The Overton Window Is Shifting | Anthony Pompliano

If you look over the last specifically 4 years, but even really the trend over the last decade or so is we essentially inverted what people wanted. All of a sudden the government kept telling you, no, you can't speak freely. No, you can't transact freely. No, you can't do whatever the thing is that you want to do. And for the last, you know, 12 years, there's been one guy who's represented the change, and that's Trump.

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Pom, what's happening, man?

Not much. How are you?

Good. Good to finally have you here. Long journey to get you on the pod. Good to see you. How's life?

Everything's amazing.

Nice. So I want to have you on because I think of you as someone who has a very holistic view of like what is happening. I think there are people who we've had on Empire who talk about markets. There are people who talk about politics, people talk about money. I think of you as someone who has a very holistic view of all of this stuff. How do you— maybe we can start as high level as we can possibly go, which is how do you make sense of everything that's happening in the world today?

I think that there are two different trends that are hard truths people don't want to admit, but they describe so much of what's happening across the economy, politics, and even what people personally are choosing to spend their time and energy on. The first is one big assumption over the last 50 years was globalist kind of pursuits is a positive trend and we should push that to its extreme. We did that. And I think that the lesson that we learned, although people don't want to admit it yet, is that the pursuit of globalism actually ended up hurting a very large portion of the population. But that portion of the population is the silent majority. And so the people in control of media, the people in control of finance, the people in control of corporations, the people in control of cities, they've benefited from this. So what you hear is, "This has been good. This has been good. Keep going." But actually the 60 to 70% of the population has been destroyed by this kind of pursuit of globalism. And it's not just a thing in the United States. The US is the thing that maybe is the most intimate to us. We understand it. We live here. We understand a lot of the economic data. But this is something that's happened all around the world. And the idea really is that the promise was you're going to pursue cheap products. Those cheap products are going to come from lower cost of labor. So you scour the world looking for efficiency. Efficiency sounds good, right? That, that, that's something that you should want. If you have lower cost, that should lead to higher profits. If you have higher profits, then ideally you'd be able to pay your employees more. You'd be able to invest more in R&D. There's this whole academic theory that goes into why this was good. In hindsight of 50-plus years of chasing this down, what you find is that one, the products were cheap in price, but they also were cheap in quality. And so you can look across a bunch of different consumer goods and see that people replace them much more often. So yes, the sticker price is cheaper, but over a 10 or 20-year period, You know, how much of your wardrobe, how much of your furniture is getting passed down to your grandkids? Probably not that much, right? Yeah, probably zero.

Yeah, nothing.

And so you're having to rebuy these products over and over again. And depending on the, the good and when you buy and a bunch of different things, maybe it's the same price as just buying it one time and it being, you know, kind of long lasting and high quality, but maybe it's more expensive. So you don't really get the quote unquote cheap aspect in price that maybe people thought they were going to get. The second thing is if you chase efficiency around the world, there's always someone willing to provide lower cost labor. And so when you do that, what do you do? You push manufacturing, you push all sorts of, uh, kind of domestic activities international. Well, in most regions in the United States, from a landmass standpoint, those jobs dried up. So now what you have is you push people from a middle class down from a socioeconomic standpoint. And rather than the American dream being this, uh, social and economic mobility, what you actually have is you have mobility downward, which in most, uh, countries is actually not what happens. In most countries, you pretty much— if you're born into a certain part of the economy, you're just stuck there. You can't go up, can't go down, right? There's a safety net, but there's also kind of a cap. In America, because there is the potential to go up, it also means that there's an elevator down. And so when you look at that, you can see that maybe 20 years ago, 20%, 30%, whatever the number was of the population, they were upset, but it was still a minority. Then it grew to 30, 40, 50. Now we're probably over 50%. And I think that also is, um, a huge reason why you see the populism rising in politics. That's why you see somehow the Republican Party is now the party of the working class, right? You see, um, So many of these kind of like second and third order effects all can be tied back to this idea that we just chased efficiency around the world. We gave up the resilience both from a supply chain standpoint, which was exposed during COVID but also we gave up the job opportunities, the economic opportunities in most of rural America. And so there's this great book that I highly suggest everyone read. It's called Twilight of the Elites and is written about France, but I think it's applicable to the United States. And what they write about in this book is this idea that during medieval times there is castle walls that are set up and the monarchs or the people in control, they're within the castle. They have safety, they have abundance of food, they have all these kind of benefits. But people outside of the castle walls, they're screwed. They're the serfs, right? They got to do all the work and they don't have all the benefits. We still have that model is what this book argues. It's just that now what we have done is we've erected walls around our cities. And so where's all the job opportunity? Inside the cities. But most of the people can't afford to live in the city. So they are priced out. It's unaffordable to them. And therefore they are pushed outside the city limits. When they're pushed outside the city limits, now we're trying to sell them the same way we sold them globalism, this idea of like remote work. Oh, don't worry, you can have the same economic opportunity. You don't need to live in the city. You can live at home, right? In some faraway place. And you can sit inside your house and just have a laptop. But the truth is, if you go and you talk to business owners, guess who gets the promotions? Guess who gets the higher pay? Guess who gets more of the opportunity inside of a business? The people who are in the office. And so it becomes this really weird dynamic where that globalism trend is one huge piece that can be sewn through economic, political, even to some degree geopolitical kind of developments in the country and in the world. The second thing is a technology story. Which is, um, there are two ways that you can think about, uh, investing and, and building businesses. There's a bucket of what are you betting on that's not gonna change in the world, and then what are you betting on that is gonna change in the world? And so a Warren Buffett is somebody who would bet on things that are not gonna change in the world. A Jeff Bezos is somebody who's betting on things changing in the world, right? And you can kind of go through these different examples, but they're really— you can bifurcate, uh, from a, an investing standpoint and a building of a company standpoint. Are you in a position to bet on change, or are you in a position to bet on stasis? And both work. There's many ways up the mountain. But the reason why that's important right now is because there is such an acceleration of technology that's happening that it is actually breaking many things that previously, uh, were thought to be unbreakable. And so you can see this with, um, maybe something like, uh, take the rockets. Rockets, uh, really good example. There are companies who 25 years ago thought it would be impossible to get reusable rockets. Okay, that makes sense. Somebody did it. But the reusable rocket, although that is a huge breakthrough and has immense economic activity that kind of drafts off of it and now is a low-cost solution to get to orbit and space and all this stuff, what people tend to forget or, or underestimate is what are the second and third order effects. So then we get Starlink because now we have reasonable rockets. Those reasonable rockets are because of somebody wanted change. So that change has this like kind of chain reaction of events. Well, when we get Starlink, now all of a sudden, guess what should happen? Wi-Fi should go down on phones. So plane Wi-Fi productivity should go up, right? Like you start to see all these order effects. And so the rapid acceleration of technology, uh, changing is kind of a parallel story to that globalization, because now all of a sudden what we've done is we've taken these huge bureaucratic bloated organizations and we're starting to smash them. And so what happens, it's like if you take a sandwich and you smash it, things shoot out the sides. Well, the shooting out the sides is all the employees. And so where are they going to go? If technology is taking your job, if technology is crushing the bureaucracy of your business, and now somebody can create a business with 1/10 the employee base and have double the profits, Twitter, right? X, great example. 80% reduction, double the profits. Now what do those employees go do? And so it's a story of technology and of globalization, which really just drives what is the economic opportunity for people. And in the United States in particular, we've done a horrible job of educating people. So then if you go and you take a look, 1 out of every 5 Americans can't read past a 3rd grade level.

