned it.
So let's say you create a piece of art and then you send it here, And now the next person wants to come buy it.
They can come see, did Andrew create this or not?
Who else owned it?
When did they own it?
What'd they pay for it?
Oh, here's my question about that, especially with art.
With a piece of art, right?
Maybe now with 3D printing or something like that, it's possible.
But up until maybe the last decade, it was impossible to recreate a piece of art in the exact same way, especially if it was like an oil painting, right?
There's like certain 3D textures to oil.
So even if you were an amazing Forger and you recreated some Van Gogh, it's not going to be exactly the same.
Maybe the colors are similar, but it's not the exact same, right?
So you know what's different.
With a piece of digital art, a simple screenshot could recreate the exact same image.
Why is it that people care about having the original thing when it's not the original?
No, no.
Why do they care about having the original one when the copy is exactly the same?
Because people aren't buying art because of what it looks like.
They're buying the story.
Yeah, that's what I have to wrap my head around.
They're buying the value, right?
If I paint the same thing as Van Gogh, it's not because of what it looks like.
You're right, you're right.
They're buying Van Gogh.
They're buying the story.
So what you said about the Eiffel Tower kind of made it click for me because you could recreate the Eiffel Tower and it has negative value.
You're like, what do I do with this?
This is a waste of space.
Yeah, it takes up too much room in the garage.
It's too much.
Yeah.
So, but the fact that there's this story built around the Eiffel Tower Tower in Paris, you're purchasing that story.
I get that.
But a brand new piece of art that just came out has no story besides you being the artist.
Buying Stories Not Gold00:04:53
So I'll explain.
You use this artist I've partnered with called Riccodi, right?
So Riccodi basically said, all right, I'm going to create art.
And what I'm going to do is I want to democratize access to this.
So think of like Christie's.
Christie's or Susie's or whoever says, yo, if you're rich, you can come and you can buy this.
Auction houses to anybody is super expensive art, right?
And it's kind of gated.
You got to verify yourself.
You got to do all this stuff.
Ricodi said, all right, I'm going to create this really dope art.
I've got 12 pieces.
I'm going to sell it on the internet.
Anyone with the internet connection anywhere in the world can now come in and can buy this.
And this artist said, I'm going to sell for 0.01 ETH, right?
Which is basically like 18 bucks, 19 bucks at a time.
And they sold this directly, sold out in 26 seconds.
ETH is showing for Ethereum.
And so basically they promote it on Twitter, blah, blah, whatever, right?
All the stuff.
Then they say, you know what?
We have three other pieces and we're going to auction them.
So just like these auction houses do, we're just going to auction them to the internet.
And when they auctioned it, it was, here's the piece.
Anyone in the world over the next 24, 12 hours, whatever it was, could come in and let the market decide what it's worth.
Sold the first one for 40,000, the next one for 70, the next one for like 40,000 again.
And the reason why that's important is what those people are buying is that Ricodi created it.
You can see in the transaction history that Ricodi is the one who minted this onto the blockchain.
And then from there, what happens is you can literally not only see every single transaction, but also in some of these platforms, you can see every bid.
So I can see that you actually bid 100K and then you got scared and you took away the bid.
Then I can see that he bid $2 like a cheapskate, right?
Exactly.
Oh, this is accurate.
And then he basically was like, nah, you know what?
Like, I don't want this, right?
So you can see all this history.
What it does is it provides transparency.
And that's ultimately what's happening around the world, whether it's blockchain crypto, Bitcoin stuff, or it's just frankly society in general, is people are calling bullshit on the world.
They're saying, I don't believe you.
I don't believe the politicians.
I don't believe the central bank.
I don't believe the media.
I don't believe anybody.
But I believe blocks.
Verify it.
Prove it to me.
If you prove it to me, then I'll trust it.
So do you think on some level, crypto is a reaction to a lack of trust in everything?
Do you think people are seeking, you know, how like girls with daddy issues, like, right?
Like they might seek out a certain type of dude, right?
Like, do we have daddy issues with the government, with politicians?
With, do we have daddy issues with the powers that be, the elites?
And we're seeking something that is out of their control to find comfort in?
The world historically has been a narrative-driven value chain.
What I mean by that is gold.
The reason why gold is valuable is because somebody told you it was.
You can't tell me.
I'll give a little pushback on that.
All right, go ahead.
Well, you can put a lot of pushback into your show.
Yeah, fair enough.
But you're the expert.
But like, have you ever held a nugget of gold?
Yeah.
I panned for it one time in Walnut Creek in North Carolina.
It was fucking amazing.
Okay, now.
I think it was fool's gold, though.
Go ahead.
That's the thing.
You might have some fake shit.
But if you, if you hold like this much gold, right?
It was the weirdest thing I've ever experienced.
I was doing some like news show and one of those guys that were on the gold rush things, he was there and he just had a nugget, like a raw nugget, and he handed it to me.
And it was almost alien.
The weight for size was the most peculiar thing I've ever held.
I've never held anything like that in my entire life.
So I could see how some like very primitive human being picked up the substance and for whatever reason, it was so fucking dense and weird and shiny and shiny and odd that you would almost feel like it was, I don't know, from outer space or something.
I can see why we would ascribe value to it.
Yeah, so it's a psychological concept.
Exactly.
And the same thing I imagine is at play here with Bitcoin, but it's playing into something else.
It's not going this is, I honestly think it's the opposite of gold in a way.
I think this is this.
I don't know what the fuck it is.
Bitcoin, I do.
There's proof of every single thing about it.
So I can verify it.
It's the fucking San Antonio Spurs.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, it's just like, this is good fundamental basketball.
I know what I can expect from it.
Whereas gold was this like otherworldly substance that we put all this value on.
But at the end of the day, what was it worth?
The whole idea of a narrative-driven value chain is when you pick it up, it's shiny, right?
Like humans are stupid at this day.
I'm stupid, you're stupid.
Like we're all stupid, right?
And so we pick up this shiny thing.
Like, oh shit, this thing must be valuable because it's shiny, right?
And so, what you end up seeing is that the world told us it's scarce.
The world told us it had value.
And so, when somebody says, Okay, well, how much gold is there?
Uh, we have a pretty good guess, but like, nobody knows for sure.
Yeah.
When the government says, Hey, the dollar, we say, Well, how many are there?
Well, you know, here's our best guess, right?
Nobody knows how much is created or taken away every day, all this stuff, right?
And so, everything in our life is a narrative.
Verifying Fundamental Value00:10:08
The media, right?
If you look at all the institutions, like it's all narrative-driven.
And so, what now has happened with digital technology is we say the narratives don't matter in terms of I'm not going to simply just blindly believe the narrative, right?
Narratives around assets will always matter because that's investor psychology, but the narrative is an inferior way to prove value or to drive value than verifying than trust.
And so, it was not, it's not even trust.
It's because it's truth, exactly.
And so, I think that the whole thing that ends up becoming really interesting is what if I could tell you that every single time, right?
Look at media, look at what you're doing.
If you got interviewed by the mainstream media every day and they wrote articles about you, you'd be going nuts.
You'd be like, That's not what I said, right?
Or they twisted my words, or I didn't know they were going to write this, or whatever the complaint is, even if it was a positive piece, right?
Now, you just speak into that microphone and people hear exactly what you have to say.
Yeah, and so it's going to the source, it's verifying.
I don't care what somebody else says from this interview.
What did he say in the interview?
We live in the age of verification, and blockchain technology is the confirmation of that.
The world is going to run on open decentralized protocols that allow for complete verification of truth of everything.
Now, I believe in that entirely, 100%.
I support that.
Here's my question: How else, what else is affected by it?
Like, what industry gets destroyed?
Do we need the stock market anymore?
Do we need finance dudes?
Like, I mean, that's sincere.
Like, are there jobs fucking done so that we can verify every single trade and do it ourselves?
Go back in time, right?
Before telephone.
One more thing.
Let me add one.
What if we can add a blockchain to the profits of a company?
There's no more Enron.
There's no more, right?
Like, I'm trying to think what the 10, 20-year effects of this are.
And you might get like a realistic look at all these different companies.
I don't even think you need stockbrokers anymore.
So, if before we go to the future, let's go to the past.
Okay.
Go before phones, computers, cars, any of this shit.
There was finance, companies, all this stuff.
There are some companies that are still around today.
If you go back and you look at, you know, JP Morgan was a dude and he was really rich and now his company still persists.
Goldman Sachs has been around for a long time, all this stuff, right?
So, some years.
So, some companies will navigate the invention of technology or innovation, right?
So, new technology comes along, they embrace it, they figure out how to use it, and they not only survive, they thrive in the new world.
Other companies that may be their competitors get completely disrupted.
So, Sierra's a great example: internet comes along like, see ya, right?
They just got completely blindsided.
And so, it's not that everything goes away and it's this like super binary world.
There's actually like this gray area.
But what's going to happen is the people who embrace the technology will thrive.
So, the bankers who say, Yo, I'm just going to figure out like what's my role in this new world.
Because by the way, out of the 10 services I offered, eight of them now are obsolete.
These other two, I'm going to double down on.
And now there's the creation of two more.
So, ultimately, what ends up happening is they have a company.
It's just the flow of resources and the organization of resources.
Pump.
I went on, sorry to interrupt.
I went on Joe Rogan's podcast a few years ago.
And I feel like we're having the conversation about the financial markets that I had with him about television and stand-up, where I was like, it's over.
Like, TV's dead.
Like, there is no more TV.
And I leaned all the way into social media, leaned into streaming, I leave into YouTube, obviously Instagram.
And I was not only was I sure it was going to win, I couldn't fathom how anybody could think anything else could win.
I couldn't fathom.
Bit is YouTube.
Exactly.
Bitcoin is YouTube.
It's just a more efficient way of getting content to people.
This is a more efficient way of making these transactions.
Maybe not more efficient in terms of every day, but whatever.
We'll work towards that, right?
So I'm sitting here with you, and I'm still having trouble getting all on board, but I do recognize maybe what people might have felt like in that instance.
So this is the undeniable future.
Which form it takes, we're not sure.
Your hedge is on Bitcoin, right?
It could be Bitcoin.
It could be Ethereum.
It could be some other one that blows them all out of the fucking water.
But without a doubt, markets are going to change because of this new technology.
It's a foregone conclusion because ultimately where we're headed is an automated world.
So here, here's the best way.
Like what people say to me like, yo, forget all the details, all this stuff.
Like at a high level, just what the fuck is going on?
The world is going to be more automated in the future than it is today.
The problem is that there's a mismatch of automation technology and assets, right?
So most assets historically up until the 70s or 80s were all analog.
Physical stock certificates, physical bonds, physical home deed, all this shit, right?
And then eventually they became what is today an electronic QSIP.
So people are like, yo, maybe we shouldn't use paper.
Maybe we should have a centralized database with this fucking string of letters and numbers.
And that QSIP, we're going to all trade around like geniuses around the world.
