Speaker 1: Welcome to Go Ask Ali, a production of Shonda Land
Speaker 1: Audio and partnership with I Heart Radio as a stand
Speaker 1: up comedian, of which I am not. I tried it.
Speaker 1: You are hilarious. I've been your fan forever. Hey, you
Speaker 1: know I should say right now, I'm married, so I'm
Speaker 1: off the table. We can do weekends. Get your bullshit
Speaker 1: detector and get it honed. Are you mad about something?
Speaker 1: Go out and seek people who are mad about related things,
Speaker 1: and also listen to them if part of what they're
Speaker 1: mad about is you. You actually look for those little
Speaker 1: colonels of hope they dump out of me. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: that's that's a good stuff. I think it is a
Speaker 1: good stuff, and I think we need a good stuff. Always.
Speaker 1: Welcome to go ask Allie. I'm Alli Wentworth and this
Speaker 1: season I'm digging into everything I can get my hands on,
Speaker 1: peeling back the layers and getting dirty, which takes us
Speaker 1: right to cryptocurrency. Talk about something that there are so
Speaker 1: many layers to peel off of, and there is an
Speaker 1: area of really getting dirty. First of all, what the
Speaker 1: hell is it? What is cryptocurrency? What is a bitcoin?
Speaker 1: Why are so many intelligent and wealthy people taking the
Speaker 1: risk of using or investing in a currency that doesn't
Speaker 1: actually exist. Well, it seems to be sticking around and
Speaker 1: people are talking about it. So Jesus, what am I
Speaker 1: missing here? I remember, my god, it was like a
Speaker 1: year ago, and I'm sure many of you read the story.
Speaker 1: This was the most terrifying, terrifying cautionary tale about a
Speaker 1: guy who had hundreds of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency,
Speaker 1: particularly in bitcoin, all locked in his wallet and apparently
Speaker 1: you have three password tries to unlock your wallet and
Speaker 1: get to your money, and he forgot his password and
Speaker 1: after his third try, instantly lost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Speaker 1: Now to me, this was like the movie Jaws of Finance,
Speaker 1: because it terrified me. I broke out in a cold sweat, thinking,
Speaker 1: oh my god, can you imagine the idea that you
Speaker 1: could have hard earned money that would just disappear in
Speaker 1: a second. So I'm putting my toe back in the water,
Speaker 1: and I want to learn about it. I want to
Speaker 1: understand it because maybe that will make me less afraid.
Speaker 1: And everybody says the man the crypto king is Michael Novograds.
Speaker 1: Why because he's the founder and CEO of Galaxy Digital,
Speaker 1: which is primarily focused on digital assets, cryptocurrencies, and blockchain technology.
Speaker 1: Don't freak out, We're gonna learn about this in a
Speaker 1: little while. He was formerly a partner and president of
Speaker 1: Fortress Investment Group and a partner at Goldman Sachs. Novogrod
Speaker 1: studied economics at Princeton University and served as a helicopter
Speaker 1: pilot in the U. S. Army. He's a badass. He
Speaker 1: also hosts a podcast Next with Novo Mike nomgrats, you
Speaker 1: are the crypto king. Everybody I've talked to says, oh,
Speaker 1: you want to talk about cryptocurrency? Talked to Mike, So
Speaker 1: thank you for being on the podcast. I mean, this
Speaker 1: is like when I first gave my mother the iPhone
Speaker 1: and she didn't know how to you. This is how
Speaker 1: I am with cryptocurrency. So this is cryptocurrency for dummies,
Speaker 1: cryptocurrency one oh one. You are going to walk me
Speaker 1: through this whole new wild West as if I'm eight
Speaker 1: years old. Okay, Okay, I'm gonna hit you with a
Speaker 1: hard one. What the hell is cryptocurrency? All right? So
Speaker 1: the genius of this guy, said Toshi Nakamoto, who wrote
Speaker 1: the paper the Bitcoin White Paper, who kind of invented cryptocurrency.
Speaker 1: But a while ago, right a few years ago, thirteen
Speaker 1: years ago, two thousand and eight, was that he created
Speaker 1: the first digital signature that you could encounterfeit. And if
Speaker 1: you think about what that means, like when you and
Speaker 1: I were growing up and wearing computers, you can control
Speaker 1: copy paste, and so if there was a hot picture
Speaker 1: of Ali Wentworth, I can make thousands of them instead
Speaker 1: of all my friends. I wish you did, and one
Speaker 1: would be no different than the next. And Satoshi, you know,
Speaker 1: use cryptography to create this system where I can do
Speaker 1: a digitally unique asset. And so there are twenty one
Speaker 1: million biitquot He created twenty one million digitally unique bitcoins.
Speaker 1: And all of a sudden, when something has scarcity, it
Speaker 1: has value, right, And so why are Picasso's so valuable
Speaker 1: Because they're not that many of them. There's a community
Speaker 1: of people that tell the narrative, tell the story of Picasso,
Speaker 1: right from um museums to gallerists to art historians. And
Speaker 1: there's a small group of people, probably less than a
Speaker 1: thousand on the planet that I ever even thought of
Speaker 1: buying a Picasso. But it creates value because if it's scarcity. Okay,
Speaker 1: So basically he created something that is finite. Yes, there's
Speaker 1: only a certain amount of bitcoin, and so, like you said,
Speaker 1: whenever there's something that there's a limited supply of, that's
Speaker 1: what we all want. So how many bitcoins are out there?
Speaker 1: Where are twenty one million total that will ever be mind?
