Speaker 1: This is Masters in Business with Barry Ridholts on Boomberg Radio.
Speaker 1: This week on the podcast, I have a special guest,
Speaker 1: my friend Paul Vigna has been a reporter with The
Speaker 1: Wall Street Journal for a hundred and twenty years. He
Speaker 1: is the author of multiple books on blockchain cryptocurrency bitcoin.
Speaker 1: This is an area that is quite fascinating and a
Speaker 1: little bit wonky, and if you are at all interested
Speaker 1: in a crash course, I heartily recommend both of his books,
Speaker 1: or you could spend the next ninety minutes listening to
Speaker 1: us chat about all sorts of things involving bitcoin. And
Speaker 1: to be honest, it's really me asking Poul questions and
Speaker 1: him taking me to school about, uh, some of the
Speaker 1: details history minutia about bitcoin. I am really intrigued at
Speaker 1: how he breaks the entire blockchain slash bitcoin discussion into
Speaker 1: three distinct groups. The first is the underlying software, the
Speaker 1: technology of the distributed ledger a k A blockchain. Uh,
Speaker 1: that's one. The second is really the fascinating group of
Speaker 1: um cyberpunks and libertarians and and just generally kind of
Speaker 1: wacky dudes. And it's mostly dudes who um become enamorative
Speaker 1: bitcoin in the early days and help take it viral
Speaker 1: from this open source software program to really a a
Speaker 1: full blown phenomena and now arguably a bubble in in
Speaker 1: the actual coins itself. And that's the third part. The
Speaker 1: bit coins, the transactions, the mania surrounding the trading. That's
Speaker 1: a different issue than either the people behind it or
Speaker 1: or the technology underlying it. I found the conversation fascinating.
Speaker 1: I think you will also, with no further ado, my
Speaker 1: conversation Nation with Paul Vinya. This is Master's in Business
Speaker 1: with Barry rid Holts on Bloomberg Radio. I'm Barry Ridhults.
Speaker 1: You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My
Speaker 1: guest today is Paul Viena. For the past twenty years
Speaker 1: he has been a journalist covering markets in the economy
Speaker 1: for such August outfits as Dow Jones and The Wall
Speaker 1: Street Journal. He is the co author, with Michael Casey,
Speaker 1: of two fascinating books on blockchain and bitcoin. His first
Speaker 1: book was The Age of Cryptocurrency, How Bitcoin Is Challenging
Speaker 1: the Global Economy, and his latest book, The Truth Machine,
Speaker 1: Blockchain and the Future of Everything, was just released to
Speaker 1: excellent reviews. Paul Viena. Welcome to Bloomberg, Barry Hults, how
Speaker 1: are you very very well, let's let's jump right into
Speaker 1: the bitcoin conversation. And you know more about this than
Speaker 1: just about anybody I know. That's a totally untrue statement.
Speaker 1: Well you don't, I know, I know something, I know
Speaker 1: some about it. Well you don't know the people I know,
Speaker 1: and apparently everybody else knows less than you. So it's
Speaker 1: a flawa running. That's right. But let me ask you
Speaker 1: this question. What was the initial idea behind the entire
Speaker 1: concept of bitcoin? The initial idea that So this comes
Speaker 1: out in October two thousand and eight, some guy names
Speaker 1: to Toshi Nakamoto. Nobody knows who he is? Is that
Speaker 1: a real name? Is that us? Nobody knows what his
Speaker 1: real name is? Who he is? If it's a team
Speaker 1: of people, you know, it's it's a whole mystery. So
Speaker 1: this white paper comes out to Toshy Nakamoto, uh bitcoin A.
Speaker 1: I forget the exact title, but basically the point is
Speaker 1: what he is creating is a digital version of cash. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, if you're a shopkeeper and I come
Speaker 1: in for a cup of coffee or whatever, I hand
Speaker 1: you a five dollar bill. That is the transaction. What
Speaker 1: Knakamoto was trying to do was replicate that transaction digitally
Speaker 1: on the internet, meaning no paper, no credit card, no
Speaker 1: no paper, no credit card, and also an immediate transaction
Speaker 1: between just you and I that nobody else sees another
Speaker 1: word party, government, no banks, no credit card, nobody exactly,
Speaker 1: just buyer and seller, right, just buyer and seller, peer
Speaker 1: to peer electronic money. That was the original idea. It
Speaker 1: sounds like a good idea. It sounds like a good idea,
Speaker 1: sounds like a simple idea, right. And and remember this
Speaker 1: is two thousand and eight, right in the middle of
Speaker 1: the financial crisis, where confidence in banks and governments or
Speaker 1: record lows. So alright, so he comes up publishes this
Speaker 1: white paper. How do you get from and where was
Speaker 1: the white paper published? We just released it online just
Speaker 1: to Originally it was to this uh, I think it
Speaker 1: was on an email list, sir, you know, one of
Speaker 1: those distributions. So, so, how do you get from a
Speaker 1: white paper to an actual blockchain technology g and a
Speaker 1: coin that starts to appreciate in value almost immedia. So
Speaker 1: what the white paper was describing was a computer program,
Speaker 1: and the goal of the computer program was to create
Speaker 1: this digital money, this peer to peer electronic version of cash.
Speaker 1: So he releases the white paper in October two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight and puts the program online. So he set
Speaker 1: up the program. Was more than a white paper, It
Speaker 1: was a paper describing what he's doing. He wrote the
Speaker 1: program too, puts the program online in January of two
Speaker 1: thousand and nine as an open source project where and
Speaker 1: anyone is open to participate in building it. So let's
Speaker 1: describe that. So building the software or building the coins themselves. Well,
Speaker 1: the software, So you know, he releases version zero point
Speaker 1: zero of bitcoin, and what he is looking for our collaborators.
Speaker 1: He's looking for people to come on and help develop
Speaker 1: the program. In other words, again, you know a company
Speaker 1: like Microsoft, like Apple, whatever, they have teams of developer
Speaker 1: building a thousand. This is a a different kind of
Speaker 1: version of that. You're talking about developing a software program,
Speaker 1: but you're looking for collaborators like Linux is a great
Speaker 1: example of it of an open source program. So that's
Speaker 1: what he releases. And again it's it's very key I
Speaker 1: think that you mentioned this is all happening during the
Speaker 1: financial crisis. This is a time where the the existing
Speaker 1: financial infrastructure has shown that it is just hopelessly conflicted,
Speaker 1: hopelessly corrupted. In this Philip Right, we could do a
Speaker 1: whole radio show on just that. I could write a
Speaker 1: book on it. You could write a book on some
Speaker 1: of us have right bailout nation. People are interested in
Speaker 1: alternatives the existing the warts of the existing system have
Speaker 1: been shown. People are looking for an alternative. He comes
Speaker 1: up with an alternative and people take to it, and
Speaker 1: it kind of goes viral. It takes a little while,
Speaker 1: but inside this community of uh they call him cipher punks,
Speaker 1: you know, anarchists, libertarians, coders, tinkerers, this small clack, this
Speaker 1: thing does go viral and it starts getting this community
Speaker 1: very quickly around. Initially a lot of skepticism, but once
Speaker 1: it goes live and they see it working, people start
Speaker 1: coming on and and and originally what you have is
Speaker 1: a lot of again tinkerers, programmers, anarchists, cypherpunk's. This small
Speaker 1: group it grows within that probably takes a couple of
Speaker 1: years until it starts hitting the mainstream. So let's talk
Speaker 1: about that period before it ramps into the mainstream. You
Speaker 1: download the software you want to create coins, so you
Speaker 1: have to solve a complicated mathematical problem, and there's only
Speaker 1: a finite number of potential coins twenty one millions, right,
Speaker 1: what bitcoin has? It's really actually and to degreed to
Speaker 1: the degree that I understand coding and programming at all, Uh,
Speaker 1: it's really it's a very elegant program. The idea is
Speaker 1: to create a program that can support a currency, a
Speaker 1: digital currency that does not need a centralized party controlling it.
Speaker 1: In other words, you don't have a computer company running
Speaker 1: the software and responsible for it. You don't have a
Speaker 1: government or a bank running the software, responsible for the
Speaker 1: software and the currency. You have to come up with
Speaker 1: a way to create a system that can opt that
Speaker 1: can be self self sustaining by this sort of decentralized
Speaker 1: group of people. So within that there are a bunch
Speaker 1: of ways that he There are a bunch of levers
Speaker 1: that he pulls to make that happen. One of them
Speaker 1: is you you want to you want to you want
Speaker 1: people to come on or you want to people to
Speaker 1: download the software. You want people to run it. You
Speaker 1: need people to run the software for the program to work, obviously, right,
Speaker 1: how do you do that? How do you entice people
Speaker 1: to contribute their computing power to a volunteer project. Well,
Speaker 1: one way you do it is your reward them. What
Speaker 1: do you reward them with bitcoin? So the way bitcoin
Speaker 1: is created is you download the software. You are contributing
Speaker 1: your computing power to the network. What you are really
Speaker 1: doing is you are confirming transactions. That's sort of the
Speaker 1: live operation of this software is you and I trade, Right,
Speaker 1: So my mobile app on my phone, I used to
Speaker 1: send you five bitcoin. Now five bitcoin would be like
Speaker 1: a hundred thousand dollars. I'm not sending you that. Then
Speaker 1: it was pennies. How did that leap from that period
Speaker 1: to bursting into the mainstream? So the program is released
Speaker 1: in two thousand and nine, two thousand nine, two ten.
Speaker 1: It is like I said that this small group of
Speaker 1: codas tinkerers, programmers, anarchists, libertarians, cypher punks, uh and the currency.
Speaker 1: And you know it's funny people argue, is that a
Speaker 1: currency is not whatever I'm gonna call it a currency.
Speaker 1: For um, it really had no actual value, right, I
Speaker 1: mean it was it was a program that these guys
Speaker 1: were using. There was nothing in the real world you
Speaker 1: could do with it. You could argue that any currency's
Speaker 1: value is only the populace is willingness to assign it
Speaker 1: a value. Well, of course, right, So so no currency
Speaker 1: has a value unless people are willing to use it
Speaker 1: as a medium of exactly the very first time bitcoin
Speaker 1: gets used to buy something in the real world is
Speaker 1: programmer in Florida. Uh, this programmer and Florida, Da says
Speaker 1: that he on a on a message board. He says,
Speaker 1: I will give anyone ten thousand bitcoin if you'll buy
Speaker 1: me two pizzas. So, in other words, he wants to
Speaker 1: show that bitcoin can be used to buy things, but
Speaker 1: he can't do it directly because no one's gonna take
Speaker 1: a bitcoin because to start out, it's just amongst that.
Speaker 1: It's just among the uh, the pizza places don't have
Speaker 1: a bitcoin swipe here for bitcoin. So this guy, and
Speaker 1: it's a pretty famous story, you know, he has this
Speaker 1: open offer. He says, I'll give anyone ten thousand bitcoin
Speaker 1: if you buy me two pizzas. And he does that
Speaker 1: for about two weeks, and people are sending pizzas to
Speaker 1: his house and he's sending them ten thousand, multiple pizzas,
Speaker 1: multiple pizzas. Yeah, the first one was I forget that
Speaker 1: early in May, and then he kept this thing open
Speaker 1: for about two weeks and he probably you know, spent
Speaker 1: about two hundred thousand bitcoin on it, which is to
Speaker 1: day of fortune God. But that was the first time
Speaker 1: that it was proven that you could actually use this
Speaker 1: to buy something in the world, real world, It could
Speaker 1: actually work as a currency. At that point it starts changing.
Speaker 1: Now people realize there's something here, and of course at
Speaker 1: the very beginning, it's really only being used basically on
Speaker 1: the dark web, right, I mean, people who want to
Speaker 1: buy and sell things sociately. He was the early criticism
Speaker 1: that I recall hearing about this is used for drugs,
Speaker 1: this is used for human trafficking, this is used to
Speaker 1: buy hitmen, this is used for all sorts of nefarious things,
Speaker 1: and there for it will never be incredible well product.
Speaker 1: I mean, the answer to that is there are two
Speaker 1: answers to that. The first answer is, yes, it is
Speaker 1: being used for that, but that is not the main
Speaker 1: It really isn't the main use of it. It's still there.
Speaker 1: And look, we're in the media. We love sensational stories
Speaker 1: and we tell those stories, but it really is a
Speaker 1: very small percentage of overall bitcoin track and the dollars
Speaker 1: so is the year. I mean, every currency is used,
Speaker 1: So that's not really criticism of bitcoin, that's a criticism
Speaker 1: of currency. Right, So people start realizing this can be
Speaker 1: used to buy and sell things. And what is the
Speaker 1: price of bitcoin back then? Oh, I think it's in
Speaker 1: the single dollars. It's in the single dollar. I mean,
Speaker 1: if we pulled up the chart, we could find out, uh,
Speaker 1: it's in the it's it is in single dollars around
Speaker 1: the same time, and we're not to go into the hold.