And that is going to represent that asset.
Now what's happening is we're moving from the electronic QSIPs to these digital assets.
But the reason why the digital assets are so important is because if I write some sort of technology to automate, let's say I want to do automated, what they call on-chain cash flow.
So when I get paid, why does the corporation hold the money for two weeks and then pay people on the first and 15th?
Why don't we just pay people at the end of every day?
It would solve so much economic pain in this world, right?
And so if all of a sudden we could do that and we had the technology to do it, why don't we do it?
Well, now the technology is here.
But the difference was even if the company had the design.
It was convenient, right?
Back in the day to pay every single day.
They just didn't have the technology.
Right.
So if I wanted to pay you every day, I would literally have to run payroll.
Then I have to go through the banks.
The banks are like, oh, you came in at 5.05.
We are fucking closed.
Come back tomorrow.
Like all this bullshit.
I could push one button and everybody on my staff gets paid down.
Yes.
Even better is you could pay them every hour.
It's automated.
So it just, it just flows.
It just takes care of itself.
It just flows.
You're out of it.
So the whole idea, though, is the electronic QSIP asset can't go through that automated technology.
It's like trying to take a cassette tape player and put it into a CD player.
The cassette tape and the CD player don't, they don't fuck with it.
Everybody listening, that's how we used to listen to music and cassette tapes and CADs.
Pomp just showed his age and it makes me feel amazing.
Keep going.
Right.
And guess what?
The CD-ROM doesn't go into the MP3 player.
Right.
So the same thing here is you got to upgrade the assets.
And so now all of a sudden we get digital assets.
Now digital assets can actually be used by all these automated technologies.
So the world we're going to is fucking going to be wild.
People who watch this right now, if they understand the world that you and I are living in, are going to see the future and be like, you guys were dinosaurs.
Is what you were describing similar to, for example, a lot of people who still had cable and maybe didn't adopt to YouTube yet because they were on old shitty internet.
So some of the, for sure.
It's like once their internet got upgraded, it was like, oh, fuck cable.
I'll just watch YouTube.
My parents watched YouTube all day.
They got rid of their, my parents, 70s.
I think what he's saying is almost the opposite.
We've had this technology.
We just haven't had the asset to match the technology.
Like we've had.
Well, it's a mix of both.
So you're both right, right?
So like one is we had to upgrade the assets, but also there's all kinds of things like, so the equivalent of I don't have fast enough internet is I don't have a digital wallet, right?
Like that would be one example.
So like if all of a sudden I have a digital wallet and I have the digital asset, then I can interact with all this stuff.
And there's still a ton of work.
Like don't don't get this wrong.
This isn't happening tomorrow, right?
Like, there's still tons and tons of work.
But, like, there's going to be a world where literally you go to work, you get into a car, that car shows up without a driver.
It's a driverless car that just picks you up as part of a robo-taxi.
And as you drive, literally, the car is just using a wallet that's in the car and it's just streaming payments to the government, which is taking their taxes in real time rather than stop at a toll.
I mean, think about it.
You drive on a road and you stop, and we literally reach in our pocket and grab paper money and hand it to somebody else.
And then they look at it, they count it, and they give us back fucking coins.
Archaic in a way.
Stupid.
So eventually the technology all gets built.
But then where you end up going to is like, okay, well, what else can get automated, right?
Where else can this happen?
So why is it that if I have a stock, I have to go from the stock to a current common unit of account, which is the dollar, and then go back into, let's say, to buy a house.
Why can't I just take the stock and use the value of the stock to buy the house?
Is there some sort of like tax liability there that we're worried about?
There's tons of regulation, taxes, all this stuff is going to have to get upgraded.
Because people might try to like avoid paying taxes by transferring their wealth from asset to asset.
All kinds of stuff will have to happen in terms of probably reasonable.
Well, it's just no, the person selling the house isn't going to take your stock certificate, right?
Like if I'm selling my house and you show up and you're like, oh, here's Apple stock, I'm probably like, dude, go sell your fucking Apple stock and bring me dollars.
Right.
And then I'll.
The government doesn't infringe on that at all.
The government is like, you have to.
I don't know.
I don't know the exact regulations.
I'm sure that you could figure out a way to do it, but you have to pay extra taxes or whatever.
Because the government might say, you need to prove that you've made income off that stock.
And that's when you change it from stock to cash.
I'm going to take my cut from that.
Then you go buy a house.
Don't go buying a house without paying a piper.
But I hear what you're saying.
So all of a sudden.
So they're getting their tax money in real time.
They're not even worried about you.
Ah, they're not trying to worry about you trying to beat them because this is all automated anyway.
We have all these rules set in place because we're trying to beat the tax man.
In fact, this is the best.
Dude, all these like Bernie Sanders and fucking AOC and all they should be dying for us to do Bitcoin because then you get your money.
These rich motherfuckers can't get away.
Even better is on top of that, think of like the SEC.
So the SEC spends millions and millions of dollars a year to find people who did something wrong, build a case, and then go enforce on them.
If all of a sudden all the stocks are digital assets, and let's say that you've got a wallet and we know who you are, your age, your income, where you live, your accreditation status, all this stuff.
And you want to transfer that stock to him, right?
And they know who he is, where he lives, what his income is, accreditation status, et cetera.
And it's an illegal transaction, right?
It breaks the rules.
Terrifying Surveillance Risks00:10:16
The code is going to serve as the law.
The coach is going to say, nope, illegal transaction, reject, right?
And so now all of a sudden the SEC saves all that time, money, and energy from fucking figuring out who you two idiots are and building the case and enforcing on you.
They just prevent it up front.
It actually makes it in a crazy world.
It makes the regulators, the government, et cetera, better at their job and it creates a more efficient system.
Now, there's a lot of people in Bitcoin who don't like the fact that the government's going to get power here, right?
In terms of and get some sort of benefit as well.
But ultimately, what ends up happening is the world we're going to is automated, it's digital, and it's run on open decentralized protocols.
So not only is it that, we're already very forthcoming with the information in our lives.
We act like we want this privacy, but the reality is we got our phones tracking wherever we go at every point in time during the day.
I mean, I had a buddy of mine growing up who ended up going to jail because his phone, well, because he broke a law, but also because his phone proved that he was in one place and another place where a crime took place, whatever.
It doesn't matter.
But point is.
Did he do it?
Who knows?
You know, all right.
Who knows?
Who knows?
Must be close buddy.
All right.
So The point I'm trying to get to is that, like, some might say that the blockchain would be intrusive if it would mint every action that you made that day.
For example, you hopped in an Uber, it's paying for the Uber while you're doing that.
You're buying a cup of coffee.
Every single transaction that you've had throughout the day is going to be minted.
Your wife can be like, Where were you at 2 p.m.?
Mom, just go check the blockchain.
You said that you were getting coffee, but you were really at this hotel banging this prod.
So, there is a way that the blockchain is almost snitching on oneself, especially if it's open source, if anybody can access the blockchain.
And you need anybody to be able to access it because without that, there's no surefire way of proving that you aren't doing nefarious things, right?
You're so far down the rabbit hole that you are a Bitcoiner already.
Keep going.
I'm getting it and I understand it.
That being said, maybe what will happen is we'll be so comfortable with our information being transparent.
Like, every time I open Venmo, for some reason, it tells me the things that like people that I know are buying.
Social feed.
I'm like, Don't show me that.
Like, I don't want to know.
Like, I'm paying the lady who cleans my house.
I don't, why not only could I care less, I don't want to know.
Like, I don't want you to know who I'm paying.
Why are you showing me that?
But it's almost like they're priming us for this time where every single action that we make is going to be coded.
It's terrifying, but at the same time, is that just what it is?
No, it's terrifying.
So, China is super into all this stuff, right?
They're creating something called a digital currency, whatever.
It's like DCEP, I think, is the name of it.
Basically, what they're trying to do is they're trying to take all the ideas of a cryptocurrency, blockchain, whatever, and they want to create a digital currency.
And they're like, yo, we're super like, you know, forward-thinking, we're innovative, blah, blah, whatever.
No, you want to track everything.
They want to track everything.
So, it increases part of the risk is that there's an increase in financial surveillance capabilities.
And so, there's a really important thing to talk about because ultimately, what we need is we need just as much of an investment in terms of the infrastructure and decentralization and kind of all this.
We also need huge investment, whether it's through Bitcoin developers or other people, into all sorts of privacy technology as well.
So, like when I fast forward 30 to 50 years from now, I see a world where there are technologists around the world that are building privacy-centric technologies that allow for people to not only hide because it's their human right to have privacy, but also to use pseudonymity when they do things so that you may be able to see that it was this entity and this entity that transacted with each other, but you don't know who owns those entities, right?
And then, on top of that, it's all built on these open decentralized protocols where there's full automation.
So, when you look at that world way out there, you say, We got a ton of work to do, but if we can get to that world, ultimately, what you do is you loosen the dependence on government, you loosen the dependence on the existing incumbents and infrastructure, and then on top of that, what you do is you give power back to the people.
And I think that's ultimately where all the distrust comes from: people are looking and they're saying, Wait a second, does the government really have my best interest at heart?
Does the bank really have my best interest at heart?
So, here's something that I've been trying to ask: Is and this is uh maybe a stupid question.
You don't have the caveat at all, stupid questions.
And you ask me like a hundred stupid questions.
I just ask him, I take it on the chin.
This asshole always prefaces it.
Yeah, just looks like it sounds smart.
Go ahead, yeah, it does make me sound smarter.
It lowers he is smarter than you, but go ahead.
Um, I started buying a little bit of Bitcoin early on because I was like, you know what?
I didn't understand any of the technology, but I was like, a global currency just makes sense.
Yep, mistake, by the way.
We're so to not understand technology, no, just buy a little bit, a little bit.
I fucked up hard, but not as bad as him, right?
This is a stupid question.
It's like little is bad until you meet somebody who has none, and then that's like worse.
Okay, the one thing that I keep thinking is: if Bitcoin is a disruptor, which makes perfect sense, can't that upset enough people that some group is going to be like, you know what?
Fuck this.
We're going to hack and we're going to bring this whole thing down, especially if 60% of the people who own Bitcoin are like, No, I'm not giving this shit up.
Fuck you.
The U.S. government or some super powerful entity could be like, no, no, no.
Like you said, we will go to war to destroy.
I went to war for far less.
So all we got to do, hack Bitcoin.
This shit is ours again for far less.
So from a technical perspective, they can't hack it because what they would have to do is they basically would have to get control of so much of the mining power.
And if they went to go get control of all that mining power, they would have to on a geopolitical level.
It's not like all the mining powers in the U.S. or in China or in Iran or in somewhere in South America or in Africa or wherever.
They would have to hack all these millions of computers.
Or there would be global coordination, which doesn't appear to be likely in any way.
But on top of that, even more so, is the financial incentive to embrace it is bigger than the financial incentive to destroy it.