Myself included.

Yeah, it's ridiculous, right? And so you say to yourself, we're supposed to be the most developed nation in the world, all this stuff, and 1 out of 5 Americans can't read past the 3rd grade level? That's a problem. And so you say to yourself, okay, I have a very kind of unique experience in life where I basically feel like I've lived in 2 different worlds. I grew up in North Carolina, I was in the military, I played college sports with people who came from all over the country. The problems that my friends face that come from those— that part of my life have zero overlap with the problems of my friends who live in New York City, work in finance and tech. There's— there's— I can't think of overlap, right? My friends in New York, they don't give a shit about the price of eggs. All my friends growing up and in, you know, kind of more the blue-collar working class, they all care about the price of food. My friends in New York City, they don't care whether they get to pay an extra $0.25 or $5 because there's a congestion tax. They just are going to use Uber, right? They're going to get in the car, they're going to go wherever they got to go. My friends who don't come from that, every single dollar counts. They're going to calculate how much longer is it going to take to actually ride the subway, and I'm going to leave early because there's zero chance I can afford an Uber.

This episode is brought to you by ZKSync. In 2024, ZKSync took a step toward a multi-chain future by transforming from a single L2 into an ever-expanding network of ZK chains, the Elastic Network. To onboard the whole world into crypto, many specialized chains must be able to coexist, work together, and share liquidity. Institutions and global financial leaders choose zkSync for unmatched security, scalable infrastructure, better onboarding, gasless transactions, and privacy-first design. Join over 20 chains, including Abstract, SoFon, and Cronos in the Elastic Network today. Behind zkSync is the zkStack. It is a one-stop platform for building private blockchains on Ethereum. The stack solves all the typical privacy, regulatory, user experience, and deployment concerns of blockchain without compromising performance or security. Join the Elastic Network today at zkSync.io/empire. Thanks to zkSync for making today's episode possible. Geodnet is a first-of-its-kind DePIN protocol that's revolutionizing satellite navigation services. They're actively generating on-chain revenue that's growing 500% year over year by providing precision location services that are 100 times more accurate than standard GPS. On Empire, we always talk about finding how crypto can power completely new business models, and they're a perfect example of this. They're already trusted by over 30 enterprise customers across industries including automotive, agriculture, construction, and even robotics. The network is powered by its native token, G-E-O-D, and easily mined with their satellite miner. By setting up a base station, you can get involved with this, uh, groundbreaking Web3 ecosystem. Learn more by heading over to geodnet.com or just by hitting the link in the description of today's episode.

Okay, let's actually talk about these two groups of friends. So it does feel like the— okay, these two groups of friends would have been on different sides of the political spectrum for the last 30 years. Maybe, maybe, maybe North Carolina group of friends is voting for Republicans, uh, New York, San Francisco friends, tech, finance, whatever, voting for Democrats. It feels like there is a, um, I'm still working through this idea, like a third party basically that's getting created where they're, they're pro-business, but if it's in America, they're, they're pro-business. But if it's kind of, but pro-business but anti-globalist, they're, they're actually socially liberal, but very against like woke ideologies. How do you think about this? What's happening with the political spectrum right now? And maybe through the lens of these two friends as well.

When I grew up, the popular thing that people would say is that they are fiscally conservative and socially liberal.

Everybody, 10 out of 10.

That was like, everyone would say that. And the truth was that usually neither one of those things were true. They said it because that was the safe thing to say. But when push came to shove, they actually weren't fiscally conservative. And when push came to shove, very few people are actually socially liberal. And so what I mean by that is everyone is socially liberal until it's them that has to sacrifice. And that is just true across countries, across language, across pretty much every socioeconomic status. Everyone says we should help others, but you pay for it.

Mm-hmm.

Nobody actually wants to do it themselves. And so I don't like that. That's not good. But that's just how humans work, right? Is nobody is like running to the IRS and stroking twice as much in their check Uh, every year they are saying, I'll pay what you want me to pay, but that's it, right? And so, um, if you actually think about what that general framework was trying to get at, was people wanted to be able to do what they wanted to do, let the— tell the government to leave me alone. And then I think that the government also should have a responsibility to help people who need help, right? And so the reason why I describe it that way is because really, if you look over the last specifically 4 years, but even really the trend over the last decade or so, is we essentially inverted what people wanted. All of a sudden, the government kept telling you, "No, you can't speak freely. No, you can't transact freely. No, you can't do whatever the thing is that you want to do." And so people kept running into that and eventually got frustrated because they're like, "Why is the government stopping me from doing what I want to do?" But then on the help side, what they saw was, "Wait a second, you're helping people, humans. They're just not people that are in our country." So we have veteran homelessness, you know, is exploding, mental health crisis. We have homeless all over the street. There's drug issues. There's, you know, all these different things that are going on that people are looking at and they're like, objectively, these people are suffering and we're not helping them. And then you go to things like Hurricane Katrina, you go to Flint water, the water issue in Flint, Michigan. Like, you can go through all these and you're just like, wait a second, what is going on? Why are we not getting the kind of government support that you would think that they need? And so you say, okay, well, the government's helping somebody. Who are they helping? And I think that's really where then they, they didn't like the answer. And it doesn't mean that the government was right or wrong, because at the end of the day, it really just comes down to, uh, how you thought the government should act. But if you're helping illegal immigrants, if you're sending money overseas to, uh, allies or foreign wars, all this stuff, like, some people like that, some people don't. But I think it really just came back to, wait a second, I feel like the government is telling me I can't do stuff I want to do. And then the people who I feel like the government should be helping, they're not helping. And so that's where you got this massive rejection of an entire, you know, kind of viewpoint of the world. And they basically said, wait a second, I'm going to go and I'm going to vote for change. And for the last, you know, 12 years, there's been one guy who's represented the change, and that's Trump. And so it doesn't mean that— like, one of the stats that I always think about, we'll never know the answer to this: how many people voted for Trump because they liked Trump versus how many people voted because it like anybody but Biden, right? Or anybody but Harris. We'll never know. Right. But it does feel like it got to the point where, you know, even folks that you wouldn't expect, those New York friends, right? I know somebody who's in a social media group. In that group are a bunch of middle-aged women in New York City who all have children. The things that were being said before the election, you would think that you were in a group of farmers in Alabama.

Yeah, objectively a group that would on paper vote for Harris.

They would say it. Yeah, this friend of mine would show it to me and they're like, these women are writing in here saying, I have voted, you know, Democrat my entire life, my parents, like, have I ever told anyone, right? Because they can all write in anonymously, all the stuff. And they're just like, I've had enough with the crime. I've had enough of the, you know, migrant issue. I had enough of— I'm walking through downtown Manhattan and I feel like I got to look over my shoulder. Like, it's personal safety. It's all this stuff. And so the reason why I look at it through that lens is what really ultimately happened is the rural areas, somehow their experience got exported to the cities. And when you export that now all of a sudden you look at the world differently. But when you live in kind of the ivory tower, you don't have the same problems. So to your point about I have these two different groups of friends, in the last 4 years, they started to actually have overlap of their problems.