Speaker 1: But anyhow, in it starts getting out of this small
Speaker 1: sort of cipher on uh programm or community, and it
Speaker 1: starts permeating a little bit into the mainstream really into
Speaker 1: sort of more the the the tech press, the tech mainstream.
Speaker 1: From there probably around starts hitting the mainstream mainstream. Because
Speaker 1: I remember first reading about it in early July, it
Speaker 1: finally gets over ten dollars exactly ten dollars, right, so
Speaker 1: inteen it kind of has its first wave of mainstream
Speaker 1: uh awareness, almost runs by November that year, it's just
Speaker 1: under a thousand dollars itself. Is a great run from
Speaker 1: ten box. Now. Yeah, also remember too, and your audience
Speaker 1: will appreciate this and you will too. The thing you
Speaker 1: have to keep in mind when you're talking about bitcoin
Speaker 1: in the price of it, you have to keep in
Speaker 1: mind that this is still a relatively small market, a
Speaker 1: relatively a liquid market, and it is a relatively one
Speaker 1: way market, meaning you could buy it, but it's very
Speaker 1: hard to actually convert that into cash. Yeah, it's well,
Speaker 1: it's difficult to convert into cash. It's difficult to sell it.
Speaker 1: Uh it. You know, they're look, they're just starting to
Speaker 1: build derivative products, they're just starting to build different more
Speaker 1: more you know, intricate ways to bet on, bick on
Speaker 1: things that are in the market right now. It is
Speaker 1: also a market that run has no there's no closing bell,
Speaker 1: there's no circuit breakers. It goes in whatever direction it is.
Speaker 1: It is wild West of trade. If you like open markets,
Speaker 1: there has never been a more open market than this
Speaker 1: you have, So you have to keep that in mindment
Speaker 1: talking about the price. The price can go in crazy
Speaker 1: directions because of those reasons. But it goes from ten
Speaker 1: to eighty, back down or whatever. Then you know, in
Speaker 1: the second half of the year it goes up to
Speaker 1: almost a thousand. You have an exchange called mount Cox
Speaker 1: which was handling about seven year eighty percent of all
Speaker 1: the trading and Mount Cox was a terribly created financial exchange.
Speaker 1: It was just bad. It was not they call not secure,
Speaker 1: are not well built, not well constructed, and all the
Speaker 1: money is going through it, so the liquidity there is
Speaker 1: almost nothing. So when Mount Cock shuts down and you
Speaker 1: can't get your money out easily, what do you do
Speaker 1: to get your money out? What you gotta offer higher prices,
Speaker 1: really higher prices just a big reason why to sell.
Speaker 1: So you're offering higher prices to sell or lower I
Speaker 1: would think you're offering lower prices to sell the only
Speaker 1: way you can get it out because withdrawals were limited,
Speaker 1: so and it was thin. There was not a lot
Speaker 1: of liquidity, so you know, you gotta entice people to sell,
Speaker 1: so you're offering higher prices. So the price goes flying up.
Speaker 1: It kind of comes down a little bit. Now you're
Speaker 1: now you're starting to get more and more in the mainstream.
Speaker 1: People are seeing it and you what you have though,
Speaker 1: is again still longer. It's still completely a volunteer community.
Speaker 1: I mean, this thing is just being built by volunteers,
Speaker 1: by volunteer coders. You're starting to have some people realize
Speaker 1: that there's money to be aid here. And you're starting
Speaker 1: to have people try to build businesses on top of bitcoin,
Speaker 1: and that was sort of the um and that was
Speaker 1: sort of the first time you have some infrastructure being
Speaker 1: put around this computer program that I was talking about before.
Speaker 1: And importantly too, I think there are I think there
Speaker 1: are a couple of things that you have to keep
Speaker 1: in mind when you're talking about bitcoin, and I think
Speaker 1: this is why people kind of get so screwed up
Speaker 1: about it. There are really three main things there. And again,
Speaker 1: this is one of the reasons why I love this
Speaker 1: so much as a writer. There are so many angles,
Speaker 1: there are so many stories. You have to keep in mind.
Speaker 1: A couple of things. One, this is a computer program.
Speaker 1: That is really what this is. If Microsoft in two
Speaker 1: thousand and nine had said, hey, you know what, We've
Speaker 1: come out with a new feature on Excel that will
Speaker 1: allow people to run a shared database that will be
Speaker 1: all all your transactions that you put onto This database
Speaker 1: will be recorded, an exact copy, will be distributed to
Speaker 1: everybody in real time, and it will be cryptographically secure.
Speaker 1: It will be impossible to counterfeit, to create false entries.
Speaker 1: It is an open source, a transparent database that an
Speaker 1: entire community can run and can feel confident that it's
Speaker 1: real and well. You would have said, Okay, that's nice,
Speaker 1: and Microsoft probably would have done well, and you would
Speaker 1: have said, oh, Sati has come up with a new product.
Speaker 1: You know, he's really doing a good job over at Microsoft,
Speaker 1: and that would have been the end of it. It
Speaker 1: would have been a nice program. However, what you have
Speaker 1: with bitcoin is you have the program, you have the
Speaker 1: time that it was released. Like you said, people looking
Speaker 1: for alternative way to do things, so you have this
Speaker 1: sort of viral community grow up around it. Personally, I
Speaker 1: think bitcoin is one of the three big social movements
Speaker 1: that erupted out of two thousand and eight. You have
Speaker 1: the tea party you had to occupy, and you have bitcoin.
Speaker 1: Bitcoin is a social movement and that is why people
Speaker 1: are so passionate about it. This is not just a
Speaker 1: computer program, This is not just digits, ones and zeros.
Speaker 1: This is a new way to build finance, to build
Speaker 1: a financial infrastructure. That's fascinating. Let's talk a bit about
Speaker 1: your career as a journalist covering markets and the economy
Speaker 1: and how that morphed into your coverage on bitcoin. How
Speaker 1: did you get into financial journalism, what what led you
Speaker 1: to your first first gig. Oh my god. Well, I
Speaker 1: mean it was quite simply. It was money, but not
Speaker 1: for the reason that you might think most people get
Speaker 1: into finance. I was just Look, I was working at
Speaker 1: a weekly newspaper. I had done been there a few years,
Speaker 1: making no real money. You make no money at community journalism.
Speaker 1: It's fun, it's a good place to learn the ropes,
Speaker 1: but you make no money at it. So I needed
Speaker 1: a job orr I can make some money. Dal Jones
Speaker 1: was hiring. It was a doctor. It was so everybody
Speaker 1: was everybody was hiring. Dal Jones was hiring editors. So
Speaker 1: I took the editing test. I passed the editing test.
Speaker 1: I knew nothing about finance. I did not go to
Speaker 1: school for finance. Really, I didn't know. No, I didn't
Speaker 1: study it at all. I literally passed the editing test.
Speaker 1: So they hired me as an editor, and my first
Speaker 1: job was rewriting press releases. And that's what I did.
Speaker 1: That's how I started out, rewriting press releases. How did
Speaker 1: you end up at what was so few young uns
Speaker 1: out there? The U C I LX terminals and other
Speaker 1: such um quote machines and the news feed would have
Speaker 1: a constant stream of of stories. But my favorite feedback
Speaker 1: in the nineties was Dow Jones market Talk, which were
Speaker 1: all these little blurby stories about what was going on
Speaker 1: in the market. It was Twitter before there was Twitter
Speaker 1: for it was finance Twitter before there was such a thing. Um,
Speaker 1: how how did you find your way to down Jones Market?
Speaker 1: So I spent a few years on what was called
Speaker 1: the spot news desk doing that press release rewrite job,
Speaker 1: which was actually another great education in journalism. And it
Speaker 1: sounds horrific to me, Well it was. I mean, it
Speaker 1: was a total It was. It was a grind, I
Speaker 1: mean it was it was. That's what I was thinking
Speaker 1: that you learn a lot about finding You're constantly looking
Speaker 1: at what companies are telling you, and if you're if
Speaker 1: you're being discerning about it, you're trying to find the
Speaker 1: holes in it. So I learned a lot about finance
Speaker 1: doing that. Then I spent a few years on the
Speaker 1: editing desk, and then I had a friend who was
Speaker 1: on market Talk, which which really was from I loved. Well,
Speaker 1: we still do market Talk, I don't think they published
Speaker 1: it in quite the same way. So we used to
Speaker 1: publish it on the web and then they stopped, so
Speaker 1: in two thousand and five, now I've been there a while.
Speaker 1: In two thousand five I started at market Talk with
Speaker 1: John Shipman, and it was it was great. It was
Speaker 1: just the two of us. It was it was actually
Speaker 1: a great job because you're right, I think our limit
Speaker 1: was a hundred words, so these tight little commentaries on
Speaker 1: which is about yeah, exactly right. So that was that
Speaker 1: was how I kind of got out of editing and
Speaker 1: into writing. And I did that for probably seven years. Again,
Speaker 1: another great education, right fast, right analytically and right short.
Speaker 1: That was it. That was our own only kind of
Speaker 1: remit and I did that for a long time. Loved it.
Speaker 1: John and I had a great time doing it. We
Speaker 1: were kind of left out on our own in the newsroom.
Speaker 1: No by the voice. It had a voice, don't get right,
Speaker 1: and the voice was my voice in John's voice. And
Speaker 1: from that I moved over to one of the blogs
Speaker 1: and then I heard about bitcoin. And my first reaction
Speaker 1: to bitcoin was, this is an online scam, this is
Speaker 1: an internet joke. We are not writing about this. We're
Speaker 1: not writing about this. Because I was gonna so how
Speaker 1: much bitcoin did you buy? An ask? The answer is zero?
Speaker 1: So My first reaction was probably what everyone's reaction is,
Speaker 1: is that this is some kind of scam, and I thought,
Speaker 1: we're not writing about this no way. But like I
Speaker 1: said earlier, it was starting to permeate into the mainstream.
Speaker 1: You're starting to hear more and more about it. And
Speaker 1: the more and more I heard about it, the more
Speaker 1: I read about it, and then I started to become interested.
Speaker 1: And at the time, now this is this is the
Speaker 1: spring of At the time, the Wall Street Journal had
Speaker 1: nobody writing about bitcoin, and I was exactly I was
Speaker 1: writing for our money Beat blog, and so I had
Speaker 1: a pretty wide, pretty wide latitude in what I wanted
Speaker 1: to write about. My my coverage was the markets. It
Speaker 1: was a market in the economy, so I could write
Speaker 1: about anything within that, which is pretty much everything, which
Speaker 1: is pretty much right exactly, which which was great. So
Speaker 1: because I had that latitude to write about whatever I
Speaker 1: wanted to write about, and I was starting to get
Speaker 1: interested in bitcoin, I started writing some bitcoin posts and
Speaker 1: I did that for a few months, and in the
Speaker 1: summer of I went to a conference here in the city.
Speaker 1: It was called Inside Bitcoins. It was a one day
Speaker 1: conference at the New Yorker and it was the first
Speaker 1: time that had ever been around bitcoin people. And again
Speaker 1: it was a small conference. They had like, you know,
Speaker 1: one one room, you know, one one conference room, a
Speaker 1: couple hundred people. Uh, there was a lobby outside and
Speaker 1: maybe a dozen, twelve or fifteen tables set up at
Speaker 1: little businesses. But it was again the first time I
Speaker 1: had ever been around these people these So two questions.
Speaker 1: One is what was the response to the blog post
Speaker 1: you were doing on bitcoin before that conference? And then second,
Speaker 1: how did what what was the impact of the conference
Speaker 1: on you? So you're talking about the reaction among readers
Speaker 1: of the news readers readers not much. Then you know
Speaker 1: what's funny is readers not much. In the newsroom not much.
Speaker 1: You know, there was enough interest among the editors that
Speaker 1: they said, yeah, I head right that it's it's probably
Speaker 1: worth us. There's something, but nobody knows what it is
Speaker 1: exactly right, And I think, and then how did the
Speaker 1: conference so? Well? The conference affected me in that what
Speaker 1: I got out of that conference was this incredible energy
Speaker 1: of this group of people, and the ideas are flying
Speaker 1: around and the it was very utopian, very pie in
Speaker 1: the sky. But again you have to remember all of
Speaker 1: this I'm coming to as a writer. I'm not an investor,
Speaker 1: I'm not an entrepreneur. I'm not looking to make money.
Speaker 1: I'm looking to write good story, interesting stories, and I
Speaker 1: realized that there are tremendous stories to be told here.
Speaker 1: Let's talk a little bit about some of the specifics
Speaker 1: of blockchain and cryptocurrency I want. I'm I'm comfortable getting
Speaker 1: into the weeds here, but before we do, let's let's
Speaker 1: start out a little basic. Um. What is a digital
Speaker 1: distributed ledger? So that is that's sort of the that
Speaker 1: is the heart of the Bitcoin program, and it has
Speaker 1: come to be called by a couple of different names.
