"the following is a conversation with anthony pompliano entrepreneur technology investor prolific writer podcaster and twitter user on topics of finance cryptocurrency technology and economics i highly..."

"with bitcoin ethereum the dollar gold seashells a beer or just a good old smile this is the lex friedman podcast and here is my conversation with anthony pompliano you served in the u.s army for six y..."

"so what you were deployed to iraq were there any memories experiences that changed you or in general like you're probably a different man on the other side of it how did that time change you i think t..."

"do you think i'm thinking about that kid with a hatred do you think there will always be hatred in the world do you think from another perspective do you think there'll be war always is that a fundame..."

"so you're one of the prominent i would say even the faces of the the world of cryptocurrency bitcoin that whole entire world let's dive straight in and ask uh do you think do you consider yourself a b..."

"bitcoin first and then it'll help us use as a kind of comparison to ethereum or whatever else so when you think about what is money right that's kind of the first question people really kind of go dow..."

"the second thing though that i think is really really important is around censorship and so when you look at again every currency in the world today every single financial service they're highly susce..."

"and so i think ultimately when you just back out you say you know what is bitcoin and why is it important to the world it is giving access to anyone in the world with an internet connection to a store..."

"centralized uh hubs of information in that if you were to look at let's say the stock market from 1971 to today in dollar terms it's a 45 degree angle right up into the right right you know it's kind ..."

"bitcoin standpoint is if you buy satoshi's or bitcoin over time it will uh increase from a purchasing power standpoint because there's a fixed supply and demand continues to rise but then you start to..."

"people are drastically underestimating the shift that's underway right now gold is won down in value since april or i'm sorry august of 2020. and so in a time frame where central banks have had histor..."

"you're seeing is at the same time that that asset is contracting you're also seeing a massive influx from not only retail investors not only uh kind of the wealthy and the elite but also from financia..."

"i think scarcity just has this very high correlation to value across all assets not just money right money happens to be the the unit of account that we use in terms of uh daily commerce um but whethe..."

"it's all about the stories and ideas we tell ourselves i think they're actually more interconnected than you're giving it credit for right which is what is money money is time ultimately right the the..."

"uh essentially acquires a bunch of time and he's able to go to one of the higher levels and now he's attending all these galas and you know poker nights and all stuff and one of the first things that ..."

"the physics means that um this is not just the narrative we tell ourselves maybe this i don't know but it it feels like pretty sure we're mortal and in that sense the scarcity there gives value to tim..."

"because you can't change anything and then the physical space time of the universe is a ledger so maybe uh it won't be bitcoin that replaces gold maybe it'll be time once we crack open that in fact th..."

"with provability and this transparency around it where everyone knows how much is there and what where it's going now all of a sudden you and i can transact back and forth that value and it is a repre..."

"right speaking of scarcity yeah and so to me uh i put eric and a whole host of other people kind of if you look at like the intellectual dark web is kind of a label that's uh been used they're actuall..."

"this digital economy you need shepherds of it and so just like a technology company wants to find those loyal fans that are willing to go out and market and word of mouth and and kind of not only prom..."

"homework in a lot of cases so they show up and sometimes it's super intellectual lazy arguments sometimes it's actually very well thought out arguments you know on the counter to the bitcoin thesis bu..."

"learning then you realize you don't understand much what i've noticed with the bitcoin community is uh they're not as uh patient with the the basics of the dunning-kruger effect like if i step in and ..."

"um more efficient sometimes when the blowback is too strong too early on the development of ideas is just inefficient and i'm not sure if if there's a you know the way it was explained to me is that f..."

"understands the internet and internet culture and uh narratives better than almost anyone yes and so you see this with kind of the uh the just complete destruction uh of narratives with memes and and ..."

"what is this upstart but now what you're starting to see is that the bitcoin community even though there's some level of toxic toxicity at times even though there's this visceral reaction sometimes th..."

"the good good vibe memes as opposed to shit posting it's a it's an interesting battleground though it's an interesting battleground to think about the other thing i would say too is um one of the elem..."

"and now i don't want to know if i want to say that he's a bitcoin proponent as much as he believes it is one of you know a portion of assets that can be a solution and so to me when you start to convi..."

"there was infrastructure that got built okay that kind of led to more adoption there was certain individuals right usually they were kind of technology oriented entrepreneurial billionaires they would..."

"word um that i think is kind of closer to your world which is it's ultimately automation and what i mean by that is uh you know before 1970 or 1980 all the assets were analog and so when you have anal..."

"of the the only finite scarce digital cell money and so when you then have that pretty big difference in that competition at the monetary policy layer it's actually not going to matter where you get p..."

"only is the currency digitized but that same technology is used to digitize stocks bonds and commodities as well and so today we live in a very fragmented financial world where basically i have a brok..."

"technologies where machines cannot transact with each other and we're going to do simple things like why do we pay people once every two weeks why don't we just pay them at the end of every day or why..."

"things to me um is i invested in a company called bridget what they told me was they said eight billion dollars was paid to the top four banks last year on overdraft fees okay so literally they took e..."

"you see the results of it so you're you're able to think in terms of money but not have to know how the like the accounting works automation simply frees humans up to do more creative work yeah right ..."

"build companies it's the business models right it's the application of those technologies all that stuff starts to change and go back to 20 uh 2007 is when the iphone came out uber wasn't possible rig..."

"but i am truly happy that however that thing works i'm just one notch above vladimir putin which is one of the that's like one of the bucket list items for me to have a list where i'm one notch above ..."

"seen in professional sports you see it in you know a lot of these things and so i just think that a lot of um the focus right now is on the technology but ultimately these are ideas that are very old ..."

