Thread by @otisa502

1/47 RYAN (@RyanSAdams): "And, Mark, the 'life imitating art' I think is actually a really good way to illustrate the fact that people understand what's going on, maybe not as explicitly as you have stated it, and that's why we've brought you on to the podcast, to explicitly

2/47 “state things. But people feel this; young people feel discouraged, they don't feel included, they feel lost. It's not just young people, but it's the majority of the United States. And this is the same through line that we saw in the Roman Empire, where the people of the

3/47 “world, they knew that things were corrupted, they knew that things were wrong. And if we take a historical perspective, people saw — inside the Roman Empire, it was hard to see it fall in real-time, but if you look back in hindsight, the writing was on the wall.

4/47 “And now we have this historical perspective; we can see these same parallels, we can see people make a farce of the current status quo, like ‘money printer go brrr,’ ‘Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself,’ all these things. People know subconsciously, at the very least, that

5/47 “something is going wrong, and at least we have these parallels to draw throughout history, and we can also talk about the new things, the unique things, about this current state, where, well, now we have this thing called #Bitcoin, and it is in direct opposition to

6/47 “the status quo. How do you feel about like the cultural understanding of some of these nefarious activities that are going on that really define the world that we live in?"

MARK (@MarkYusko): "I think it's a really great point on the inability to see something when it's

7/47 “happening to you. I wrote a letter about this — it was the Year of the Frog — a few years ago. No, I think it was the Year of the Dog and I called it the Year of the Frog... in that basically being boiled. And when you boil a frog, if you drop it in hot water, he just

8/47 “jumps out; but if you put him in cold water and slowly heat it up, he's paralyzed and he can't jump out. So you're right, you don't see it when it's happening to you. But I will say the younger generation does see it for what it is; I don't really know why. Maybe it's

9/47 “because media is so much more advanced today. In the olden days, my days of Walter Cronkite coming on and reading the news, that was the news that was created so that you would consume it, some of it propaganda, some of it really news. And not that he was a bad person,

10/47 “he was just doing his job. Today, if I want to know about the Argentinian elections, I don't wait for a reporter to write a story to get edited to get published in a big national media with their particular slant. I watch a Periscope of people in line at the polling place.

11/47 “So the immediacy of information and the ability to get sourced data, I think, has just been enhanced by the Internet and by all that. So I think there's a really interesting digital divide. I talk about this all the time. If you ask anyone over 35, who is your broker?

12/47 “I don't know, Merrill Lynch, UBS. How much gold do you have? I don't know, 3%, 4%. How much #Bitcoin do you have? Are you kidding me? It's a Ponzi scheme. Jamie Dimon, 'it's a fraud.' Warren Buffett, he calls it 'rat poison squared.' Not to be outdone, his partner

13/47 “Charlie says it's like trading newly harvested dead baby brains. And I apologize for this, but what the fuck, Charlie. Seriously, W-T-F! That's some weird stuff. He says that to be extreme. Why? Because he's an incumbent. 46% of Berkshire Hathaway is financial services.

14/47 “Jamie Dimon (@emo_jamie_dimon), I love that tweet of Jamie Dimon — maybe you did it, or whoever did it — the 6 stages of JPMorgan. They went through the denial, and then the — and now they're in acceptance; we're going to have an actively managed fund. It's amazing

15/47 “to watch. But, look, incumbents will always tell you that the new, disruptive thing is bad. At the turn of the century, horse's carriage, the average person doesn't know why stoops in Downtown New York are 9 feet above street level; that the old buildings from the 1700s,

16/47 “the stoop is 9 feet above street level. Why?"

RYAN (@RyanSAdams): “It seems like a hazard."

MARK (@MarkYusko): "It does. It's because of horse shit. Literally, the poop would get swept to the side and it would pile 3, 4 feet up and the ladies didn't want their dresses to

17/47 “drag in it, so they built elevated sidewalks 9 feet high and you'd walk into your house. To your point, a hazard, get drunk at night, fall off into the horse poop and never be seen from again. Bad plan. But that's why it exists. And so, the street sweepers didn't want to

18/47 “lose their jobs when the horse's carriage came out, so they passed out pamphlets saying that you would die if you got into a horse's carriage. My grandfather-in-law went to work for the airlines, American Airlines, left the train, a safe job, and his parents thought he

19/47 “was an idiot. The train companies passed out pamphlets, saying if you got on an airplane, your body would cave in on itself because you'd be going too fast. So fear, uncertainty and doubt, FUD, has been around forever. So back to the digital divide, ask anyone

20/47 “under 35, who is your broker? What's a broker? You mean my Robinhood account? I got one of those. How much gold do you have? Are you kidding me? Boomer rocks? Zero. What are you talking about? How much #Bitcoin do you have? I don't want to talk about it. Why not?

21/47 “Because it's a really big percentage of my portfolio. Why is that? Why do the boomers think it's a Ponzi scheme. Why does Peter Schiff call it a Ponzi scheme?"

RYAN (@RyanSAdams): "Incumbents."