Speaker 1: You call it distributed ledger technology, blockchain technology, just blockchain.
Speaker 1: But what it essentially is is a program that is
Speaker 1: designed to maintain this online ledger. It's a live ledger
Speaker 1: that is not operated from any one central server. In
Speaker 1: other words, JP Morgan has a ledger of every transaction
Speaker 1: that they don't take, but it's on JP morgan servers
Speaker 1: and JP Morgan maintains it and only JP Morgan can
Speaker 1: see it. What is it track? What is it? Before
Speaker 1: we even get into that, just what this is is
Speaker 1: a a program that can run on any number of computers.
Speaker 1: Every computer that is running the program live has an
Speaker 1: identical copy of the ledger. Every transaction that goes into
Speaker 1: that ledger gets updated on every single computer at the
Speaker 1: basically at the same time. The transactions are secured cryptographically,
Speaker 1: so it's virtually impossible to change them. So what you
Speaker 1: have is a live transaction history that is transparent because
Speaker 1: it's on any number of computers and anybody can see it,
Speaker 1: and it is impossible to change. That's what it essentially is.
Speaker 1: So that means that means it's a legitimate record of
Speaker 1: each transact and it's theoretically unhackable. And bitcoins blockchain has
Speaker 1: never been hacked. You hear a lot of stories about
Speaker 1: hacking in this world. It's always some company that got
Speaker 1: like mild like mauld Cox got hacked, or someone's wallet
Speaker 1: got broken into. That's possible too, But the the ledger itself,
Speaker 1: the transaction history, but has never been attacked. It's been attacked,
Speaker 1: it has never been hacked. Now you said, what can
Speaker 1: you do with that? Well, the question is, and that's
Speaker 1: why you have this sort of explosion and interest. The
Speaker 1: answer is, anything that can be digitized and recorded and
Speaker 1: tracked potentially these are still early days. Potentially could be
Speaker 1: done with this program. So, in other words, the first
Speaker 1: application of this technology was bitcoin. Let's track a peer
Speaker 1: to peer transfer, transaction, exchange, value exchange, it's a currency.
Speaker 1: Could you use it for land registries? Could you use
Speaker 1: it for identification? Could you There so many things now
Speaker 1: that people realize that you can use this fork Potentially
Speaker 1: can artists use it to protect their copyright and maybe
Speaker 1: make some money and track where things, you know their
Speaker 1: their works are being used. So anything that's transacted digitally,
Speaker 1: you could keep a perfect so perfect example. We were
Speaker 1: talking about the financial crisis earlier. Um Mers is a
Speaker 1: sort of unspoken villain of the crisis. This is the
Speaker 1: electronic registry of mortgages, and they were so overwhelmed with
Speaker 1: the number of transactions and collateralized mortgages all put into
Speaker 1: other derivative products that very often when there is a
Speaker 1: default and people would go to court to defend it,
Speaker 1: the people who thought they owned the mortgage couldn't prove
Speaker 1: they actually owned the mortgage. If you went to court
Speaker 1: with a lawyer, you very often won because the people
Speaker 1: suing you couldn't demonstrate they were the appropriate party. They
Speaker 1: were a mortgage holder. It's amazing. So Jane theoretically could
Speaker 1: solve for something like exactly, and it's you know, it's amazing.
Speaker 1: I always think of this. Uh. Two thousand and seven,
Speaker 1: Lehman Brothers reports record revenue, record earnings, best year in
Speaker 1: the company's history two thousand and seven, hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: years they've been around, two thousand seven best year. Nine
Speaker 1: months later they're out of business. How is that possible? Right?
Speaker 1: Morga total accounting fraud moving fifty billion dollars in links
Speaker 1: which which to this day Dick Fault still claims was legit,
Speaker 1: which is hilarious. So this is a really interesting program. Essentially,
Speaker 1: what you have is would prevent that sort of fraud
Speaker 1: theoretically if it was implemented, if the industry would accept
Speaker 1: it as a standard. That's the other thing. I mean,
Speaker 1: one big problem for the banking industry is that this
Speaker 1: is too transparent to transpor course it is. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, you listen, you've been in the market's a
Speaker 1: long time. I mean you know that information and having
Speaker 1: it and having it before other people and a city
Speaker 1: are all virtues if you're trading. They are a feature,
Speaker 1: not abuve you can you could charge higher prices by
Speaker 1: bamboozling people and making things that are simple sound complex
Speaker 1: and eliminating transparency. And when the bank started experimenting with this,
Speaker 1: they were all interested in it, and they're gonna have
Speaker 1: their blockchain labs and everyone's gonna build something. Well what
Speaker 1: happened was they all realized it was way too transparent,
Speaker 1: and so they know really and it really held things up.
Speaker 1: And now people are trying to build things that are
Speaker 1: sort of that that will operate among a bunch of say,
Speaker 1: financial institutions, but they also are trying to put in
Speaker 1: checks so that nobody's order book is is visible to
Speaker 1: anybody else, so you can mean so they're trying to
Speaker 1: figure that out. So let's talk about this exact subject.
Speaker 1: What are some of the legitimate uses for blockchain and
Speaker 1: how likely is it that we're gonna see implementations at banks, insurers,
Speaker 1: brokers of this sort of technology. I think of actually
Speaker 1: we will. And I think the reason I think, I
Speaker 1: think there are two reasons why bitcoin kind of took
Speaker 1: off the way it did and why this technology is
Speaker 1: being so looked at the way it is. One is
Speaker 1: certainly just sort of the viral nature of it, the
Speaker 1: panic A two thousand and eight, the idea that we
Speaker 1: can have an alternative way, uh and and that was
Speaker 1: But the other reason, I think the more important reason
Speaker 1: is just that this technology fits our lifestyle today. We
Speaker 1: are digital, we are online, We are doing things across borders,
Speaker 1: across time zones, across continents, and this is a program
Speaker 1: that will allow you to track things across borders, across
Speaker 1: time zones, across continents, and to do things live and
Speaker 1: to do things in I hate saying the word real time,
Speaker 1: but real time. And it's one feature of the Internet
Speaker 1: when it was first built in the nineties, that one
Speaker 1: feature that it didn't have was an easy way to
Speaker 1: exchange value, to to do currency transactions. So what gets
Speaker 1: built onto the Internet, of course, or all the sort
Speaker 1: of existing you know, the third party credit card transaction
Speaker 1: literally literally punching in a credit card. And because you're
Speaker 1: doing this over such great distances and it's harder to
Speaker 1: verify identity, you have an entire industry that grows up
Speaker 1: around that. Right. You have very assigned. You have all
Speaker 1: these third party providers who will take your information, validate it,
Speaker 1: and allow you to do the credit card transaction. Bitcoin
Speaker 1: kind of takes that and and blockchain technology takes that
Speaker 1: and sort of uh flattens it and makes it all
Speaker 1: one transaction replaces it. So the transaction, the verification of validation,
Speaker 1: the valid and the exchange of value all happen in
Speaker 1: one That is it exactly? You don't sound like a
Speaker 1: skeptic on this, Barry Ridholtz, Well, no, I'm just so
Speaker 1: let's talk about the skepticism. It's not on the blockchain technology.
Speaker 1: And it's a cliche every time you hear someone say
Speaker 1: blockchain is fascinating, but I'm skeptical on bitcoint. To me,
Speaker 1: when I see something rise two thousand percent in six months,
Speaker 1: my experience, both in the markets and as a trader
Speaker 1: is immediately to screen bubble. And uh, I got a
Speaker 1: little lucky in the timing on on writing something when
Speaker 1: should you sell your bitcoin? Um? And the timing on
Speaker 1: that is as often luck as anything else. But how
Speaker 1: let's let's look at bitcoin. Is bitcoin separate from the
Speaker 1: underlying technology? Is that in a bubble? If it was
Speaker 1: ten thousand dollars and now down to ten thousan dollars, Well,
Speaker 1: like I said earlier, there, to me, there are three
Speaker 1: huge angles to this whole story. There's the software, which
Speaker 1: is what is really important, and its applications. There's this,
Speaker 1: by the way, is the thing people talk the least
Speaker 1: about exactly. There is uh, the counterculture movement, the social
Speaker 1: movement that I really fint I think is a big
Speaker 1: part of the story. And the third party is the
Speaker 1: speculative mania, the trading of it. And you know, you say,
Speaker 1: is this a bubble? I don't even know if it's
Speaker 1: almost it's such a it's such a pre thing. I
Speaker 1: don't even know if you can say it's really a bubble.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is it? Is this a speculative mania?
Speaker 1: Without a doubt. I think it is virtually impossible from
Speaker 1: a fundamental perspective to say what bitcoin is worth. I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously it's worth what anybody will pay for it. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's the simple answer. So if someone's willing to pay
Speaker 1: eleven thousand, twelve, nine thousand, whatever it is, that's what
Speaker 1: it's worth. But at that moment, at that moment, that's
Speaker 1: the problem. Can can you fundamentally value a technology that
Speaker 1: has not really been implemented yet? No, you cannot. I mean,
Speaker 1: does bitcoin run? Is it live? Two people use it? Yes,
Speaker 1: absolutely absolutely. Uh is there a lot that you can
Speaker 1: do with bitcoin right now? No? Besides trade it. I
Speaker 1: mean really, so what you what you have is a
Speaker 1: a mania, a speculative mania for a product that is
Speaker 1: virtually impossible to fundamentally value. And like I said earlier,
Speaker 1: still a small market. It's still a thin market. It's
Speaker 1: still a relatively a liquial liquid market. So you get
Speaker 1: these crazy volatile swings. So yeah, you're in in terms
Speaker 1: of the price. I think your skepticism is a hundred
Speaker 1: percent on um. I don't buy bitcoin because the Wall
Speaker 1: Street Journal would not want me buying and selling something
Speaker 1: that I'm writing about. I mean, it's obvious every journalistic
Speaker 1: operation has ruled exactly avoiding you know, you can't go
Speaker 1: buy a stock and then talk about it. You can't
Speaker 1: be the Apple Beat reporter and be day trading Apple shares.
Speaker 1: So it's the same thing. So I don't buy bitcoin
Speaker 1: for that reason. But even if the journal didn't have
Speaker 1: that restriction on me, I personally would not buy it anyhow,
Speaker 1: because it is a specular gambling. It's a speculative asset.
Speaker 1: You're betting that it is going to go somewhere, and
Speaker 1: it's going to be something, So you probably you want
Speaker 1: to do that, but you have to understand of what
Speaker 1: you're doing, and what you're doing is just you're you're gambling.
Speaker 1: So am I assuming too much in saying that you
Speaker 1: don't believe this belongs in people's four oh one k
Speaker 1: or their retirement portfolios? No, and I'm not giving financial advice.
Speaker 1: You're just asked me a question. I mean, does an
Speaker 1: unbelievably speculative asset belonging to four oh one k, which
Speaker 1: is essentially retirement portfolio? My answer is no, And I
Speaker 1: don't think anybody else would say. Nobody should say, let's
Speaker 1: put it this way, nobody should say yes to that.
Speaker 1: We have been speaking with Paul Vina. He is the
Speaker 1: co author, along with Michael Casey, of Truth Machine, Blockchain,
Speaker 1: and the Future of Everything. If you enjoy this conversation,
Speaker 1: be sure and check out our podcast extras, where we
Speaker 1: keep the tape rolling and continue chatting about all things cryptocurrency.
Speaker 1: I'll be sure and check out my daily column. You
Speaker 1: can find that on bloomberg view dot com. Follow me
Speaker 1: on Twitter at rid Halts. We love your comments, feedback
Speaker 1: and suggestions right to us at m IB podcast at
Speaker 1: Bloomberg dot Net. I'm Barry Results. You're listening to Master's
Speaker 1: in Business on Bloomberg Radio. So there are so many
Speaker 1: questions I did not get to during the broadcast portion.
Speaker 1: Let's let's spend some time on on those questions before
Speaker 1: I get to my favorite podcast questions that I ask everybody.
Speaker 1: One of the things that I had to ask is,
Speaker 1: so you write the Age of Crypto in what made
Speaker 1: you think that there was an audience for a book
Speaker 1: on crypto? It's interesting because the whole thing goes back
Speaker 1: to that conference in that I was talking about where
Speaker 1: I go to this conference and I realized that there's
Speaker 1: just this tremendous energy around this thing. I realized this
Speaker 1: is a story to be told. And I go back
Speaker 1: to the newsroom and I'm talking to another reporter, this
Speaker 1: guy Dave Benoit, very good reporter, and I'm telling him
Speaker 1: about the conference and these crazy people I saw, you know,
Speaker 1: and he's listening to me and he looks at me.