Could they, another thought I had is could they, the government or somebody just be like, oh, all these people who were Bitcoin billionaires, I'm just going to indict you on some bullshit charge just so I can take your Bitcoin and then we can have more wealth.
Is that a danger for a regular guy who just bought a thousand Bitcoin at $600 and now is fucking rich?
So there's always risks in everything, right?
And I think that part of the conversation that becomes really interesting is if you disincentivize the adoption of something, that's a big problem.
Now, you could argue that there's some politicians who they want to do that same thing, not because people own Bitcoin, because they own too many dollars, right?
Maybe they don't want to put them in jail, but they want to take all their dollars, right?
And they're like, oh, you're too rich.
Like, okay, well, I thought we lived in a capitalistic free market society.
Right.
And so ultimately what ends up happening is people will always, always want to go after those who have more than them, right?
Whether it's a politician, an average person, whatever.
And what you end up finding, though, is Bitcoin is a way more kind of democratic view.
Right now, today, anyone in the world can go buy Bitcoin.
You and many people around the world can't go buy a lot of assets, me included.
There's super exotic financial instruments that you, if you're not an institution, you can't buy.
If you're not an accredited person, you can't go fucking invest in a company, all this stuff, right?
So you get the democratic aspect of it.
On top of that, there's this idea of if you have an internet connection, you can just connect to the Bitcoin blockchain.
You don't need anyone's permission, even if they tell you it's illegal, even if they say they're going to shut it down, all this stuff.
As long as you have an internet connection, you can get on.
The wildest thing I've seen to show you just how extreme this is is there was, I think it was in Venezuela, there was a blackout.
And so, of course, like all these freaking trolls, you started this off with saying like, I've been like, you know, dancing on graves on Twitter, right?
And so all these trolls are yelling and screaming.
They're like, oh my God, the electrical grid's down.
Like you can't use Bitcoin.
We're like, hey, you idiots.
You can't use dollars either because 92% of the supply is electric.
But okay.
Somebody literally used a generator, turned on their generator, got access to power, then took their computer and they pointed it.
And there's a satellite that runs this node.
And they basically were able to send a Bitcoin transaction via the satellite, even though the entire electrical grid in the country was down.
And so like, by the way, that's a super extreme one-off case.
Like not everyone's going to ever have to do that, whatever.
But it just showed the fact that even when the entire national infrastructure was down, if you went to the bank with your generator, you're not getting any money, right?
And so what ended up happening is it completely reduces the reliance of the individual on the government.
To your point, there's going to be a lot of people who don't like that.
Yeah.
But what ends up happening is there's a difference between rules and enforcement.
So jaywalking is illegal in New York City.
You ever jaywalked?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I do it all the time.
You do it?
Yeah, you do it in front of cops.
Of course.
They don't enforce it, right?
Because guess what?
It would be nearly impossible to enforce it, right?
Like they would literally be arresting people all day long if that's what it was, right?
Or giving tickets or whatever bullshit.
And so there's a lack of enforcement around a rule.
And therefore, the rule basically doesn't exist.
So if you want to enforce on Bitcoin any rule, you can't.
Give me your doomsday scenario for Bitcoin, even if it's not something you believe in.
What is the possibility of the number one risk to Bitcoin?
Like all this other stuff I think is just intellectual Olympics.
The number one risk is in the development process, as the code continues to get upgraded, et cetera, there's a bug that's introduced into the code.
And so that bug then gets exploited, whatever.
Now, I think that that's a near 0% probability.
But to me, right, and other people disagree with me, but that's what I think is the biggest risk.
So kind of a self-inflicted wound of the Bitcoin community.
Because they're still creating code for Bitcoin?
They're constantly upgrading it.
They're constantly upgrading the Bitcoin code.
That's separate from the mining.
So what they're doing is they're building on top of it.
They're doing all kinds of things around it.
But they're not ever changing that core monetary policy.
They as human beings.
So this is potential human error.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's always going to be human error.
There's code.
Yeah.
There's code being written, whatever.
So again, very low likelihood because of where the code's being contributed for things on kind of think of it almost like on the fringe, right, rather than the core value proposition.
And then two is, again, the whole idea of like optimizing for security.
They don't want to go faster than everybody else.
They don't want to be the most innovative in terms of most secure.
There's now a trillion dollars of value at stake.
We cannot fuck this up.
Human Error In Code00:15:12
How much do you got?
Enough.
More than $500.
Well, considering you said you put $60,000 in Coinbase, I have $61,000.
Which means you're going to put $62,000 and then I got $63,000 and then we're going to work you up to $120,000.
Give me a number.
Give me a number.
What do you have?
You got like $2,000 in there?
Enough.
Like, what, $2,500?
Is there a number that I could lie to you about that would make you happy?
Yeah.
Try it.
All right.
$500.
You look like you got $500.
You got to play to Italian's Egos.
You got to go at them a little bit.
Yeah, I mean, with your outfit, I would say you got about $600 in there.
I'm actually mad that you have your shirt button today.
I didn't want you to get too comfortable.
No, no.
What are we talking about?
A million?
We're talking about $10 million.
We're talking about $100 million.
Where are you at?
Well, the first problem is you're denominating everything in dollars.
That's what I was going to say, you dummy.
Y'all are bullies, bro.
Y'all are real bullies.
I'm just trying to ask you.
Listen, I'm not melting ice.
Can I tell you a trick?
You want to really go dance on graves on Twitter?
Yeah, yeah.
You should go buy two Bitcoin, which would be the $120,000 I told you you're going to put in Coinbase.
And then you could go, you could tweet out Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos and all these guys and tell them that you're richer than them because you got two Bitcoin.
They got zero.
Wait, Buffett doesn't have a single Bitcoin?
Well, he thinks that it's going to zero, but he also doesn't use email.
So I don't know if we should listen to him about that.
But he's done pretty well.
Has he?
Over the last 10 years, he hasn't beat the S ⁇ P 500.
God damn, this guy got bars for days.
This guy.
If you held Bitcoin, hold on, hold on.
He hasn't beat the S ⁇ P 500?
For the last decade.
Now, to his credit, he's one of the greatest investors of all time, gone on an epic run.
Let me just sell my fucking Berkshire hathaway real quick.
S ⁇ P 500?
So basically the S ⁇ P returns every year.
Like it's an index.
He hasn't outperformed it in terms of like S ⁇ P 500 is what?
The top 500 companies?
Basically, the market.
He hasn't beaten the market.
His problem is he's got a lot of money to deploy, right?
So he's got hundreds of billions of dollars.
It's not like you can just be like, hey, let me buy one Apple stock, right?
Like you've got to put a lot of money to work.
And so as you get more money, it's harder to do that.
But all jokes aside, he's the first person to say, look, he doesn't understand technology.
That's not where he made it.
What he said as far as investing is, yeah, I only invest in companies that I understand all stuff.
And like, I always joke.
Bezos should understand this.
You should be expecting.
Bezos actually hasn't talked too much about it.
So we don't really know where he's standing.
I bet Bezos got it.
You think?
I mean, probably.
He understands technology.
You got money everywhere.
Like, why wouldn't he?
What if his wife put all of her money in Bitcoin?
Yeah, that would be unfucking real.
Now she gave it away.
Her and that fucking teacher in Seattle hilarious.
Jeff Bezos is wild because that dude's still the richest dude in the world and he gave away what, a third of his wealth?
Like two years ago?
Right before he made a pandemic.
Yeah.
Dude, right before he started a pandemic.
Dude, he did that.
Dude, he gave away half his money.
He's like, fuck this bitch.
Everybody's got a sniffle.
You thought that he wasn't happy with 52% of e-commerce.
He wanted 58%.
No, you need a little bit more.
Yeah.
Let me ask you a question for investors.
Is it a smart question or stupid?
This one is actually a good question.
I don't know if it's smart, but it's good.
Okay.
Biggest mistake I make is always pussy, bro.
This shit is so pussy.
This might be a dumb question.
Don't catch me for my question.
Ask him how many dollars he has.
Ask him how many dollars he has.
Yo, how many Canadian dollars you got, bro?
Tell me how many Australian dollars you got.
That's your question.
How much?
No, seriously, how many Euros?
Euros.
How many Euros do you got?
I actually think I got a two Euro or whatever in my pocket right now.
You have a two Euro.
I don't know.
Let's see.
The motherfucker don't even call it paper money anymore, dude.
It's insulting.
This is, look, if you really want, let's see.
He was swiping that credit card.
Look at that credit card he got.
Hold on.
Look at that wallet, y'all.
Look at that.
Look, here we go.
Top credit card.
Hold on.
Can you show that top?
We're not showing my fucking credit card, bro.
Something like some sorority girl's iPhone is cracked up, bitch.
Hold on, let me go this one.
Oh, no, this is just disrespectful, bro.
He handed this money ain't worth shit.
Venezuelan dollars, Euro, you got something there.
Son, the Zimbabwe money.
How much is that?
This is 10 billion Zimbabwe dollars.
It just got rocks on one side, and then it got a guy drilling on the other.
It don't even have the president.
It don't have the prime minister.
The truck leader.
This one's got someone with a wig on it, and it's the Republic Boliviard of Venezuela.
50.
I think this is a 50 billion.
Oh, I just saw this.
I don't know.
Yeah, but you don't care about this little paper money.
Nah, of course.
Well, do you care about this?
Do you want the would you rather the $10 billion Zimbabwe dollar or would you rather a Bitcoin?
No, I'll take a Bitcoin, but all right.
So hold on.
So here's a good question.
Would you rather $60,000 or a Bitcoin?
Right now?
Yeah, right now.
I'll take $60,000 right now because then I could just buy a Bitcoin with it or I could not.
That's freedom.
Stupid?
What kind of dumbass question was that, dummy?
Should have prefaced that one.
Y'all deal with this dude every day.
No, no, for real, though.
How many of you have to do that?
You would rather hold for the next five years, you would rather hold $60,000 in cash than a Bitcoin.
No, I'd probably rather have a Bitcoin.
It depends if my friends have Bitcoin or not.
If my friends don't have Bitcoin, does Akash have any Bitcoin or not?
I got Bitcoin.
It would kill me.
It would honestly, let me tell you something.
Listen, I'm here.
I know it's paining the shit out of you.
It would kill me.
It would kill me if he sat there and became a fucking billionaire off of Bitcoin and I just had to look at him every week in his stupid shirt.
He has one fucking business.
Put all my money in Bitcoin.
I'm long on Bitcoin.
Dude, absolutely kill.
I would rather go broke than him make billions of dollars on Bitcoin.
Listen.
This is my investment question.
I don't think people understand what's about to happen.
This is my investment question.
There's always down cycles of Bitcoin.
No, He loses 90% of the banks.
Preface that question, bro.
I got a great question.
Okay, good, good.
Got a great question.
Here we go.
Here we go.
He's all in on this one.
Bitcoin loses.
There's down cycles.
It loses 90% of its value.
Is that happening anytime soon if you're thinking of investing?
