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In Search Of Excellence
Brock Pierce: What Is Bitcoin, How Does It Work, And The Importance Of Contribution | E139
Brock Pierce, began his career as a child actor, notably appearing in Disney's "The Mighty Ducks" series and "First Kid." Transitioning from entertainment to entrepreneurship, he co-founded the Digital Entertainment Network (DEN) in the late 1990s, aiming to deliver original episodic content online. Pierce later became a prominent figure in the cryptocurrency industry, co-founding Tether in 2014, a leading stablecoin, and serving as Director of the Bitcoin Foundation. In 2020, he ran as an independent candidate in the U.S. presidential election. His diverse experiences offer valuable insights into the intersections of technology, finance, and media.
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The reason why we don't use Bitcoin as a medium of exchange is because of its volatility. I mean, people use Bitcoin for any transaction. You can buy a Tesla, you can use this, you can use that. Bitcoin can be used as a medium of exchange. But like you said, nobody does it. People do, but that's not the primary use case. The primary use case of Bitcoin is as a store of value, as a speculative investment, as a hedge against other assets. Right? It changes the fundamental world in which we live that we can now transact over the internet with anyone in the world without a trusted person in the middle.
Randall Kaplan:You're listening to part two of my awesome interview with Brock Pierce, a crypto billionaire who has pledged to give away billions of dollars during his lifetime. If you haven't yet listened to part one, be sure to check that one out first. Not without further ado, here's part two of my awesome show with Brock, and let's switch it to something that I think people know most about you. It's exciting. It's what everyone in the world talks about, and that's blockchain. And let's start with the premise that everybody has heard of it, but not a lot of people know actually what it is. We can get very complicated, but I want to keep it very simple, what I call the grandma standard. So the grandma standard is your grandmother, my grandmother. My grandmother passed away two years ago at 104 years old. But the grandma standard, she was the best, good genius. My my hero, my hero. What a life 104 what a what a life. I mean, she was
Brock Pierce:amazing. Probably, my great grandmother passed away at 104 it's, it's
Randall Kaplan:in what she functioning at 104
Brock Pierce:Yeah. I mean, not as well as it I need, but Right?
Randall Kaplan:It's great. So, so, so the standard is, let's explain it to people in a way that people will now learn exactly what it is. So let's, let's take a step back. What is the blockchain that everyone's heard of? I
Brock Pierce:think we have to start with Bitcoin, because I think that's going to be help people at least understand the first piece of it. Okay, most people have heard of, you know, Bitcoin, or you know, at this point, at least heard of it. And so think of Bitcoin as the first application utilizing what we call a blockchain. Think of the blockchain is like the operating system that powers your iPhone or powers your Android device, right? That is the underlying operating system, the sort of software system or the architecture. Bitcoin was the first app, like the first app, and now that same database, or blockchain, that architecture is being utilized to do lots and lots and lots of other interesting things, but Bitcoin was the first use of this concept, and what we've learned is the same architecture that makes Bitcoin possible can be used to do A lot of other things, and so to describe it, a blockchain is just a new type of database, what you'd call a distributed database, kind of like cloud computing or AWS, or Akamai, or Akamai, right to use a more appropriate one that less people know today, but yes, right, than those, as far as grandma is concerned, but, but exactly perfect example, Akamai, except for its decentralized meaning, it's not run by a company, right? Akamai is a corporation. You know, AWS is, you know, a division of Amazon, right? All these sort of cloud computing systems. A blockchain is a distributed database similar to cloud, except for its decentralized meaning, there Corporation usually that runs it. It's an open system that anyone can use. So imagine if we talked about a credit card, for example. Let's talk about a MasterCard, a visa and AmEx a discover. Imagine of American Express said to all the card holders in the world to kind of keep it in the financial services area. As an Amex holder, you are allowed to use your computer or your cell phone to run the AMEX software. So instead of American Express having its own back end, instead they said, we're no longer going to run the American Express back end. We're going to allow all American Express holders, card holders, to run the American Express platform. And imagine 10% of all the AMEX holders in the world said, I'm going to run the software. And in exchange for running the American Express software so they no longer pay server fees, they no longer pay for infrastructure, they said, We're going to give it to our users to do that. And. They said, in exchange for that, we're giving all Amex users that run the AMEX software a piece of the