Speaker 1: He says, it sounds like something like a lewisid write
Speaker 1: a book about. And I'm trying to stop my fingers,
Speaker 1: like bang, lightbulb, Oh my god, this is And I've
Speaker 1: been looking for a long time. I wanted to write
Speaker 1: a book. I've always wanted to write, you know, I
Speaker 1: wanted to write a book. I never found a good topic.
Speaker 1: And he said that to me, and I realized I
Speaker 1: had just been handed a great topic and nobody else
Speaker 1: has done it yet. I'm like, I'm the first one
Speaker 1: there was that was this book? Literally, Age of Cryptocurrency?
Speaker 1: Was that the first book on this topic. By the
Speaker 1: time that went out, a few other people had also
Speaker 1: written their books. Uh, I don't I don't remember if
Speaker 1: Nathaniel Popper's book came out right before or right after
Speaker 1: hours around the same time. The New York Times is
Speaker 1: Digital Gold Popper's book, and it's a good book to digital.
Speaker 1: I shouldn't plug a competitor's book, but whatever, you know,
Speaker 1: you get a free one from me, Nathaniel. So I
Speaker 1: mean at that by the time our book came out,
Speaker 1: other people had gotten onto this this idea too, that
Speaker 1: there were books to be written. But I think Popper's
Speaker 1: book and our book were the first mainstream books, the
Speaker 1: first ones by big publishing houses to go out. He
Speaker 1: was made, Oh that's the paperback. That's the paperback, uh,
Speaker 1: digital gold Bitcoin and the inside story of the millionaires
Speaker 1: trying to reinvent money. Yeah, that was his book. So anyhow,
Speaker 1: so I realized there was a book to be written.
Speaker 1: I spend a lot of time. Actually, at the time,
Speaker 1: I wanted to convince the journal to let me write
Speaker 1: any book. No one else has done this. Let's do this,
Speaker 1: get it out quick. And I remember I went home
Speaker 1: to my wife and I said, I have this great idea.
Speaker 1: I said, I want to write I'm gonna try to
Speaker 1: do any book about bitcoin. And she said she slows down,
Speaker 1: and she says, let me get this straight. She says,
Speaker 1: you want to write a digital book about a fake currency.
Speaker 1: She's I think, she said, you want to write an
Speaker 1: electronic book about a digital currency. And I said yeah.
Speaker 1: And she said, so you want to write a fake
Speaker 1: book about fake currency. I said yeah. She said all right,
Speaker 1: She's like, just good do I don't want to hear
Speaker 1: another word until you get a check for me. Like
Speaker 1: just she thought it was in you know, crazy um
Speaker 1: And again you know that's because you know, people who
Speaker 1: grew up on our generation were used to tangible things, right.
Speaker 1: So anyhow, I come up with this idea, I try
Speaker 1: to sell it to the journal. They eventually don't want
Speaker 1: to do it. Uh. And then by that by that time,
Speaker 1: my Casey, my co author, had also started getting interested
Speaker 1: in bitcoin. So we put our heads together and Ike
Speaker 1: had written some books. He had an agent. We go
Speaker 1: to the agent, she loves the idea, and we find
Speaker 1: a publisher and we sell it. January it comes out
Speaker 1: and so you beat you beat uh Poper by like
Speaker 1: five months, right, So we beat Popria. So I guess
Speaker 1: we were the first mainstream book. So here's the question
Speaker 1: I have with you. My experience with writing a book
Speaker 1: was that it was like a PhD. You know, it was.
Speaker 1: It was your graduate thesis. It was it was exhausting.
Speaker 1: And immediately after you start getting some sales and they're like,
Speaker 1: how about a follow up? It's like, go away for
Speaker 1: a decade. You guys turned around and write another book
Speaker 1: three years later. That's and I wrote another book in between.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of book writing for someone who's also
Speaker 1: writing a regular column in the mainstream. Mean you have
Speaker 1: to realize, like, I'm a news drunkie. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: he was drunkie. I I want to write that's all
Speaker 1: I want to do. So for me it was not
Speaker 1: I mean, look it. Also, it helps tremendously having a
Speaker 1: co author, because what Mike and I would do is,
Speaker 1: you're too half books and other ones? How did you
Speaker 1: guys split over? What we would do is we we'd
Speaker 1: plot out the book, we'd plot out the chapters. We
Speaker 1: we kind of figure out what each chapter is going
Speaker 1: to be about, and then we just split them up.
Speaker 1: Who's written about this more, Okay, you've done this more,
Speaker 1: so you do that chapter. I've done this more, I'll
Speaker 1: take this track. Do you each then go back and
Speaker 1: then we so we would write our chapters, then we
Speaker 1: would send them to each other, edit what we were doing,
Speaker 1: rewrite what we were doing, send it back to the
Speaker 1: guy having to look at it again. Then we said
Speaker 1: it to ours. End up, we sent the book in
Speaker 1: chapters to our editors, which is a little bit unusual.
Speaker 1: A lot of times you'll just write the whole manuscript
Speaker 1: and send it to your editor. We were doing this
Speaker 1: in chapters, so you end up with this crazy dynamic
Speaker 1: where I'm writing my own chapter, I'm editing something Mike
Speaker 1: sent me, I'm getting back something that Tim Bartlett, our
Speaker 1: editor at St. Martin sent So you're doing it's it's
Speaker 1: a little hectic and crazy. But like I said, if
Speaker 1: you're a junkie for this kind of stuff, it wasn't
Speaker 1: that bad. I mean, it really just wasn't I don't know.
Speaker 1: I would work during the day, i'd come home, i'd
Speaker 1: see my wife, i'd see my son, they'd go to bed,
Speaker 1: and I put in a couple hours every night. So
Speaker 1: you guys did this very postal service, like if you're
Speaker 1: familiar with Postal Service. The band No so Ben Gibbert
Speaker 1: from Deathcap for Cutie and Jenny Lewis, who has been
Speaker 1: with a number of other sort of old country and
Speaker 1: alt rock. They start writing this music and literally mailing
Speaker 1: tapes back and forth to each other, and the first
Speaker 1: Postal Service album is this fascinating combination of odd electronic
Speaker 1: um music overlaid with a sort of old country sort
Speaker 1: of Yeah, you have to listen to it. It's actually
Speaker 1: quite charming and once you get past how initially confusing
Speaker 1: it seems. But they basically did an album the way
Speaker 1: you guys did the book, and today you can do
Speaker 1: all that digitally. And I think the thing too is
Speaker 1: a lot of people will say to me too, like
Speaker 1: you just said, like, oh my god, I can't believe
Speaker 1: you wrote a book, and you wrote another book books.
Speaker 1: I've written three books. Sin yeah, I wrote a book
Speaker 1: about the Walking Dead too, because that's my other sideline. UM,
Speaker 1: and people say, I can't believe you wrote a book.
Speaker 1: I've always wanted to write a book, but I can't.
Speaker 1: What I figured out early on is that it is
Speaker 1: an extremely mechanical process. There has to be a lot
Speaker 1: of thought that goes into analytics and yeah, but that's
Speaker 1: that's one element of it. The other the writing element,
Speaker 1: is extremely mechanical. And all you do is you say, okay,
Speaker 1: today is today. My deadline is this deadline. I have
Speaker 1: X number of days to write X number of words words.
Speaker 1: Do the division, do the math, figure out how many
Speaker 1: words you need to do per day, and you do
Speaker 1: that every day, no matter how long it takes, how
Speaker 1: short it takes. If you have a great day and
Speaker 1: you write two thousand words, then great. You can, you know,
Speaker 1: ratch it back a little bit the next day. If
Speaker 1: you have a terrible day and you only write a
Speaker 1: hundred words, you have to you have to amp it
Speaker 1: up the next day. You have to average that many
Speaker 1: words every single day until you're deadline, and you can
Speaker 1: do it it's it's it's it's work. It's hard, it's work,
Speaker 1: but you can do it when when you have to
Speaker 1: set it out, I think you have to set it
Speaker 1: out that way because if you set it out as
Speaker 1: here's my deadline and I need a book, and you
Speaker 1: have nothing, no structure to what you're doing in between,
Speaker 1: that's how you can kind of get lost in the weeds.
Speaker 1: When when people say they want to write a book,
Speaker 1: what they really mean is that they're subconsciously paraphrasing Dorothy Parker.
Speaker 1: They don't want to write a book, they want to
Speaker 1: have written a book, because the writing of the book
Speaker 1: is a lot of it. You describe it's heavy lifting.
Speaker 1: It's a bit of a grind exactly it is. But
Speaker 1: you seem to have been really enjoyed it. Well, I
Speaker 1: love it. I mean this is it's funny because I've
Speaker 1: been in this business since was my first journalism really
Speaker 1: twenty five plus years plus years, and for that entire time,
Speaker 1: I I always you know, look, anybody you know, like
Speaker 1: you want to be the guy at the middle of
Speaker 1: the story. I've always wanted to be the guy at
Speaker 1: the middle of story. And I never was the guy
Speaker 1: at the middle of the story, and in the journals newsroom,
Speaker 1: you would watch the guys and the girls in the
Speaker 1: middle of the story, and you'd see the other reporters
Speaker 1: who are covering a big covering the first story. We're there,
Speaker 1: the person there at the center of attention, there at
Speaker 1: the center of the big story, and it's great and
Speaker 1: you want it. For the first time in my career,
Speaker 1: I'm that person. And a lot of times you can
Speaker 1: go a whole career and never be that person. So
Speaker 1: I recognized that. I recognized that I'm in a very
Speaker 1: fortunate place and that I lucked out and getting interested
Speaker 1: in this early, and I kind of set myself up
Speaker 1: to be that person at the middle of the story.
Speaker 1: And now I'm there, and I just want to take
Speaker 1: advantage of it. So I love it again. I'm a
Speaker 1: news monkey. This is what I live for. This is
Speaker 1: all I want to do. So yeah, right, So you
Speaker 1: have you have two books on on blockchain and cryptocurrency.
Speaker 1: Is there another blockchain book, crypto book, bitcoin book in
Speaker 1: you or if you pretty much said everything you need
Speaker 1: to say about the topic, Uh, there's there's probably another book.
Speaker 1: I don't want to say. Definitely. It's funny because he's
Speaker 1: you know, it's at the launch event on that Tuesday night.
Speaker 1: People are saying to me immediately, oh, what's the next
Speaker 1: book about? Uh? And we got the I got the
Speaker 1: check for this book from my publisher, and my wife
Speaker 1: is very happy with that. It was all the money
Speaker 1: in the world. But by the way, if you want
Speaker 1: to earn a living writing books, if your name is
Speaker 1: and Stephen King of Michael Lewis, you're you're going to
Speaker 1: be disappointed. You're not gonna do it as a full
Speaker 1: time thing. But uh, my wife, we got that check
Speaker 1: and I immediately put it in the bank and she
Speaker 1: was happy with that, and she said, Okay, what's the
Speaker 1: next next book? You gotta keep Yeah, she's like, you
Speaker 1: gotta keep working. You gotta produce. You're the going you
Speaker 1: want to be the producer, you gotta go produce that.
Speaker 1: I mean, there will be There will definitely be another book.
Speaker 1: Whether it will be another bitcoin book, I I don't know.
Speaker 1: And Mike and I kind of shoot around ideas. There's
Speaker 1: just so many stories to tell in this, so yeah,
Speaker 1: I could definitely see another book coming out of it.
Speaker 1: So you mentioned the social network of of sort of libertarians,
Speaker 1: and um, uh cipher punk's libertarians anarchists. So the question
Speaker 1: that had come up um from Mike bat Nick in
Speaker 1: my office, who helps me put these questions together, is
Speaker 1: what's the overlap between the crypto enthusiasts and the gold bugs,
Speaker 1: because there seemed to be some similar If you were
Speaker 1: to draw a Venn diagram, it feels like the enthusiasm
Speaker 1: for something that is a speculative um asset that may
Speaker 1: or may not be worth a whole lot more or
Speaker 1: a whole lot less than a few years. They seem
Speaker 1: to have similar characteristics. They do. And the interesting thing
Speaker 1: about both the gold bugs and the bitcoiners is you
Speaker 1: can make a rational argument that you know, the world
Speaker 1: is an imperfect place and if you're investing in this world,
Speaker 1: things are gonna go up and things gonna go down,
Speaker 1: and you should probably have a hedge against bad times.
Speaker 1: What's that hedge, Well, gold is is, you know, traditionally
Speaker 1: been a store of value and you know, stable asset.
Speaker 1: You should have a little bit of gold in your portfolio.