Or do you need to just put money in now and not fucking?
Bro, why are you asking me these dumbass questions?
What the fuck is going on over here?
So, Sky.
There's two ways to look at it.
Is you can try to.
You got it.
This dude's over here dropping his phone.
So you can try to time markets, right?
If you think you're a trainer, I'm going to hit a bottom.
So instead, you'd be hitting bottoms all the time.
I am the bottom.
Okay.
Hey, listen, you can't laugh.
You got 100% of your wealth in fiat currency.
Dude, I can't believe it, bro.
Yo, don't call my shit fiat again, bro.
That shit sounded wild and disrespectful.
Listen, listen.
That shit sounded too disrespectful, bro.
That's gay.
He said fiat.
I know.
I think he just called me.
You're mad, bro.
I think he maggoted me right there.
Fiat.
Did you when you started this off?
You asked me about when I was on CNBC the other day.
Yeah.
I ain't gonna say the guy's name because I actually am friends with him.
I like him a lot.
I'll say his name.
He was coming at you, bro.
But yeah, he's an entertainer.
It's fine.
He's gonna get mad because he thinks he's an investor.
I'm fucking around.
I'm fucking around.
Jason.
I'm fucking around.
Jacob.
Jason.
Jason.
Nah, Jason.
Listen.
Somebody told me he had a fiat haircut.
I was dying, dude.
Yo, I was like, they turned fiat into this super derogatory term.
I got to get my money out of fiat, bro.
You are the fiat.
So, like, you dropped most of your money in fiat.
This guy invested in Dogecoin.
Loser?
Nah, I didn't.
That's some loser ass shit right here, actually, but I should have.
You did invest in Dogecoin.
All right, listen.
So you could basically try to time markets, but the whole thing is, and this is a classic investing.
This isn't like financial, but it's just a natural thing to do in investing.
Just to clarify the question, the question is: when is the right time to invest in Bitcoin?
Is it about to take another dip?
Yeah, the best thing you can do is just dollar cost average in any asset, right?
And what I mean by that is basically you say, yo, every Monday, I'm going to buy X dollars worth.
And you just buy on Monday.
Don't look at the price.
Next Monday, buy again.
Next Monday, buy again.
Next Monday, buy again, whatever.
And the reason why that's an important financial thing is, look, this is like this.
If you had bought Bitcoin, let's say in December of 2017.
And in December 2017, Bitcoin was at 20K.
You bought it.
Yeah.
And you put all your money in at one time.
Yeah.
And all of a sudden it crashed 85%.
He sold it when it crashed.
And then fucking retard.
Fucking dump me.
He got scared.
We're a little twinkle toes over here.
Oh, God, my ice is melting.
My ice is melting.
What should I do?
I'm talking about you.
I'm still in.
Nah, you sold your Bitcoin.
Did you not sell it?
You're lying for the pump.
Listen, we can check the blockchain.
We can check the blockchain.
Yo, check the blockchain.
Let me see the crypto wallet.
Let me see your crypto wallet.
You also bought Litecoin.
Who buys Litecoin, dude?
He's so pussy.
Yo, Litecoin.
There you go.
Of all the things.
Let me see that shit.
You see a Bitcoin?
Let me see that shit.
Oh, I'm dying inside.
I am dying inside.
Yo, he does have some stuff other than Bitcoin, though.
What else you got?
I got Chain Link.
I bought a three.
It's at 30.
Yeah.
Fucking ass boy.
Well, it doesn't matter if you only put $20 in.
All right.
So living in squalor.
All right.
Listen.
So basically, the whole idea of dollar cost averaging.
You couldn't buy a whole fucking hate this motherfucker.
You couldn't buy a whole chain link at $3.
That's him for the joke.
The joke's on you now.
Look, the dollar cost averaging is if you had bought Bitcoin all your money in December 2017, right?
And then you waited, you would have gone down 85%, up.
You'd be up 300%, 3X, right?
So you're $100 now worth $300, whatever.
But if instead you said, yo, I got $10, I'm going to start at the top of the market, the worst time to buy, and I'm going to buy $10 every month or whatever, right?
You would have way more in terms of US dollar value because you basically were buying at all these different prices, but the blended average is lower.
So the whole thing of dollar cost averaging is just don't time the market.
Like, I don't know where it's going in terms of like tomorrow or today.
It's stupid for me at the end of this podcast to buy a whole Bitcoin, one entire one.
Well, you're going to put $120,000 in, so you can buy $60 up front, and then you're just going to do $10K for a couple of weeks.
So I'm going to put $60,000 up front, which would be a whole Bitcoin, not the little fraction of a Bitcoin.
What do you got?
Some Satoshis?
Is that what you got?
You hanging out with your little Satoshis?
You got a little coin purse for your Satoshi?
Don't think I won't buy more than you.
Don't think I will buy more than you right now.
Look, I'll just, all I need is a little bit more Bitcoin in that.
Nothing funnier than fiat bros arguing with each other.
Don't you ever call us a motherfucking fiat bro again on this goddamn podcast, Pop.
Hold on.
Okay, so you're saying I should buy all.
He's got the fiat shoes he's got on, too.
Nah, that shit is Bitcoin.
He got this blockchain, this box, bro.
Look at it.
I wore my most blockchain sneakers for the podcast.
That's fair.
Don't make me put your shit up here.
Keep going.
I got Adams on.
That's fine.
What is that?
Adams.
Them shit look like Bruce Lee sneakers, Doug.
Put your fucking feet up on the table.
You're going to let me run the ad, the free ad?
Dude, what?
Let me run the free ad, bro.
Come on.
The most comfortable shoes in the world.
No, that's 96% of my money's in Bitcoin.
I can't take it out.
That's what that is, bro.
That shit is ridiculous, bro.
My maid wear that.
Adams.
You should go to adams.com.
Go ahead.
You're wearing Maria's.
All right.
So I buy a whole Bitcoin, you're saying, and then I got to put $10,000 a month or a week.
Every week, whatever.
What I'm saying is, like, it doesn't actually matter what your plan is, but you should have a plan.
You should stay disciplined to it.
You should tell me.
What do you think the best plan?
What is the best plan?
That's the one I'm going to do.
Well, I mean, if I was you, what I would do right now is I would put some money in 60K, whatever, and then just do 10K every week for a couple of weeks.
For two weeks.
This poor guy can't even count over here, dude.
How am I going to trust him on maps?
Well, I count in Bitcoin, not in Fiat dollars.
Okay, how many bit weeks do you need me to put money in in order for me to make the most money out of this?
Here's what I should say, ready?
If I was you, you're probably going to do another Netflix special soon, right?
We'll see.
All right.
If you do, you should walk in the room and you should say, yo, I have a shirt on.
It's buttoned halfway, but you're going to pay me in Bitcoin.
I'm not going to do it.
And if you do that, and they're like, why?
You just pay me in Bitcoin.
You'll probably end up getting paid more money.
He's calling you over time.
Pomp?
Pomp.
I mean, you could get paid in depreciating purchasing power, or you could get paid in.
I have a lot of respect for you, Pomp.
Okay.
You're a veteran.
Are you not a veteran?
I am.
A veteran of the Iraq war.
Yeah.
Which seemed like a good idea at the time.
Somebody said that.
I mean, we could talk about it if you want.
That's why he's out on dollars.
I'm just saying it kind of fell apart.
That would be an understatement.
Is that Bitcoin?
Did it fall apart or did we just not leave?
Ooh.
Okay.
We could talk about the current administration that dropped bombs in another country before they bailed out the small businesses and individuals.
Listen, I'm with you.
We can criticize them all day long.
I just want to make sure Bitcoin isn't another Iraq war.
Do you know what I'm saying?
Like, it seemed like really good at the time.
We're like, yeah, this is what we got to do.
And then later on, we're like, what the fuck?
All right, let me ask you this.
What would have to happen and for how long until you were like, how would you rate this question?
The game?
I just asked good questions.
Oh, shit.
Oh, shit.
I probably asked two questions the whole podcast.
Let's go.
All right.
What would have to happen and for how long?
You know what I'm saying?
They want to call me Fiat.
All right, go, go, go.
Well, then your Fiat legs.
Let's go.
Let's go.
What would have to happen for how long until you're like, yo, this is real?
Like, what are the things that you're like, yo, if this happened, I'd be like, oh, shit.
Akash would have to make money.
Okay, they already do.
They tax it.
They already do.
No, they already do.
They tax it.
No, no, Akash would have to make it money.
Oh, I think Akash is.
All right, well, he's up.
I'm up.
Fucking hey, dude.
Fiat.
But he's made more money in Bitcoin than you.
He's like a fiat.
Did I tell you?
I was like, yo, yo, I bought it.
You guys are going to tell that to a guest and a guest, what the fuck is fiat?
I've been looking for an F-word to replace the old F-word.
And let me tell you, we are some happy boys on this podcast.
Why'd you buy it now?
Why'd you buy it now?
When did you buy it?
Yo, what did I buy when you bought Bitcoin?
I don't know.
Another shirt?
No.
Fucking idiot.
Silver.
And I was bullish on silver.
I came in with my little bullshit.
This is exactly what happens when you go on Twitter and you just search GameStop and then you see, oh, where are they going to go next?
Silver squeeze.
And then I know that's not.
No, I bought the silver before and I got lucky with the squeeze.
Squeeze that bitch, nerds.
No, I didn't get out of stuff.
I'm back down, baby.
You started us off saying that you had no investments and then you got silver.
Like, I do have silver.
No, I got a few investments and I'm about to take them all out.
Okay.
You want to see what I'm invested in?
All right.
And this is not.
Probably not, but go ahead.
This is not investment advice.
I got to find my TD Ameritrade shit on my phone.
Selling Your Crypto Portfolio00:06:48
While you're pulling that up, I just wanted to ask: are there any threats if Bitcoin becomes too valuable?
Like, say, some people say it's a bad thing if it hits 100K.
Yeah, I think it goes back to the whole thing of just like the power dynamic in the world, right?
Kind of the geopolitical kind of competition, the government, what do they think?
All that stuff.
In my opinion, price is definitely a big component, right?
If you see all of a sudden it's 100, 150, 200, 250K, like this thing's not stopping at 60K, right?
It's very obvious that there's way more demand than there is supply right now.
So price is obviously continuing.
I don't know where there's like a trigger point, right?
Is it maybe it can go all the way up to the market cap of gold, right?
Which we bought like 500,000 of Bitcoin.
They'd be like, wait a minute, it's just as big as gold.
Like, that's crazy, right?
Maybe it's a million dollars.
It's going to be a two X, right?
You've been on, you're on record saying you can't.
It's going to be way.
It's going to be a million.
And I never actually said it publicly.
So here we go.
I think it's going to be a million dollars by the end of 2026.
Wow.
One Bitcoin is worth a million dollars?
After the next hat, 18 months after the next half.
I got to call my fiancé.
