E122: Anthony Pompliano: Let's be honest, we are all in Crypto for the money!

30:07And then somebody could tell you a problem and you're like obsessed about being the problem solver. But I do think that most of the mistakes I see are people who are doing things they think they're supposed to be doing. But when you kind of prod them and you say, what did you do over the weekend? We have people who work in our business who will come to me and they'll bring some problem. And it usually is, I don't like what I'm doing at work. Am I getting paid enough money? I want more responsibility. I mean, all the normal, you know, kind of HR type stuff. And I always say to them, I say, okay, what were you doing on Saturday morning?

30:40Because I was at the office. That's not me bragging about working hard, whatever. It's that I genuinely look forward to whatever day, time, whatever, because I know that nobody else is going to bother me so I can actually get work done. Right? Right. And so it comes down to this idea of like, sure, you can characterize it as like, oh, obsession, whatever. But like at the end of the day, it's like, I genuinely enjoy doing this stuff. And I remember we had a conversation one time, my wife and I, and she was getting a little frustrated because I was, you know, at work all day and I'd come home and she'd be like, okay, you know, what are you going to do?

31:22And I'm like, well, I got to start working. She's like, you've been at work all day. And I'm like, no, no, no. I was meeting with people, you know, from eight o 'clock to five, 36 o 'clock and 30 minute meetings back to back all day. Now I got to do my work, right? That was everyone else's work. Now I got to do my stuff. And so she was just very, she was just like, I don't get it. And I said to her, you see me doing this. You think that it's like so sad that I have to do this. I enjoy doing it. How much do you enjoy that part of the day when you have to do all this HR stuff? Because entrepreneurs, usually, they're less wired towards that.

32:01Of course. But I think that it is, if you're trying to get better at all times, then you can look at it as I have to do this stuff versus I get to do this stuff. And the way that I always think about it is even in the times where I'm doing things that aren't necessarily, you know, if I had to pick out of all the things to do in a day, like this is the thing I would do. What lesson can I take out of this so that I then can feed it back into the system to prevent me from having to deal with this again? And so if you look at, you know, from the first business we ever started until today, we are exponentially much better, both from how we structure them, how we recruit certain people to the team, how do we structure their compensation?

32:44How do we think about operating the business on a day-to-day basis? How do we make decisions? All that stuff has improved. But almost every single one of those improvements I can tie to did this, that was a pain in the ass, bang my head against the wall, don't want to do that again. Let's go improve that system. And frankly, maybe one of the best areas that you can easily see this is when you start a company, the first time, especially if you're incubating it and partnering with somebody, there's a lot of things that you don't yet know that you need to discuss in order to set expectations up front.

33:20There's easy stuff, right? What is your job going to be? What's my job going to be? Are we going to be in the office? Are we going to be remote? I mean, there's basic stuff. But over time, especially when you do a bunch of them like we have, you begin to see the same problems pop up and you realize this is only a problem because we didn't have the clarity and expectations setting up front. So now if we go start a business, I almost have a checklist. Here's all the different things that I know are potential kind of potholes along the way. Let's just talk through them. And we may identify something that you and I disagree on.

33:55Okay, we can either work through it and come to an agreement, or maybe we just shouldn't do this together. But that clarity of expectation setting up front makes everything so much easier. And so I just think a lot about this idea of like obsession, how many people really get excited about creating that checklist not that many people unless you're like i want to perfect the craft of doing this thing right this one hits too hard because it's my main frustration in my business is i don't want to do this shit right but then i get end up frustrated because and it's my fault ultimately i'm like fuck it's my fault things were not clear.

34:36But it's not unique, I think, to you or I. I think there's a lot of entrepreneurs who you usually see it when they start their second business. The first time, it's kind of like your hair's on fire. Oh my God, imposter syndrome. I can't believe this is working. Don't tell anyone, right? Because they're going to figure out that this thing is like a house of cars is going to all fall apart tomorrow. The software is going to stop working. The customers are going to leave, whatever. The second time, part of it, I think, is they gain a little bit of confidence and like maybe i do know a little bit about this two they practice that they have experience but three is um they also understand how important some of the inputs in the beginning are so if you have confidence that what you're going to do is it's going to work you take a lot of the details more seriously in the beginning because you're like this thing that may you know one percentage point of equity in a thing that probably isn't going to work is actually less valuable than 1 % of equity in a thing that you have very high confidence is going to work.

35:41Right? And so now maybe actually I should spend a lot more time thinking about the vesting schedule for our employees so that they're incentivized to help make the company successful. And if they are a big component of that, they really, really benefit from it. But if you're like, hey, you and me are just going to flippantly start something. Let's see what happens. Yeah. We might not even talk about equity. Right? Yeah. Or we'll probably argue about some equity that is never going to be worth anything. You mentioned before your wife's frustration because you say, I'm so obsessed. I go to the office on Saturday because I need to work, right?