Speaker 1: About nineteen million have been mined. And so what do
Speaker 1: you mean by mind? I told you this is Toddler time, right.
Speaker 1: So the way he decided to distribute bitcoin was he
Speaker 1: created a system where computers would have to solve mathematical problems,
Speaker 1: and if you solve the math problem, you get a bitcoin.
Speaker 1: And as there were less and less bitcoins, the problems
Speaker 1: would get harder and harder to solve, and the more
Speaker 1: people that tried to solve them, right, they get harder
Speaker 1: and harder to solve. And so it's really turning electricity
Speaker 1: into value because you need electricity to run these bitcoin
Speaker 1: mining machines, which are just computers that run really complicated
Speaker 1: math problems. So if I answer a math problem, I
Speaker 1: get a bitcoin. Yeah, you know, but it's a pretty
Speaker 1: complicated bathcom It's really just multiply two giant numbers times
Speaker 1: each other. Right, the bigger they are, the more computer
Speaker 1: power you need to do that. And so it wasn't
Speaker 1: like an intellectual It was raw horsepower of a computer
Speaker 1: using electricity to get a bitcoin. It was kind of
Speaker 1: a genius idea on how you would slowly dribble out
Speaker 1: the monetary supply because on day one he said, hey, here,
Speaker 1: twenty one million, how do you ever get any sense
Speaker 1: of narrative or story or scarcity coming up? But he
Speaker 1: he let them slowly be mind and mind is using
Speaker 1: these computers. That's it. So you're actually not digging anything.
Speaker 1: They call it buying because it feels like, you know,
Speaker 1: a bitcoin money, but the computer, the computer does all
Speaker 1: the work, so you're just sort of plugging it in.
Speaker 1: Your computer is rapidly trying to figure out the code
Speaker 1: that gets to the bitcoin, which is why everybody's buying
Speaker 1: those special basics chips. Chips. Yeah, that can make it
Speaker 1: go very fast. Okay, I understand it. I have to
Speaker 1: get one of those. You could have originally used a
Speaker 1: computer like your laptop. Now there are farms of these
Speaker 1: giant computers with the fastest chips in the world. Because
Speaker 1: if you have cheap electricity at a cheap chip and
Speaker 1: you run it really efficiently. You can mind bitcoin at
Speaker 1: much cheaper prices that they sell for. And so lots
Speaker 1: of people around the world, first and Chinese, but all
Speaker 1: over the world have spent forces building these giant data
Speaker 1: centers to mind bitcoin and that network of miners who
Speaker 1: spend lots of money. It creates the security in the system. Right,
Speaker 1: So bitcoin lives on a blockchain, all the blockshain is
Speaker 1: is a database, so I think like a Microsoft exceled database.
Speaker 1: But if you control the database, you can change the
Speaker 1: numbers all the time. Right, if it's just me and
Speaker 1: you that sharing the database, we could screw. Everybody else
Speaker 1: might changeing the numbers. If it's five of us, the
Speaker 1: five of us could collude to change the database. And
Speaker 1: so what bitcoin is is a distributed database. So everybody
Speaker 1: that runs one of these mining notes gets a copy
Speaker 1: of the database every ten minutes. And so as the
Speaker 1: new transactions are put onto the database, right, it's called hashed.
Speaker 1: They're hashed into the database. Uh, they're basically there permanently
Speaker 1: because you would have to convince twenty people all to
Speaker 1: change the input at the same time, which is almost impossible,
Speaker 1: or is impossible now it gets even more safe because
Speaker 1: the moment the next group of transactions gets put onto
Speaker 1: that blockchain, like the next block in the chain, it's
Speaker 1: even harder to go change the data from ten minutes earlier,
Speaker 1: twenty minutes earlier, thirty minutes earlier. And so these chains
Speaker 1: build on top of each other and really become permanent databases.
Speaker 1: Not just permanent, but publicly available. So you could look
Speaker 1: and you can see every transaction that's ever happened from
Speaker 1: day one of the bitcoin blockshane on what happened this address,
Speaker 1: set this many bitcoin to this address, and that gives transparency,
Speaker 1: and it gives a sense of finality, and so over
Speaker 1: time you're going to see more and more public data
Speaker 1: held on these things called blockchains. Uh. They came out
Speaker 1: of a period where people started losing trust, right, trust
Speaker 1: in our government, trust in banks. Remember the financial crisis.
Speaker 1: We all thought JP Morgan was going out of business,
Speaker 1: their Starns did go out of business, marilynch almost went
Speaker 1: out of business. And so this idea of trust authority
Speaker 1: people started questioning the The energy of this movement is
Speaker 1: gen z and millennial. It is an f you to
Speaker 1: the man, f you to the system, and you're cutting
Speaker 1: out the middleman, right, you're controlling it yourself. Yes. One
Speaker 1: thing that drives me crazy is like libertarian politicians love
Speaker 1: crypto and progressive don't. And I think libertarians love bitcoin
Speaker 1: because it's anti government and it's privacy, right, and so
Speaker 1: progressive should love it because it's cutting out the rent taker.