Because we're going to make some changes to our lifestyle.
But I think if you go back and you start to think about in terms of like how big is too big or like what we kind of pull people in, I think it's less about like, oh, it hit a certain number.
And to me, it's actually more the adoption.
So if all of a sudden like every bank in America is like, yo, we're doing this.
It's going to be pretty hard to kind of roll that back.
And that's what we're seeing right now, right?
Is you got all these banks and stuff.
So as the price goes up, the price is going up because all these banks are showing up.
Like Tesla bought $1.5 billion.
It took 7% of their cash and they were like, you know what?
This dollar thing's not such a great idea.
We're going to just buy this Bitcoin thing.
I got Tesla.
Stop.
What?
That should have gone down.
So all of a sudden now, like, what are you going to do?
You're going to go to the Fortune 500 companies and be like, yo, you're breaking the law?
Like, that feels like maybe they will, right?
I don't know.
Anything could happen.
But that just feels like that's a little crazy.
And so I think what you're starting to see here is ultimately, if they're going to do something, they would have already done it.
And so now what they're trying to just figure out is like, yo, how do we benefit from it, right?
I don't even know why I'm listening, this motherfucker.
I'm up 14% today, bro.
Look at that shit right there.
You're up 14% on what?
Look at that shit.
I'm actually a 0.14%.
You fucking fiats.
Fuck with me.
Fuck with me, guys.
Listen.
Silver teeth.
Are you sure that's not your 10-year return?
Yeah, dog.
No, I'm getting, I'm getting raped out here in these markets, dude.
So maybe a smart way to invest would be invest in the companies that are going to adopt it first.
So definitely that's one way to do it.
Like the whole thing, again, it's just like anything, right?
There's people who want to be diversified.
So even if you believe that the dollar is going to be the greatest thing in the world forever, whatever.
How do you feel about diversity?
He loves it.
That's why he don't like the white people that control the business.
My whole thing when it comes to financial markets is I actually think that there's a lot of kind of bullshit that's spewed by Wall Street, financial advisors, all this kind of stuff.
And again, everyone's different.
So there's no like one size fits all solution.
But if you look at people who build real wealth, they don't own 100 stocks, right?
They go, they do the work.
You have to take personal responsibility.
You have to understand, okay, it's my money.
I got to figure out how to grow it.
I'm going to go and I'm going to have concentrated positions and things that I think will work.
By the way, that also means if it goes wrong, it's going to go down, right?
Go back to the whole Warren Buffett thing.
He may not understand Bitcoin.
Dude's pretty smart about investing.
He says concentration builds wealth.
Diversification protects it.
If you're not wealthy, stop buying 500 stocks because your $1 going up to $2 doesn't have an impact on your portfolio.
So that's one.
The second thing I think is that people want to invest in all kinds of crazy shit they don't understand.
So it's like, actually, if you're like a sneakerhead, you'll probably make more money investing in sneakers than you will in the stock market.
That's a great.
Because you understand sneakers.
So like go invest in sneakers.
So should I not invest in Bitcoin?
Because I still don't know what the fuck it is.
Well, what socks do you have right now?
Because that's going to scare the shit out of me.
Okay, you ready?
No.
Berkshire Hathaway B. Your fiat couldn't buy A, right?
No, I couldn't.
That shit was dumb expensive.
I got JP Morgan up 1.28% today.
Should poor asses.
I got IWM.
Do you know what that one is?
No.
What is that?
It's IWM, bro.
I don't know what the fuck that shit is.
Someone told me to buy that shit.
It's down.
I got Disney.
Your boy's even.
I got XME.
I got Silver.
I got Microsoft and I got NVDA, which I thought was November until last week.
So yeah, that's what I'm doing.
But your boy's up 0.14%.
You got with a boomer portfolio over there.
I do have a boomer portfolio.
Berkshire Hathaway, JP Morgan, Microsoft, and Disney?
I do.
What is going on?
I just asked like a wealthy dude that was successful that's older, like, what should I get in?
Yeah.
And he's like, these things.
But I'm going to sell it all and I'm going to get into some coin, dude.
Actually, I don't know if I'm selling it all, but I think I want you to honestly give me an investment strategy that you can put your stamp on.
I've been saying this for a long time now.
Every single person in the world should have some exposure to Bitcoin.
I don't know if that means 0.1% of your portfolio or 20%.
I need you to say exactly what I should do.
How old are you?
37 years old.
How much money did you make last year?
I can't say publicly.
Okay.
You say you're 37?
Yeah.
So if I was you, I would be more risky than not.
You got time to make it up.
It's not like you're 65 and trying to retire.
And so I literally would put like 50% in Bitcoin.
50% of my cash that I've amassed or 50% of what I made last year.
Of your cash.
Because think of it this way.
There's two worlds.
There's the fiat, inflationary, unlimited supply world, and there's the digital decentralized finite supply world.
Right.
If you tell me that you think that the old world has a 99% chance of surviving and this one only has a 1% chance, then you should be 99% and one.
If you tell me you think it's 50-50, then be 50-50.
If you think it's 99 and one, then be 99 and 1.
Yeah.
Back to what I was saying earlier.
I have no question that the blockchain technology is going to be what wins, right?
Like I have no question that streaming is going to be what wins when it comes to television.
Right.
But my concern is, is it Bitcoin, Ethereum, or these different brands that utilize this technology that I believe in?
Are those going to be the successful ones?
But they're going after different things.
That's the whole key, right?
Is Bitcoin is a currency that is specifically created to fix the money, right?
I got a buddy, Marty Bent, who always says, like, people come for the money, but they stay for the money.
And what that means is like, people do exactly what you did, what I did, what everyone does.
Blockchain Will Win Eventually00:03:12
Is they're like, yo, should I get rich off this?
Sign me up.
Where can I go?
Right.
So I started, I did mining and I was like, oh, shit, this is just sending me all this stuff.
Like, this is amazing.
Like, oh, okay.
Well, what else can I do?
Right.
You start like looking at it.
But then what ends up happening is you get thrown on this rabbit hole and you get educated and you start to understand like, what is money?
Wait, why are they printing so much?
How does this work?
Why is this one better?
And you start to learn.
And then all of a sudden you're like, yo, if I don't own investable assets, I'm screwed.
Okay.
Why don't they teach us this in school?
There's like 14 states in America that teach financial education.
Why don't we teach people that?
Yeah.
Right.
And so you start to understand, like, okay, like the system is not really set up for us to be successful.
And so you either get lucky because somebody somewhere told you, like, yo, buy a stock, do whatever, or you have to be smart enough and go look for the information, or you basically have to pay somebody to do it for you, right?
With a financial advisor or whatever.
And so you start to realize, like, okay, hold on a second.
Like, how do I build wealth?
And you start to look at it and like, you're not going to get rich off your salary.
You're not going to get rich with no investable assets.
And you're not going to get rich because you fucking won the lottery.
And so, you got to do is you got to go actually do this stuff.
And I think that's where like people start to like realize like, yo, they're not coming to save us, right?
And this goes back to a more macro picture of like the government giving you $1,400 is in one hand, they're giving you the money, in the other hand, they're jacking up the cost of living.
And they're literally just saying, yo, we gave you $1,400.
Like, look how great we are.
And then all of a sudden, when you try to go use it, how come if the government handing you money was supposed to solve all our problems?
How come literally we have a wider wealth inequality gap now than we had 12 months ago?
They gave us all this money.
They printed five, you know, $4 trillion, $5 trillion, whatever it was.
And they literally gave us $2,000 plus dollars, right?
In terms of the people who are eligible for it.
They give all this unemployment insurance, all this stuff.
So if all of a sudden the wealth inequality gap is worse, what the fuck is going on?
Maybe the money's just messed up.
Okay.
Akash has to pee.
I can see him.
He's about to piss fucking explode.
But we'll let you get it.
Do we take a pee break?
We're going to take a pee break and then I want you to talk about your best friend, Peter Schiff.
All right, we're back from the P break.
We should wait for Miles because he's coming back in, right?
Oh, yeah.
Well, that's fine.
That's fine.
Okay.
What does Miles do?
Miles is editing another episode.
We had Chris Hansen, Your Biggest Nightmare on the podcast.
But did he hit you with the line?
Oh, yeah, I did.
All right.
Well, you've been hit with that line before.
What was that like the first time?
I thought I saw you on the show, but go ahead.
All right.
So we have a couple of questions before you get out.
Obviously, I want to hear about this Peter Schiff beef.
You guys are always beefing.
But before that, let's say we get rid of this fiat currency.
It's okay, Miles coming.
It doesn't matter.
Let's say we get rid of fiat currency.
We get rid of paper currency.
How do we do illegal shit?
How do we buy drugs?
How do we pay for pussy?
How do we do things that we don't want people to know about?
And that is a real problem because sometimes you need to do illegal shit.
If you're rich, you need a liver.
You're going to have to buy a liver from somebody, right?
You're going to have to do things under the table.
You know, you want to get a discount on someone's car or whatever like that.
Paying For Illegal Things00:04:40
You can't have it minted onto the blockchain.
So what happens to that market?
It's important to remember that in many cases, the most illegal stuff happens through the traditional financial system, just in terms of like, you know, go look at how much of the banks have been fined for just laundering money through their banks, right?
So like Epstein.
Yeah.
I mean, it's basically you just get into this weird world of like, we're going to go lock up the drug dealers on the street corner, but then we're going to, we'll let you launder like billions of dollars to our bank, like, but you're cool, whatever.
So like people, I think, are like onto that game now.
So I think that that will continue where like you have these regulated entities that basically put their stamp of approval, like not illegal, not illegal, not illegal, regardless of what the currency is, and it'll end up being illegal.
So I think people, you know, the big time illegal folks will do that.
In terms of like more what I'll call like the street crime, right?
Whatever that ends up.
I want to buy some weed.
I'm in a state where it's not legal.
How do I pay for that fucking weed?
So there's two things.
One is there's still a lot of people who use cash for that stuff for obvious reasons.
Right.
And so I think that cash is not going to go away tomorrow for the number of years moving forward.
Like people will still use physical cash to do stuff.
But it will go away eventually.
It will go to Van Luin to buy some ice cream.
You can't use cash.
Yes.
My dad's joke used to be whenever he would pay for something at a diner was, do you accept cash?
That was his dad joke because who wouldn't accept cash, right?
There are places that do not accept cash in his lifetime.
Yeah.
What the fuck happens when all these choices stop?
There's also privacy coins, right?
In terms of like, there's all this like R ⁇ D and innovation and experimentation around, can I basically use a cryptocurrency asset that isn't able to be tracked, right?
Can't be seen and all this stuff.
Jury's out in terms of like, will that stuff persist as a private focused cryptocurrency as a standalone?
Will the technology be ported over and eventually incorporated into Bitcoin?
Like I'm not technical enough to know like what's going to win, what's not going to win, but like there's a lot of effort around privacy in crypto assets.
And it's very interesting for this exact reason.