36:17The other day you tweeted, don't be that guy who does 80 hours a week for 50 years and then he dies. This is kind of contradictory. story it it's not because um two things one uh here's a little uh alpha for the dads out there um i bring my kids with me on saturday to the office so we're spending quality time together where our mom is free to do things and get a break what do the kids do while you're working they work they literally they have like a little computer and uh they but they're excited right They're like, it's a special time. Like I get to go to the office with my dad on the weekends and do this stuff.

36:59How old are you? How old are they? They're under the age of five. And so you can imagine, you know, they watch some cartoons, they draw, they've got, you know, arts and crafts and stuff. And I'm not working 100 % of the time where, you know, engaging and stuff. But what you're doing is you're melding work and life together, right? And so here in our office, my wife works out of the office. My brother works out of the office. My kids very often are around the people that we work with. It's just this belief that like you design the life you want to live. And I don't want to have two separate lives, like a professional life and a personal life.

37:38But also if you think about during the week, I don't work 80 hours. I work a lot, but I'm very intentional about, I leave the office by a certain time every single day. Which is? It varies from time to time.

38:00But I'm intentional about that on a given week because I know that, for example, I want to see my kids when they wake up and I want to see them before they go to sleep. I don't want to go a day where I don't see my kids. So when I was younger, I may get up and go to the office 7 a.m. and not come home till eight or nine, well, with young kids, you won't see them, right? So when you think about it from that perspective, you have to make a choice. Maybe I got to do a call before I go to the office, but the trade-off is I get to see my kids. And so as a family, we understand the kind of nuances. So like most people, I think, especially young men, what I have seen is they take pride in like, I'm going to work 80 hours a week, et cetera.

38:54The problem that I've seen is as you take on more responsibility in terms of, you know, significant other kids, you know, marriage, all this kind of stuff, your time gets compressed. Your wife don't give a shit what's going on at work if it's going to cost life at home, right now if you are able to communicate hey here are the things that are important and these are kind of the non-negotiables for you your wife your kids whatever right everyone kind of puts their cards on the table and then you figure out how to design your life and so when you do that now that sounds a lot like time management right but also maybe instead of working 6 a.m 7 a.m to you know eight nine o 'clock at night monday through friday well what if actually you work less hours during the week and you add some hours on the weekend you enjoy doing it anyways right there's times probably people at our office hate me on sunday afternoons i got some free time i start calling people what's going on what's the update what's this whatever right but like i'm thinking about this stuff right and so thankfully a lot of people who they also are thinking about this stuff but maybe that time on sunday afternoon isn't actually you know uh like overworking because you're able to kind of blend more of the time throughout the week then go you know 12 hour days uh five days a week it's very hard if not impossible to disconnect when you're an entrepreneur for sure you've been pushing a lot in the last few years a lot watching your content i could feel i mean people can feel your level of energy it's the same for me actually people sometimes say oh you look so destroyed i was like yeah i took a plane for 20 hours at minus 16 hours time difference and then i went straight with jesse polack like obviously i'm gonna be fucked guys like it's normal um have you ever struggled with mental health no i think that um 50 cent said it best he was given an interview and he said um depression is a luxury and i was like okay that's gonna catch some you know headlines like it's kind of a bold statement then he explained he said where i come from people don't have time to be depressed they're worried about where's their food going to come from they're worried about their physical safety going to school or going to the mall or whatever right it's just like there's a lifestyle where we don't have time to think about that stuff like you're living your life because in his case, people don't have a lot and they're trying to fight their way and have mobility economically.

41:43I think that a lot of the mental health stuff that has become very popular today, some of it's true, but I think a lot of it is performative. I think there's a lot of people who we got it so good that we have time to concoct these like fake problems. So, again, there are certain people 100 % have real issues that they're dealing with from demons to all kinds of issues, etc. That's been true for ever for history. Right. Right. But if you look at some of these charts of the growth of mental health issues, it's like 5x, 10x growth in, you know, let's call it the last decade or so. And it coincides with if you see all your friends constantly talking about this thing, there's a lot of people all of a sudden that start saying, hey, I'm interested in that, too.

42:46right and you see this um you know one of the craziest statistics that i saw is um i think one in five middle school or high schoolers now identifies as lgbtq right i think this one is a is a subject we could probably talk for something i never understood to be honest yeah i mean i don't live in the u.s so it's also like but but here but here's the reason why i say it is um there is a a social pressure and phenomenon. And, and again, it's like the psychology and sociology of this stuff. To me, it's, it's fascinating intellectually because it's very hard to pinpoint because it's not a science or a math, right?