Speaker 1: And so I actually think it should be bipartisan, and
Speaker 1: the progressives don't have a great argument against it. It's
Speaker 1: more of an emotional reaction. And I think it was
Speaker 1: the early stories of bitcoin using too much electricity. Uh,
Speaker 1: in crypto, they have this word called FUD, which is,
Speaker 1: you know, obstructing the truth in lots of ways, fear
Speaker 1: obstruction and doubt fud. And so I was says, oh
Speaker 1: my god, bitcoin is gonna use all the electricity and
Speaker 1: the planet, which is not true. It uses like quite
Speaker 1: one two of the electricity, so a tiny amount, but
Speaker 1: there's a story that it's going to ruin the planet,
Speaker 1: and and they hooked onto those stories and never really
Speaker 1: did the homework. I'm like, dude, this is the most
Speaker 1: progressive thing we've seen in a long period of time. Right,
Speaker 1: It's going to take banking fees to zero right now?
Speaker 1: This year, Americans will spend eight billion dollars on bounce checks.
Speaker 1: Eight billion, and so it's attacks on the poor and
Speaker 1: that should be zero. You say it's attacks on the poor.
Speaker 1: But isn't cryptocurrency a rich man's game in general? I mean,
Speaker 1: is it all bought up? Now? Can I still get
Speaker 1: a bitcoin? Sure? You can? Matter of fact, it's interesting,
Speaker 1: but black Americans, uh, and Latino Americans hold a much
Speaker 1: bigger percentage of their wealth and crypto than white Americans do.
Speaker 1: Young people, by far hold a much bigger portion of
Speaker 1: their mouth. So it's really listen, there are rich guys
Speaker 1: like me that on a bunch of crypto. But when
Speaker 1: I look at it as an asset class, the progressive
Speaker 1: should love it. Right. It's black and brown and young.
Speaker 1: So why is everyone so scared of it? Then? Because
Speaker 1: what originally any new technology came out, it was associated
Speaker 1: with illicit activit these there was a thing called the
Speaker 1: Silk Road where you could, you know, buy drugs God forbid,
Speaker 1: or you know even worse um and people were using
Speaker 1: this thinking, oh, it's easy that the cops can't find me.
Speaker 1: I mean, the exactly opposite happened. When I said earlier,
Speaker 1: every transaction is publicly on the blockchain. There security companies
Speaker 1: now that help law enforcement figure out where the bitcoin went.
Speaker 1: But originally it had this reputation of being used for
Speaker 1: illicit stuff. Think about what we first used that the internet,
Speaker 1: Like seventy five cent of Internet traffic was born not mine,
Speaker 1: not mine, but other people's no I know, not yours,
Speaker 1: And so it got this reputation and people didn't do
Speaker 1: their homework. About a year ago, myself and a few
Speaker 1: other more senior guys in the space hired it got
Speaker 1: a Mike Morrell, who had thirty years in the sea,
Speaker 1: unbelievably respected and intelligence, and he did a about a
Speaker 1: forty five day report where he went and visited all
Speaker 1: the intelligence agencies, he had visited all the security companies,
Speaker 1: and came back with this conclusion that bitcoin is actually
Speaker 1: used far less than cash and less than the legacy
Speaker 1: banking system for a list of usages. And then if
Speaker 1: you're going to create a system to catch criminals, it
Speaker 1: would look like bitcoin because it's all on this public ledger.
Speaker 1: And so a lot of this is a pr battle
Speaker 1: we lost early, and again the demons haven't haven't kind
Speaker 1: of come up to speed on the reality. They're fighting
Speaker 1: against the story that's not true, got it? So what's
Speaker 1: the endgame with cryptocurrency, Like for somebody to invest in it,
Speaker 1: is it to get rich? Is it because it's going
Speaker 1: to be the new currency of which we're all gonna
Speaker 1: you know, buy and trade on. No. So I think
Speaker 1: cryptocurrency is a funny title because it incorporates a few
Speaker 1: different movements that are going on. So I think most
Speaker 1: people should buy some bitcoin as digital gold in the
Speaker 1: same way before bitcoint I would tell you to buy
Speaker 1: some gold. Right. We have a terrible budget deficit in America, right,
Speaker 1: it's a hundred of debt to GDP. When I started
Speaker 1: on Wall Street, it was closer to forty. And so
Speaker 1: this generation and charge, right the baby Boomers from Elizabeth Warren's,
Speaker 1: Joe Biden to Donald Trump, all of them, right, McConnell,
Speaker 1: this group that's been in charge for thirty years have
Speaker 1: pretty much bankrupted America. Right. So, so the amount of
Speaker 1: money are new generations o back is more than any
Speaker 1: American generation ever had to think about. Most likely, the
Speaker 1: only way that Deck gets paid back is through inflation,
Speaker 1: and we're seeing inflation right now, and so holding a
Speaker 1: hard asset, gold, bitcoin, real estate. That's really well when
Speaker 1: inflation eats away the rest of the value of your
Speaker 1: of your dollars and you're seeing it right now. The
Speaker 1: middle class is upset with Biden because milk is so expensive,
Speaker 1: so you get paid, you know, twenty an hour, thirty
Speaker 1: dollars an hour, and all of a sudden, gas is
Speaker 1: more expensive, milks or expensive oranges are more expensive, lumbers
Speaker 1: more expensive. You're like, shit, I'm losing my winning and
Speaker 1: so bitcoin has it in lation hedge or as a
Speaker 1: hedge against the basement, is something everyone should have in
Speaker 1: their portfolio. I don't think we're gonna use bitcoin to
Speaker 1: buy glasses or orange juice, but we are going to
Speaker 1: change our payment system to digital dollars, and we've already
Speaker 1: done that right Apple pay, vedbo, those are centralized platforms
Speaker 1: of digital dollars. My strong intuition is we're going to
Speaker 1: go to a crypto version of that, so venmost still bookkeeping,
Speaker 1: where crypto is you own it, you own it, and
Speaker 1: so you're gonna see and we already have the US
Speaker 1: dollar in token for there's a thing called U s
Speaker 1: d C and pretty soon on your phone you're you'll
Speaker 1: have a wallet, and your wallet will have your opera tickets,
Speaker 1: your bitcoin, your stocks that are held in token form,
Speaker 1: and your dollars and many other things. And so that's
Speaker 1: the transformation that's happening, and it's time for a short break. Great,
Speaker 1: let's get back to it. So bitcoin, Let's say I
Speaker 1: bought how are they sold? I bought six bitcoins or
Speaker 1: I bought three? Like, how does it work? If I'm
Speaker 1: investing or i'm buying. You can buy whatever dollar amount
Speaker 1: of bitcoin you want. A bitcoin right now is a
Speaker 1: roughly forty dollars per bitcoin. Let's say I buy one, right,
Speaker 1: I buy one? Yeah, so now I have a bitcoin? Yes?