transaction fee. That is probably the easiest way to think kind of how Bitcoin works. There's no Bitcoin company. There's no blockchain company that runs Bitcoin. You can run a node, you can effectively run those servers, and in exchange for doing that, you can earn Bitcoin blockchains effectually, effect effectively work that way, whatever product and service a blockchain is essentially a decentralized, distributed architecture where the people that run the infrastructure get a piece of the action in the form of coins, similar to like how cloud works, distributed database, except for it's decentralized, which means it's the user base that runs the software, normally, professional users more than amateur users. But it's a new framework, where no company runs the thing, and one of the benefits of that is it creates what we call censorship resistance, meaning there's not a company that you can go to to say, oh, you can't do that. It's run by people or groups of people all over the world, which means you can't really stop censorship, which presents a whole nother potential discussion, but you also can't shut the network off, which is why Bitcoin is very popular. It's call it very resilient. You know, it's a very resilient, highly secure system, where, if someone didn't like Bitcoin, a government historically, for example, no one can shut it off. So these are some of the benefits of using a database like this, highly resilient. It's also the most secure system the world has ever seen. Highly secure, highly resilient, can't be shut off, and it's censorship resistant, and these are the reasons why one might want to use a blockchain, but to speak in a different way, it's also a slow, dumb database, right? And so these are the reasons why you'd want to use a slow, dumb, expensive database. Is it? One of these things is must be a need for it. Most people just put a blockchain on things because it's a buzzword, like AI or cloud or this or that, though most businesses and most products and services don't really need it. So in short, a blockchain is a new architecture of database, a decentralized, distributed database that has a few attributes that justify using that slow, dumb database for certain types of applications. Okay, so let's go back long winded, but hopefully simple, and covers everything. Okay,
Randall Kaplan:let's go back to the creation of Bitcoin. And to do that, we have to go back to 2009 someone who went by the name Satoshi yakamoto wrote a white paper about Bitcoin. Tell everybody what a white paper actually is, and just explain the fact there's no coin you're putting in your wallet here, and how people actually get a Bitcoin. You can buy it on exchange, but anybody listening who has a computer could also make their own Bitcoin. So explain that to everyone, because no one, no one really understand if, if you're not in the crypto game, you don't understand that. And even my guess is over 50% of people, hundreds of million, billions of people who own Bitcoin don't really know where it started. Yeah,
Brock Pierce:you have to go back further than 2009 or eight. So crypto is short for cryptography, right? It means it's security like it's a form of encryption to encrypt data for purposes of condensing file size and securing it. It goes back to 1982 and a guy by the name of David Chom, who really was the first person to publish, like scientific research, to publish this concept of using encryption, or cryptography to build a new monetary, or currency way of transmitting value. And then there were a number of ideas and things that happened in the 1990s uh, kind of the next big idea was the National Security Agency, the NSA, wrote a paper in 1996 on, you know, how to create the similar concept. And then you have a number of entrepreneurs in the 90s, and 2000s that were also publishing ideas, e gold, hash, cash and similar concepts. My background goes back to the 19 late 1990s and 2000s I ran all the digital currency markets, not all, but I was the main person running the. Markets for virtual currencies and video games. So if you played World of Warcraft and Second Life, I was the main market maker for all the game currencies, from 2001 into 2000 call it eight when this begins. I had 400,000 people in China, primarily living in the metaverse, or the virtual worlds mining digital currencies. I was PayPal, largest merchant for years. I was instrumental in launching Alipay. And so there were a number of what you'd call precursors. Then you had your internet poker sites, internet gambling sites. And so a lot of these ideas were kind of the precursors, the stuff that predated Bitcoin, which was when the eventual solution of how to really make this work happens. So Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonym of the Create tour, or create tours of Bitcoin. And the white paper, which is, think of that as like a thesis or a scientific, you know, sort of research report. It was the publishing of an idea for those that want to study it was published on October 31 2008 Bitcoins. Idea was then published to the scientific sort of community, the encryption community, and then it launched on January 3, 2009 and that was the first time anyone could download and run the Bitcoin node. You know, you're
Randall Kaplan:getting too complicated now. So what's a, what's a, what could they download? And what's a node?