43:30You, a lot of times you can't even recreate it. And so what you're trying to understand is you're trying to understand something that is undeniable, right? You go and they do the surveys, they do look at the data, whatever, like it's mental health has exploded a lot of these things why and you have to look at it and say well there's probably some people who had issues that previously never reported it or never talked about it or you know it's the classic like uh men used to think that it was a sign of weakness or something and so now they're willing to talk about it so so there's definitely some of that going on um where you would expect the numbers to go up but 10x you know type growth stuff um yeah and so i always just go back to my philosophy in life is whenever anyone does anything, whenever anyone says anything, whatever, I always ask myself two questions.

44:18Are they hurting anyone else? And are they happy? And I think that that's, you know, for me, that's the mentality that works is if that person's not hurting anyone and whatever they're doing makes them happy, good for them. I'm happy that they're happy. And in a weird way, there's a lot of things that people do in society which you and i may not see the benefit of but maybe they get peace of mind out of it you know somebody one time said to me they said um they meditate a lot and i was like you know i just never really got into meditation it's just for whatever reason like i understand why it would be valuable to somebody but if i sit on the floor and i you know uh am quiet i fall asleep right so like uh i just for whatever reason never got into it and he said well tell me about your day start telling him i didn't get past nine o 'clock and he said oh you meditate so what do you mean he says you work out and run every morning he goes what do you do while you're running so i'm thinking meditating that's the meditative thing that you do for yourself and so i just think a lot of times uh it's very easy to put these things in buckets but instead having the mentality of um are you happy like does what you're doing make you happy and are you hurting anybody and if you get the right answers on those, good for those people.

45:37Are you happy? I'm ecstatic. What makes you happy? What makes you ecstatic? I know what I want out of life and I've been very fortunate through decisions that I and those around me have made to be getting that out of life. And so, you know, there's a quote that Naval Ravikant once said, which is a sign of intelligence is getting out of life what you want from it. and I don't know if intelligence is assigned to that but I do know that happiness is assigned to it because the gap between expectations and reality is where unhappiness is measured and so for me you know it's just hey what are the things that are important to me as long as I can do those things then everything else what do I have to complain about and I always joke with people that say, hey, how are you doing?

46:31I say, I got no complaints. I'm saving them all for my next life, right? It's just like, what is there for me to complain about? Other people have serious issues and all kinds of things they're going through. But I was born in the United States of America. I was born in a situation where I was a healthy person. I grew up in a family where my parents loved me. I had brothers to constantly hang out with and enjoy and do all this stuff, whatever. It could be way worse. You mentioned before the explosion of mental health kind of awareness. Another thing that exploded in the last five, let's say 10 years, but that has probably less popularity than mental health is crypto and Bitcoin.

47:21We have to talk about that a bit. how did you get so fascinated by the world of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies? I think a lot of people don't want to admit it, but most people are drawn because they think they can make money. Right? People show up and it's like, ah, we're going to change the world. We're going to shut the fuck up. You're showing up because you think you can make money. Now, the beautiful thing about it is you show up for the capitalistic, you know, kind of personal financial benefit, but then you learn about a lot of the ethos and things like that. And so Marty Bent, a friend of mine has this great quote.

48:03He says, people come for the money, meaning they show up for the profits, but they stay for the money. They realize the generational importance of something like digital sound money. And so I actually think there is this like spectrum of learning that goes on. And so when you show up, you don't know a lot, but you have this really, really deep desire to make money. That's what drew you there. By the time you've gone through the whole spectrum, you know a lot. And it's not that you're now a non-economic actor, but the like make profit is not nearly as high on the list of what it was when you started.

48:45And for me, that was definitely a piece of it. A kid pitched me on the idea of you buy these computers, you plug them in and it prints money. How much are the computers? That sounds interesting. The other thing was I had really heard about Bitcoin twice before in 2012 and then 2014. And I dismissed it both times. and so by the time i heard a third time price had gone up right there's a bunch of different factors i said myself what did i miss i became obsessed with this idea that these other people i knew saw something i didn't see i got i got to catch up how do i how do i do the work and so you know once you're convinced to do the work i don't know anyone who's gone and really spent the time and then walked away and been like oh this is gonna be a zero yeah i think michael sailor says if you spend 30 hours studying bitcoin i've never met anyone who spent 30 hours studying bitcoin and not thinking it's an amazing idea you used to be a bitcoin maxi that's how you actually built your personal brand around bitcoin so i have to quote your book again surround yourself with people who are intellectually humble enough to change their mind What made you change your mind on non-Bitcoin related cryptocurrencies and network?