Hmm.

Right? My friend who lived in Manhattan worries about their safety as much as my friend who lives in North Carolina worries about their safety. And so then you start to say to yourself, well, how did we get there? And it goes back to the ideas of globalism and technology change and all this stuff. And then part of the conversation nobody wants to have is one of the big questions over the last 4 years is like, why did Biden open the border? He opened the border not as a national security policy. He opened the border as an economic policy. I disagree with it. I don't think he should have done it. But if you go back and you look, basically what they did was inflation exploded. How do you get inflation down? You need a deflationary force. You need to overwhelm the system. And when they opened that border and they let in millions of people, It was an economic policy to try to flood the country with cheap labor to drive down cost. The problem is that you hurt all of the American citizens that are there competing for those jobs now. And so you get in this very weird world where politics and economics are now banging heads with each other, and the things that you should do to optimize for economics can actually be really, really bad for your country, your society, the fabric, all these other kind of non-economic factors that I think a lot of people really care about.

Yeah. I mean, let's talk about that now because there's two— I mean, there's a big macro thing happening, which is tariffs, and then on a more micro scale in the industry we operate in, in crypto, there's this strategic reserve. So maybe we can talk tariffs first. I'm curious, two angles on tariffs. So the headline that is, I think most people agree with if they read the headlines and it's clear the market is reacted this way is Trump putting in place tariffs, tariffs equal bad, costs go up, bad for business. And so the market's been spooked. It just feels like overall chaos in the market. So I'm curious just—

Wrong.

Okay. Let's go there.

Pretty much everyone's understanding of tariffs is wrong. And the reason is because if you ask people to explain tariffs, I've done this for, I don't know, 50, 75 people, something like that. They all tell you the same story. Tariffs are inflationary. If you put tariffs, it drops us from a free trade, free market perspective to now a manipulated market. Uh, the importer pays the cost and ultimately the consumer bears the brunt of it. Okay, we don't have to go back. I could sit and talk about how our country was built on tariffs and how Uh, all of our government revenue came through tariffs. Uh, the Coast Guard was literally built— used to be called the Cutter Revenue Service. Uh, it was built to collect the tariff. It was 5% flat tariff on all imports to the United States. Pretty much every founding father was pro-tariff, um, and the idea was tax everybody else outside the country to benefit the citizens versus what we have now, which is you tax the citizens to benefit everybody else outside the country. Right? So you can imagine federal income tax didn't exist. As federal income tax got increased, tariffs came down. There was kind of a reverse relationship. And it's easier to tax your people than tax people outside the country. So it makes sense, you know, kind of what the incentive was, how we got here. But we don't have to go back to the 1800s to understand how this works. Go back to 2018. There are 3 major products that Trump put tariffs on, and Trump basically ran what I call the tariff experiment. And to be honest, when he first announced this stuff back in 2018, I was pretty skeptical. I was like, you know, I got an economics degree.

Was it still a solar panel tariff?

So he did solar panels, washing machines, and steel.

Washing machines?

Washing machines and steel. And what he did though was he cut federal income tax from 39.6% down to 37%, and he implemented the tariffs. Now the tariffs are very surgical. They were on 3 products. It was very specific. It wasn't these blanket tariffs, which we can get to. But if you go and you take a look at, uh, washer machines, washer machines, uh, saw when the tariff got put on a rise in price. Within 18 months, so by the end of 2019, we actually saw washer machines were cheaper than before the tariffs were put on. Why did that happen? Well, a great example is that two Korean manufacturers of washing machines said, I don't want to pay the tariff. So they came to the United States, they each built manufacturing facilities in the U.S., they created thousands of American jobs, And we ramped up domestic production. And so if you ramp up the supply, the price falls because demand doesn't change for washing machines. And so we actually ended up 18 months later with cheaper washing machines in America rather than before the tariffs got implemented. So a lot of people say, oh well, those were just the two Korean manufacturers. Okay, let's go look at solar panels. Same exact thing happened with solar panels. We had, uh, solar panels mainly coming out of China. We put a tariff on them, 25%. Uh, that tariff led to more domestic manufacturing of solar panels. As we increased domestic manufacturing, we also actually saw towards the tail end of Biden's, uh, term, a— an explosion of demand as well, because he started to put in all of these rebates and, and, uh, kind of incentive systems. But what we got was lower prices, demand never slowed down, and we were able to collect more revenue because now anyone that was shipping solar panels from China to the US was paying 25%, uh, to the US. Now here's what's interesting. Before Biden left office, he actually increased the solar panel tariff from 25% to 50%. So he doubled what Trump did. And the reason why he did it was 'cause it was working. So you say to yourself, okay, so that's two different products now where the products within 18 months of the tariff being, uh, levied were cheaper than before the tariffs were, were implemented. So we go look at steel and steel. China has basically completely destroyed the steel market in terms of they just flood the world with steel. And so good for China, right? They're producing a lot of this stuff, but US steel production was, uh, not operating at capacity. So the whole point of the steel tariffs was we want to put this tariff in place and we want to get US steel manufacturing up to at least 80% of our capacity. We put the tariffs on, guess what happens? We stop importing as much immediately. US production spikes, prices fall. And so within 18 months, US steel is now cheaper than it was before the tariff. And now if we go to 80% or more, uh, manufacturing capacity, guess what? We're hiring more people. We're investing in American manufacturing, all this kind of stuff. So in every single one of the examples in 2018, not only were we able to drop the federal income tax, but also we were able to drive prices lower, not higher. We were able to collect more government revenue and we ended up creating more American manufacturing and more American jobs. So you look at that and you say to yourself, well, wait a second, that's everything opposite of what I've been told tariffs do. And the reason that people are so worried about tariffs is because there is one, like, Achilles heel of them. If you put tariffs on products where you cannot replace the foreign manufacturing or production with domestic manufacturing and production, then yes, prices will rise and it ends up being a bad thing. What Trump, I think, has done, which is very unique, is he has said this is not just a foreign and domestic game. What he's actually said, and he's explicitly said it, which I was surprised he did this, he has said, "Listen, I'm putting the tariffs in place. If you're a foreign manufacturer, I'm not taking them off. You should just come here to the United States and produce the good here in the US." So we see TSMC recently, right? Biden passes this CHIPS Act, they start to build facilities in Arizona. Then all of a sudden Howard Lutnick and Trump, they go with the tariffs and they basically strong-arm TSMC to create even more facilities in the US. So people look at that and they say, okay, it's actually not a Trump win, it's not a Biden win, it's both of them in their own way, stick and carrot, are able to go and get TSMC to come here. And now I believe that they're going to do 8 different facilities in the US, invest about $160 billion, and it's estimated they're going to create at least 30,000 jobs in total. And so you say to yourself, wait a second, all we're trying to do is incentivize people. If you actually want to build products and create things for the American economy, come build it within our borders and hire our people to do it rather than people externally. So if you take this to its natural conclusion, what I think should happen, which I don't know if it will, is that we should actually go from a world where we default zero tariffs and then we run around and we say, oh, we don't like what you're doing. Okay, we're going to add a tariff. Oh, we don't like what this country is doing. Add a tariff. That is using tariffs as a punitive kind of punishment. Instead, I think we should reverse that. I think we should start with a 5 or 10% blanket tariff on every single thing coming into the United States. And then run around and say, we want more of your products or services, let's drop it so we can incentivize you. Use tariffs as an incentive system, not as a punishment system. When you do that, now all of a sudden what you're doing is you're saying, look, for the products and services that we don't necessarily need, they're not critical for national security, we can, we can build ourselves, whatever, hey, you got to pay the tariff. 5% isn't a huge deal. 25%, which is being levied right now against Canada and Mexico, that's a pretty big number. So 5% on all goods would be actually much more kind of stomached better by the economy than having some big number. And so if you start with that 5% and now all of a sudden you use the tariffs to incentivize rather than punish, I think what you can do is you can have better command and control over the products that people are creating for you and you actually end up with more American manufacturing and American jobs. So if you go to the market, why is the market freaking out? Because the market's thinking about it the old way, right? They're thinking tariffs are bad. But my favorite stat looking at 2018 was if tariffs are supposed to lead to more inflation, why did inflation go down between January 2018 and January 2019? So over the year where he put the tariffs in place, actually inflation went down. And so you say to yourself, it's because what people think about is they think of tariffs in silos. And so if you go and you look at countries like the Netherlands, Netherlands has a 25% VAT, right? A value-added tax. That is, you could think of it as a tariff on goods that are being imported. Uh, it's kind of a, a consumption tax. They have no inflation. It's like 1.6% or something. Why is that? Because they've had it in place forever, like for decades. Okay, well, if there's no change in the VAT, then there's no inflation. So what is the quote-unquote inflation that's associated with tariffs? It's not the tariff that's inflationary, it's the action of putting it on. So that's why you get that initial spike in price, is because you went from no tariff to they have a tariff. but then as the system works itself out, within 18 months the prices are lower. So it comes back to this idea of the market is thinking tariffs are inflationary, tariffs are bad. But I think what we're seeing already is that the threat of the tariff, we have the leverage.