Speaker 1: What am I doing with it? My husband leaves me
Speaker 1: for his secretary. We didn't pay our mortgage, but I
Speaker 1: have this bitcoin. So if you want to sell it
Speaker 1: for dollars, you can sell part of it. You can
Speaker 1: sell a half of it, a quarter of a tenth
Speaker 1: of it. If you bought it, like I bought it
Speaker 1: at a hundred dollars and now it's at forty thousand,
Speaker 1: and so if I sold it at forty two thousand,
Speaker 1: I have to pay tax on a difference between just
Speaker 1: like an equity. I think bitcoin can get up to
Speaker 1: five hundred thousand over the next five or six years,
Speaker 1: and so I would advocate to hold it. But I
Speaker 1: wouldn't tell you to put all of your money in
Speaker 1: bitcoin because you need money to you know, live and
Speaker 1: pay your rent and everything else. Do you think it's
Speaker 1: more of a sure thing than real estate. I think
Speaker 1: it's probably not more of a sure thing, but I
Speaker 1: think on a risk adjusted basis, it's a it's a
Speaker 1: better bet. I think real estate will go up in
Speaker 1: value as well. I just think bitcoin has a chance
Speaker 1: because we're so early in the adoption cycle. As more
Speaker 1: and more people adopt bitcoin, I think the prices can
Speaker 1: go much higher. But if I was younger and didn't
Speaker 1: have a lot of money, I put something in it
Speaker 1: went up twenty five So I put a thousand dollars
Speaker 1: and now it was worth fifty tho. I might sell
Speaker 1: it to buy my first house. I can't have all
Speaker 1: my money in it, so the impetus to sell is
Speaker 1: so strong with people, and this was one of those
Speaker 1: things you were just really bet atfited just to sit
Speaker 1: and hold better than if there's an expression in crypto
Speaker 1: called huddle hold on for dear life, Just hold Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're just in it for the long, long term. Like
Speaker 1: if I bought bitcoin today, I would just hold onto
Speaker 1: it and give it to my kids probably, right. Yes,
Speaker 1: there are people that will do that, and they literally
Speaker 1: have an identity. They're called Hoddlers. And so it's kind
Speaker 1: of funny that there's an entire lexicon language culture that's
Speaker 1: built up around this. You know, wag me is another one,
Speaker 1: wag me. We're all gonna make it. Or if you're
Speaker 1: a crypto skeptic, you're a n g M. I never
Speaker 1: gonna make it. It's a whole language. It's a whole language.
Speaker 1: So I have to go to the new school to
Speaker 1: learn this language so that I can trade in bitcoin,
Speaker 1: is what you're saying. Get on you gotta get on Twitter.
Speaker 1: What about forgery? Is there any kind of criminal um
Speaker 1: activity that you could see in this crypto world? Well, listen,
Speaker 1: there are a few ways that people got burned early.
Speaker 1: It wasn't the bitcoin themselves. It's impossible to crack the
Speaker 1: bitcoin code. But if you were a fly by night
Speaker 1: brokerage shop and you said, hey, buy your bitcoint with
Speaker 1: me and I'll store them for you, and you had
Speaker 1: them on your laptop, someone stole your laptop and you
Speaker 1: lost my bitcoin. And so you know, there's a whole
Speaker 1: industry of how people hold their bitcoin in non custodial wallets,
Speaker 1: and their wallets you get on the internet for free
Speaker 1: or if they're bigger amounts. We own a custodian called
Speaker 1: bit go that is the second largest custodian, And those
Speaker 1: safest places they take them off the internet. So they
Speaker 1: take them off the electronic ecosystem and put them in
Speaker 1: what's called cold storage. I used to when I first
Speaker 1: bought them, I had a safe in my room and
Speaker 1: we would take the computer and we put it in
Speaker 1: the safe, and we locked the safe in the locked room.
Speaker 1: And finally we had so much value. One of those
Speaker 1: guys from the army worked for me. He's like, well,
Speaker 1: how much is in there? And I started doing the
Speaker 1: math and he was like, we should get some like
Speaker 1: Mossan agents. So then we so that we realized we
Speaker 1: should put it into a cold storage place. So why
Speaker 1: couldn't I come up with the whole system where I go,
Speaker 1: it's carrots come by carrots, you know what I mean? Like,
Speaker 1: because everybody could sider create their own bitcoin world. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So people started thinking, well, if I can do that
Speaker 1: with these things called bitcoin, I can do it with art, right.