50:07I was never what many people would consider like a hardcore Bitcoin maximalist, but I made a very conscious decision about what I was willing to talk about publicly. And so let me explain. When I first started, I actually started out mining Ethereum or Ether. I remember that. Um, you know, we bought GPUs, we were doing that. So, uh, my first interaction with the industry, I kind of skipped over Bitcoin and it was with the Ethereum and it was really just the GPUs were easier to buy than the ASICs. And so, um, the guy who was helping me do it, that's what he preferred, right? And so that's what I did.

50:44No one pitched me on Bitcoin or crypto or any of that stuff. It was literally by the computers, Prince Bunny. in i think 2017 i think there's a tweet that i've uh posted and i do my best unless i make like a factual error that could be like uh detrimental i pretty much don't delete tweets right now that's been my philosophy for a long time um and so i'm pretty sure there's a tweet out there somewhere of like me being like uh yeah i'm not into the bitcoin thing like i like ethereum or something right but what i saw when everything started to crash in 2018 was i better learn about this it went up a lot but i actually don't even know what i own and so i need to go learn and as i did a lot of the work right i got a lot of conviction in bitcoin i still held at certain times other assets whether i had mined the ethereum um you know in uh investing in our funds right we had exposure to different crypto assets or different fund managers, whatever.

51:45But I said to myself, the thing that to me was the lowest risk in the entire industry was Bitcoin. And Bitcoin in a weird way was almost like the index for all of crypto. If Bitcoin goes up, everything else is going up. If Bitcoin's going down, everything else is going down. But this is the S &P 500 of crypto. I'm not comfortable talking about definitely pre-2020 and even pretty much today about these other coins and things like that because I feel like having this large audience, people are going to listen to me. And so if I start talking about every new shit coin that comes out, the odds are that people are going to lose money, right?

52:27Absolutely. And so I took the perspective of the lowest risk asset is actually the thing that has the highest confidence over a long period of time. And I can choose to be short term oriented or long term oriented. And I chose to be long term oriented. And so over the years, I got plenty of shit from all these different people in crypto, whatever. Yeah. But I said. Look upon that. Yeah, but you know what I said to myself is I know what I'm doing is working because at times the Bitcoiners are pissed at me and at times the shit corners are pissed at me. And so actually, like, I don't want to be explicitly put in a box.

53:10It's kind of like a political party. I'm not a Republican. I'm not a Democrat. I'm independent. Same thing in the crypto world is I don't want to be put in any one box. I don't want to, like, pledge allegiance to, you know, one cult over another. and so it has allowed me to think very independently but you know that hey you know very kind of tribalistic industry there are times where you know the xrp people are mad at me one day the you know if people are mad at me the next and then the bitcoiners and you're just like look i believe what i believe if i'm wrong i'll get punished in the market for it and uh you know you just keep going yeah i took a very similar approach but later on right so i was thinking i started this podcast in december 2022 just after one month after ftx crash and i was like okay good timing the only way i mean i was here 2018 19 i knew it came back so i was like this is gonna come back right but it felt like shit and i i just had lost six million dollars in luna in two days like six months before and it was very bad but for everyone but one thing i was thinking was there's really missing a sort of like lex friedman of crypto like a place where i can go and talk to the big people in the industry.

54:21So I was thinking, I understood media. I was like, either I can go full Bitcoiner, but there's already these people and there's probably other things of value that are created in your space. But the only people I can talk to are the big founders of these things, right? I cannot talk to anyone else or the media game would be, oh, it's meme coin time. I'm going to shield all the meme coin shit. And then you get the views and the argument, but you know it's wrong and you know it's going to wreck everyone, right? So you don't do it. And then you're going to lose trust with the audience over time yeah so my idea was how do i interview the biggest people in crypto not only bitcoin so i can it's much safer right it's harder because i can to get there at the top i found of solana found of ripple etc but i have this open-mindedness that bitcoiners don't necessarily have right but at the same time not going too much down the risk curve and going all in all the shit kind of world where you know people will get wrecked right um so absolutely absolutely what's the biggest mistake you've ever made in life i'm not going to count uh mistakes of omission there's plenty of things where you know saw an investment opportunity and didn't do it and i in hindsight that was dumb whatever um in particular one company i passed on just got bought for$2 billion.