Speaker 1: A bitcoin they're trying to set up as a digital
Speaker 1: version of that. So if you're looking to have a
Speaker 1: hedge against the world, something that when everything else goes
Speaker 1: down this is sort of stable over here, and it's
Speaker 1: a little different in my God, you can you can
Speaker 1: make that as a sort of rational argument, but it
Speaker 1: gets that message gets lost somewhere. There's a reason they
Speaker 1: call them gold bugs because they get crazy about it,
Speaker 1: and the bitcoin people they get crazy about it, and
Speaker 1: suddenly you go from this sort of rational argument about well,
Speaker 1: you should have a hedge against bad times, it might
Speaker 1: be this too. Gold is everything in the world is terrible.
Speaker 1: Bitcoin is everything in the world is terrible. And so
Speaker 1: they do have a sort of similar psychology in that
Speaker 1: they get so caught up in the idea that the
Speaker 1: world is terrible and everything is going to go to
Speaker 1: hell in a hand basket and we're just waiting for
Speaker 1: the next crash that you should put everything nobody should
Speaker 1: ever put everything into gold or bitcoin. And I think
Speaker 1: that's insane, but it's sometimes on it feels like that's
Speaker 1: their argument. So it's not their argument. My belief, and
Speaker 1: I am obviously biased. My belief is that is their
Speaker 1: post hoc rationalization. If they own all this gold and
Speaker 1: if the world goes to hell, gold or maybe bitcoin
Speaker 1: is worth a whole lot more, they start internalizing the
Speaker 1: concept that it's not my own gold because it's a
Speaker 1: possibility of the world going to hell. It's our own gold.
Speaker 1: The world has already gone to hell, and therefore this
Speaker 1: gold should be worth so much. So we listen, everybody
Speaker 1: does it. We all lie to ourselves. The easiest person
Speaker 1: to fool is yourself. Um, talk yourself into an at everything, absolutely,
Speaker 1: and so you you end up with So So that's
Speaker 1: what I've kind of find fascinating is there's not a
Speaker 1: cold calculating what is the value. Here's a price to
Speaker 1: book ratio. It's filter for these it's we don't know
Speaker 1: what this value is. But I'm so emotionally in tied
Speaker 1: up in it, not only my personal net worth, but
Speaker 1: my sense of self and how smart I think I am.
Speaker 1: And therefore this proves it. All objectivity goes goes out
Speaker 1: the window. And that's why I kind of I think
Speaker 1: Mike was looking at them as hey, here are some
Speaker 1: very similar or characteristics with two distinct groups. So the
Speaker 1: next question is what sort of overlap is there in
Speaker 1: terms of are the crypto people also holding gold and
Speaker 1: vice versa, or have those two groups never the twain
Speaker 1: shall meet. I mean, I'm sure there are people in
Speaker 1: this world who are holding bitcoin and gold, but I
Speaker 1: think the real bitcoin you know, uh, aficionados they think
Speaker 1: bitcoin is the better gold. So they're probably not you know,
Speaker 1: they're not holding bitcoin and gold, they're just holding bitcoin.
Speaker 1: The people are doing it are pride people who are gold,
Speaker 1: people who think the right right, right. Um, So let's
Speaker 1: talk about some of the companies that have grown up
Speaker 1: around this. So we mentioned Mount Cox, which very famously
Speaker 1: blew up and it was hacked then I want to
Speaker 1: say a hundred million dollars or something. I think they
Speaker 1: usually they lost eight hundred thousand bitcoin. They later recovered
Speaker 1: two hundred thousand bitcoin. And what's interesting is so they
Speaker 1: lost six hundred thousand bitcoin, which at the time I
Speaker 1: think it was worth four hundred millions something like that. Uh.
Speaker 1: The crazy thing now that they're trying to figure out too,
Speaker 1: is that that two hundred thousand that they recovered is
Speaker 1: now worth more than everything they lost. Who gets it?
Speaker 1: Who gets it? They have to distribute it. Do the
Speaker 1: creditors get it, does the company hold it? Do you
Speaker 1: sell it at what it was worth? Do you sell
Speaker 1: it what it's worth? Now? You know, like this has
Speaker 1: become a whole different issue with Mountco. But mount Cox
Speaker 1: was basically a one man company. It was a guy
Speaker 1: who had bought a website from another guy and just
Speaker 1: set it up and because there were no real exchanges,
Speaker 1: it just got all that traffic. It was never really
Speaker 1: a very well thought out company. What coin Base is
Speaker 1: another company that started in and initially I think they
Speaker 1: were just trying to build bitcoin wallets. So anyhow, so
Speaker 1: in another word, it is a place to say digital
Speaker 1: account where, yes, where you hold your bitcoin, although apparently
Speaker 1: lots of these have gotten halfed over the years. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, interesting thing about bitcoin is though one of
Speaker 1: the core ideas was that you are your own bank.
Speaker 1: You are holding your own money. You're responsible for your
Speaker 1: own money. You're not putting your money at a bank
Speaker 1: and then the bank gets to do whatever it wants
Speaker 1: with your money. You have it, so your wallet, your
Speaker 1: digital wallet, your account that is like that's the equivalent
Speaker 1: of your bank account. You are in control of it, though,
Speaker 1: so you have to secure it. You have to make
Speaker 1: sure that the security measures are there. You have to
Speaker 1: hold the private key, the the account number to it,
Speaker 1: never lose it. If you lose it, it is gone.
Speaker 1: You are the only person forever the only person with
Speaker 1: access to it. You lose the key, it's gone. There's
Speaker 1: been some estimates that twenty plus percent of bitcoin keys
Speaker 1: have been lost and that money has gone. Yeah, which
Speaker 1: again gets to my whole point I was making earlier
Speaker 1: about liquidity. I mean, if a quarter of all the
Speaker 1: bitcoin that exists can never trade, that's huge. But anyhow,
Speaker 1: coin Base started out building a wallet. They have grown.
Speaker 1: They now have an exchange. I think they do some
Speaker 1: uh and you know, enterprise business. They work with companies
Speaker 1: trying to implement bitcoin processes and everything. Uh. They have
Speaker 1: become probably you could safely say the premier bitcoin company.
Speaker 1: I mean they've kind of gotten into the mainstream. At
Speaker 1: one point last year in seventeen, their online app was
Speaker 1: the number one app in the Apple Store. It rose
Speaker 1: to the top up. Estimates are they made a billion
Speaker 1: dollars last year. They're making a lot of I mean
Speaker 1: a lot of money. Now people are realizing is in
Speaker 1: operating as a quote unquote exchange. I almost say quote
Speaker 1: unquote for coin Base their regulated company. Uh, they registered
Speaker 1: with the New York Department Financial Services. But a lot
Speaker 1: of these exchanges are quote unquote exchanges. They're just websites
Speaker 1: where people are trading back and forth. But there's a
Speaker 1: lot of money to be made in that. So right
Speaker 1: now the big money is being made by you know,
Speaker 1: offering trading services, the tel Aviv company. Let's see if
Speaker 1: I can pronounce this right. Commuter is commuters I think
Speaker 1: it is. Yeah, it's interesting. And again, you know a
Speaker 1: lot of these companies will come up and you have
Speaker 1: to realize that these are startups. They have ideas, but
Speaker 1: they have to build it and implement it, survive fund
Speaker 1: revee to build a business. Right, coin based started in twelve.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of companies that started in twelve
Speaker 1: that didn't make it. Coin Base made it. They built
Speaker 1: a business. Uh, Commuters is an interesting idea. It's sort
Speaker 1: of a bitcoin based version of Uber. So in other words,
Speaker 1: Uber is this great popular app everyone. You don't have
Speaker 1: to explain what it is now at this point, but
Speaker 1: it is a piece of software that's owned by a company.
Speaker 1: The idea behind Commuters is to have a piece of
Speaker 1: software that is not owned by a company that operates
Speaker 1: the same way Uber does. It's about hooking up riders
Speaker 1: and drivers, but the program operates the way bitcoin operates
Speaker 1: on a decentralized network of computers. That's it. That's the
Speaker 1: idea behind it. Uh, it's really interesting. I don't know
Speaker 1: how far they're getting with it yet. I was actually
Speaker 1: went online line last night trying to find some updates
Speaker 1: on how they're doing, and I couldn't really find anything,
Speaker 1: which is never a good sign. No offense commuters. I
Speaker 1: hope you make it great, good luck, But again, interesting idea,
Speaker 1: and there are a lot of interesting ideas out there.
Speaker 1: At some point you have to build a business on it.
Speaker 1: What else is an interesting idea built around blockchain? A
Speaker 1: lot of the hot ideas and I think these are
Speaker 1: going to be difficult to build quite frankly. A lot
Speaker 1: of the hot things are people want to build the
Speaker 1: platform now right. I mean the idea is you look
Speaker 1: at Ethereum, which is essentially an operating system. It's an
Speaker 1: operating system, it's like Android, it's like iOS on your mobile,
Speaker 1: but it's a decentralized operating system, rather than Apple owning
Speaker 1: it for computers or for computer for no, for computers.
Speaker 1: So you would download the software you get on the network,
Speaker 1: and then anybody who wants to build an Apple or
Speaker 1: service on top of that platform build it and then
Speaker 1: you have access to it if you're on the Ethereum network.
Speaker 1: That's what it is. So what you have now a
Speaker 1: lot of people and a lot of people have raised
Speaker 1: money to build their own version of the platform. So
Speaker 1: now you have this competition. Everybody wants to build the
Speaker 1: platform the next Android, Android for mobile, Android for mobile, decentralus,
Speaker 1: open source, decentralized. It's a good idea, but it's going
Speaker 1: to be hard. You have to build up all the
Speaker 1: network effects. You have to build up the community, you
Speaker 1: have to build up users, you have to have people
Speaker 1: coming on and building services on top of it that work.
Speaker 1: Uh So that's a really that's a big bet kind
Speaker 1: of thing. You know, that's pie in the sky. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna build the next Ethereum. What meanwhile, Ethereum is still
Speaker 1: trying to build the next Ethereum. What about other coins?
Speaker 1: Which is ethereum? So you have Bitcoin as the best.
Speaker 1: There's probably fifteen hundred coins whatever you want to call
Speaker 1: the cryptocurrencies, tokens coins, you know, yeah, this probably is
Speaker 1: at least not off of the same blockchain, not off
Speaker 1: the same blockchain. The idea because bitcoin is open source software,
Speaker 1: anybody can take that program rewrite it to their own specifications.
Speaker 1: So what are the top five coins? Out the top five,
Speaker 1: and I have to say of those fifteen hundred, I
Speaker 1: would my personal bet is no more than a dozen
Speaker 1: have any chance of ever becoming something. Most of them
Speaker 1: are just you know, either they're flat out pump and
Speaker 1: dump schemes or their well meaning their well meaning efforts
Speaker 1: that are not going to go anywhere. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it's Look, it's hard to get a community of people
Speaker 1: to come together and agree to use your thing. Uh, Bitcoin, Ethereum,
Speaker 1: Ripple light Coin are probably the four major ones. Then
Speaker 1: you have offshoots of that. You have bitcoin Cash, which
Speaker 1: is an offshoot of Bitcoin. You have Ethereum Classic, which
Speaker 1: is an offshoot of Ethereum. Those are probably the half
Speaker 1: dozen that I think have the largest market value right
Speaker 1: now combined. Um. There are a couple others out there,
Speaker 1: but they're gonna have a harder time. But that's really it.
Speaker 1: There's not there are a lot of them out there.
Speaker 1: I think there are very few that have a real
Speaker 1: chance of kind of building a viable future for themselves.
Speaker 1: So I have I have two more coin questions before
Speaker 1: I get to my standard questions. One is explain what
Speaker 1: forking is, okay, and the other is uh i c oh.
Speaker 1: So so let's start with forking. Alright. So forking is
Speaker 1: it's a it's a term. It's a software term. Basically,
Speaker 1: what you're doing is you are taking the software and
Speaker 1: you are update, you're updating it. You're creating a new
Speaker 1: version of it, and you can have is a soft
Speaker 1: fork and a hard fork. In a soft fork, you
Speaker 1: are updating the software, coming up with a new version
Speaker 1: of it, but the older versions of the software will
Speaker 1: still work with it. Think of when Microsoft comes up
Speaker 1: with a new version of Word. You can download the
Speaker 1: new version of Word, or you can keep working off
Speaker 1: your old version of Word. They're still A hard fork
Speaker 1: is where there's a new version of the software but
Speaker 1: it is incompatible with the old version of the software.
Speaker 1: So say Microsoft comes out and says, well, we have
Speaker 1: a new version of Word that you have to download
Speaker 1: or the old version won't be compaled. That's a hard fork.
Speaker 1: In open source, this becomes a policy, It really becomes
Speaker 1: a political tool. Um, if there's a community that wants
Speaker 1: certain features and they're not getting them, they can hard
Speaker 1: fork the software. They can come up with their own
Speaker 1: version of every everyone has to come along or not.