Brock Pierce:You could download the Bitcoin software to run it from your computer. So
Randall Kaplan:you had a PC, yeah, you click something that downloads on your hard
Brock Pierce:drive, and then you install, you know, the basically, to run one of those Bitcoin nodes which powers the the node, for people who don't know. So the node is your computer then becomes one of the servers for Bitcoin that is tracking all the Bitcoin transactions in the world, which also allows you to become what's called a bitcoin miner. And so all the nodes that are also be Bitcoin miners, are competing in a lottery where every 10 minutes, someone wins the lottery, running that software around the world, and whoever wins the lottery gets a block of Bitcoins. You get a bunch of Bitcoin. You make a ton of money today, if you win back, then Bitcoin had no value, because it was just an idea of people experimenting in 2000 early 2009 because no one had ever used Bitcoin for a transaction yet. So at that point, if you were curious, you read research reports, you read a white paper. You're like, oh, this is an interesting idea. This may be a big breakthrough, which, by the way, if you ever saw Good Will Hunting that Matt Damon movie, one of the greatest challenges in cryptography at the time, you know, one of the Holy Grail, sort of like a big ideas, is, Could anyone ever build a system that would allow peer to peer financial transactions without a bank, without a PayPal, without a trusted intermediary? And prior to Bitcoin, it was believed to be impossible, because for decades, people had tried it was like that, that problem on the whiteboard, you know, on the blackboard, you know, where great theme, by the way, a great scene, and no one could solve it until Matt Damon, the janitor, you know, the genius, comes in and looks at it. Satoshi Nakamoto would be the equivalent of Matt Damon in that movie, solving the impossible problem of technology, which has changed the world. It was, it was a breakthrough. So the people that read the scientific research, the white paper, you know, we're not there for monetary reasons. They were there to see, did someone actually solve this holy grail of problems that literally fundamentally changes the way that our world can operate we talked about earlier, the internet of information. The Internet, by design, couldn't become a system other than moving information. It couldn't do financial transactions other than in the same we'd always done finance with a trusted intermediary. We had to trust a third party to facilitate all financial transactions. We could never do them other than in person. If I hand you a bill or a coin prior to that, we've always needed from the time of the Knights Templar to today, you know, a financial intermediary that was trusted. It changes the fundamental world in which we live that we can now transact over the internet with anyone in the world without a trusted person in the middle, changes everything, right?
Randall Kaplan:So, so, but let's talk about it's not, it's not a coin, and how we get then you mentioned the word mining, and people don't really know what it is. I think that some people who do know what it is, you plug in your computer, you get lucky. It takes a lot of power, and your own computer, over time, can generate Bitcoin. Yes,
Brock Pierce:back then, it didn't require a lot of power, because it's just your regular computer. But as more and more people took an interest in Bitcoin, more and more computers came on the network, and then people started using in. They're just laptop or their desktop. They started customizing computers to run better and better systems to try and solve this mathematical problem, to win the Bitcoin reward, the mining reward, which then eventually, as Bitcoin had value and started to go up in value, people started investing in really competing for this stuff, which has now become a huge industry. There's big public companies, you know, in the US public markets that all they do is Bitcoin mining, so it's not really something you can do with your laptop anymore. It's become an entire industry like ISPs, like data centers, which is a massive, massive industry now, in terms of its 10s of billions of dollars, the industry of Bitcoin mining, it's not really a hobby of an individual. You still can. The main variable is, do you have the hardware? Because it requires specialized hardware. Today, it's not your standard computer. You can go learn with your computer, but you're not going to make money, per se, and then it does. The primary variable is now energy. Bitcoin, you could argue, in some ways, is digital gold, right? It's a digital gold versus a physical gold. In some ways, it has a lot of the same attributes that makes gold valuable. It's also, you could argue, a form of stored