This episode is brought to you by ZKSync. In 2024, ZKSync took a step toward a multi-chain future by transforming from a single L2 into an ever-expanding network of ZK chains, the Elastic Network. To onboard the whole world into crypto, many specialized chains must be able to coexist, work together, and share liquidity. Institutions and global financial leaders choose ZKSync for unmatched security, scalable infrastructure, better onboarding, gasless transactions, and privacy-first design. Join over 20 chains including Abstract, SoFon, and Cronos in the Elastic Network today. Behind zkSync is the zkStack. It is a one-stop platform for building private blockchains on Ethereum. The stack solves all the typical privacy, regulatory, user experience, and deployment concerns of blockchain without compromising performance or security. Join the Elastic Network today at zkSync.io/empire. Thanks to zkSync for making today's episode possible. Geodnet is a first-of-its-kind DePIN protocol that's revolutionizing satellite navigation services. They're actively generating on-chain revenue that's growing 500% year over year by providing precision location services that are 100 times more accurate than standard GPS. On Empire, we always talk about finding how crypto can power completely new business models, and they're a perfect example of this. They're already trusted by over 30 enterprise customers across industries including automotive, agriculture, construction, and even robotics. The network is powered by its native token GEOD and easily mined with their satellite miner. By setting up a base station, you can get involved with this, uh, groundbreaking Web3 ecosystem. Learn more by heading over to geod or just by hitting the link in the description of today's episode.

I get the sense that you are very happy that Trump is president and maybe didn't like some of the things that Biden was putting in place. You talk about immigration. I'm kind of reading between the lines. Talk about tariffs, kind of reading between the lines. How do you think about— there's an article labeled you, you know, Trump loud voice on pro-Trump or something like that. Like, I'm just curious how you think about your own political views.

I'm a hardcore independent. You know, one of the things that I challenge my friends a lot of time is whichever political party they subscribe to, can they say something nice about the other one and can they critique their own party? And, you know, behind closed doors, I think if people heard me talk, I think people publicly believe that, you know, I think everything Trump does is amazing. I think everything that Biden did is stupid. A good example, I think, of why that's wrong is Biden's economy, as much as people said, "Hey, the guy's asleep," and all the critiques or whatever, stock market hit all-time high after all-time high, crypto was ripping, all these things. And so yeah, you could be like, "Hey, that happened despite him shooting himself in the foot the whole time." But at the end of the day, his policies led to a great stock market performance. Okay, there's a hell of a lot of things I could critique him on, right? And I have extensively. Same thing with Trump is that there's a lot of things I like that he's doing, but also there's a lot of things that I'm like, come on, man, right? And so, you know, one of the things I've publicly talked about is when he went after the, like, the priests or whatever in the thing, it's like, look, I just— I don't think that's the way to treat people, right? And so, you know, the truth is that if you support somebody 100%, then you're probably in a cult, right? The way I think about it is if you can look at whether it's a political candidate, a human, a business person, an investor, whatever, you should be able to say, here are the things that I agree with them on, here are the things I don't agree with them on, right? You know, I think people have been surprised. I've been very critical of the administration on the crypto reserve and to the point where people are like, wait, what? I thought that you wanted this. And it's like, no, I don't think that it's just like blind belief in these organizations or these people. It is very much trying to figure out like, okay, forget the political parties for a second. Here's a topic. How do you think independently about it? And what do you agree with and what do you not agree with? But the problem is like, that's very difficult to do, especially on the internet. So usually those nuanced conversations end up being had in private more so than in public.

COVID opened the window for Overton, for everyone accepting that these Overton windows change. Quicker than people realize. And I think that, yeah, COVID was clearly, at least for me in my life, the first big moment in time where it was masks, you know, shutting down travel, all these big ideas. And then, you know, you weren't allowed to— you got kicked off of Twitter if you said that it came from China. And then very quickly, the Overton window changed. And then, you know, there's obviously big reports that some of these things were wrong. And you see it. I mean, mainstream media saying Trump would never win, and then he wins and things like that. You're talking about these tariffs. Are there any other things that are starting to feel obvious to you that maybe when you look out at the public, you say it doesn't feel obvious to them yet, but I see this coming?

Well, I mean, Bitcoin was over the last decade or so was very obvious. Bitcoin's a great one. Yeah. And one of the things maybe that I've never publicly said before, but why not do it with you? I never got vaccinated. It wasn't like I was so hardcore about it or whatever. It was more of just, look, I'm like a young, relatively healthy person. If I need to do that, I will. But I'm also not like going to, you know, a bunch of places where there's a bunch of at-risk people or whatever. I'm just going to kind of like hang out by myself, whatever. And, um, I think what really bothered me early on was, uh, the political flip-flopping of— they're like railing against the vaccines coming too early, and most of the Democrat Party in particular was like, the Trump vaccine is unsafe, they're rushing it, whatever. And then it flipped the media, was like, everyone needs it, you know, type thing. And so whenever I see, um, an acceleration of a story that goes from hard one view to hard the other direction I immediately get very skeptical. And I mean, 2020, 2021, there was a bunch of these examples. But I think that's something I've learned over time is whenever you see the kind of volatility in a view without an easy explanation, it's usually a time to be somewhat cautious. And then I think also there are a lot of things in maybe just investing in general. And so a good example is One that blows my mind is intrinsic value. If I go online right now and I say there's no such thing as intrinsic value, I will literally— it's like I'm the devil. All these—

I've actually seen you do this and I saw you get skewered.