Speaker 1: And I c O stands for initial coin offering. Uh,
Speaker 1: and this is a very nascent field. It's very contentious
Speaker 1: eyes when I asked that, it's just it's such a
Speaker 1: it's such a great story. Again, remember everything for me
Speaker 1: is the story. It is a great, great story. It
Speaker 1: is so much fun, it's so interesting. There's so many
Speaker 1: angles to it. So and I see O his initial
Speaker 1: coin offering. It's it's a way for companies to to
Speaker 1: raise money. It's kind of a cross between crowdfunding and
Speaker 1: an I p O. So a startup says. What a
Speaker 1: startup says is we have this digital product that we're building.
Speaker 1: We have this service. We are going to attach a
Speaker 1: token to it. You can buy the token and give
Speaker 1: us money, and we're gonna sell it. And that's it.
Speaker 1: That's really what it is. What I think happened in
Speaker 1: Seen was you had a price rally in Bitcoin and
Speaker 1: ethereum and a couple of the other coins. So people
Speaker 1: who were holding we're making tons of money. But again
Speaker 1: there's not much you can do with this stuff besides
Speaker 1: trade it. So they're sitting on all these paper profits,
Speaker 1: paper profits, digital profits without much to do with it.
Speaker 1: Here comes this other trend of the I c O
Speaker 1: startups saying, hey, invest in us, we could be the
Speaker 1: next hot thing. So you have a group of people
Speaker 1: who have a lot of money and nothing to do
Speaker 1: with it, and you have a group of companies over
Speaker 1: here saying we're gonna be the next hot thing. Those
Speaker 1: two things merge, they bang into each other, and you
Speaker 1: have this unbelievable speculative menia. The I c O market
Speaker 1: takes off, and I think it was it was six
Speaker 1: billion was raised last year via this method. Uh it is.
Speaker 1: It's most of which no one expects to do anything anything, virtually,
Speaker 1: all of which everyone expects will be dead money in
Speaker 1: the end. Amazing. All right, So let's get into my
Speaker 1: favorite questions. These are what I ask all of my guests.
Speaker 1: So let's jump into our favorite questions. Tell us the
Speaker 1: most important thing people don't know about your background. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I don't know if this is the most
Speaker 1: important thing, but and I'm probably important thing. I'm probably
Speaker 1: gonna expose myself here and maybe, actually maybe people would
Speaker 1: figure this out on their own. I'm basically self taught.
Speaker 1: I didn't go to school for journalism. I didn't go
Speaker 1: to school for finance. I didn't go to school for
Speaker 1: business or economics. I was an English major. Got out
Speaker 1: of college, needed a job and there was a newspaper
Speaker 1: in my town that was hiring. So I applied for it.
Speaker 1: And I knew the rudimentary writing and editing skills, so
Speaker 1: they hired me and that was it. So I learned
Speaker 1: everything I learned about journalism I learned on the job.
Speaker 1: Everything about finance I learned in my twenty years of
Speaker 1: working at Dow Jones and reading The Big Picture and
Speaker 1: some other blood. By the way, there was a long
Speaker 1: standing argument that said all of education is a function
Speaker 1: of giving students the tools to teach themselves. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: you know what the tools I got. I went to
Speaker 1: Fairfield University in Connecticut, which is a Jesuit school, And uh,
Speaker 1: the Jesuits give you a great education. They really believed
Speaker 1: them in New York as well. Right for them in
Speaker 1: New York as well. Uh. They are big on teaching
Speaker 1: you how to think, how to analyze, and giving you
Speaker 1: a broad introduction to everything. So I got a great
Speaker 1: I actually got a great education in learning how to
Speaker 1: think what you can apply to anything. So who are
Speaker 1: some of your early mentors. My early mentors were they're
Speaker 1: gonna be people you never heard of. Right. My first
Speaker 1: editor was a guy named Ward Mealy. My first editor
Speaker 1: at at the Verona Cedar Grove Times run in New Jersey.
Speaker 1: My first editor at Dow Jones was this guy Pete Rooney.
Speaker 1: And they were great mentors. They were old school journalists. Right,
Speaker 1: work hard, don't f with the news, go out and
Speaker 1: have a beer after work. This is just a job.
Speaker 1: Don't take it too seriously. Uh, And that was what
Speaker 1: they kind of taught. They kind of taught me how
Speaker 1: journalists operate, and and that was great. So my my,
Speaker 1: you know, look, I started in right, I mean, I
Speaker 1: started pre Internet era, so I have a little bit
Speaker 1: of a foot in the old, the old journalist world.
Speaker 1: And those those guys were more early mentors, and they
Speaker 1: were great guys, absolutely great guys. I picture you with
Speaker 1: the fedora with a little press for a band of that. Um.
Speaker 1: So you mentioned, uh you started in the nineties. Who
Speaker 1: were the journalists, who were the writers who influenced your
Speaker 1: approach to writing? Right? Uh? Some of them were actually
Speaker 1: let's see, you know you can read that. I'm impressed.
Speaker 1: I have classes classes, didn't do anything without classes anymore. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's funny a lot of And I'm
Speaker 1: not just trying to kiss up to you because you
Speaker 1: already gave me the interview and imagine you're gonna publish this.
Speaker 1: But I loved I know, I'm just like I loved
Speaker 1: the Big Picture the blog, you know, back in the
Speaker 1: early auts, when you were doing it, that was that
Speaker 1: was a big influence on me. James Stewart, Denna Thieves
Speaker 1: was a great book. Daniel Jurgan, the Prize. Those were
Speaker 1: great books to read, you know, they were great storytelling.
Speaker 1: They really kind of especially Denna Thieves got it all
Speaker 1: the craziness of the eighties that was going on in
Speaker 1: Jurigan's whole history of the oil industry was really fascinating.
Speaker 1: So those are those are some of my early influences.
Speaker 1: Tell us about this is everybody's favorite question. You mentioned
Speaker 1: Denna Thieves and the Prize. What are some of your
Speaker 1: favorite books, by the way, finance, non finance, unfiction, anything,
Speaker 1: most of it's it's more fiction. My favorite, my favorite
Speaker 1: book absolutely of all time is Zenna The Art of
Speaker 1: Motorcycle Makers. Repeatedly in college, did you yeah, I did too.
Speaker 1: I mean I not only did I read it repeatedly
Speaker 1: in college, I there was a point in my life
Speaker 1: where I was probably reading that whole book once a year.
Speaker 1: I mean, I just know people do that. So it's
Speaker 1: such a great book. Uh. That is, without a doubt,
Speaker 1: my favorite book. Then a lot of others. I mean
Speaker 1: there's a lot of other stuff. I think Dubliners by
Speaker 1: James Joyce's story short story collection, I just think that is.
Speaker 1: I think James Joyce is probably the greatest English language
Speaker 1: writer ever. You're not the first person who knows. I'm
Speaker 1: sure I'm not, but I think he is. And and
Speaker 1: like you know, Ulysses and and it's his novels can
Speaker 1: kind of you can get lost in them. They're difficult,
Speaker 1: but the short stories are unbelievable. They're great. Uh, this
Speaker 1: is gonna sound odd. I guess Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.
Speaker 1: Ryan Holiday just was talking about. I'm not kidding, that's
Speaker 1: one of my favorite books. That's in on my bookshelf.
Speaker 1: I turned to it off. Have you read his book
Speaker 1: The Daily Stoic? I have not, but I know who
Speaker 1: you're talking about. That is something you should check out.
Speaker 1: If you should if you like market, if you like meditations,
Speaker 1: check that out. You know what else, Give me one more,
Speaker 1: give you one more. I mean just giving me. I
Speaker 1: mean most of Hemmingway a lot of carouac. I think
Speaker 1: Fitzgerald was a great writer. I think it was a
Speaker 1: good I had a good command of the language. But
Speaker 1: I don't think he was a great storyteller, like I
Speaker 1: think if you look at Great Catsby, there's no real
Speaker 1: story there, which is I think why all the movie
Speaker 1: adaptations fail. The richer difference. I was on a flight
Speaker 1: the other day and I had been carrying him own
Speaker 1: The Old Man in the Sea, only like a hundred
Speaker 1: and something pages, And I had this thin book in
Speaker 1: my bag for weeks, and I figured, let me just
Speaker 1: bang out the first chapter and through. Six hours later
Speaker 1: we land and I had finished the book, and I
Speaker 1: was debating going back and reading it. Hemingway is a
Speaker 1: master of the language, mastering language, a master storytell Yes.
Speaker 1: I think people get caught up in his his persona,
Speaker 1: that sort of tough guy thing, uh, and they kind
Speaker 1: of miss his ability to write. Unbelievable writer. And Old
Speaker 1: Man in the Sea is just it's a master and
Speaker 1: it's so beautiful. The funny thing is it's so sensitive
Speaker 1: and so perceptive. It stands in stark contradiction to that
Speaker 1: exact guy ex drinking woman ezing. No Hemingways. I think
Speaker 1: Hemingway is a great writer. Yeah again not the first person. Yeah,
Speaker 1: have said that with me. Um, We'll give me one
Speaker 1: other Hemingway. But if you if someone says, hey, I've
Speaker 1: read Old Man, see what else should I read by Hemingway.
Speaker 1: The first one I read by Hemingway that I really
Speaker 1: fell in love with when I was fifteen, a sophomore
Speaker 1: in high school was Sun Also Rises, which was interesting
Speaker 1: at the time. But you know it's funny is at
Speaker 1: the time I really didn't understand half of what was
Speaker 1: going on in that book. I was fifteen years old.
Speaker 1: I was just in tranced by the way. Too young,
Speaker 1: too young. I went back and read it years later
Speaker 1: and kind of caught everything I was missing. But I
Speaker 1: mean all his all his early novels before, I mean
Speaker 1: Sun Also Rises? Uh, farewell to arm Well, that's a
Speaker 1: master piece. What's the one set in the Spanish Civil
Speaker 1: War and blanking on the name now obviously famous for
Speaker 1: Whom the Bell Tolls? For Whom the Bell Tolls? Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean those are all great works. And his early
Speaker 1: short story collections are great too, They're very very good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I really like his short So I'm a big Hemingway fan. Um,
Speaker 1: so since you joined finance? What has changed since you
Speaker 1: joined finance journalist? Him? Right, that's what I joined. Let
Speaker 1: me ask that question again, Oh, to have and have not?
Speaker 1: I haven't have not such a spectacular movie too. Um,
Speaker 1: since you joined financial journalism? What has changed in that industry?
Speaker 1: I'll tell you what a broaden it a little bit.
Speaker 1: I'll just talk about journalism, because since I joined the
Speaker 1: journalism industry, what has really changed? You know the answer
Speaker 1: you want to give as well, everything's changed. What has
Speaker 1: really changed is the business model. The business model and
Speaker 1: journalism and and it's funny. When I got in, we
Speaker 1: were still we were making the pages by hand. We're
Speaker 1: we're printing out the pages. We had a big piece
Speaker 1: of oak tag on a light table. We would cut
Speaker 1: out the stories with an exact o knife and glue
Speaker 1: them to the page. I did that in college. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what I got into journal That's what we did.
Speaker 1: But journalism hasn't really changed the business the journey. What
Speaker 1: journalism's you know model is goal is has not changed.
Speaker 1: What has changed is the business model. The business model
Speaker 1: was blown to smither reens by the Internet. The idea
Speaker 1: that you could create a product, a hard product of newspaper,
Speaker 1: sell ads in it, and make a business on that
Speaker 1: is gone. The Wall Street Journal does a wonderful newspaper,
Speaker 1: it really does. I love our newspaper. The Times does
Speaker 1: a great newspaper. That that is a business model that
Speaker 1: has been blown to hell. And in my mind, nobody
Speaker 1: has actually figured out what the new business model is.
Speaker 1: I I think that the two papers your names, along
Speaker 1: with the Washington Post in the FT that have a
Speaker 1: paywall up that charged for online access, that's the model.
Speaker 1: And and it looks like the whole fake news and
Speaker 1: the whole Facebook Twitter real fake news, not what the
Speaker 1: President calls fake news, but actual Russian bots and fake
Speaker 1: news has become this kind of buzzy drive. It's it's
Speaker 1: propaganda and it is I'm hoping that sends more people
Speaker 1: into the arms of the Wall Street General, the New
Speaker 1: York Times, the Washington Post FT. Because I've written about noise,
Speaker 1: I've written about signal. You can't just take something off
Speaker 1: the web and say, oh, I read it on the internet.
Speaker 1: That's a joke now, you know. It's so maybe that
Speaker 1: will imbute to the benefit of the big because you know,
Speaker 1: I think it's interesting in that we think we're living
Speaker 1: in such a different time and everything is different, everything
Speaker 1: has changed, and it really hasn't. The tools have changed. Uh,
Speaker 1: Politicians have always lied, political parties have always spread, you know,
Speaker 1: lies about their opponents. I mean, these things are not new.