And then on top of that is maybe the asset itself isn't necessarily private and have this privacy technology, but the way you use it could be private.
And so there's all sorts of, you know, really at this point, kind of experimentation around like, well, what if I have Bitcoin, which technically isn't private, but I could send it to you in a way?
Or what if I could take my Bitcoin and I could basically put it in this thing called like a coin joint, which when I put it in there, we all put it in there.
And then you don't know who's in there.
And then I take out another one and then like, yo, it's like, you know, I was running and then I had a red shirt on ran into a room with a bunch of other red shirts.
Like, now you don't know who I am.
Like, see ya.
So like, again, some of this technology is.
Some of this technology is going to end up being super, super valuable.
And some of it we're going to look back and be like, man, that was a really stupid idea.
But like, it's important for all the experimentation.
Right, right.
So we are going to be able to solve a problem.
I think so.
I'm always, I'm a, I'm like a long-term optimist and technologist, right?
Like technologists will figure out solutions to real world problems over time because that's the financial incentive.
And also it's like the society incentive.
And so if people want to do something and there's not a way to do it, technologists will figure it out.
Al one thing.
So you explained this earlier.
I think I got it.
There's one blockchain and then a bunch of miners that are constantly doing all the computing and confirming of all the transactions.
What happens?
You said you invested in like some company that's able to send a Bitcoin like across the world like that.
Like how is there enough time to get confirmed by 51% of these miners if it's in one second?
So layer one is the process is like the mining process you talked about in terms of everyone is confirming it, but these 10 minute blocks, right?
So go back to the monopoly example.
It's like if I held up the piece of paper with all the transactions and we were all like, yep, looks good, right?
Whatever.
Layer two, specifically what Strike is using is called the Lightning Network.
And so very simplistically, basically you and I want to transact with each other.
We could open up a channel and I can send you the Bitcoin.
And then at some point in the future, you basically write it to the blockchain.
You say, yo, I got the Bitcoin now.
And like you can basically kind of contribute it into the transactions.
So you use the layer one as a way to keep security and keep kind of provenance.
But at the same time, you have this fast transactions.
So one way to think about it is, and this is like a really weird way to think about it, but like imagine if you were on a highway and the highway was backed up or it was going a little slow and you got off the highway, went on a side road, right?
There was no traffic and then you got back on the highway.
In some like weird way, that's similar to these like layer twos.
It's like it's a faster way to transact, but like you can't take the side road all the way to your destination.
You got to get back on the highway.
Right.
And so maybe it helps in the short term, but you still got to get back on.
Layer One Security Layers00:14:31
But doesn't it kind of fuck up the system?
Because now it's like, hey, you could have gave me this Bitcoin last week, but I just now said that I got it now.
It's like, you could have done a bunch of nefarious shit throughout that.
You're going down the rabbit hole.
So there's technical solutions to prevent that from happening.
Right.
So the example I'm using is like super simplistic, but basically you're able to do both.
You're able to keep the kind of integrity of the Bitcoin blockchain and network and who owns what in the transactions, but you're able to do it at the second layer with these channels.
You can essentially do it in a faster, cheaper way.
Right.
So I always caveat it.
I'm like, yeah, there's like a bunch of like magic behind the scenes that makes it work and more technical people can explain it in great detail.
But like from a use case standpoint, the second layer allows for it's easier to transact back and forth from a time perspective and a cost perspective versus the layer one.
Who is Peter Schiff and why does he hit you so much?
Peter Schiff likes me.
I like Peter Schiff too.
I think that we both recognize that, you know, I'm Batman and he's the villain.
So, you know, it sucks to be him.
Who is Peter Schiff?
Peter Schiff is actually an incredibly intelligent guy.
He is probably one of the best known gold bugs in the world.
And so Peter Schiff has this really unique ability to understand the macro environment.
What's a gold bug?
They're into gold.
So a Bitcoiner versus a gold bug.
Yeah.
Right.
Another word.
Into gold, into Bitcoin.
So if you think about...
So if you think about Peter Schiff, Peter Schiff has this incredible understanding of the macro environment.
And he's really, really been on top of all kinds of different things that have happened from what the government response to the COVID was.
He became really famous for calling the 2008 financial crisis.
Some people would argue, you know, if you call a bubble every day, eventually there is one.
Like, you can't say you're a genius, right?
But at the same time, like he did call it whatever.
No, no, no, no.
And also, like, I really, I've learned a thing.
I'm going to talk that about this Michael Berry guy a little bit.
Like, he calling a lot of broken clock.
Yeah, broken clock.
Yeah.
So like, like, I really respect Peter Schiff in terms of like his understanding of the financial markets and his belief in sound money.
Now talk that shit.
Well, we did.
Look, we agree on all the problems.
We actually agree on the solution.
Jay EZ.
That's what just sounded like.
We agree on sound money.
He's about to drop.
Listen.
Give it to him, bro.
Listen.
What's up?
We agree on all the problems in the system.
We agree on sound money as the solution.
Which camera's on?
Yeah.
Yo, Peter, listen, but you a dinosaur dog.
You literally got this gold.
It's physical gold.
Nobody wants the shiny rocks.
They want the digital asset.
They want sound money in a digital form.
That's why everyone is selling gold, dropping gold, and they're buying Bitcoin.
I love you, but you got the problems wrong, right?
You got the solution right, but you got the application of the solution wrong.
Maybe he's just trying to drive the price down so he could buy the Bitcoins.
Listen, here's a funny thing about Peter Schiff is his son, Spencer Schiff, came out of nowhere.
All of a sudden, Spencer Schiff came on Twitter like a year ago, and this dude literally recently said, nah, I'm not going to listen to my dad.
I'm not going to hold any stock.
I'm going to sell everything.
And he just bought Bitcoin.
Are you saying that you're his dad?
No, you're not.
No, what I am saying is Spencer's dad.
Who's daddy?
Oh, shoot.
Who's daddy?
What I am saying, what I am saying is it's a smart move, right?
Peter understands.
He's like, look, I got to keep my reputation intact.
I'm the gold bug.
I'm going to keep my business going.
But yo, my son's going to be wealthier than me.
So he's going to buy all the Bitcoin.
And then we're going to benefit from the Bitcoin.
You rock hoes, y'all rock fellas.
I mean, I didn't say to Poet did.
So Peter Schiff just stays getting bodied on Twitter is what you're trying to say.
But Peter Schiff likes it because it's attention, right?
And if you're in the attention economy, then hey, like, who's talking about?
You're not even giving him a gold economy anymore.
No, you're really talking like you're a bitch.
He wants attention.
I'm going to give him a little attention.
Listen, hey, it's good.
Bitcoiners love Peter Schiff because when Peter Schiff says stuff, it usually means that if you buy Bitcoin, then it's going to go up in value.
God damn it.
He paints the bottoms.
Like he's just like, he'd be real quiet.
Bitcoin goes from 50 to 60.
He don't say a word.
Then all of a sudden it goes from 60 to 55.
He's like, oh, it's going to zero.
And then the next thing he knows, they're like, all right, man, whatever.
Look, here's what I will say, though.
He's been right a lot of times.
But the thing he's been wrong about is gold's down over the last six months.
People are saying they don't want gold.
Bitcoin's up like 500%.
In the last 12 months, Bitcoin's up.
I think it's like 550%.
Gold is up like 19%.
That's little boy numbers compared to Bitcoin.
How can it go to zero?
That's the last thing I want to know.
How can it go to zero?
Just so I'm prepared for it when I go all in and that shit hits the fucking bottom.
Just tell me how it can go to zero so I know.
The more I'm here, the more worried I'm going to be when you do go in.
I made you say the last thing.
Make believe.
I'll be in brickle looking for you.
Just screaming.
Bumps.
It's down to 45.
I bet the house.
I'm being serious, man.
If I go all in, I need your address.
I did not dollar cost average.
I bought it all right at the time.
That's all I know how to do.
Okay.
I don't buy part of a sneaker.
Give me the fucking breads.
I want the whole thing.
When you shop at Payless, you don't got to buy that much.
If you put your fucking shoe up, put your fucking shoe up right now.
I can't believe this guy's talking shit.
Look at what he's wearing right now.
I strategically placed myself.
Say what's back to where you're going.
Watch your cap for him with his bullshit.
Look what he's wearing.
But he was coming out of your shirt earlier.
I didn't say nothing about that.
Yeah, because you know this shit's fly.
Yeah, but Chris, but this shit with the feet, first of all, put your feet.
Adams is Adams.
Listen, you're a size eight.
You don't talk about feet ever.
You don't want this, dog.
You don't want these flippers, bro.
You got so much room in the back of your heels.
Ain't even touching the back of your shoes.
You got a plastic shoe color.
You got funny clown shoes on.
No, it's Bitcoin.
There's room to grow, baby.
We got to do this.
Let's go.
All right.
It's not going to zero.
Here's why.
Okay.
I promise you it's not going to zero.
I mean, I believe you.
I promise.
You know why?
Because I'll buy them all if it goes to a dollar.
It might go down a lot, but it ain't going to zero.
What do you think it will go down to?
I don't think it's going to go over a long period of time.
Again.
A short period of time.
Because that's all I care about.
The short period of time is impossible to know because so many things can happen.
Like the other day, they're like, India's going to ban it.
Everyone's like, I was all in my Bitcoin.
Like, the fuck if India bans it, that shit's going to be more valuable.
Yeah.
Right.
So it's just, it's investor psychology plays so much into it.
Because you remember, it's 24-7, 365 market.
Right.
And there's not a lot of electronic trading that happens.
So the stock market's super rigged.
They got it.
Like, this is the funniest thing about the stock market.
If the stock market goes down more than 7% in the day, 7.5%, whatever it is, they shut it off.
Yeah, that is kind of fucked up.
They're like, yo, yo, timeout, we're losing too much money.
Everyone stop.
Like, what?
Bitcoin went down 50% in the day, and 60% of people didn't fucking sell the shit.
When did it do that?
In March of last year.
March of last year.
Thousands of times.
Yeah, yeah, we fucked up.
Yeah, so no, but here's the whole thing is it's not going to go to zero because there will always be people who will believe in it.
Could it go down a lot?
Sure.
Could it go up a lot?
Sure.
But ultimately, where people are going to psychologically shift at some point in the future, I don't know when, is they're not going to price it in dollars anymore.
So the whole idea is like, is it worth $60,000, $70,000, $100,000, $20,000?
Like, whatever.
It's like, how much is the dollar worth?
You're like, yo, $1 is $1.
Wow.
And so when you start to just denominate things in the actual asset, they're just going to be like, yo, how much is that gold plate at AK-47?
Like, yo, it's 100 Satoshis.
Okay, cool.
Here's my hundred.
Do you have 100 Bitcoin?
I have 100 Satoshis.
Of course you do.
How many do you have?
How many Satoshis?
I got 100 more Satoshi's than you.
You got more Satoshis than me.
That's facts.