Yeah. Yeah. And then I always go and I look at the people's returns and they never outperform the S&P 500. And the reason that I think it offends people is because people They need mental frameworks that have social consensus to feel comfort. But whenever I see social consensus, I get very nervous because in my mind, most of the time the social consensus arrives at something, they're wrong. Whereas I think other people see like their safety in numbers, like a lot of people believe this, so it must be right. I just have seen it too many times where it doesn't mean that the non-consensus view is right. It just means that like I'm going to be skeptical and go try to figure out what's right here because there's too many people—

You'll go down the rabbit hole. There's too many people.

Yeah, there's just too many people who have coalesced around a viewpoint that now it's obvious people aren't like actually doing the independent work themselves. Right. So like, I'm going to go do that. I might arrive at the same conclusion that the consensus has, but like, I need to go do the work to have the confidence to know what to believe here. And so intrinsic value is a great example where the belief around intrinsic value is that you can look at an asset, you can tell what the objective value of it is. And the reason why that's not true is because if I show you an asset, it could be a stock, it could be a piece of real estate, it could be a piece of gold, whatever. And I ask you, well, what's the intrinsic value? You're going to tell me a number based on some formula that you use. But if I go ask another super smart, sophisticated person what the intrinsic value is, they may tell me a different number through their formula. And so it can't be intrinsic if there's different viewpoints, right? So it goes back to this idea of like value is subjective. And so those types of things really rattle the framework that investors in particular have. But if you just extrapolate that out to all of society, you say to yourself, "Okay, there's a lot of commonly held beliefs that when you actually unpack them, they're not true." And so the one that was probably the most controversial thing that I wrote in the book was luck's not real.

I had a feeling you were going to say that.

I mean, this just sent people over. I mean, literally people were writing me all kinds of crazy messages, whatever. And my point to them was like, both academic studies and anecdotally, you can see that most of the things people point to as quote unquote luck are actually mathematical probabilities. And the reason why we like to use luck is because it helps us feel comfortable explaining things that we otherwise don't want to acknowledge. And so if you and I are in the same situation, something happens to us. And the example I always use is we walk across the street, we get hit by a bus, we both lose our right leg. Show up to the hospital, somebody comes up, he says, Jason, what happened? Say, oh, I was really unlucky. I was walking across the street, I got hit, I lost my leg. Holy shit. And then they come up to my bed and they're like, what happened? I'm like, man, I'm so lucky to be alive. Same exact scenario.

You got lucky, I didn't. Same scenario.

Yeah, but same outcome, right? So what it shows is that actually luck is a psychological concept, right? And the way that you become more lucky is you start to tell yourself that you're lucky. And if that's the case, then luck is not real, it's just how you view outcomes.

I ask— I'm sorry for cutting you off, but I ask this in every interview. How lucky are you? Like a question we ask in the final round of interviews for people. How lucky are you? And I want people to tell me I'm 10 out of 10 lucky, luckiest person alive, because they make it— they make their own luck by saying that.

Yeah. And it goes back to this idea of like, if you acknowledge that luck is not real, then you're as lucky as you believe you are.

Yes.

Right. Right. Yeah.

Let's, uh, let's actually go deeper on this idea that there's no such thing as intrinsic value. Everything is a meme. Can you just, yeah, expand on that? Like, does it, does it stop?

Let's just go right to the heart of it.

Yeah. Um, because I, I, I would guess where you're getting at is something like Bitcoin. There's no intrinsic value, right? There's no cash flow. Something like Tesla, maybe a cult stock or something like that.

Let me give you a framework of, um, you know, the one that really gets all the, the boomers upset is, uh, Berkshire Hathaway is a meme stock. And by saying that, immediately people are like, "Ah, you know, whatever." But let me explain. So Berkshire Hathaway is obviously a very good business. They have incredible assets. There's cash flow. There are tangible value to these assets, all this stuff. But there is a, what we can call Buffett premium, we can call a Buffett bump. If you're going to call it a premium or a bump, you can also call it the Buffett meme. It's all the same thing. But let's say that Berkshire Hathaway is 90% amazing company, 10% Buffett premium. So that means that if Buffett was to pass away and Greg Abel or whatever who's supposed to take over, he's running it, 5, 10% lower valuation simply because Buffett's not there anymore. Berkshire's still a great company, whatever, but the Buffett premium goes away. Okay, Tesla, 50% amazing company, 50% Elon premium. People always point to, oh, it's trading at this insane valuation compared to the other car companies, all this stuff, right? So the like Elon meme, the retail craze, adds to the valuation multiple. So Tesla's still a good business, but the reason why most of the, you know, kind of Wall Street world doesn't understand the valuation is because they can't wrap their head around that Elon, you know, premium that gets associated with it. It's not the 5 or 10% Buffett, it's like 50%. Okay, let's go look at DJT stock, the Trump media company. That is like a 10% company, 90% Trump meme, because it has $4 million of revenue and it trades at like a $6 or $7 billion market cap. So obviously anyone who looks at this objectively is like, it's probably not actually worth that. How do you get to that valuation? 10% is based on what the company does. 90% is on the like Trump, you know, premium or whatever you want to call it. The last iteration of it is just the Trump coin. Just take— get rid of all the company stuff and just do 100% meme, right? Right. And then you get the Trump coin. So the reason why I give that framework is it's actually a natural extension of like what has been in motion now for decades. I'm not saying that it's a good thing. I'm not saying that the highly, you know, percentage meme, you know, type valuation stuff is sustainable or it'll be around for a long time. I'm just saying that the same thing that is giving the Buffett premium, the Trump premium is just like, you know, 90% of the value.

Yeah.

So when I, I look at that, I say to myself, okay, everything is quote-unquote a meme to some degree. You know, Warren Buffett is, um, I literally have a bust of Warren Buffett in my office. And I think people are always very surprised at the paradox of, I can attack him and think that he's probably not the most moral person. He's probably not a really good example of— I don't want my kids to grow up like him, but I can also really respect his investment track record, his patience, his wisdom, and learn from him and do all that stuff. I can also think that Buffett is probably somebody who is relatively close-minded when it comes to technology and change and all stuff, but I can respect the fact that he has built his entire career on betting on things that don't change and stuff, right? So like understanding and unpacking these people is really important. But if you go and you take a look at the quote-unquote meme, Warren Buffett is the original finance influencer. He would only talk to one journalist. She would disclose, we're friends. She edited his annual letter. But man, that was pretty effective because he kept getting really positive coverage because his friend was writing about him. He actually— people don't know this— started out, one of the first things that he ever did was he created one of the original newsletters. He used to send out gambling odds, uh, for horse racing, and he had this whole thing and he would send out the odds and he's basically just like gambling at the horse track. Then he actually bought stock and would go and write op-eds in like national newspapers, basically being like, go buy this stock. Again, you can't hold what a 21, 20-year-old guy does to, you know, somebody who's 90 years old. He's got the track record.

Yeah, but I still think he's, he's, he's, he's still sculpting this persona. It's like, you ever seen the videos of him pulling up to— I think it's like McDonald's every day. He gets the big— or he gets the, you know, whatever he gets in the morning. It's like the fried fish or something.

Depends on if the market's up or down.

That is a meme. That is the marketing. I got to watch that. He lives in a small house in Nebraska. This is him perfectly sculpting the persona of Warren Buffett. Yes.