energy. So if you have a bunch of excess power in a place where that power can't be used, meaning it's stranded and it would be wasted, the power would be lost. You can now take stranded or excess energy, convert it into a digital commodity called Bitcoin and use it anywhere in the world. It's a way of taking wasted or low cost energy, turning it into a digital asset or commodity that looks a lot like digital gold. That's a way to think about why is this asset class so valuable, as well as at a time where people are concerned about inflation, they're concerned about financial instability in the world, they're concerned about black swan events. They're concerned about wars and pandemics and so in the same way that people used to buy gold historically, or, you know, assets to hedge against uncertainty, Bitcoin has become another alternative, a digital version of people putting something in their in their investment portfolio for call it a rainy day fund. It's a rainy day asset for most people that buy it, you know,
Randall Kaplan:right? And so to the layperson listening today, there's no bank who's minting Bitcoins. They're all individual people now companies mining these huge data centers. There's 19 point 7 million Bitcoin. Yeah, 21 million in metal, right? So, Max, uh, 21 million. What are we talking about when we talk about those numbers? So
Brock Pierce:the that's the total amount of bitcoin that will ever be produced. Why, through the mining process, it's how it was originally encoded to create scarcity. So inflation is central banks keep printing more and more and more money, and so the amount of dollars 10 years ago is substantially less than the number of dollars in circulation today. Every time we print more dollars, your dollars theoretically become less valuable because you have a smaller and smaller and smaller percentage of them. Bitcoins, economic theory right to create interest is around, rather than abundance and continual dilution of your Bitcoin or dollars is scarcity, meaning there's a limited supply of Bitcoin, which in theory as demand, and so far is beyond theory. As demand in Bitcoin rises, so does with it the price like gold. The only difference is, as the price of gold goes up in value, we can dig more of it out of the earth. So every time the price of gold goes up, we mine more of it from the earth, because the car, you know, we can afford to extract more of it. Bitcoin doesn't have that Bitcoin, there is a fixed, limited amount. And when you hear 21 million, you might go, Well, that's not enough. But it's a digital asset that's call it nearly in infinitely divisible enough to the purpose that you can call it infinite meaning. Owning one Bitcoin is a lot. Now, in today's market, that's a substantial amount of money for most people, you know, and 60, $70,000 per Bitcoin. You don't need a whole Bitcoin. You can own point, one Bitcoin. You can own point, oh, one Bitcoin, right? You can own point, oh, one and eventually, you know, so it just happens to have been called 21 million. It could be 21 billion. It could be 21 trillion. That would just determine as a percentage when we, when we switch to digital it's hard for our brains to conceptualize it. It's it's instantly divisible, kind of like digital money today, we just press and print with Bitcoin. You can. Press and print more, but you can send a fraction of it. Imagine if I had a piece of gold, and I could just say, I'm sending you a, you know, a sliver of my gold coin. It just you press the button. It does that.
Randall Kaplan:So when we invest in a traditional currency, where most people today will invest in stocks, for example, you have immediate liquidity by the second, like you do in Bitcoin, companies are traditionally valued on a whole bunch of other things. Traditional companies, cash flow, profit, history of the company. There's some financial metric there, even for non profitable country, even for non profitable companies, it could be multiple of cash flow or multiple of revenue, depending on a whole bunch of other things. In Bitcoins. Case there is zero financial history, all the metrics in terms of how you value it go out the window. And so my question to you is, how are people valuing Bitcoin? Because let's say there's no difference. I mean, I get a daily Coinbase update on the price of Bitcoin. So it's up 6% today, down 20% yesterday, and really, the number of coins hasn't changed one bit. And we saw several years ago Bitcoin Tim Draper, who I know as a friend of yours and a friend of mine, he was on my show like you was part bought a bunch of Bitcoin in the mount Gox fiasco. That Bitcoin went up to, I think, 70 or $80,000 and then not too long later, was down to$3,000 today, it's at 67,700 I think, before we came on the show today. What's going on here?