Speaker 1: Readily how readily it can influence. And the job of
Speaker 1: journalism has always been to independently verify facts, too, independently
Speaker 1: tell the truth as best as we can get to
Speaker 1: it at that time. That has not changed and that
Speaker 1: will continue to be what our business is. The problem
Speaker 1: is just trying to do that profitably. And I think
Speaker 1: what you're you know, you can see pro Publica is
Speaker 1: a really interesting effort. The Washington Post. Look what the
Speaker 1: Washington Post did. That was a big, publicly traded company
Speaker 1: that bought a lot of pieces when things were hot,
Speaker 1: things turned in, things turned out, They went private, they
Speaker 1: sold off a lot of the business. They got back
Speaker 1: to their core pieces, They got back to their core,
Speaker 1: which is Washington not that they did, and so the
Speaker 1: business what what we do hasn't changed. Trying to figure
Speaker 1: out a way to do it profitably. That is a
Speaker 1: big challenge for us right now. Tell us about a
Speaker 1: time you failed and what you learned from the experience. Uh, time,
Speaker 1: I failed. So for a while in the nineties, and
Speaker 1: I guess they're early aughts. I thought I was going
Speaker 1: to make a career as a screenwriter. Really yeah, I did.
Speaker 1: I thought I love movies, I like telling stories. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna be a screenwriter. Have you have you written a
Speaker 1: screen play? I've written like ten. Uh, you know, I
Speaker 1: bossom software, read some books, try to figure out what's
Speaker 1: the mind? How do you broad a screenplay? Wrote a
Speaker 1: bunch of them, never sold one. One day, this is
Speaker 1: before this is before bitcoin. So one day I'm walking
Speaker 1: down the street in New York City. If this really happened,
Speaker 1: I'm walking down street, New York City. A guy comes
Speaker 1: walking up the street. He's on his cell phone and
Speaker 1: he said, I hear him say this. He says, I've
Speaker 1: got one day to get a script to Steve Bouschemmy
Speaker 1: and I've got a million dollars. And I my first
Speaker 1: thought was, I've I've got a script. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: Like this is Opportunity walking up the street at you guys,
Speaker 1: says I've got a million dollars. I need to get
Speaker 1: a script to Steve Brushemy. And I'm thinking I have
Speaker 1: a script, and I literally within within five seconds is
Speaker 1: how fast it went. I literally talked myself out of
Speaker 1: going up to the guy and saying, I've got your
Speaker 1: script right now. I I said, girl, maybe my script
Speaker 1: isn't right for Steve Bouchemy. I don't if he's the
Speaker 1: best character, would he really be interested in? And I don't.
Speaker 1: Opportunity walked up the street with me right and I
Speaker 1: and I talked myself out of it. Why did I
Speaker 1: talk to myself? Why didn't I just who cares? If
Speaker 1: it's right for Steve Bush, Like, here's a guy looking
Speaker 1: to buy a script, I've got a script, talk to him.
Speaker 1: And I didn't do it, and I regretted it my
Speaker 1: whole life. And how I learned from it is I
Speaker 1: led to the books when I realized bitcoin was a story.
Speaker 1: I was not going to let it go. You were
Speaker 1: not gonna get Steve not. I was not gonna Steve
Speaker 1: Bushemy myself again. Tell us the sort of advice you
Speaker 1: would give to a millennial or someone who just graduated college.
Speaker 1: You said, I'm interested in becoming a journalist or writer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would say, it's really it's it's two words, don't stop,
Speaker 1: don't don't stop, And it's funny. I learned this. I
Speaker 1: actually learned you know, talk you talk about tennis. For
Speaker 1: a while, I was running. I was jogging. And what
Speaker 1: I realized doogging was that as long as I didn't
Speaker 1: give up, I could build up my endurance. Whether I
Speaker 1: ran for ten minutes or for an hour, whether I
Speaker 1: felt good, I felt bad, I was into it. I
Speaker 1: wasn't into it. As long as I kept doing it
Speaker 1: and convinced myself I was going to keep doing it,
Speaker 1: I would get better at it. So if I didn't
Speaker 1: run for a day, if I didn't run for two days,
Speaker 1: if I don't run for a week, I was going
Speaker 1: to go back to it and keep doing it. And
Speaker 1: I did that for a while, and eventually I got
Speaker 1: pretty good at it. And I realized too, like in
Speaker 1: your career, that is the only thing you can control,
Speaker 1: is you right, don't stop. Especially in journalism, journalism is
Speaker 1: a war of attrition. I have seen a lot of
Speaker 1: good writers over the years just give up and get
Speaker 1: out of the business. It's not an easy business. It's
Speaker 1: not a particularly lucrative business. It's hard to do if
Speaker 1: you really want to do it. Thought, if you love it,
Speaker 1: if you're a writer, if you just don't stop. And
Speaker 1: our last question, tell us what it is you know
Speaker 1: about writing, uh and the markets today that you wish
Speaker 1: you knew when you began. I mean one thing, This
Speaker 1: is gonna sound very cliche, but but there is there
Speaker 1: is no substitute for experience. And it kind of goes
Speaker 1: back to what we were both saying years ago. I
Speaker 1: was a bad writer and the only way I was
Speaker 1: going to get good at writing was by writing for years.
Speaker 1: That's it. There's literally no other way to get good
Speaker 1: at writing, but by writing. No. I thought it was
Speaker 1: a good writer. I thought it was a good writer.
Speaker 1: My very first story, I interviewed three guys who were
Speaker 1: at Pearl Harbor the day it was bombed. So we're
Speaker 1: doing a fiftieth anniversary and there were three guys at
Speaker 1: the local VFW who were at Pearl Harbor the day
Speaker 1: it was bombed, and I interviewed them on December and
Speaker 1: I wrote the story and I thought it was you
Speaker 1: interviewed them. I interviewed them in Pearl Harbor, No. Fifty
Speaker 1: years earlier years. So I interviewed them. I wrote the story.
Speaker 1: I thought it was a really good story. I got
Speaker 1: this such a good story. I have gone back to
Speaker 1: read that story. It's a terrible story. It's not not
Speaker 1: for the guys. The guys gave me great story. They
Speaker 1: were at Pearl Harbor. The story itself is terrible. There
Speaker 1: was nowhere me my writing that terrible. That's amazing. I
Speaker 1: missed your did rollout events at the New York Museum
Speaker 1: of Finance. It's the it's the Museum of American Finance,
Speaker 1: museum in downtown on Wall Street, and you what was
Speaker 1: that an event was Well, we were going to have
Speaker 1: it at the museum. They had some water damage, so
Speaker 1: we couldn't do it there. When they got that fixed up,
Speaker 1: I encourage everyone to go to the museum. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: it's great. It's absolutely great. So we held it up
Speaker 1: at Fordham Law School in Lincoln Center and it was, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, it was a launch event. But we had
Speaker 1: a uh, we had a you know, one of these
Speaker 1: quote unquote fireside chats which might conducted with Joe Lubin,
Speaker 1: who is a co founder of Ethereum, which is another
Speaker 1: cryptocurrency platform, And then we had a panel discussion which
Speaker 1: was myself, your colleague, Josh Brown, and the Winklevoss twins,
Speaker 1: Tyler and Cameron with the Winkle Vye is Now, so
Speaker 1: I talked about that actually, and yes, I gave you
Speaker 1: a hard time for not gave me grief. It was Tuesday's.
Speaker 1: I have a standing date on Tuesday's, so unbelieving. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I leaned over to Josh before it and I said,
Speaker 1: Barry coming and he said, no, no, it's it's Tuesday.
Speaker 1: It's like, what are you kidding me? So I have
Speaker 1: to you gave me grief, But I really have to
Speaker 1: share why that was an issue. So I am very
Speaker 1: late to the game of tennis. I picked it up
Speaker 1: in my mid fifties, right, I'm and I'm only in
Speaker 1: my mid fifties, right. And there's a longer story about
Speaker 1: a younger, much dumber, fourteen year old version of myself
Speaker 1: being offered tennis lessons by my mom and saying tennis.
Speaker 1: Who plays tennis? Fourteen year old idiot? So anyway, I
Speaker 1: start playing, and this is really a bizarre digression, but
Speaker 1: since you've been You tortured me about it on Twitter.
Speaker 1: I have to explain this, so that was private. I
Speaker 1: didn't give your heart. You d mned me, which was worse.
Speaker 1: Publicly people can trash me and I laugh, but privately
Speaker 1: it's like, oh, he really means this. I start playing tennis,
Speaker 1: and if you've never really played before, but you have
Speaker 1: some I hand coordination and have played other sports like baseball,
Speaker 1: you feel like you can hit the ball wherever you want,
Speaker 1: and I could place the ball anywhere in the court.
Speaker 1: I could catch that back mine anytime I want when
Speaker 1: I'm playing with other newbies. Then you start progressing and
Speaker 1: you start playing with people who have some skills, and
Speaker 1: now you want to be in that group. They're hitting
Speaker 1: the ball with some power, and suddenly merely swinging back
Speaker 1: doesn't get it done, and you start to learn you
Speaker 1: have to have the eight mechanics of your swing, the
Speaker 1: distance to the ball, the footwork, there are all these things,
Speaker 1: and it's classic meta cognition Allah Dunning Krueger. Where As
Speaker 1: you get better at something, you developed the ability to
Speaker 1: self evaluate. Right. You ask most people you're a decent driver,
Speaker 1: and you know how many people are above average drivers
Speaker 1: in a room, hands go up. Most of them you
Speaker 1: are not, so I be. I am. I am among
Speaker 1: the group that I have. I have become skilled enough
Speaker 1: at tennis to know I suck, right. That is a
Speaker 1: skill set to be able to say honestly, Oh, I
Speaker 1: really have a lot of work to do. So a
Speaker 1: friend who I was playing with, who also sucked, disappears
Speaker 1: for a few weeks, and he comes back, and we
Speaker 1: were pretty head to head, evenly matched, and he starts
Speaker 1: running me off the court. I'm like, dude, where did
Speaker 1: this come from? I got a new guy I'm taking
Speaker 1: lessons from. You can't get it to see him. He's
Speaker 1: sold out. He coaches a no, no, it's absolutely true,
Speaker 1: like the top people at a particular tennis facility. So
Speaker 1: one day and so I I asked, hey, you know
Speaker 1: i'd like to take my friend said he's taking lessons
Speaker 1: with you. I'd like to take a lesson. He's like sorry.
Speaker 1: So a couple of weeks go by and I'm still
Speaker 1: getting my ass kicked. This like a year ago, eight
Speaker 1: months ago, and maybe with September October, I get a
Speaker 1: text on my phone, Hey, I had a cancelation. If
Speaker 1: you want to take a lesson tonight. I'm free, so
Speaker 1: I go in August September, I go take a lesson.
Speaker 1: The next day, I'm playing with a bunch of people
Speaker 1: and the like. And by the way, the lesson, it
Speaker 1: was just one of those things where just a few
Speaker 1: little mechanical changes, keep your elbow down, turn this direction,
Speaker 1: make sure your shoulders are like stupid things that I
Speaker 1: can't believe in hindsight, nobody else told me. Um, and
Speaker 1: you're unaware of the I think it's called prior perception,
Speaker 1: where your various body parts are in space. So the
Speaker 1: next day I go in and I just amongst my
Speaker 1: you know, the junior crew, I do really well. And
Speaker 1: I pin him back and said, that was a great lesson. Let's, uh,
Speaker 1: let's do another one. He's like, listen, I'm fully booked.
Speaker 1: I teach six days a week. If you want a lesson,
Speaker 1: if somebody drops out, i'll get But but you're committing
Speaker 1: to that space every Tuesday at seven o'clock for forever
Speaker 1: or or for a year. So I'm like, I'm willing
Speaker 1: to do that because my game. You you made me
Speaker 1: better in one lesson, and I understand the rules of
Speaker 1: diminishing returns, but I'm in. You get a cancelation, I'm there.
Speaker 1: So a few weeks later go by, I get a cancelation,
Speaker 1: and now I have to commit to him for the
Speaker 1: next six months. So seven listen, if I had the
Speaker 1: pope on the panel, would you have blown off the tennants?
Speaker 1: I like this Pope, but you have to extend my regrets. Absolutely.
Speaker 1: And and by the way, I'm not like a I
Speaker 1: was been playing tennis for forty years and I'm insane.
Speaker 1: I've been playing for three years and wish I've been
Speaker 1: playing for forty years. So I feel like I have
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff to make up. That's five minutes
Speaker 1: of tennis that nobody who's listening to this gives. If
Speaker 1: you want to make it, if you want to make
Speaker 1: it interesting and not just a funny anecdote. I do
Speaker 1: think it's interesting that in your mid fifties you decided
Speaker 1: to pick up something that is brand new pro at
Speaker 1: obviously no offense, but I mean, I think that is
Speaker 1: so I think that's a thing that people kind of
Speaker 1: lose as they and I'm fifty two, folks, so I'm
Speaker 1: not like in my third you know, I think people
Speaker 1: lose the interest in new things. Oh no, I'm fascinating.