It's all branding. And by the way, it works.

It works.

You cannot hate the player. You got to kind of respect what he's doing and understand how it works. Now, the reason why I say that he's the original finance influencer is he also has the largest capitalist conference in the world. I joke that boomers go on Mecca as disciples, right? I mean, it's crazy.

Yeah.

And to sit there and listen to him talk about the feet. And again, it works. So like, this is not— I think people hear me say this stuff and they're like, oh, you're criticizing. Like, I understand what he's doing. I respect it. It's worked. You would be an idiot to not recognize what he's doing and try to learn little things of how he's been able to do this. Now, with all of that said, you then can look at, okay, extrapolate out to the GameStop guy, right? That looks a lot different. He don't wear a suit and tie. He doesn't look like the old grandpa with wisdom, right? All this stuff. But to a new generation, in a weird way, they kind of sit in the same seat.

Oh yeah. He's got his persona too. The red bandana. Yeah.

Yeah.

So again, I'm not saying that, uh, Buffett's bad and the GameStop guy's good, but what I am saying is that, uh, understanding these personalities and how they're able to attract an audience and have influence and stuff like that. It's like important to unpack. And so maybe one other thing that I think kind of cuts through all this is a critique of the crypto world that I think is unfair is the legacy finance folks will always say, ah, you guys never lived through a real bear market. You weren't old enough in '08, '09. Okay. I always ask the kind of the boomer crowd, How many times have you held an asset that's gone down 80% and not sold? Because I know people who've done it 3 or 4 times now. Right? And they're like, "Well, I've never done that." Okay. So what we're actually getting is we're in this accelerated market cycle in crypto where you basically are living through boom and bust cycles every 4 years, whereas the traditional system is kind of operating on a dinosaur speed. Right? There was the 2000 bust, Then you had '08, '09. Then you kind of sort of had a little bit of market gyration in 2018. Then you had the COVID stuff. Then you had a 2022 bear market. But if you really think about quote unquote bear markets, the market went down 20%. Bitcoin will do that in a day. And so I just think that there's a very different kind of training ground now for the younger investor where they are buying stocks that have 80 volatility to them.

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Okay, maybe a two-part question. What is driving this? Because the thing in my head that is driving this is that everyone's becoming an investor. The typical investor used to be 50 years old, white dude, gray hair, who works on Wall Street. Now it's everybody in the world, right? Now it's everybody in the US. Soon it'll be everybody in the world. Like, you know, brokerages become digitized, Charles Schwab, E-Trade. Then it moves to mobile with things like Robinhood and Public.com and things like that. And now it's just everyone in the world with things like DeFi and, you know, just these, these mobile apps. So my first question maybe is what's driving this? Second question is, if this is such a good strategy, will we see more public companies and tech founders and just founders in general running their businesses almost more as cults, less as just your typical business?

Yeah. So there's two things that are driving what I call the rise of the self-directed investor. The first is access to information. It used to be that, uh, you had to watch, um, TV, right? Or you had to read the newspaper. Well, if you're in school, I don't know how many kids you knew that brought the newspaper to school. Zero in my school, right? And then we didn't have access to TV during school hours, so you basically had no access to financial information while you were in school. We have no access to financial information, you're pretty much not getting it. If you're not getting it, then You're not going to participate, right? You're not informed. Now, TikTok, Instagram, X, you know, newsletters, whatever, you have this access at your fingertips. So everyone's informed now. Everyone knows what's going on all the time. And so if you give people information, they want to act on that information. But there used to be a second friction point after the access to information, which was I had to call up a broker, a stockbroker, right, to tell them what to do, or I had to call up a financial advisor. There was a bunch of friction there. Well, now what happened is Robinhood, Public, many others, they have brought that friction down to the point where I've got an app on my phone. I can press some buttons while I'm sitting in class, right? At the most extreme example. And then not only do I have access to the market, but now I can literally buy fractions of a share. I don't even need to have money to buy a single share, right? So what you've done is you've just, you know, drastically opened access to information and drastically opened access to the market. And you've given these tools to people And so naturally you do that, plus the backdrop of, well, if I keep saving, I'm losing money, everything's getting more expensive, I got to invest. And you get the explosion of the self-directed investor.

Maybe we can tie it back to just your view of what happens from here. We're talking about the markets and tariffs and Trump and all that kind of good stuff. Right now, if you look out at the landscape, I think you've got a bunch of any— anybody in their 20s, you know, who's between the ages of 25 to 40, have not made the money that they thought they would make. They haven't been able to afford a home. They're kind of disgruntled in their 9-to-5 jobs. I think there's probably chaos in the markets today. What happens to— we haven't even really talked about AI. AI flips a lot of this upside down. You can now build a billion-dollar company with 7 people. What's your view of how the next couple of years shake out?

Everything you just said is true about a portion of the population, but it's also completely inaccurate about another portion of the population. So what I mean by that is at the same rate that people feel like they're falling behind, there's another cohort that feels like they're making so much money they don't even know what to do with it. And that is the bifurcation of kind of society. You're getting that kind of like K-shaped wealth inequality.

But the group that feels like they're making more money than they know what to do with, that's a very small amount, right? Is that the— maybe you would call it the terminally online group?

Well, think of it this way. When I was growing up, the idea of being a millionaire was like, "Oh my God." Yeah, yeah, same. Right? It's still, I think for a very big portion of the population, it's like, "Oh my God, that's an unreachable thing to attain." But there's a heck of a lot of the population in the United States that is like, "Hey, I need more than a million dollars." And not only do I need more than $1 million, I'm going to blow through $1 million and I got to get much, much higher. And so sure, is the billionaire the new millionaire or something? Probably. There's some kind of evolution of what the milestones are. But I do think that the, let's just call it the millionaire cohort, is much, much bigger than people realize it is. And especially if it's not just cash millionaire, but net worth millionaire type stuff. Boomers, I think 50% on average of their net worth is in their primary home. They've just been doing it long enough now, right? A lot of them, I think 42% of American homeowners don't have a mortgage. A lot of them are just boomers who have just been paying it off for 30 years, right? And so they get to the 30-year mark, like, "Yeah, I paid it off." So when you look at all that stuff, you can say to yourself, okay, again, it's a bifurcation. And I don't know, is it 2 to 1, 3 to 1, 1 to 1? What's the ratio? I'm not really sure. But I do think that there is a continuation of these trends. And the only way that you can reverse being in the bottom half of that trend into the top half is education. You got to position yourself with assets to be able to get there. And I do think that AI is probably the only broadly applicable technology that can empower these people to make a shift without becoming an investor. Yeah. Because at the end of the day, the people who own the resources or control the resources, they're the ones who usually end up benefiting. And historically, we think about that as you own a company, has economic productivity, you know, kind of associated with employees and machines, etc. You can own assets, right? All this stuff. Now you can actually just own the software and the software can have that economic productivity kind of value to it. But you got to learn it. And so where we're going, in my opinion, is I call it the automated economy. And what I mean by that is Bitcoin is like an automated central bank. AI is obviously automating a bunch of stuff. Smart contracts are automating a bunch of stuff. There's very nuanced technology like ZK-proof stuff and whatever. That's going to automate stuff. But really what we're doing is we're just going to a world where code is going to replace so many of the inefficiencies and it will unlock brand new use cases for things, streaming payments and all that kind of stuff. But probably more importantly is we are going to recapture a bunch of our time from the rote activities that we repetitively do. And that's exciting on one hand. Imagine if you got back a bunch of time that you otherwise were wasting. But I don't think society is yet prepared to like, what are you going to do with that time?