Speaker 1: N f t s are digital assets that are unique
Speaker 1: that live on a block shape. So let me tell
Speaker 1: us a story about There's this young woman, Irene Zoo,
Speaker 1: who is like a social media influencer, think of a
Speaker 1: young Paris Hilton, an Asian version. And about a year
Speaker 1: ago she started putting up sexy photos of herself, but
Speaker 1: very sweet, like funny little expressions all about crypto on
Speaker 1: both Twitter and Instagram. And because she was very witty,
Speaker 1: she was kind of playing a bit with everybody, and
Speaker 1: because she's very pretty, her following grew and grew, so
Speaker 1: now she has five hundred thousand Instagram followers a Twitter followers.
Speaker 1: So she issued n f t s like her own currency.
Speaker 1: An it's ten thousand of these pictures of her and
Speaker 1: she auctioned them off just recently the last couple of days,
Speaker 1: and what she in effect was doing was monetizing this
Speaker 1: community she's built out. We call them social tokens. Her
Speaker 1: breakthrough was she issued a social token in the form
Speaker 1: of an n f T. So an n f T
Speaker 1: is a unique object. She did ten thousand objects that
Speaker 1: were unique but all look the same, like you know,
Speaker 1: they were all versions of her. These things are now
Speaker 1: training at you know, ten to fifteen thousand dollars. Multiply
Speaker 1: that by ten thousand, right, So she's monetized this network.
Speaker 1: And so while it's not a currency, it's kind of
Speaker 1: like a currency. Right. You have one of the Team
Speaker 1: Irene cards and you're seeing that with so many different communities.
Speaker 1: So we have a joint venture with Major League Baseball
Speaker 1: called Candy and we're making digital memorabilure for baseball players.
Speaker 1: So instead of buying a baseball card, you're getting a
Speaker 1: n f T version are unique three dimensional object. We
Speaker 1: might do all the thousands of them, and then you
Speaker 1: know there's only a thousand, uh that collectors are buying,
Speaker 1: and they're buying because they think the price will go up,
Speaker 1: and so there's a gambling aspect to it, but there's
Speaker 1: also a collecting aspect to it. Last week alone, we
Speaker 1: just started this secondary marketplace where you can buy your
Speaker 1: old card for someone else's card. It did three million
Speaker 1: dollars of business. So this is using that technology of hey,
Speaker 1: I can create a scarce digital asset, doing it with
Speaker 1: somebody famous, a baseball player and creating a marketplace. And
Speaker 1: so it really is how can I connect community to
Speaker 1: each other? But young kids don't go to games? Right,
Speaker 1: If you'll go to baseball games, that's great, So how
Speaker 1: do I get young people at gage? So the baseball guys, Hey,
Speaker 1: we can get them engaged through this world of crypto
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, you're pulling them into their communities.
Speaker 1: I'm surprised, like Comic Con hasn't done this. They will,
Speaker 1: They will everyone in the big Marvel and Disney And
Speaker 1: what's why Facebook rename their company meta? Right, as we're
Speaker 1: moving into the metaverse, right, So what is the metaverse?
Speaker 1: The metaverse is this world that's beyond the reality. Right,
Speaker 1: So it's our phone, it's the screen. Pretty soon it's
Speaker 1: a r right. So I'm gonna have glasses. I might
Speaker 1: hit a button of my glass and you can be
Speaker 1: dressed in Gucci. All of a sudden, I'm like a
Speaker 1: nice Gucci. It will be digital Gucci, right, but I
Speaker 1: had to buy it, right, Yes, you'll have to buy
Speaker 1: the digital Gucci from the digital Gucci store. Right. And
Speaker 1: I can buy a house, yes, in this sort of
Speaker 1: fantasy world. Yeah, it's you don't find this somewhat. I
Speaker 1: find it unsettling, you know, I find at an adventure. Listen,
Speaker 1: if you look at how much tied kids spent on
Speaker 1: video games, and if you think about a world where
Speaker 1: labor is being replaced by electricity. Right, So when I
Speaker 1: say that labor is slowly being replaced by robots and computers,
Speaker 1: not tomorrow, but if you look five t any years
Speaker 1: and you just see it happening, humans are gonna have
Speaker 1: more and more free time. And part of that is plite,
Speaker 1: and part of that is living in a virtual world,
Speaker 1: and some of us making a living in a virtual world.
Speaker 1: You can envision a world where me and you are
Speaker 1: meeting instead of on zoom in some really cool Shanghai
Speaker 1: Ease bar in the metaverse, and I'm not looking at
Speaker 1: your picture, but I'm looking at your avatar, and you
Speaker 1: might be at Shanghai Ease, you know, twenty one year
Speaker 1: old that I'm flirting with and paying you tips and
Speaker 1: bitcoin as you're serving the beers, and you might make
Speaker 1: your living as a Shanghais bartendress. I mean that there's
Speaker 1: there's a thousand ways this is going. I would tell
Speaker 1: you it's going with an accelerating pace. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: you're getting a call. My what I talked to? Uh,
Speaker 1: what I talked to young people in the space. I'm
Speaker 1: like I originally thought, oh, like I get the metaverse. Well,
Speaker 1: like visit it, like we visited Amusing Park and they're like, dude,
Speaker 1: you're sold. Like we already live in the metaverse, and
Speaker 1: think about it. The next generation they call gend glass. Right,
Speaker 1: if you grow up with a phote in your hand,
Speaker 1: Like if you just watch the Dexterity, these young guys
Speaker 1: with their phone and their game, and that's just all accelerating.