Brock Pierce:Yeah, so you talk about, how do we value, assets, and we've talked about venture capital. One of the things that we do when we are looking at companies to invest in is we look at the TAM, the total addressable market. And so Bitcoin isn't a company, so it doesn't have revenues or earnings or cash flow, per se. It's a it's an asset, a digital asset, but one of the things you do look at is, how big of a market is it in? You know, the market for Bitcoin, right? Is it's competing with commodities like gold as an alternative to gold, right? It's, it's potentially competing as an alternative to currency, as a store of value, one that goes up versus down. So, you know, we're saying that instead of people putting money in a bank and putting it in treasuries, some people may take their money and put it into Bitcoin and hold it, or people might put money into Bitcoin and hold it as an alternative to gold. So you have to look at it as an asset. It's not a business. You don't value it in the same ways. But if you look at the size of the market that it's offering an alternative to, you're talking about the largest market in the world. And clearly a bunch of people have recognized that Bitcoin is an interesting speculative investment product or asset to buy and hold, as opposed to holding money or holding treasuries or holding gold. And so you have to look at it from that perspective to see where its value is derived. It's not a business. It's not valued on cash flow. It's not valued on revenues or earnings. Never will it ever be. It's valued by the size of the market, that it's offering an alternative, you know, investment, or speculative investment, to which is the biggest market in the world, and that's why it's gotten to where it is. What explains the fluctuations? Fluctuation is all assets. Well, the we're we're talking about massive fluctuations here. But all assets right, the price of something going up and the price of something going down ultimately, is determined by supply and demand. So crypto is a 24 hour, 365 day market, and so it doesn't stop trading like the stock market or currency wires and banks. And so it's also a market that is heavily traded. The types of people that hold Bitcoin are digital, kind of always on and hardcore, and in the same way that stock markets have high frequency trading, a lot of the prices go up and down, not based upon revenues going up or down or earnings going up and down. It's by news, right? We look at news a lot of things so that the the price is often based upon, not necessarily the fundamentals, right? A lot of it is emotional. And so markets are moving. And if markets start going down, people are trading, trading, trading. And because a lot of people with Bitcoin are trying to, they're traders, they're actively going, how do I grow my bitcoin? I sell high, I buy low. And so you have a huge active market where they just trade Bitcoin all the time. So it's an actively traded market, far more than most stock people. I mean, most of us that hold stock, unless we're a hedge fund or a day trader, we kind of. Buy and we sit and we hold and crypto, we call that hodlers. But what do you call them? Hodlers? H, O, D, L, it means hold on for dear life. You know, which is the roller coaster ride of up and down for crypto, but the sentiment drives the price more than the fundamentals, and so there's just a lot more active trading. And, yeah, Bitcoin volatility is not a bad thing from an investment perspective. You know, volatility is, is actually a very good thing to make money from, um. And it's not as volatile as, you know, some assets, but yeah, it's uh. It goes up and down a lot. You know, generally over time it's been goes in these big market cycles. And we're, you know, it's people are very excited about, I think, kind of what the next year potentially has in store. You know, we think many of us that were on the verge of the next big run
Randall Kaplan:10 year 10 years ago today, Bitcoin was trading at 350, $3 each. Today. It's at 67,715 I think, as I said before we came on the show, that's a 191 act. So if you invested$10,000.10 years ago, you'd have$1.97 billion today. And there's a frenzy, right? Everyone knows someone who's investing in Bitcoin. Everyone knows somebody who's made a ton of money in Bitcoin. People don't really talk about losing a lot of money in these speculative asset classes. Should people be investing in things like Bitcoin, including Bitcoin, when they really know nothing about the asset itself?
Brock Pierce:So you can go watch all of my speeches, all of my interviews. I think since I've begun publicly speaking on the subject, I've never encouraged people to invest in Bitcoin. I encourage people to invest in themselves, in their own education, in their own knowing when you're dealing with an emerging technology, a speculative investment class. You know, I would not encourage people to do something because I say so, or because I've done so, or because you've seen people do well with it. I encourage you to take the time to be informed. And so what I encourage people to do is to go buy $100 worth of bitcoin, $20 worth of bitcoin,$10 for the Bitcoin, but generally not more than $100 something you could afford to lose. $20 you know, if that's the right number for you, it's the sort of thing that you should expect to lose it because you're not making a speculative financial investment. You're investing in yourself. To take a little bit of time to become informed, you know, so that you can start to get a sense of what's this is. If I told you about email in the 90s, you know, we could spend a show like this talking about it, but the moment you sent your first email, you might have a, Oh, wow. I don't have to, like, write a letter and put it in an envelope and stick a stamp on it and wait days, you know, and spend money, I can type something up and press send, and it just gets there. You know, it's one of those sort of things. Until you've tried it, you're not really going to understand it, even if I've done a good job explaining it. And so what I encourage people to do is take a