55:42It's like a$20 million seed round. Like, that was dumb. Another one, I had previously invested in the founder. He started another company, but he was like kind of working on it, but he really had another business. So I was like, ah, he's not like really serious about it. $1.7 billion business today. So, you know, you get those things that are like kind of professional stuff. I think personally you're always going to regret I went to this dinner for work I didn't go home and see my kid and actually even if it's a good dinner I think it eats away at you a little bit and you're like did I really need to go so there's stuff like that but I would say the biggest mistake is probably time based I wasted a lot of time when I was younger and you could argue that I was doing things that eventually made me who I am and therefore, you know, it was time kind of well spent in like an indirect way.

56:42But I've always been very impressed by young people who know what they want and they start working at it at a very young age and they have a high degree of intentionality. I feel like I have that now, but when I was a teenager I didn't and so what is the most expensive asset you have is time and so your biggest mistake if you did waste time a lot of time is probably that time misallocation is really interesting the what you say I regret going to this dinner instead of going to see my wife and kids because I started recently to think I mean I live in Singapore I'm from Switzerland my parents live in Switzerland we're very close we have an amazing relationship but I don't spend enough time with them and i don't call them enough and now i'm like i i watched a series where the the father dies from cancer and i was like fuck man like i need to call my parents multiple times a week instead of once every two or three weeks because because who gives a fuck like if i make a bit more money here or there like these are my parents like this doesn't make sense so i started to do that recently and i think i start to get more and more into this uh mind space calling my my sister and my parents more so basic.

57:57One thing that people who hang out with me probably are all going to laugh when they hear this. I'm notorious. I'm always on the phone. And part of it is like I'm always trying to like learn, right, and get information and do all that stuff. But if I have five minutes and I don't have anything going on, you know, I can't meditate. The same. So I call my brother. I call this brother. I call this, right. I call my wife. Like whatever. I'm just like, let me just, you know, stay moving, right? And so, yeah, I just started one day just saying, hey, there's a group of people, I'm going to call them every day.

58:33Every day? Every day. Nice. Because the way I am is if you tell me to call them three times a week, I'm calling them zero times a week. But if I know it's every day, okay, every day, every day, every day, right? And so, you know, maybe that's the sin of having the mentality I have, but it's like if you do it every day, you're not going to do it at all. another thing i read in your book agreeing with strangers on the internet is a waste of time when did you understand this too late uh look every once in a while still somebody will say something and uh yeah there's a guy recently he uh i forget i don't even remember what i tweeted i tweeted something and he you know basically was like you don't understand pretty much he listened like a thousand things it was like you're an idiot that's what he said to me and i said uh this guy's like some big shot wall street guy why is he spending his time writing this super eloquent tweet like talking shit to me so i said i think that this guy is probably actually really insecure i'm gonna go find out why so i went on the internet googled around and i found his fight his returns he hasn't beat the S &P in 20 years.

59:48Right? Like cumulatively. So I tweeted hey man for you claiming I don't know any of this stuff seems like your returns prove you don't either. Right? And he was real pissed and freaking out. You know, whatever. In hindsight just ignore. Yeah. Well on one hand you're like look if you just let people walk all over you everyone will try to do it. Right? But on the other hand i got enjoyment out of it it was i kind of felt like i stepped back in the ring like all right you want to talk some shit like i talk shit with the best of them right uh it's just like you're gonna waste a lot of time if you're like i'm gonna be the king shit talker yeah right so uh i said to my wife this guy forgot who i am and i need to remind him like i'm not the guy that you want to be chirping at because i got too much time on my hand if you get my attention where I will go find information.

1:00:47Right? And there's another guy recently who tweeted some crazy thing at me. And I was like, oh, I know this guy is not chirping at me right now. So I went and I did some research, whatever. And I found an article that he wrote where he promised his audience he had three investing strategies to beat Bitcoin. We'd like with that. He deleted it off his website because he didn't beat Bitcoin. and so i have the archived website right and so i it's just again i didn't tweet it but i just said to myself you know i don't i don't i don't need to waste my time on this today but i have the website bookmarked in case motherfucker but listen if you come back you know there was another guy one time who uh is founder of a company in crypto and uh chirping chirping chirping i said i just the more you chirp at somebody the more you're hiding something went and i looked absolutely i found on the website their terms of service were copy and pasted from their competitor you go deep so i screenshotted it and i when i tweeted it and i said hey man before you chirp at me you should probably clean up the house right don't throw rocks in the in the glass house now again i don't it's just more so um you're just like look Let's all be friends.

1:02:08Yeah. Everyone chill, right? I don't make a habit out of going after people. I always feel like, especially when you have a large audience, anyone that you proactively go after, you're punching down. Even if they got a bigger audience than you. Like you're now using something that is a relationship of trust to punch down at someone and that's, it's not my style. I don't like it, whatever. but i always tell people i'm an excellent counter puncher right if you get in the ring and you throw the first punch i got a lethal counter punch and so you don't want to pride yourself on that stuff but it's a good skill to have from time to time you have a big audience huge audience and when you make mistakes you have to own them because they're all out there in public Let's take an example of something that went wrong.