"and then you know i hate the term but killer apps like cool ideas that are implemented effectively at scale to transform the world there's been there's been a lot of different ideas popping up like th..."

"heavily biased i went out and i scoured the market looked at all of them i've invested a lot of money in a company called block fi that basically um basically has financial products for crypto investo..."

"counterparty risk though so it's mitigated but there's still counterparty risk i'm counting on that bank but it is easier to move it around right if all of a sudden you call me up and say hey send me ..."

"uh but counterparty risk is big and in the bitcoin community specifically this is a huge thing of uh they really really have a cape for not leaving the bitcoin there right for the obvious counter prio..."

"the decisions as to whether you hold on to it or you use it without censorship right no one can tell you what you can do with it or can't do with it and so the purchase and the storage what i find is ..."

"and when i saw the government step in and start to say hey we're going to really be aggressive in terms of interest rate manipulation and quantitative easing i then decided to go ahead and take basica..."

"here's the thing is the last 50 years or so is actually the outlier in history most people used to think this way yeah it's only when a fiat currency got introduced that one argument the positive argu..."

"and so when you then switch to this sound money you say wait a second why would i if today i can trade one bitcoin you know back in october of last year one bitcoin for 10 000 us dollars why would i s..."

"yeah you have to provide real value in the goods and services you provide to get them to give it to you there's less room for corruption less room for manipulation that's and like that's not actually ..."

"um the best way to acquire bitcoin without having to worry about timing markets and being a professional trader is to simply take whatever the percentage is that you want and to buy bitcoin when you g..."

"and so don't look at the price of bitcoin and all that kind of stuff just pick a specific time specific day that you just buy and you just keep buying that's probably good investment advice across any..."

"volatility i think all comes back to like what do you price your life in for the majority of people that's dollars so you look at the us dollar price you get all this volatility the beauty of this is ..."

"think i remember when it was at least in the double digits i think i remember was in the signal digits of a dollar so the fact that it's across 50 is crazy uh but uh you're even crazier apparently thi..."

"that's what the 20 trillion comes from correct got it so if you then say to yourself okay how does the uh the pricing um kind of cycles work right or the boom and bust cycles gold is a very kind of li..."

"i can show you that there's 18.6 million give or take uh bitcoin that actually are in circulation today right now i can go all the way back show you every single transaction that's ever occurred since..."

"well it happened and here we are i now look for and i say okay we are likely going to see a hundred thousand bitcoin a hundred thousand dollar bitcoin this year right at some point i don't know when i..."

"world to think about uh i mean but i do have to kind of ask you about the whole space of technology there because we're talking about the value of security we're talking about the the future which bit..."

"who you ask um the uh most um uh kind of enthusiastic and uh uh parts of the bitcoin community shitcoin is anything else right kind of if you ascribe to kind of a maximalistic view of the world should..."

"so you actually get tribalism but you also get things like shit coin because what it does is it's not only a kind of verbal attack towards uh others it's a rallying cry for internal what's so funny is..."

"world does and some crazy crazy way to look at it is bitcoin is ultimately about truth yeah not about narrative not about feelings or emotion it's math yeah you look at a blockchain and you can prove ..."

"you're right in that uh it's all about intention versus action if your intention is to uh tell somebody that they are wrong in an effort to get them to see the truth yes that's very different than if ..."

"he essentially is um he's using dogecoin as a way to say i'm doing this because i can yeah he couldn't do it with securities he couldn't do it with certain types of other assets right like i almost lo..."

"think that it's um a really kind of game of like 3d chess that frankly i'm not privy to right i'm kind of watching from the sidelines and uh figuring out alongside everybody else but i also don't thin..."

"bitcoin has kind of this like um you know proxy for time as we talked about inter-plant planetary travel where there's multiple steps from creating a reusable rocket to landing it to you know all the ..."

"excitement in the crypto community is nfts i i have no idea really the depths the fundamental technological philosophical depths of the second of this technology whether this is just like a little bit..."

"and so in a six month period you've actually made three times the progress than you would have if you had to do in the physical world so that's where i think we're heading so [Music] so there's digita..."

"is uh in the name it's simply the replication of human intelligence at scale automated and pr and program programmatic meaning that in the analog world you could go hire a thousand employees or in you..."

"and it can i mean the the thing that's scary to me is that it can scale arbitrarily so it can outnumber humans very quickly even if it's dumber than humans and so i don't know if we're able to reason ..."

"or like concerned about super intelligent systems i think i'm definitely much more concerned about super dumb systems at scale that that's terrifying i always think about um the inadvertent but as you..."

"the podcasts and uh email are like the two most selfish things i do because the podcast is a way for me to learn from other people so i get them to come on and tell me all the things they're thinking ..."

"just reiterates over and over and over again long-term thinking outliers disruption all the stuff and so he's a guy who he runs a fund that essentially they just do uh tail risk hedging and so in you ..."

"life not doing those things because they feel the need to pursue economic means as a way to provide a living or whatever and so i explained that i said listen in my opinion again it's my opinion it's ..."

"so let me ask what is the meaning of life anthony do you think about these ridiculous big questions that have no answer every once in a while or do you just enjoy the shit out of every day i answer it..."

"it for me it's just like the meaning of life is to enjoy it the way i think about it that's because it's a really nice formulation i i almost like to sort of oscillate back and forth so majority of th..."

"way to end it anthony i'm a huge fan it's a huge honor that you waste all this time with me today uh i you know i thank you for just educating the world for for teaching me uh inspiring me to learn mo..."