little bit of time out of your life to learn what it is, how it works, and with that, you know, if you decide it makes sense for you, once you've informed yourself, you know, then you do a little more. Then maybe you invest $1,000 in this. Once you've decided that you're ready for your next step, remember, this is an emerging technology, you can lose your money, not just because the price goes down because you didn't learn how to protect your password. You didn't learn how to, you know, lock your computer. There's little things you need to learn first before you should be investing any meaningful money here. And the one exception that makes today different than the last 10 years is because there's now ETFs in the public market. You can go into your traditional brokerage account and you can get exposure to Bitcoin without the risks of, call it the security and without using, you know, call it a coin base. So you could if you wanted to, which, again, I don't encourage you to do if you wanted to get more meaningful exposure without the security risks. You can do that through these ETFs. The next best thing you can do is go to your call, what we call centralized exchanges that have password recovery better protections, like Coinbase, but there's still some risks there, if you get hacked, and things of that nature. So a, there's the speculation. But B, in this call it Brave New World, you're going to need some training first. You shouldn't go make a big investment in something where you don't know what you're doing, forget you don't know what it is, and you don't have a strong opinion. There are risks. It's an emerging technology. So I. Um, I would encourage everyone to go put 20 bucks or 100 bucks or 10 bucks, depending upon what you can afford. I would hope you can afford a cup of coffee, and it's probably the best investment in yourself you may ever make. You know, for a cup of coffee, not only in terms of the potential financial rewards you could achieve in learning from this, but it's preparing you for a future that's probably going to be different than the one that we currently live in. I mean, at this point, most of the leading minds and industries in the world, whether it be JP Morgan on down, whether it be Blackrock on down, at this point, I'd say consensus has been reached. There's almost no dispute, almost no debate, that this technology is real, and it is here to stay, and it's not going anywhere, meaning you taking a night out of your life. And you know, a cup of coffee worth of risk might might change your life one day. It might even save your life one day. So
Randall Kaplan:let's say you're an accredited investor. SEC defines that by you have to make some amount of money, two or$300,000 a year. You have to, or have a net worth of over a million dollars now to clean your home, something like that, which is designed to prevent against people who can't afford to lose money and speculative investments. These may be private placements. They be all kinds of things. So let's take someone who has a million dollars and has maybe 50% in stocks, 40% in bonds. What percent of the asset allocation would you recommend investing in Bitcoin? And is Bitcoin a good investment today for people that can afford to invest in it as an asset class?
Brock Pierce:So my advice still stands of take the time to learn with your 100 bucks.
Randall Kaplan:Let's say they learn about it. Let's say they know everything about it. Now you're even saying they've read the paper, the white paper, which nobody does so you're
Brock Pierce:past that point, which is excellent, yep. Unless you are actively working in the industry on a day to day basis, you should never have too much exposure, because markets you know, you don't want to be the last to learn if a market goes through a negative event. You know, it's musical chairs, unless you're day to day in the industry, you do not want to have too much exposure to a sector. If you're in the venture capital business, we can afford to have a meaningful amount of our asset allocation exposed to call it early stage private equity, because it's our business. We know what we're doing. And if it were public markets, you know, you've got liquidity. This is a liquid asset. You know, you don't want to be the last like to log in and be like, Oh, I didn't pay attention for a year. What happened? But we're talking about Bitcoin specifically, people ask me this, and have asked many times, and in the private forum, I've always said, you know, a good starting point, if you are an expert and you really believe in this is I might consider starting with 1% a 1% sort of asset allocation, meaning, if you lost it all, it's not going to change your life. And in the event of a black swan event, a catastrophic event, you know, call it in the financial system, it might materially impact your life. And that number depending upon, like, how you want to allocate it, be it just Bitcoin, all Bitcoin, maybe other things that one can participate Ethereum or otherwise, or private equity, venture, public companies, mining. You know, you might want to go as high, you know, if you had some meaningful conviction, is 5% but in that range of one to 5% you're not going to you're not doing anything so substantial, it's going to wreck you. You can't get wrecked. Which is, I'd say as far as you should probably go, until you've gotten so much conviction and you're such an expert that you don't need my advice anymore, because I would never want to encourage anyone to put themselves into a position where they're jeopardizing their future. And you can see I'm cautious, right? You know that's that's a decision for you, you know, to make, not, not one to follow. Because I suggested there's been some people in the industry who I respect greatly, and I won't name who I think have, you know, encourage, they encourage people to sell everything they have, you know, mortgage all their real estate, dump everything and go all in on Bitcoin. I think that is even if I believe that to be the right thing to do, I think it's imprudent and dangerous to advise. So