1:03:03BlockFi, a crypto lending company that went bust in 2022, like many others, most in the industry. BlockFi was not only a sponsor of your show, but you also probably said that it was one of your biggest personal investment. There was a lot of FUD against you for years. How do you deal with this huge FUD when you take risk publicly and it goes wrong, which happens all the time in entrepreneurship and investing? that's the whole game is you take risk sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't now what i will say is um it is always easier to uh deal with a situation where um the reason why something fails is because the company in this case is defrauded by a criminal right um doesn't make it right doesn't mean that it was any less painful doesn't mean that the people who you know are upset about stuff whatever doesn't absolve any of that stuff but it's easy to see how it happened right versus there was many other situations uh of similar companies where we had actually passed on investing and there was nefarious malicious criminal you know type activities And so in this situation, it's like, okay, a bunch of these companies don't work.

1:04:22Why did they not work? And if you lump them all together, you're like, well, hold on a second. One is like the team is doing things that ultimately have been determined illegal. Another is the team got defrauded. And so it's a very tough situation. But the one thing that I walked away with that from was I said to myself, I didn't get treated any differently than any other user on the platform. I didn't, you know, pull my money off the platform when other people had money on a platform and that stuff. Right. So we all went through it together and it wasn't fun. I lost money. Right. but I also knew that if you get credit on the way up of course you got to take it on the chin on the way down and I did this thread where I said I know that's how it works so you got to take it and I think there's a lot of people who would like try to squirm out of it they would try to oh this is unfair why is everyone attacking whatever dude you get all the credit on the way up everyone is so excited you're getting invited to all this stuff everyone thinks you're a genius whatever when things go down obviously the opposite is going to happen and so just stand there and take it but but you must have felt something i asked raul because he also went through massive further into 2022 early 2023 and he told me he was like yeah man like i spent three weeks i think he he called a friend of his in spain who was a yoga teacher and he said for three four weeks i just stopped tweeting stopped being online and i was just doing uh yoga every day because because people were really mean even some really big people that he knew personally or for you it's just oh listen i'm built different this part of the game i mean we're all humans you must have felt something like man this is this is really really rough and strong you're frustrated um you are uh nobody wants to hear people say you know negative things to them all that kind of stuff um but i remember at one point uh i sat on the couch and um i was just reading all tweets and my wife said to me like put your phone down i'm not putting my phone down and she said why are you reading all of that and i said because i never ever ever want to forget this feeling i'm gonna read every single one of them i read every single one of them and there's certain people who they saw they were waiting and they thought that you know i was knocked out of the game and they came and they said all kinds of crazy stuff i didn't forget i know who those people are right there's a lot of people who were friendly friends all of a sudden they saw an opportunity to kind of boost themselves up by stepping on me right now i try to be my friend i'm not interested in that stuff right and so on the flip side there's a lot of people i know who when all that stuff happened called me and just said how are you doing they didn't care about the details they didn't care about it just how are you doing i remember those people right and so to me again it's like for whatever reason the way i'm wired you're going through this situation and i said to myself what can i learn and i read every single tweet for days read them and read them and read them and read them obviously if you're programming your brain with people just you know saying all kinds of crazy stuff um you don't feel good but also you realize that the lessons you can take out of this situation provide the foundation for what comes after and so i think it's just you have to understand you know there's this great framework um i think the guy's name is jeremy Giffen, if I remember correctly.

1:08:29He says that every person who achieves success, you can look and see in their career before the fall and after the fall. And it is only that you can achieve great things after the fall. Because before the fall is full of bravado, arrogance overconfidence it's just this like ungoverned acceleration and it feels amazing you feel on top of the world but you gotta go through some fire to be able to appreciate it and so I actually think that we would be less successful as a business less successful uh from an investment portfolio standpoint, et cetera, if we did not go through that situation. And, you know, it is, it's kind of crazy because it was industry-wide.

1:09:30That's what contagion ultimately is. So, you know, I think that there's a lot of people, not just me, that, you know, kind of went through that whole situation and you don't want to lose money as an investor in a company. You don't want to lose money as a user of a platform. I mean, you said that you lost money on, you know, Luna or whatever, right? It's not fun. No. But also - It happens. I mean, it's part of the game, right? But you also probably, I don't want to speak for you, but like you probably actually are a better investor today having gone through that situation. Now, did you want to pay, I think you said$6 million.