MARK (@MarkYusko): “Incumbency, right. But also, there is this

22/47 “great thing — and I actually retweeted it -- on plasticity, that if something is invented when you're born, it's normal; if it's invented between when you're born and when you're 35, it's innovative; if it's invented after you're 35, it's against the normal order of

23/47 “things. And that's exactly right. And if you think about my tech cycle that I always talk about — which is '54 was the mainframe, '68 was the microchip, '82 was the personal computer, '96 was the Internet, 2010 was the mobile net, and 2024 is the trust net — it happens

24/47 “every 14 years. Why? And it always is led by young people. Why? Marc Andreessen was 19, Sergey and Larry were 20s. Why is it always young people? Because the creative class, they don't know any better. Again, before he was a bad person, Bill Cosby was this funny comedian

25/47 “when I was growing up and he had this great schtick that he did about this kid. And he said, this kid was amazing, he could ride his bicycle anywhere; he could ride it up over the swing set, over the top of fences, he could do 360 6 inches off the ground and he never fell.

26/47 “You know when the first time he fell was? When someone explained to him about gravity. And so, young people don't know what they don't know, and so they experiment, and they try things that are new, and then they discover things and they innovate. And innovation is what

27/47 “creates wealth. And you asked at the very beginning of this, is this an opportunity to create wealth? This is the greatest wealth creation opportunity I will see in my lifetime. Money Over Internet Protocol [MOIP] is the greatest invention of this century, bar none.

28/47 “Everything is happening in real-time, and that's why I went from spending none of my time 8 years ago — hey, look, I've done plenty of stupid things, and I'm not a gazillionaire because I wasn't smart enough to get involved when I first got exposed to this in 2013.

29/47 “And no one is crying for me, I'm doing fine. That's not the point. But the reality is that I didn't get it because I didn't do the work and I was over 35 and I wasn't as open as I should have been. But now, 1 because I'm hanging out with people like you; 2 because

30/47 “I met Pomp (@APompliano) and others, and I now get to hang out with the crypto kids and I get to hang out with people who are smart and motivated and energetic, and I'm kind of reverse aging, and I have a little bit of wisdom because I've seen some

31/47 “things that have happened in the past, and I can kind of use that to my benefit. I've had more fun in the last 8 years than I've had my whole life; because this is a big deal, and it is a chance to take — 40% of people in the world don't have a bank account.

32/47 “40% of the people in the world don't have a bank account. So they can't get financial services, they can't get lending. Now we are going to provide financial services to everybody. And to your point about bankless, I mean, we can

33/47 “all be bankless, we can all interact, we can all move from these legacy financial systems that were controlled by this banking cabal to a more democratized and open society. And I'm not in the — back to 'Mr. Robot' — F society, not fuck society. No, no. I'm about

34/47 “let's move society to a more open and less Ponziized — and 'Ponzi' is an important word. People want to talk about #Bitcoin is a Ponzi or Ethereum is a Ponzi. No, no. That means you don't understand the word. Ponzi works like this: In the old days of finance, your

35/47 “banker lived in your town, he knew your name, he knew where you lived, he knew your family, and you would go to the bank and they would do what was called 'hedged finance'; they would lend you money, with the expectation of getting paid back

36/47 “principal and interest, and the bank kept the loan on their balance sheet and they took the risk and you were partners. And then we moved over the years to speculative finance, where the banker kind of knew who you were and he didn't really

37/47 “think you could pay back the principal, but he was pretty sure you could pay the interest, so they would make you a loan for a second house or maybe some speculative real estate. Then we moved to speculative finance. Over the last couple of decades, we've

38/47 “gong full-on Ponzi finance, where the banker doesn't know your name, the banker doesn't live in your town, it's a nameless, faceless organization; you get the money, they don't ever expect you to pay back the principal or interest, bullet loans

39/47 “and long-term — it's just can you pay — I mean, can you flip the house at a higher price, can you flip the stock at a higher price, can you gamify investing or gambling like GameStop or all this other crap that's going on.

40/47 “I mean, Dogecoin, Doge is everything that's wrong — hopefully you guys don't love it — with the markets today. It started as a joke. A bunch of people want to pump it and buy it because the price is moving. If you're buying something because the

41/47 “price is moving, you're a degenerate gambler. Now, that doesn't mean you're a bad person, it just means you're gambling. If you buy something because you think the value — you think the price is below the value, you're an investor. And if you buy something because

42/47 “you think the growth is really good, you're an investor. And so, the way I think about this is, as technology evolves and as we move to this more open society and more democratic society and more equal society — and as Jimmy Song, who I love, when

43/47 “he talks about this — if you have a fiat currency-based income, and he says it, that's why I'm borrowing it, you're a slave. It's a little dicy of a word, but it's true. You are an indentured servant to the fiat masters who can devalue your asset at any time, which

44/47 “they've done in spades. Yet, if you own this other asset that's outside that system that is fixed in supply and has a beautiful deflationary monetary system... Now, people say, but, Mark, it lacks all the benefits of fractional reserve. Yep, I actually don't

45/47 “hate fractional reserve. I think if you look around the world, the countries that have fractional reserve banking systems actually are better off than those that don't. So the idea of depositing assets, lending the assets is a good thing. That's why we invested in BlockFi

46/47 “and other CeFi. I don't think everything has to be DeFi. I think CeFi has a role, I think it replaces TradFi, and I think DeFi will replace everything that is human and we'll go to code; like derivative contracts, humans don't need to be involved, structured products.

47/47 “If I want to buy high-risk #Bitcoin, meaning basically #Bitcoin on leverage, or low-risk #Bitcoin, meaning low-volatility #Bitcoin, I can do that with a smart contract now. That's why I invested in BOND through BarnBridge."

Timestamp: 36:35

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