Speaker 1: I think that really is a problem. I'm fascinated by
Speaker 1: new things. But I'm said when old things go away.
Speaker 1: So I used to play softball, baseball and softball, and
Speaker 1: you hit a certain age and you just can't do
Speaker 1: that anymore. I used to play basketball. I I have
Speaker 1: I have some, I have some. I got game and
Speaker 1: I remember, like mid thirties, rolling my ankle and usually
Speaker 1: the next day and it just takes days and days
Speaker 1: and weeks to heal. And finally at forty, you know,
Speaker 1: you're fatter, you're slower, you win, You're you're So there's
Speaker 1: there's lots of stuff with that one last tennis thing, keenness,
Speaker 1: you haven't lost any listeners. They're still they're gone. It's
Speaker 1: just dude, it's just the two of them. They're still here.
Speaker 1: So tennis tennis has ruined the Matrix for me, the
Speaker 1: original Matrix movie, because if you because if you remember
Speaker 1: the movie The Matrix, the scene on the roof where
Speaker 1: he's leaning back, bullets are going by and she has
Speaker 1: to jump into the UI and fly the helicopter and
Speaker 1: she calls in, Hey, Tanka, I don't know how to fly.
Speaker 1: You hold on and they download remember, and now she
Speaker 1: could and it turns out that's not true. Hypothetically, if
Speaker 1: you're in any sort of compute dissimulation, and someone could
Speaker 1: download a skill set. And I have watched enough of Dartfish,
Speaker 1: which is an online collection of of basically every tennis
Speaker 1: stroke by every major player. You want to see how
Speaker 1: federal served, you want to see how aggassy backhands, you
Speaker 1: want to see, It's all there. It's an incredible service.
Speaker 1: It's effectively free. I don't know how they do this,
Speaker 1: but anyway, intellectually I understand exactly how to do a backhand,
Speaker 1: how to do a forehand, a drop shot. But actually
Speaker 1: developing the muscle memory to convert your intellectual understanding of
Speaker 1: the mechanics of a specific stroke to executing that stroke
Speaker 1: is this Giants to the matrix is not a real place.
Speaker 1: It is a computer program. They're not manipulating their bodies.
Speaker 1: They're manipulating digits digits. Completely understand that for you. But
Speaker 1: even with they're not in the physical world. They're inside
Speaker 1: a computer program. To the muscles they're manipulating are also
Speaker 1: even within so then within the simulation, within the simulation,
Speaker 1: I can't believe this conversation is within the simulation, there
Speaker 1: isn't even a then why have a fight, because all
Speaker 1: you're gonna do is download various fighting techniques and so
Speaker 1: everybody ends up with the same various things. Either of
Speaker 1: skill matters. But the point is that most people in
Speaker 1: the program don't realize they're in the program. This is
Speaker 1: only a small group of people who have figured out
Speaker 1: they can manipulate the program. But the agents who are
Speaker 1: within the program, but their program, they know their party,
Speaker 1: they are programs don't exist in the right word, that's right.
Speaker 1: So so theoretically, Agent Smith of course busts out. But
Speaker 1: theoretically shouldn't shouldn't every agent have at least this the
Speaker 1: downloadable skill set that they do. Just why until Neo
Speaker 1: comes there? Unbeatable? That's why they say to Neo, if
Speaker 1: you've see an agent, run because the agents were unbeatable
Speaker 1: until Neo. Who is the one? And I hate that
Speaker 1: whole like this is a little Jesus anyhow, but but
Speaker 1: to me, so so let's we'll we'll bring this back
Speaker 1: to bit. We're discussing digital technologies and the application of them.
Speaker 1: So you gave me grief about not coming and the
Speaker 1: whole launch, the whole tennis thing is I made a
Speaker 1: commitment on Tuesday's there's a sunk cost. I'm paying for
Speaker 1: the uh lesson whether I'm there or not. So I
Speaker 1: sort of feel like an obligation to Plus, I respect
Speaker 1: your commitment to your game. You know what there are?
Speaker 1: There are things that I am interested in that I
Speaker 1: know I have skills or abilities. I may not be
Speaker 1: able to win a Formula One race, but I get
Speaker 1: on a track and hold my own with just about
Speaker 1: any other amateur. I wish I had more track time.
Speaker 1: That's another area. Yeah, it's it's if you ever get
Speaker 1: a chance, go to Lime Rock take a uh AN
Speaker 1: Advanced driving course. Um, they're amazing. You realize you don't
Speaker 1: most people think they know how to drive. You discover
Speaker 1: again back to the medicognition. Oh really, I could keep
Speaker 1: a car on a lane and I can make a
Speaker 1: left turn, but I really don't have the ability to
Speaker 1: manage a car in a variety of So you you
Speaker 1: run through this whole. So. I like being competent at things.
Speaker 1: I like being good at things, and it was frustrating
Speaker 1: to find something that was fun that I sucked at
Speaker 1: and the better I got, the more I realized how
Speaker 1: poor I was, Like with each additional skill that was added,
Speaker 1: it was oh really, so you think like on a
Speaker 1: scale of one to team him a five and suddenly
Speaker 1: you realize, no, no, you're five on a scale of
Speaker 1: one to a hundred. Did you ever find that early?
Speaker 1: Because now, obviously, I mean, if you host a show
Speaker 1: called Masters in Business, you should be a master yourself.
Speaker 1: But I mean, and you're early in your career in
Speaker 1: the markets, did you ever find that dynamic, that same dynamic? Um,
Speaker 1: that's an interesting question. I've talked about this before. The
Speaker 1: training you. I started as a trader, and the trading
Speaker 1: you get is essentially they throw you in the deep
Speaker 1: end of the pool, and whoever drowns is in a
Speaker 1: trader anymore. And oh the people who managed too and you.
Speaker 1: One of the things I picked up quickly was cut
Speaker 1: your losses short. But when you're winning, uh loss was?
Speaker 1: I felt the loss very intensely and would would if anything,
Speaker 1: cut my losses too fast. You want to call them quickly,
Speaker 1: but not instantaneously, but so you eventually iterate and get
Speaker 1: better and better. But I was more fascinated not by
Speaker 1: that process, but why the people around me on the
Speaker 1: long trading desk who were effectively all doing the same thing.
Speaker 1: How come this person is making money this month and
Speaker 1: last month you lost money. How come that reversed the
Speaker 1: last money last month? Act I was losing money, this
Speaker 1: month is making it, and I it set me down
Speaker 1: the rabbit hole of behavioral finance. And and so so
Speaker 1: I was a decent trader. I made decent amount of money,
Speaker 1: but it was very volatile and inconsistent. Um I liked it,
Speaker 1: maybe a little too much. I loved it. It was
Speaker 1: it was, you know, looking for a vein. And so
Speaker 1: all of that stuff ends up going to well, if
Speaker 1: you want to have a career in finance, you're gonna
Speaker 1: make your wife crazy if you stay as a trader.
Speaker 1: So move to research. Moved to market analysis so that
Speaker 1: you'll make less base money but more consistently, and she won't.
Speaker 1: I'm not a stress monkey. She is. So it's like
Speaker 1: I'm like, hey, honey, how is today I lost a
Speaker 1: hundred grand? And she would go throw up. No, no,
Speaker 1: you understand that happened all the time. I'm about a
Speaker 1: hundred of them down. Stuff happens and they don't care.
Speaker 1: Now she she's a teacher. She wants ready, steady life.
Speaker 1: The thought of you lost four cars or half a house,
Speaker 1: what's wrong with you? Sometimes a position goes against you
Speaker 1: and you have limits of how much you're willing to
Speaker 1: accept losses, and you know it's everybody's style is different,
Speaker 1: and all of that led to where we are today.
Speaker 1: And by the way, ps, if you go back and
Speaker 1: listen to the early versions of Masters in Business, I
Speaker 1: find their unlistenable. They're terrible. Yes, only because that with
Speaker 1: a lot of my old Do you go back and
Speaker 1: read some of your own right, listen? I think Bailout Nation.
Speaker 1: If I was writing it today, I would have adopted
Speaker 1: a much more dispassionate tone. I would have been a
Speaker 1: little less flamboyant, and some of you you probably would
Speaker 1: have asked me to be your co oer there instead
Speaker 1: of Aaron. Aaron was not my co author. Adarin was
Speaker 1: my editor. Kept me from having these long, rambling digressions
Speaker 1: and things like Aaron is a wonderful editor. So so No,
Speaker 1: but I do find that I things that I wrote
Speaker 1: early in my career, the videos that I made earlier,
Speaker 1: because I did a live show for the Journal for
Speaker 1: a while. All the early stuff. I go back now
Speaker 1: and I cringe. I just cringe. I can't stand it.
Speaker 1: I actually can't stand it. I don't like it. I
Speaker 1: don't like who I was. That. It's funny because experience
Speaker 1: do you get criticisms and you think that person doesn't
Speaker 1: know what they're talking about. I'd be that person now
Speaker 1: criticizing me. I have that experience every five years or so.
Speaker 1: Every now it's five to ten years, where you look
Speaker 1: back what you were doing five years ago and you say, oh,
Speaker 1: what I'm doing and whatever it is? Radio writing, management, assets,
Speaker 1: what whatever? Distructing portfolios. I'm so much better at X,
Speaker 1: Y and Z today than five years ago, and I
Speaker 1: assume five years from now, I'm going to look back
Speaker 1: and say, what were you doing in talking about tennis
Speaker 1: and trading? It's you clearly have have no idea how
Speaker 1: to host a radio show. And I will tell you
Speaker 1: is looking at this right now and it's like, oh
Speaker 1: my god, this is terrible. Everyone stopped listening. It's horrific.
Speaker 1: It's hope people are still listening because actually we'll move
Speaker 1: this to the end so people who hang out get
Speaker 1: you did have some interesting questions for me. One last
Speaker 1: thing about medicognition. I want to share with you if
Speaker 1: you've ever done live radio with somebody who's a pro.
Speaker 1: When I watched Tom Keane run a constant with the
Speaker 1: producer and you're counting down ten seconds to the commercial
Speaker 1: five four three to one. Live commercials were live billboards,
Speaker 1: live roze to people on the floor of the exchange,
Speaker 1: and he does it flawlessly, seamlessly. People don't appreciate how
Speaker 1: skilled the pros are because you just assume, hey, how
Speaker 1: hard is it to get on a mic and go
Speaker 1: blah blah blah for an hour. But when you actually
Speaker 1: watch the bullets in the air, the moving targets, the
Speaker 1: precision in which the timing has done, you realize these
Speaker 1: guys are amazing. And after thirty years, you certainly should
Speaker 1: be good, but they're astonishing, astounding. No, Tom is great,
Speaker 1: and I think you have to realize too, he has
Speaker 1: a team around him. Sure, he has a team. He
Speaker 1: has producers, he has people on the floor, control room,
Speaker 1: he has researchers. I mean, that is a huge team.
Speaker 1: And all those efforts get funneled through Tom Keane, But
Speaker 1: you don't He has to be able to maintain that
Speaker 1: and he does he's great. I mean, Keene's a total pro.
Speaker 1: He's great, but the listener doesn't see it. They don't,
Speaker 1: So that that's what I get why I keep coming
Speaker 1: back to Donning Krueger. You have to get to a
Speaker 1: certain point where you can understand exactly what goes in
Speaker 1: and how much you suck at it. So the joke is, wait,
Speaker 1: you host a podcast, will you interview people? You're my
Speaker 1: wife says I'm a terrible listener or something like that.
Speaker 1: I wasn't paying attention. So that's the joke. So now
Speaker 1: we're gonna go back in time, and we have been
Speaker 1: speaking with Paul Vina. He is the author and co
Speaker 1: author with Mike Casey of two books, the first being
Speaker 1: The Age of Cryptocurrency, the second being The Truth Machine, Blockchain,
Speaker 1: and the Future of Everything. If you enjoyed this rambling
Speaker 1: and digressive conversation, ban look up an Inch or down
Speaker 1: an Inch on Apple iTunes and you can see any
Speaker 1: of the other two hundreds such conversations we've had about uh,
Speaker 1: the art of the backstroke and the drop. Um. We
Speaker 1: love your comments, feedback and suggestions right to us at
Speaker 1: m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. I would be
Speaker 1: remiss if I did not thank the crack staff that
Speaker 1: helps put together these conversations each week. Medina Parwana is
Speaker 1: our producer Slash What You Engineer? Taylor Riggs is our
Speaker 1: book of producer. Mike Batnik is our head of research.
Speaker 1: I'm Barry Ridholts. You've been listening to Masters in Business
Speaker 1: on Bloomberg Radio.