1:10:05You want to pay$6 million for a lesson? Probably not. That's an expensive lesson. But, you know, it is a kind of a progression that, you know, and one of the things that I found great kind of soulless in maybe is there's a lot, a lot of guys that have been hyper successful that many people who are in the younger generations look up to as heroes or role models or whatever. And when you go and you read their stories, fires. They crashed and burned at some point in their career. You kind of have to. The advantage of crypto is you go through that very quickly. So if you're able to survive or to not dive completely afterwards, you will learn much faster, right?

1:10:48So that's for sure. Yeah. And look, I think that there are companies now that are going to get built that are better structured because of a bunch of lessons that people learned. And also I think that it humbles you, which if you really go back and look, if there's one big change that I would say that has happened for industry-wide, not me, you, and anyone industry-wide. The 2022 bear market humbled the industry in a healthy way. Yeah. Right? So there's still a lot of confidence. There's still a lot of excitement, all that kind of stuff. But the humbling of that market was because that was the first time we were on the big stage.

1:11:322017, nobody is kind of like a corner of the internet. Nobody cared, whatever. But this was the first time that like Wall Street was knocking at the door, mainstream media was covering it, all this stuff. Yeah. Stadiums. Yeah. Yeah. And so that humbling of the industry was really, really healthy. And I think that you can point to a bunch of the success that the industry has had since then and tie it back partially to that experience. You were early to Bitcoin and crypto and early to podcasting, personal branding game. What's the next big trend that people don't understand yet or even ridicule?

1:12:07And that is early now. There's a lot of them. I think that humanoid robots are going to be probably the single largest total adjustable market on earth. There's some great companies that are doing stuff there. I think that there's a ton of innovation that's happening in the energy market where private companies are building large scale solutions to some of our problems there. I think that a lot of people are excited about space, but they're thinking about space in terms of like, let's go to Mars. I'm an investor in a company called Varda, where they are manufacturing drugs in zero gravity in space and then bringing it back down to earth.

1:12:47And so like using space to benefit us on earth rather than exclusively use space to like get somewhere to another planet. So I think like space, energy, humanoid robots. And frankly, it sounds crazy, but I think people are drastically underestimating kind of Bitcoin in the crypto industry, right? You know, people inside the industry were like, ah, it does, so obvious. People outside the industry, I still think, are significant. It's still not popular at all, for sure. How do you know it's early in any of this industry? How do you feel? I measure it two ways. One is I put together a lot of dinners of smart people that I know and, you know, kind of try to drive the conversation.

1:13:29And if you never hear anyone talk about it, it's early. But also even better sign is if it's something that you have pretty deep conviction on and you suggest it to other people and there's a negative reaction, that's usually a pretty good sign. So one of the things that I always say is if you ever see me tweet something and a bunch of people start yelling and screaming about how stupid it is i'm like i'm close to the target right and um it's just experience of you know you start to learn um what kind of a different idea looks like and then really what you've got to be able to judge is is it going to work or not um because you got to be different and right you know to really kind of have outsized returns you spent two years writing a book it's called how to live an extraordinary life what is an extraordinary life whatever you want it to be, right?

1:14:23Everyone's is different. What I want and what I think is my extraordinary life is very different than somebody else. I spend a lot of time with my family. There's a lot of people who say, I never want to be married. I never want to have kids. Shouldn't judge those people again. Are you hurting anyone? Are you happy? Right? If that's what makes that person happy, amazing. How many people in the world would love to be happy. Right. And so part of the like paradox of the book is how to live an extraordinary life. Sounds like I'm going to tell you how to do it, but actually how you do it is all about frameworks that then you have to personalize to your specific or extraordinary life.

1:15:05Right. I can't tell you what your extraordinary life is. Only you can decide that. And so I think it's a very personal experience. What is success to you? Just being happy, right? That there's, you know, look, your life can change very quickly for the better and for the worst. I know people, you know, I mean, just look at, you know, my situation. I remember my wife and I being in a studio apartment in New York City where it wasn't very glamorous. Nobody was like, I want that guy's life, right? To very quickly, you make some good decisions, you figure some stuff out and you're like, oh, my life is changing, right?

1:15:54It's improving. That's great. That can happen. That's part of the beauty of America is we have this economic like in social mobility, right? We have kind of the American dream, all stuff. But I also know an incredible number of people where the opposite happens. So it works in both ways, right? You have upwards mobility, but you also have downwards. And so what it does is it requires you to have the hope and the belief and the aspiration to have the upwards movement, but you better be humble enough and aware of the risks enough to prevent the downward mobility as well. It really keeps you honest.