I got more cash than you.
Ah.
Yo, you broke fuck.
I know what your guy got.
I know what his Bitcoin is.
We got the whole buddies.
This guy got no money at all.
I just realized that.
I'm taking financial advice from a broke motherfucker who got diner waitress sneakers on.
And this guy's trying to tell me shit.
I'm rich.
Yo, since I get my money into Bitcoin.
Yo, since we've been sitting here, your dollars have gotten less value.
I know.
It's breaking my fucking heart.
Mark, say something mean to him.
Why's the coolest one in here?
You've been chill the whole time.
Thank you, bro.
You lost us.
I'm going with the theory of.
What are you laughing about?
You own Chainlink.
Come on, baby.
To the million.
NX Sunlight Chain Link.
I love everybody.
I love everybody.
I've been buying Bitcoins the whole show for the record.
That's what I haven't been talking about.
There's multiple people in here who have already told me that during the show they've been buying Bitcoin, but go ahead.
Wow.
Okay.
Wow.
Wow.
And it wasn't anti-oh, by the way, this show is not an investment advice show.
I think I have to say that in the beginning of the podcast as well.
And there's like legal liability for that.
That being said, we're all in.
Yo, my girl is going to be so pissed when I sell her engagement ring tonight.
Her shit is gone.
Don't you want a Bitcoin, baby?
That's what I should have put on her fucking ring.
Okay.
I have two questions.
First question: when did you buy your first Bitcoin?
I didn't buy the first.
Well, actually, I kind of did.
In 2006, so I was actually like really late to this.
Like, that's the crazy part.
Yeah.
Is there's people who I know who, I know one guy who I think he first bought a Bitcoin.
No, he mined it in 2010.
Max Kaiser, who's the guy who gave Alex Jones the 10,000 Bitcoin.
I got to think it was 2010, maybe even 2009.
Like that's how early some people were into this, right?
It was created in 2009, whatever.
In 2014, I worked at Facebook.
First time I heard about it, I didn't do shit.
Didn't Google it.
Didn't do anything.
I was kind of like Andrew, you know, like an idiot.
Successful.
Successful.
In 2016, was it Facebook?
It was a Facebook.
Basically, a kid pitched me on mining and he was just like, you know, it's like a data center, blah, blah, whatever.
So that's where I started.
But it was like really small.
And I was just like, how does this work or whatever?
So you were on your computer just doing like math problems and fucking.
I wasn't doing shit.
I basically paid somebody else to figure out all the computer stuff.
Can we get into that?
That's something we could get into.
Miles is right here.
Miles the miner, maybe.
Miles the miner.
Miles the money.
Bitcoin donkey.
So, so, uh, and then in like beginning of 2017 is when I was like, yo, this thing, because everything was just going up in value.
There's a whole idea of like the greatest thing that happens with Bitcoin is the price goes up.
And when the price in US dollar terms goes up, what does it do?
It attracts people's attention.
CNBC starts talking about it.
The media starts writing about it.
People are tweeting about like all this stuff.
People's attention goes.
And then what they start to realize is like, wait a minute, there's actual value here.
And so there's cycles that happen, right?
And you should remember earlier, like the boom and bust cycles.
And so there was one, let's say, I don't know, 2011.
There was another one in like 13, 14, right?
There was one in 16 into 17.
And now we're in one now.
And so each one of those cycles brings more people in.
So it's almost like you could think of it like, well, you're to graduate from college.
Like, what, you know, what vintage are you?
The 16, 17 cycle is when I came in.
And then from there, it was just like, oh, shit, this is valuable.
And then the one thing that everyone, every Bitcoiner will agree two things.
One is they don't, they don't want the US dollar price to go up, right?
That's the other Bitcoiners want the price to stay or go down because they want to buy more Bitcoin.
Yeah.
Right.
So they're trying to acquire as much as they can.
So they don't want to hack it.
They don't want the US dollar price.
They don't want to hack it either, but they don't want the dollar price to go up.
The second thing is they constantly feel like they don't have enough, right?
Which is this weird thing.
Like, I don't know if you guys know who Michael Saylor is.
Yeah.
Right.
The microstrategy guy.
Like he owned 90,000 Bitcoin.
Right.
And then all of a sudden he was like, ah, I think I should buy 15 million more.
I bought 300 more.
Like, dude, you bought 300 million.
You bought 300 Bitcoin more and you had 90,000 before.
And he was like, I think I should buy another 220 or whatever.
Like, he's got literally billions of dollars and he still wants to buy more.
Right.
So it's just like deep-seated belief.
But that's kind of how I think of the cycles.
And then when I came in, do enough.
Is it, you had another question?
No, you have one other question.
So I'm 24.
All right.
There's still hope for me compared to some people here.
And I was wondering.
I was like, shit for 24, doesn't it?
I'm wondering.
Bro, have you looked in the mirror?
Yeah, I'm 36.
I'm 37, Pomp.
This guy's 24.
How old are you?
32.
You're 32?
Yeah.
Oh, you look worse than me for 32?
For sure.
Dude, you got 100%.
Listen, dude.
Do you have the goatee because you can't grow hair on this?
Can you grow hair on the top of your head?
Look at your hair shit right there.
Stop scratching your shit while you're buying a Bitcoin.
You look like you've been mining your scalp.
I'm not listening to these fiat jokes.
I'm trying to save my financial career, okay?
Come on.
Come on.
I need to buy a house one day.
So I'm going to go to the bathroom.
I'm lashing out right now.
I'm fucking lashing out.
So, what advice do you have for like recent college graduates that are looking to invest in cryptos?
Like, how should I diversify my portfolio?
I think it's the same thing, right?
Of like when you're young, here's a really interesting concept where if I said to you, are you wealthy?
Most people would think in terms of dollars, right?
Or like financial assets.
If I said to you, would you switch lives with Warren Buffett and you get all of his 90 plus billion dollars, but you got to be 94, would you do it?
No.
No, right?
So actually the more valuable asset is time, not dollars, right?
You can't buy more time, right?
So this whole concept of like time billionaire.
So a million seconds is about seven days or I'm sorry, 11 days, right?
Time for a billion seconds is 31 years.
So at 24, you probably got 2 billion seconds left in your life.
Losers.
Andrew's only got 1 billion.
He's over time.
No Bitcoin, no time.
Let's go on, gosh.
So 2 billion seconds, the greatest advantage you have is that you've got literally got 15 years more than he does in terms of financial markets.
So let compounding work for you.
The thing that we haven't talked about is Bitcoin has grown 200% compound annual growth rate for 10, 11, 12 years, whatever it's been, right?
So like if you start to dollar cost average now, you just constantly keep doing that over time.
That's true of every financial asset.
And I think that the thing that young people always do as a mistake, and I did the same thing was like, you just want to be rich today.
You're like, yo, I want to be rich today.
What can I do?
Like, what's the zero or hero type thing to do?
But it's actually not the way that people build wealth, right?
Jeff Bezos didn't build his wealth over a year.
He's been literally doing this for 30 years, right?
And same thing with all these other people.
And so it's like, okay, cool.
Set a goal.
Let's say when I'm 30.
So you got six years.
All right.
I want to have a million dollars when I'm six in six years.
Cool.
Do the math.
Just back into it.
All right.
If I invest 20 bucks every week and it compounds at 10% a year for six years, what do I have?
Okay, that's not a million dollars.
All right, go back.
And you just start to play with the numbers and you just come up with like, yo, I should put a thousand dollars in the market, right?
I don't know what the exact numbers are, but a thousand dollars I should invest every single week.
And if it grows at 10% a year, then I'll have a million dollars in six years.
Okay.
Now, how do I get a thousand dollars a week to invest?
Right.
Building Wealth Over Time00:13:34
You just back into it.
And what I think ends up happening is like we live in this weird world where everyone looks at the end result, but they don't back into the plan.
And so it's like, you ever heard these people that are like, yo, everyone's like, got the dream, but not the plan, but the plan's actually what gets you there.
And so the single best thing I've ever done, and I'm not going to go into details before you ask, is I basically started to create like a net worth calculator, right?
And so I literally use an Excel spreadsheet.
Every month, I just update it.
And you can literally watch the numbers move.
And it's not because I give a fuck, like what, you know, if it goes up, down, whatever, like in the short term, but it's just I know, yo, is there more money in my bank account this month or last month, right?
Did the stocks that I own, which are zero, go up or down, right?
Is the real estate?
Is this like all this stuff?
And so you start to track it.
And it goes back to this whole idea of like what you measure, you'll move.
And so like, if I said to you right now, what are you worth?
Like you'll start trying to calculate, you know, hey, here's what I own.
Here's this, here's whatever.
But if all of a sudden I said to you, cool, you got to grow 10% between this month and next month.
All right.
And you start thinking like, how do I do that?
And I think that's like the biggest thing is it's the like psychological concept of financial planning, but not in the sense of like, yo, I want to diversify 60, 40 in bonds and all this bullshit.
It's like, yo, I have a number that I think is really important and I have a timeline on which I want to hit that number.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to back into from where I am today to that number.
What do I have to do?
And then you'll know I'm either tracking to it or I'm not.
And if you're not tracking to it, like go do something else.
Like it's not working, do something else.
And I think that's the key to this whole thing.
But people are just like, yo, I want to be a millionaire.
Okay.
How are you going to do it?
We get a million dollars.
Like, not going to happen, right?
Thank you, Anthony.
Yeah, man.
It's those shoes suck.
I'm teaming up.
Adams.com.
Those shoes suck, dude.
Who's Adam, dude?
Yo, listen, you want to know the Adams story?
Listen, you ready?
Tell me his best.
Here's the Adam's story.
Yeah.
You're going to feel like a dickhead now.
If it's anything like Tom, he gives the shoes to the poor kids.
With these white boys just making sneakers, dude.
So buy the fucking sneakers the black guys made cool.
It's that simple.
What is this?
So they're both from Pakistan.
They're shoe on the table.
They're from Pakistan.
I'm doing it, dude.
I'm good.
These guys are trying to outlaw Bitcoin.
Dude, so Wakasa and Cedra.
Adam is for the bomb.
India should drop on this.
So Wakasa and Cedric basically grew up in Pakistan.
They wanted to get out.
So it's great.
Like six years ago, seven years ago, whatever, they don't even know English, right?
Yeah.
Basically, come in, they get into Y Combinator in San Francisco and they're working on a different shoe company.
And then there's like, yo, the only way out of this place is we got to build a company.
So they ended up building this company, which are these shoes.
They got co-founder of Reddit, Alexis Ohani in 776, like all these folks who all backed them.
And basically, what ends up happening is they went and they convinced tech people that they're the most comfortable shoes in the world.
As soon as that happened, then what happens next?
Then the artistic people, and then just keep going like that.
No, it hasn't, it hasn't kept going.
I see how his pockets is.
It looks like you're wearing burkas actually now.
Come give me your cell phone number.
They're coming for you.