Speaker 1: And why cryptos important is because all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: you'll be able to have scarce goods and ownership in
Speaker 1: that world. Like you can have a metaverse where we
Speaker 1: all just go and play, but if you want to
Speaker 1: own things, you create value there. That's where the blockchain
Speaker 1: comes into play. And what happens to the value of
Speaker 1: the tangible stuff in the quote unquote real world. That's
Speaker 1: really interesting, you know. So I have one friend who
Speaker 1: has literally spent ninety million dollars on what's called generative art.
Speaker 1: And this is art in the metaverse. This is not
Speaker 1: art hanging in his walls. Right, Well, he could take
Speaker 1: a piece and put on a giant screen. Generative art
Speaker 1: is art that's created by code. So these really creative
Speaker 1: guys right lines of code and they run it randomly
Speaker 1: and it generates a picture, and I'm like, WHOA, that's cool,
Speaker 1: and they'll sell that it's unique. He sold a bunch
Speaker 1: of his Renaissance paintings that he had been collected because
Speaker 1: he's like, no, young guys are gonna buy what he's
Speaker 1: grabbing the Renaissance paintings. So he's the first guy I
Speaker 1: know that sold old masters to buy maybe the new masters.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm fifty seven and I've just started buying art,
Speaker 1: and I I'm still buying a lot of tangible stuff,
Speaker 1: you know, like it feels better to be my generation.
Speaker 1: But I've also want sub n F T s. But
Speaker 1: the thought is your kids might not even look at
Speaker 1: the stuff you used to look at. Right, they're artists,
Speaker 1: will be digitally native people that they grew up with.
Speaker 1: Are you concerned at all about just human beings and
Speaker 1: socialization and in reality that kind of stuff, or you
Speaker 1: think this is where we're going and fasten your seatbelts.
Speaker 1: I think we're going this way. I am concerned at
Speaker 1: some right, and I'm again the older are you like,
Speaker 1: I actually like to have real sex, not internet sex.
Speaker 1: But it's funny. I I've literally seen the robots that
Speaker 1: are coming with faces that look like May and yours,
Speaker 1: And you can meet your shanghai Ese buddy and avatar
Speaker 1: and probably have that face projected on a robot like
Speaker 1: you saw a blade Runner too. So we're in this
Speaker 1: really weird world where humanity is going to start meshing
Speaker 1: with this Internet space. Um, but I don't think we
Speaker 1: have control over it, right And and financially, Bitcoin is
Speaker 1: like the first big leap into this world, right. It's
Speaker 1: the currency that we need to probably buy stuff. Bitcoin
Speaker 1: was then there's this second big thing called etherium. In
Speaker 1: some ways, ethereum is the currency of culture, so all
Speaker 1: the n f TEMs are bought with ether or ethereum.
Speaker 1: It's like Bitcoin, but it's a far more flexible and
Speaker 1: programmable blockchain. So I talked about that database that bitcoin
Speaker 1: all lives on a data base. It's a pretty rigid
Speaker 1: database that it was meant to be slow and expensive
Speaker 1: to use because you're securing value. Where this young Russian
Speaker 1: kid name Metallic had this idea is that we can
Speaker 1: use the same concept and make it much more flexible,
Speaker 1: so you can build contracts on it, put your music
Speaker 1: on it. You can do anything you want on this
Speaker 1: block shade and share things. And so that's the second
Speaker 1: largest ecosystem, and that right now is the currency of culture.
Speaker 1: And so if you're buying n f T, you're gonna
Speaker 1: have to buy it with Ether. Okay, we'll be right back,
Speaker 1: and we're back, So explain this to me, all right,
Speaker 1: I say, Mike, how do I get some Ether? Because
Speaker 1: I want to buy some ship? What do I do?
Speaker 1: What's the first thing? Do I google Ether? So you
Speaker 1: could set up a plane Base account, you could set
Speaker 1: up a Gemini account. How does somebody do that? You
Speaker 1: go online? The most downloaded apps on the app Store
Speaker 1: over the last two years have been these crypto companies
Speaker 1: that are taking retail accounts and setting them up so
Speaker 1: they can buy crypto like a retail brokerage account, and
Speaker 1: you put in dollars and you can buy whatever cryptocurrency
Speaker 1: you want, and then they hold it for you a wallet. Okay,
Speaker 1: And then when I decide I want to go buy
Speaker 1: something in the metaverse, I go to my crypto wallet
Speaker 1: and use that money to buy my cool Saint Barts
Speaker 1: shack on the beach. You are most likely at this
Speaker 1: point have a meta mask wallets and that will store
Speaker 1: your n f t s and your ether to buy
Speaker 1: your n f t s and so all of this
Speaker 1: stuff is still relatively do and so what you're gonna
Speaker 1: see in the next few years is the user experience
Speaker 1: get so much better and the complexity get bled it away.
Speaker 1: Like when you watch TV, you don't have the TV works.
Speaker 1: It was like, it's the TV right right right. In
Speaker 1: ten years, crypto is going to be the same way.