1:16:30Yeah. Some people say you have to panic all the time, right? Only the paranoid survive. Yeah, paranoid. Absolutely. Absolutely. This one hits too hard too. The more you help other people become successful, the more success finds you. Be a problem solver, right? If you solve problems for other people, somehow value accrues back. I recently said one of the best ways I found that people make money is to help other people make money. And somehow the universe has a way of making sure some of the profits make their way into your pocket. And so it goes back to this idea that you can look at the world in a zero-sum way and constantly be in extraction mode.

1:17:12How do I extract economic value? How do I extract value from my friendships? How do I extract time? Whatever. Instead, you can also look at it from a service perspective. mindset. How do I help that person be successful? How do I help that person make money? How do I help that person find better relationships, et cetera? And what I found in my life is the more you try to extract, the more the well is dry. But the more that you give, the more that there's abundance. And so - Easier said than done. Of course. Right? And it's easier to talk about then follow your own advice sometimes. But it's a true kind of law of the universe.

1:17:56In business, I mean, in everything, right? But in business and in crypto, it's so, it's terrible. Everybody's just an extractor and coming and trying to take. And I'm like, for me, the way I've built this media and podcast is just that. Is I'm never going to ask anything to anyone. I mean, a bit of your time ever. And then I'll build, you talk about these private dinners. I do the same with all my podcast guests. And I'm just like, here, like for you, what do you want? Hey, maybe you want this intro, maybe you want this thing. And I'm never going to ask anything. And then they come and say, hey, I want to sponsor, right?

1:18:29Like after six months, right? And it's just being patient and trying to provide value, which most people don't do. And I realized if you have this mindset, you're already in the top 0.01 % because most people don't think about giving. They just think about taking. 100%. watch someone's daily habits today and you will understand what their future looks like of course of course right i don't know that many uh people who um are lazy who are rude to people who are uh constantly screwing people over who don't take care of themselves who don't take care of the people around them and all these like negative associated activities and daily actions and then somehow a positive outcome of high degree of success pops out.

1:19:18Are there edge case examples? Of course. But for the most part, the outcomes in your life are really tied back to the decisions you make. And are there certain people who start at more of a disadvantage than others? Obviously. But again, specific to America, the economic and social mobility that is available in this country is unbelievable. And so it's not easy, but people can change their life by making certain decisions. And hopefully the more that technology becomes pervasive, et cetera, knowledge and the friction to knowledge collapses, more people have information. And then really it just comes down to are you acting or not, right?

1:20:03Are you doing the things that are necessary to get the outcome that you want we talked quite a lot about your wife and kids how did becoming a dad change your perspective on life um i already thought pretty long term but now most of the decisions i make are focused on what is the outcome for them but not in a weird like you know people say that stuff and they're talking about like oh if i do this thing uh are my kids going to like uh find out or whatever weird way people think about it. I think about it, every investment decision I make today is literally all of the money is theirs. I'm investing their portfolio.

1:20:45It's one thing for you to gamble with your money. You're going to gamble with your kids' money. Probably you become much more responsible, yeah. But also you become much more long-term thinking. You think a lot more about resilience. You think a lot more about compounding. You think a lot more about confidence level. It changes the way you think. Same thing with the businesses. And so, you know, there's a lot of people who, uh, they just like give away a hundred percent of their money. I'm very much in the camp of, I want to build something where I then can have my kids eventually take over and run that thing.

1:21:21Not because I have some like a huge, um, belief in like world domination or something like that. I just think that building really, really valuable, resilient, long-term oriented things takes a lot of time. So 36, if I'm fortunate, I got 40 years, it probably takes more than 40 years, right? So if you need a hundred years to build something, you better make sure you got somebody who can take the baton when you can't anymore. It's just a different way of thinking. It doesn't mean I'm better or more right or anything. It's just, that's the way that I am choosing to kind of pursue it. Thank you so much, Pomp, for doing this.

1:22:05Thank you for taking the risks years ago to, I mean, not only go all in this crypto thing, but also this personal brand because you inspired quite a lot of people. I'm one of them. And it's super cool to be just able to talk to you today. I told you before we started, I already learned something from you today. So we're not going to say what it is. I appreciate you. And look, the beautiful thing about this entire industry is you never become the master, right? You're always a student. You're always constantly learning. Things change so fast that it's very intellectually stimulating that way. But also my greatest memories are from the people that I met along the way.

1:22:51And some of my dearest friends I met years ago and we got to know each other. But also I've met tons of people where I talked to them one time and I learned something from them. And so it's just this very accepting, collaborative, kind of learning oriented community. And for somebody like me who's obsessed with that type of stuff, it's like the perfect industry. So thank you. Thank you. Bye!