But that's the thing.
Only tech people wear these things.
Nobody else wears them.
Do you want to know what else tech people do?
What do they do?
They use Facebook first.
They're on Clubhouse.
They're like, basically, they know all the trends before anybody else.
They're not fashion.
No, they don't.
They don't get no pussy first.
Right?
All the tech people are just coming to Miami.
You're like, how do I get into Carbone?
You know what I mean?
They're nerds.
How do you know they're asking?
Are they asking you standing outside in line?
Yeah, they are asking.
Can you get me a carbone?
I'm like, how do I get into Bitcoin?
It's a little knowledge swap there.
There's a knowledge swap.
But no, we can't act like they understand.
You want to go to Carbone?
You just get in touch with Andrew.
Exactly.
We got this.
Dove?
No.
No, but the thing with tech people is they don't understand anything that like, what is it called hardware?
Like that's what happened with Google with the glasses.
Like Google, just do the nerd shit.
Don't make glasses, because we're not gonna wear your nerd things because you don't know what looks cool.
Yeah, the glasses was a little weird.
Anything they try to do as physical doesn't work.
You think the Apple Car is gonna work, though?
Right, of course Apple Car works, because Apple's not nerds.
Bro Drew mentioned this earlier, that all finance videos they give this disclaimer.
Why is that?
Why, what's the disclaimer and why is that?
The disclaimer is just, none of this is financial advice.
So we have no financial advice, but none of it is.
Yeah we, we have absolutely zero clue what any of us are talking about.
Why do you give the why?
So we don't get sued.
Well yeah, one one is so that people aren't get sued.
And then also two, I think is, uh look, probably the most important thing that over the last year, i've just been like hammering on people is, you have to think for yourself.
It is so important to do your own research, educate yourself.
Just do it for you.
Yeah, I don't want to think for myself.
I've been thinking for myself for a while and you've made me feel horrible about myself today.
I mean absolutely horrible, like one of the things I was really proud of was the amount of money I have in my bank account and now I feel horrible about it.
I was like I did this in my lifetime.
You know, my mom didn't even go to college and I did that and then you took all that away from me.
You pizza boy, what the?
I'm so goddamn upset at you pumps.
I'm so upset, but i'm all in all in Pops.
I'm going to mine it.
I'm saying.
Yeah.
Dude, I'm so upset, but I'm going to do it.
I'm buying a coin today.
You want to know who's been into Bitcoin for a long time?
Everyone forgot who?
Ray J, probably.
Motherfucker got into everything.
He really did.
That motherfucker.
Everything early.
My man understands appreciating assets.
50 Cent was accepted Bitcoin for like an album, but I think he sold it for dollars, which wasn't that smart.
I'm pretty sure Kevin Durant was in really early.
Like 2014, he's an investor in Coinbase, I'm pretty sure, as well.
35 Ventures.
Murder Beats is big in this.
Mr. Beast, like all these guys who have basically just said, look, I got to figure out what it is.
I got to play in the game, right?
At a certain point, you can't stop the future.
I think our thought is, is this?
The future is blockchain, right?
But we don't know if this is the future, right?
That's basically what our whole thing is.
Yeah.
I'm demoralized.
But I think you are.
Are you going to buy $120,000 of Bitcoin now?
I'm going to do whatever you tell me to do.
You have about 30 minutes left of telling me whatever you want to do, and I'll probably do it.
And then on my way home, I'm just going to go, the fuck was that asshole talking about?
Who the fuck is he?
Was he from Rhode Island?
Wait, where are you from?
Where are you from?
Rhode Island.
I knew you're from.
North Carolina.
No, no, you're not from North Carolina.
Okay, I'm not from North Carolina.
You don't sound like you're from North Carolina at all, like Chicago or something.
Not North Carolina.
What part of North Carolina?
Raleigh.
Really?
Really?
That's crazy.
I hear it a little.
Now?
A little bit.
I don't.
We're going to do a show in Raleigh, which you're not invited to.
That's fine.
Fucking asshole.
Dude.
You should accept Bitcoin.
If you guys could process it.
Shit's getting weird now.
Dude, I'm just so bummed.
Okay.
So I buy a coin and then I put some money in every week for an extended period of time.
Yeah.
But definitely buy the coin now.
You should, yeah.
I should because I might be more liquid than the average investor, but you would say for the average person, they should put...
It's dollar cost average.
Dollar cost average.
Okay, fine, fine.
But you think that I should get in now because you have no Bitcoin.
I have no Bitcoin and I'm going to mitigate that risk over an extended period of time.
People in the Bitcoin community laugh about all this stuff.
There's tons of memes.
I'm sure you've seen all this stuff on Twitter or whatever.
But it is legitimately becoming more risky not to own any Bitcoin than to own some.
One of my friends who was dumb early in Bitcoin told me this is like 2017.
I didn't listen.
He was like, I think at a certain point, it will become irresponsible not to have any Bitcoin.
And I think we're getting to that point pretty soon.
Fucking A.
Okay.
Is there anything at Pomps?
You have your own shows that I want them to know about.
One, can you tell us really quickly about them?
Like, are they going to be able to do that?
I basically do this exact same thing, but just with cooler, richer people.
I'm assuming there's no video on this podcast because you wouldn't dress like this.
But tell us about it.
Yeah, bro.
We need to switch the digs, dude.
I need you to take 10% of your Bitcoin out, and I need you to go to Zara.
I'm rich.
I don't need to do this.
I'm with it.
But if you're going to say like... Listen, I'm not listening to you motherfuckers about fashion advice.
Bro, look at you, dude.
What is this guy dressed like?
You dress like you should be disappeared.
This is, you got to get into this Miami shit, bro.
You're trying to do this New York life still.
You're not in New York anymore, man.
You're in Miami.
Are you staying?
No.
Should I?
I'll do anything you say.
30 minutes.
We're thinking of doing half and half.
Okay.
Yeah.
So we're going to maybe half six months, New York, six months, Miami.
More half in New York or Miami.
We just extended for another month.
So we'll see how long we keep extending.
What should I do?
Where should I live?
Well, I'm here now.
Who is it?
Yeah.
Wow.
Question.
Before we get out of here, no, say your shows, and then I have one final question.
People can go on Twitter or just pompletter.com.
Pompeletter.com.
You do a like.
I send a daily email to people and basically just like, yo, this is what's happening.
Everyone, chill out.
When the shit goes down, I'm like, chill out.
When shit goes up, I'm like, this is why it's going up.
Okay, that's fine.
I'm signing up.
It's easy.
Okay.
And then obviously you have your shows and then you can see on CNBC you arguing with nerds and stuff like that.
It's not really arguing because it's kind of just dunking on them all the time.
Yeah, you're just dunking on these nerds.
I mean, you just smile and laugh and they get real mad and then you're just like, eh.
And they get more poor.
I mean, do I need to say it on the show?
Can we just like close out with what everyone wants me to say?
What's that?
It's like, Andrew, have fun staying poor.
Oh, my God.
You know, that's the saying on Bitcoin Twitter.
No.
After the thing pulled.
They literally tweet at like billionaires who are like, you know, Bitcoin is not going to be the winner.
And they're like, cool, man.
Have fun staying poor.
Like to billionaires.
I'm stuck in against Bitcoin.
You guys are spiteful, dude.
Yo, they're a lot of assholes.
Just be a millionaire and chill.
Yeah.
You are extra about it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm not.
And then somebody's going to be like, fuck you, and hack it.
And then it all goes to shit.
Yeah.
I hope the tweets were worth it.
Yeah.
You're the fucking vegans of the currency world.
Just every two seconds.
You know how many coins?
How many coins do you have?
10,000?
150.
I have more than you.
500.
Are we talking thousands?
Are we talking hundreds?
I have more than you, too.
But if it goes to zero, not for long, bro.
Yeah, it's like, we're coming in, bro.
But I'm going to keep some cash just in case Archa stun on you.
You know what I mean?
That's fine.
I got a little cash, too.
You have a little.
You got 4%.
It's nothing.
Pennies.
You got pennies.
The way percentages work is it's all about what the denominator is.
I don't know what that word means.
So that's the total.
Ah, got you, gotcha.
I only know common denominator.
That's all I know.
I know some fraction shit.
I know common denominator.
Don't use that word anymore after that.
All right.
Listen, we got to get out of here.
I got to go buy some Bitcoin immediately.
Thank you guys so much for listening.
Thank you very much for coming on.
We appreciate it.
Thank you for having me.
You know, we'll definitely keep in touch with you.
I hope that as Bitcoin continues to do what it does, maybe we'll get back and you'll be our financial expert for that.
The flagrant financial expert.
So we'll keep it.
Why are you talking to you?
Because he said the flagrant financial expert, which is not what you guys should do.
Well, yeah.
That's why you're here.
Exactly.
You're here doing it.
You're telling us what we should do with our money, making us all rich or poor.
Dude, if this doesn't work out, man, oh, man, dude.
Yeah, it'll be a bad decision.
If it doesn't work, I'm going to move back to New York and you'll never see me again.
Well, New York will be affordable, so don't worry about it.
New York is fiat.
That shit is.
That's the dollar, bro.
Hey, you in Miami Bitcoin now, baby.
You Bitcoin now.
Miami converted Bitcoin, huh?
Yo, you converted.
Yo, the mayor, the mayor's just in every mayor's trying to do what is he doing?
He's trying to put Bitcoin into the city treasury, which I think is a good idea.
He wants to pay the employees in Bitcoin, and he also wants to allow citizens to pay city taxes and fees in Bitcoin, too.
This guy is a beast, bro.
Andrew, are you paying for this?
We're trying to get kidding women like it's the 80s.
This guy, it's the whole city stuck in the past.
You're right, dude.
You're done.
True.
We're here.
Yo, anytime you got de Blasio and Cuomo arguing who's more corrupt, you know shit's fucked up.
They're the dollars.
They're the dollars.
They're the epitome of fiat.
They are fiat, dude.
They're probably not going to be happy now that they heard this, but yeah.
I mean, it is what it is.
We've said way worse.
I mean, you can just brag that Andrew Cuomo is watching your show.
Yeah, Andrew Cuomo's probably watching my show.
You ain't got shit.
You fucking rapist.
Just kidding.
There's no proof.
It's a legend.
All this is a legend.
And also, none of this is financial advice.
Thank you guys so much for listening.
We love you.
Go check out Pomps.
It's A Pompe Leano on Twitter.
And on Instagram, it's like A underscore Pompeleton.
I don't use Instagram.
You don't do Instagram.
You do have Instagram.
I have one, but I just don't really use it.
But something pops up on it.
I follow something on Instagram.
Pomp Global.
Pomp Global.
Well, I follow someone else.
Someone else is posting.
Have they hit you up and they're like, yo, send me one Bitcoin, I'll send you two?
No, they haven't done that, but I would definitely take that deal at this point.
Dude, if a Nigerian hits me up and says, listen, I have five Bitcoin.