Speaker 1: You're like, there's not gonna be I need a metal
Speaker 1: masks wallet and I'm using it's all gonna be much
Speaker 1: more fluid. Uh. You have to remember we're literally thirteen
Speaker 1: years after Bitcoin and about eight years into the ethereum world,
Speaker 1: and so it's a really young industry. Why I'm so
Speaker 1: optimistic on it is I look out. I have five
Speaker 1: sixty employees now, and we're hiring the best and brightest
Speaker 1: from where we want. Like when I started being crypto,
Speaker 1: we didn't have that kind of talent. But now you
Speaker 1: can hire anyone you want, and we don't know all
Speaker 1: from standing. We get some off Twitter, you know, these
Speaker 1: what they call crypto dgens degenerates have just spent all
Speaker 1: their days learning about what's happening, and so it's become
Speaker 1: a movement. But it's got unbelievable human capitalvoying it to
Speaker 1: it and money. So there's been over sixty billion dollars
Speaker 1: of venture in the space this year. And so markets
Speaker 1: can go up and down, but it's hard not to
Speaker 1: see this thing accelerating. And does the cryptocurrency market go
Speaker 1: up and down? It does, Yeah, it does. Bitcoin was
Speaker 1: sixty nine thousand three months ago and we all felt, oh,
Speaker 1: it's so great, and now it's forty two, and so
Speaker 1: it's like, oh, it's not as great again. If you
Speaker 1: bought it in a hundred, you still feel like a hero.
Speaker 1: If you bought it at sixty, you feel like spinning up.
Speaker 1: And so, just like any market, you have to make
Speaker 1: sure you don't buy it hysteria. But my strong advice
Speaker 1: to people who are getting started as take two two
Speaker 1: to three percent of their net worth and put it
Speaker 1: in and and don't buy it and sell it. Sit
Speaker 1: with it, and that will force you to start watching
Speaker 1: and pay attention to what's happening. Maybe by half bitcoin
Speaker 1: and a half a theory of work by a third bitcoin,
Speaker 1: a third etherory, and a third Galaxy stock. That's our
Speaker 1: company had to take a pitch um, but it forces you.
Speaker 1: Once you have skin in the game, you start paying attention.
Speaker 1: What do you see ten years from now? What is
Speaker 1: what does this whole world look like to you? You're
Speaker 1: probably not going to be on podcasts explaining it anymore.
Speaker 1: You're gonna be on podcasts talking about our new president
Speaker 1: that is a robot. It's interesting cryptos moving into politics, right,
Speaker 1: so you know, like there's sixty million Americans, mostly young,
Speaker 1: that care about crypto. That's a big constituency. And so
Speaker 1: you're seeing people wake up. Also, you'll see a bunch
Speaker 1: of candidates in this mentorm that will come out in
Speaker 1: terms of like the wealth disparity in our country. Is
Speaker 1: it taken by people that understand this world as a
Speaker 1: level playing field? No, people listen. I think the ethos
Speaker 1: of this space is collaborative. It's open source, it's transparent, uh,
Speaker 1: and it's a galitarian. People went into this to build
Speaker 1: a better world. They're not dumb. If you didn't have
Speaker 1: money to buy it, it it was part There's been about
Speaker 1: two trillion dollars of wealth created in the last ten years,
Speaker 1: really in the last five years. A lot of that
Speaker 1: is disproportionately owned by young people relative to what they
Speaker 1: would have made in this dock market. But if you
Speaker 1: think about the baby boom, are still on most of
Speaker 1: the money in this world and in our country. And
Speaker 1: so again, it didn't fix those problems overnights, but it is.
Speaker 1: It is helping some, and it's got the potential to
Speaker 1: help more. And so why politicians quickly learned not to
Speaker 1: screw with the crypto community is because they're so passionate.
Speaker 1: So if I were running for president, I would say,
Speaker 1: I'm pro cryptocurrency, and I'm going to get rid of
Speaker 1: all your student debt. And then I'm in. Yes, i
Speaker 1: am in the White House. You're on your way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So here's my last thing I will read about. So
Speaker 1: I graduated college seven Right, if you want to think
Speaker 1: about globalization or the baby boomer air, it starts, call it.
Speaker 1: Clinton becomes president Clinton, Bush, Trump, all born the same year.
Speaker 1: Think with that at twenty years of representation of that
Speaker 1: one birthday. Right, if you think about the way it works,
Speaker 1: you're supposed to get one year representation. And so this
Speaker 1: group of leader we've had for thirty years has taken
Speaker 1: our country from AT to GDP, has taken inequality to
Speaker 1: something that felt pretty normal to something that feels like,
Speaker 1: you know, pre French revolution, right with the most inequal
Speaker 1: we've ever been. We've taken our planet from something that
Speaker 1: felt stable to now. I keep being told in ten
Speaker 1: years the planet's gonna melt down. The average American man
Speaker 1: and woman has gave thirty five pounds since I graduated
Speaker 1: from college. The average American woman is now five ft
Speaker 1: four hundred seventy pounds. So we have a we have
Speaker 1: an obesity and health ependemic. So all on the watch
Speaker 1: of Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump and Bill Clinton and
Speaker 1: Hillary and so what I say to the crypto kids,
Speaker 1: because I hear it is like enough enough of this generation,
Speaker 1: the selfish generation of baby boomers that have done a
Speaker 1: ship jobs stewarding our economy. It's time for them to
Speaker 1: get off the stage and letting new people try new ideas.
Speaker 1: Why crypto won't go away, because that's the energy, and
Speaker 1: they're so sick that even vote amost and that we're
Speaker 1: just gonna build our own system. But there's such a
Speaker 1: lack of humility amongst our current group of leaders. I'm
Speaker 1: supposed to be in charge, Well, you guys have done
Speaker 1: a ship job, you know, and listen, I'm a baby
Speaker 1: poop were by thirty four days November four. So it
Speaker 1: pisces me off, like I identify as gen Z and
Speaker 1: I'm really a custper. I'm really a custper. But I
Speaker 1: think politically we're stuck in this world of eighty year
Speaker 1: old and seventy eight year old politicians who don't even understand,
Speaker 1: you know, how to log you do an iPhone? Haven't
Speaker 1: done right? That's really interesting and I think that that's
Speaker 1: what originally excited you about all of this. There's a
Speaker 1: sense of revolution, yes, exactly. Like there was a thing
Speaker 1: called Constitution Dow where there was a constitution for sale.