Yeah.

And, um, it's not a problem we haven't faced before. We've always kind of figured it out. Uh, so it's exciting on one hand, but also just, you know, all of a sudden half of Manhattan had back, you know, 4 hours a day.

Oh, you don't want to see what that looks like. Yeah, right.

Like, you know what I mean? Yeah, the transition period might be a little crazy.

Let's, um, maybe a big Shifting gears a little bit, talk about time. You know, Mike and I were lucky enough to work out of your office for when we were starting Blockworks. And still to this day, I mean, anytime someone says, what was it like to work with Pomp? I have a very clear answer, which is he has the highest capacity for work of anybody that I've ever met. Actually, I mean, you taught Mike and I a lot about just like work ethic. And I mean, we would go 7 days a week. We're showing up Saturdays and Sundays. You're still recording. You're writing the newsletter every day. How do you, how do you structure your day?

It evolves from time to time, but generally I wake up relatively early. I go work out. I then spend some time with my family. I usually write in the morning. I kind of have one mentally kind of sharpest then, but also to the writing process really forces me to kind of intake a bunch of information that's happened, you know, over the last day or so. Synthesize it into what my thoughts are, outline what that argument is, put it down in writing. And then from there, now I basically for the next 24 hours have, okay, these are my views because I've taken the time to write them down. And so from there you can see when I do podcasts, I already kind of know what I'm talking about. Because imagine before you did a podcast, you sat down and wrote down every single thing you thought about these events, whatever. TV, all that kind of stuff just comes off of that. So I try to spend the mornings really focused on the content stuff. And I think of that as kind of the engine for everything we do. And then I pretty much spend midday, all afternoon into the early evening focused on the businesses that we run. And yeah, I don't know. I was laughing when you're like, he's got a high capacity for work. Because to me it's always just been One, I just don't know anything else, but two is, uh, this is like living a dream, right? Like, and not like a cheesy, like, oh, I'm living the dream, you know, whatever. In the Army, somebody's like, how you doing? Like, oh, living the dream, right? Which really meant like, dude, this is miserable as everybody else, right? Um, but, but like in a sense of if you went back and you told like, I don't know, 8, 10-year-old me, you're like, hey, every day this is what you're going to get to do, I'd be like, that's awesome. Yeah, sign me up for that. Right.

I agree with that. I feel the same way every day. I'm like, this is insane. I get to do this for a living. I've only got one business though. I only record two podcasts a week. I'm not writing a newsletter. We've got 80, 85 employees roughly. You have— I was trying to figure this. I don't actually know. My guess is 9 to 10 businesses.

More.

More. You've got— some of them have outside capital, some of them don't. I think some of them you own like 50% of, some of them smaller. Then you've got a whole investing arm, right? You had Full Tilt. I'm sure you've still got those. You had Morgan Creek Digital. You've got angel investments in like tech companies. You got kids. How— what's like— how do you think about structuring all of it?

Just get done whatever needs to be done.

Yeah, but actually, do you hire— like, do you hire— you have a whole executive leadership team? Do you— Hire a bunch of younger people?

From a pure executive leadership team, we have only one other executive, which is CFO. We don't have a president, a chief operating officer, a CMO, any of those positions. I think that I really aggressively pursue taking our cost centers and turning them into profit centers.

Like the studio?

Yeah, just everything that we do can be turned into a business. And some businesses can be big, some are going to be smaller. That's fine. I'm obsessed with the businesses being profitable. I don't want to run kind of loss-generating type businesses. We have only ever raised money for one company. Everything else we basically fund with the profits from the businesses that we've built. And our thought process is that in this new world, you want to sit at the center of 3 things. And I call it kind of like the triple threat. You want to be able to build companies and operate them. You want to be able to invest capital and you want to be able to create content. And if you do that correctly, there's a lot of opportunity, but it's very much this idea of where can you create value? I think one of the things maybe people don't really realize is I spend a lot of time thinking about, um, what is the solution or what is like the service to other people. So when we create a business, what we want to know is, okay, if we put this out there into the world, like, who is it benefiting and what is the value it's creating? And the bigger that the impact looks like, or the bigger the, you know, kind of value driven to someone, the more that I have conviction like, hey, this is going to work. But you can always figure out how to make money, right? But it's just like, how do you solve that problem? And I think that's why our batting average is so high. But I do think that there's a world where maybe one of the mistakes that we've made over time is we can hit singles and doubles all day long. And if you do enough of them, Constellation Software is a great example. They made over 400 acquisitions, average purchase price around $5 million. And you string that together, they got a $30 billion company. Not a bad run, right? So you can do volume of smaller things or you can make really concentrated, kind of very asymmetric type bets. And we have historically been in the volume business versus the kind of slugging percentage business. And so maybe we'd be better off doing the other.

That's maybe more of something like a— you mentioned Richard Branson, something like a Virgin, right? They're not buying companies for $5 million. They are a holding company essentially, but they're taking these moonshot bets.

Yeah. I mean, look, at one point I think he owned like 180 companies. So some of them get big. And I think that one of the things, and I've talked to a lot of people who run these different things, I've tried to understand it. If I was to make the bull case for what we're doing, I would say, oh, what you do is you start off with high volume kind of Really what we're trying to build is we're trying to build $20 million businesses. And we've so far had the fortunate ability to build some companies, scale them. We've sold one. It works. You can keep doing that. And then over time, as you build up that batting average, you start to increase your ambition. And then 5 years, 7 years, 8, 10 years in, then all of a sudden you're going after bigger and bigger opportunities, but you build up the muscle memory to be able to do that. The opposite argument is just like, why don't you just go after the bigger opportunities to start?

How do you think about how the founder looks at these different investments? So basically, how does the founder of a venture investment look versus the founder of someone you might partner with to go build a business?

The similarities are more interesting than the differences. You want somebody who has a propensity for action. You want somebody who is detail-oriented, you want somebody who is borderline obsessive, you want somebody who is scared of failing, scared of where they came from, scared of something. Mm-hmm. Yeah, there's a lot of people in the world who say like, I want somebody who's running towards something. I actually have found that we've been most successful partnering with people who are running away from something. And those people have a persistent motivation that is very hard— you can't teach it, but also it's very hard to find. Um, and so, you know, we've got people— we've got one person who runs one of our businesses, he's got, uh, 3 kids and he had another one on the way, I think, when, uh, when he quit his job. Hey man, we better win.

Yeah, right.

Um, and then I also think that there's an element of, uh, you want people who are curious, and that curiosity is, uh, something that maybe the single most important aspect that no one usually talks about. Because take the AI stuff right now. We have one business where the people on the team, they take in a lot of information, they synthesize it, they then create content around this, whatever. And so I recently said to them, I said, "Have you guys ever looked at any of the AI stuff?" One of the guys on the team, he enjoys coding and he's learning. And he said, "No." And I said, "Well, why don't you go do this?" And I showed him a couple of things that I'd looked at. He gave me a demo earlier this week. He pretty much is able to automate, I don't know, we're probably at 60 or 70% of the work. And you're just like, "Okay, what else do you have to do to get to 100%?" He's like, "Well, I could do this, this." I'm like, "If this goes right, within 3 months, he's going to basically have been able to automate." Now, that doesn't mean that we're going to be able to like have less employees. What it means is that they're now going to be able to handle more clients. Yeah, because they can now oversee it and all the tedious work is gone. And now they go from like individual contributor almost more to a manager, but they're managing AI. Yeah, right. And so the only reason I knew about that was because I had been curious about the stuff and tinkering and trying to figure all this stuff out. And then this, this person in particular, he was very curious when I kind of gave him a direction to run towards. And he went, he figured out a bunch of stuff that I had no clue about and all that. So I think that it's— I have this saying internally, which people always give me a hard time about, but I'm looking for winners. And people are like, "What does that mean?" I'm like, "You just kind of know when you see it." And a winner is the same person that you could go stand outside on the street corner in the middle of the winter with an apple stand, and they'll figure out how to sell the apples. They also can build a software company, right? It's just really like, can they navigate what the challenges are in order to be able to execute? Some people got it, some people don't.

Yeah. I got your book here. I want to know how you originally came to write it, because I doubt you were coming home tired Tuesday night saying, "All right, the next thing I need to do is write a book." Well, you know what they say, the most motivating thing in the world is to have your wife write a book. That's true. That's true.

And then you're like, "How many copies did you sell?" Then you got to sell more copies. I only need to sell one more and then I'm done. I'll never talk about the book ever again.

Yeah, exactly.

Uh, I told Polina that one time. She got very upset at me.

Um, it's good to repeat on a podcast then.

Um, she is the one who, uh, when our first kid was born, she was like, you should write her a letter. And I was like, stop it. Like, come on, I'm not writing letters. And she was like, you should do it. And so I wrote, uh, the letter, the first letter Uh, I went back and I read it a couple months ago, and, um, thank you so much for making me a dad. I'm so excited, you know. Uh, very long on like, here's how I feel right now, not very long on advice or wisdom. And so, um, when our second child was born, um, I was like, all right, I kind of already got that one out of my system. And I'd written a couple of letters to our daughter. And so at some point, uh, I realized that oh, this is going to be a really good way for me to tell them things that I want them to know. And somewhere along the way, I don't know, 5, 10, whatever it was, I remember saying to myself, I'm probably not going to do this to the extent that I should. I need to have a forcing function. And so why don't I just put them into a book and publish them? Also, I thought that would increase the quality of them because I knew other people were going to read it. And so I just started writing and usually I would write on every Sunday, I would try to write 3 to 5 of them. And you just do that for a couple months and next thing you know, you got a whole book. Story of my life.

Yeah. What's the reaction been?

The only reaction that I care about is I have been shocked at how many dads have reached out to me and been like, "Hey, thank you. I started writing letters to my kids." Um, and the reason why it's like— some of them have even sent me the letters and I'm like, oh, like, that was cool, let me start reading. And then it's like, dude, it's like a pretty like intimate, you know, like, I don't want to read this.

That's cool though.

That's cool.

Um, and I think it, it's different because, uh, you know, my dad and I got a great relationship, uh, but he's not exactly the type of guy who would ever like write me a letter.

Yeah, yeah.

He's more of like, uh, you know, he just looks across the room, you get his vibe.

Yeah, I think he's saying nice work, son.

But, uh, yeah, we're good.

Yeah, thanks, Dad.

Yeah. Right. So I don't know, it's— I think it's cool to kind of see, you know, other people say like, hey, there's something I want to do as well.

That's cool. Well, congrats, man. Maybe the last thing I want to ask you is just how you deal with hate online or just people. Yeah, basically people not like you. I mean, you've got 1.7 million followers. I'm sure every day in your comments it's grifter, scammer. Like I've seen— the reason I'm asking is because as Blockworks has gotten bigger, Every day there's someone saying something negative about us. And I can only imagine when we have, you know, 1.7 million followers or 600,000 subscribers on YouTube, what the comments look like. How do you deal with that? Do you, do you go, do you hit back at them? Do you just brush it off? Do you, if it's at a certain threshold, then you respond, but if it's not a threshold, how do you think about that?

I used to thrive getting in the comments, getting in the mud, talk some shit. Yeah. I grew up a family of 5 boys. Like I'd throw down with the best of them. Yeah. Now I just don't have time, frankly. Uh, I see it all. Um, it's kind of like this, um, you know, 50 Cent wrote a book, and in the book he talks about, uh, kept trying to go on Oprah's show. She wouldn't let him go on the show. So then one day he just like broke. He went online and just started trashing her. And he says that he was at a, um, at a function it was Gayle King is her friend. And Gayle King came up to him and was like, what the hell are you doing talking shit about my friend? Like, you know, whatever. And he said, uh, damn, if we can't be friends, at least respect me enough so we could be enemies. And his point was, you're either gonna let me come on the show.

Yeah.

Or I'm gonna use you as part of my marketing.

Yeah.

Hype myself up, right? I'm gonna get value out of you.

Yeah.

And that's kind of how I feel about the haters. Yeah, right. Is Wow, imagine how good we are doing if they cannot resist taking the time out of their day to promote our work.

They spend that much time thinking about me.

I'm honored to push it further out into the algorithm, you know, uh, galaxy by commenting on it. I have some friends who, they're, uh, you know, the rage baiters. That's not me. I don't really post to, you know, get those responses. Um, but yeah, it's just kind of I don't know, there's been a couple times I've even like DM'd somebody who said like really just ridiculous. My favorite is the guys who are like, uh, you know, they'll say something crazy, you'll go look at their bio and they're like, dad to 3 kids trying to teach them to be good people in the world, right? Yeah, I can't resist. I'll take their tweet and I'll DM it to them. I say, you think your kids think you're a good person today? And usually it's like, ah, sorry, man, you know.

Yeah, everyone apologizes in the DMs. That's the thing.

But I always say to them, I said, look, by I get it, people got a bad day, have a good time, whatever. But it's just, you know, self-satisfying. Yeah, whatever. Um, but, but I think that, uh, that is my takeaway.

Yeah.

Is that, you know, I, I even, uh, one time I was, uh, at a mall in Miami and some kid— I was walking with, uh, Plin and some kid like did a triple take like, yo, Pop! And he got real nervous or whatever. And, uh, what's up, man? What's your name? And he's like, uh, and whatever, but he wanted a picture. So he was just like, a picture? And I was like, sure, man. Took a picture. And, uh, he tweeted it but then deleted it, but he had tagged me, so I got the notification. So I saw who it was, whatever. So when I looked, he's been talking mad shit to me for like years. For like years.

I want to pick—

but I kind of respected it, right? I was like, look, man, you got real nervous because you're like, oh shit, does he know? But it was It was like this moment of where I was just like, you know, I'm not even mad, right? Like, whatever. But, uh, I always thought about DMing him, like, hey man, you shouldn't have put— now I know who you are. Yeah. So I just, you know, whatever. Let them, uh, let them have fun. And, uh, a lot of people just, you know, they got a bad day, whatever.

100%.

Good.

Thanks for the time, man. Been awesome seeing you grow. It makes me very happy seeing you crushing it. So thanks for coming on the pod.

Appreciate doing it.