Speaker 1: A dow was like a company. It's a decentralized, autonomous realization,
Speaker 1: but think of it like a company. Knew how much
Speaker 1: constitution would be. So these young kids they all pledged
Speaker 1: money to a nonprofit two dollars on average to buy
Speaker 1: the Constitution, and then they were going to have a
Speaker 1: group of people who were more scholarly that got to
Speaker 1: decide what museums they would lend it to and but
Speaker 1: it was kind of like give it back to the people.
Speaker 1: And they raised forty three million dollars in three days Jesus,
Speaker 1: and they almost bought it. One hedge fun guy decided
Speaker 1: he was going to buy it and pay more. But
Speaker 1: it was such a beautiful story. It was like, hey, again,
Speaker 1: hit the spirit of the ethos of community and giving.
Speaker 1: And if you ask gen Z, they think the Constitution
Speaker 1: should be owned by the people, not by some rich billionaire.
Speaker 1: It's just it's a different ethos than baby boomers. We're
Speaker 1: we're looking at doing something that with dinosaurs right, used
Speaker 1: to be like a great macho thing. My Ramarable, who
Speaker 1: was the co founder of of one of the early
Speaker 1: Microsoft guys, has three Tyritosaurus rexism. When we first saw
Speaker 1: were like that guy's the coolest guy on the planet.
Speaker 1: If you ask nineteen year old son, you'd be like,
Speaker 1: the guys a douche. Like you have toranos source trecks
Speaker 1: that is living room for that should be in a
Speaker 1: museum or share with the people. And so there's this
Speaker 1: conscious shift at I think you're seeing. And these block
Speaker 1: chain ecosystems allow governance to be built into the rule
Speaker 1: system and so you know, it'll be really interesting to
Speaker 1: watch how the world shifts around how we organized ourselves. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: it's this part of it I'm fascinated by. And you
Speaker 1: have definitely educated me, and I appreciate it so much, Mike,
Speaker 1: because I have spent all this time asking you a
Speaker 1: million questions on my podcast, I then let the guests
Speaker 1: ask me a question, and you can ask me a
Speaker 1: question about anything. What's your favorite restaurant in New York
Speaker 1: Rio's Wow. Yeah, I would have to say Rails, but
Speaker 1: you know, I have to know somebody to, you know,
Speaker 1: go eat there. But I like any place that has
Speaker 1: like a mafia vibe to it and just a lot
Speaker 1: of parmesan cheese and pasta. What's your favorite restaurant we're
Speaker 1: debating that. I like, Oh, well, that's that's my second.
Speaker 1: That's where Georgia and I go every year on our
Speaker 1: anniversary steak free red wine. Yeah, for Federal Roles. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's my second favorite. Alright, good stuff. I'm going to
Speaker 1: go buy bitcoin. Okay, thank you, thank you? Is it working?
Speaker 1: I have to be honest. I was slightly overwhelmed by
Speaker 1: the topic cryptocurrency, and I had listened to a few podcasts,
Speaker 1: and I'd read a bunch of articles about it, and
Speaker 1: I was still very confused. But I feel like I
Speaker 1: understand it now. I feel like, yes, it's it's the
Speaker 1: wild West, but I have a horse and a saddle
Speaker 1: and I can sort of ride my way through a
Speaker 1: little bit. Um. I guess it's the future. I mean,
Speaker 1: I that's what I'm getting. And the more I think
Speaker 1: about it, it saddens me the idea that we're going
Speaker 1: to live in some kind of matrix world. But I
Speaker 1: do think we have to educate our younger generations, you know.
Speaker 1: And I was I was sitting here talking to Mike,
Speaker 1: and I thought, I've got to sit my girls down
Speaker 1: and go, you have to understand this world. You have
Speaker 1: to understand it so that a you're not afraid of
Speaker 1: it and be if it truly is the future, you
Speaker 1: have to get on that wagon. And they might want
Speaker 1: to buy a time share and the Jersey Shore. In
Speaker 1: the metaverse, I will be in assisted living, but my
Speaker 1: children this might be part of their new world if
Speaker 1: they're not living on Mars with Elon Musk. My big
Speaker 1: takeaway is to understand always, to understand what's going on,
Speaker 1: To understand cryptocurrency is a way to just participate in
Speaker 1: what's happening in the future. As always, thank you for
Speaker 1: listening to Go Ask Alli. Be sure to subscribe, rate
Speaker 1: and review the podcast, and follow me on social media
Speaker 1: on Twitter at Ali e Wentworth and on Instagram at
Speaker 1: the Real Ali Wentworth. Now if you'd like to ask
Speaker 1: me a question or is it just a guest or
Speaker 1: a topic to dig into, I would love to hear
Speaker 1: from you, and there's a bunch of ways to do it.
Speaker 1: You can call or text me at three to three
Speaker 1: three six four six three five six, or you can
Speaker 1: email a voice memo right from your phone to Go
Speaker 1: Ask Aali podcast at gmail dot com. If you leave
Speaker 1: a question, you may hear it. I'm Go Ask Alli.
Speaker 1: Go Ask Gali is a production of Shonda land Audio
Speaker 1: and partnership with I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from
Speaker 1: Shondaland Audio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.