Randall Kaplan:you're one of the leading Bitcoin crypto. We're gonna talk about crypto in a second, and what the difference is but one of the leading crypto, Bitcoin blockchain experts in the world. Is it a good investment today, at $67,700
Brock Pierce:I believe, yes, but it's, it's a speculative asset class. They could, you know, I like to use a binary example. Bitcoin is, and this is, it's not exactly this, but this is a good way to think about it. It's either going to zero or a million dollars. Plus, you. Uh, it's one of those two things. It's either going to fail at some point, either because something better comes along that replaces it, or the encryption and the technology that it's built upon fails, or, you know, the whole world fails on something I think, where it's not even a good hedge, because the world has gone into such a dangerous place that Bitcoin is not going to be accepted either. But generally, I think it's more likely to go to a million dollars than zero. I think substantially greater odds of that over call it the next 10 years. But there are reasons that may not happen, and so I continue to be bullish on Bitcoin, long term, short term, it's hard to say, though. I think there's some short term reasons to be bullish. The fact that our presidential candidates are all talking about it here in the United States, some of them like really talking about it, showing up at Bitcoin conferences, talking about how the United States is going to start to take Bitcoin on its balance sheets. Governments all over the world embracing it. You know, it's pretty exciting. The fact that BlackRock and Larry Fink has created ETFs and talking about, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's looking pretty compelling right now, and depending upon the elections and what happens around the world. I mean, we could see, I think, a material, meaningful move in the price of Bitcoin, not just in the years ahead. I think in the months ahead. I think the next, you know, months, including the next, you know, whatever happens at this election, and between, you know, whatever administration ends up in power. I mean, we could see events happen that really for multiple reasons on either side, things that could really cause the price of Bitcoin to move quickly, so and positively,
Randall Kaplan:right? So, Bitcoin is a speculative asset. It is, but it's also a medium of exchange. You can use it to actually pay for things
Unknown:you can,
Randall Kaplan:but people don't really use it, right? So I to be right. So, so there's a famous story about, supposedly, the first transaction, someone used 10,000 Bitcoin to pay for a $12 pizza. And I think it was a two for one pizza, some something. I forget the guy's name, but that's a $670 million pizza today, and we would say, oops on this, are there any practical uses for Bitcoin today, except for criminals, money launderers and people who are trying to do bad things? Yes. I
Brock Pierce:mean, people use Bitcoin for any transaction. You can buy a Tesla. You can use this. You can use that. Bitcoin can be used as a medium of exchange. But, like you said, nobody does it. People do, but not that's not the primary use case. The primary use case of Bitcoin is as a store of value, as a speculative investment, as a hedge against other assets, right? That's the primary use of it. Another company i co founded is tether, which is the US digital dollar, of which there's now 120 billion digital dollars in existence. And for those that are old enough, it's best to think about tether is basically, was the next evolution of the American Express cashiers check. All we did is use the Bitcoin Blockchain to take $1 built on top of Bitcoin technology and created a digital equivalent of like an American Express cashiers check, so you could go anywhere in the world and pay with it, but in a digital fashion, meaning you can do it from anywhere in the world. Tether, because it's a digital dollar, is used for transactions around the world, and the main one is it's used in trade finance now, all over the world, more and more of the biggest trading engines, trade fi, they're not using banks anymore. They're shifting away from banks rapidly, because banks are only open Monday to Friday. They don't have instant settlement. And time is money we want when the ship comes in and the thing gets dropped, or the this or that you're watching 10s of billions a day now in basically trade finance moving to tether. So this technology is being used as a medium of exchange. It's being used for settlement, as an alternative to banks. The reason why we don't use Bitcoin as a medium of exchange is because of its volatility. Most people that hold Bitcoin are like, I want to hold my bitcoin. I don't want to give up my bitcoin. I want to give up my dollars. Most Bitcoin holders are like, I spend all the money I have in the bank until I have none left, but I keep my bitcoin. I don't think that's a good strategy. I think that's a little I think it's imprudent, but I understand why a lot of Bitcoin holders believe that money is always it's a race to zero, which is actually true. If you look at what happens to money in your bank account, the. Value the purchasing power of money, especially at the rate that we've been printing, it is not a good you don't want to hold money. Rich people don't keep dollars anymore, right? Rich people hold stocks, you know, they hold high yielding fixed income instruments they you know, you don't actually want to store a bunch of money in the bank, because the bank because the value of your money is going down, the purchasing power of your money is going down. And it's a terrible idea to bury, you know, money under your mattress or in your backyard, because by the time you go get it, you won't be able to get much with it. That's just, that's a fact. And so the Bitcoin community, you know, is often people that understand this reality, and so they're big believers in the long term value of Bitcoin. So they spend all their dollars first, and they hold all their Bitcoin, just like people that hold stocks, that they're big believers and hold their stocks, they spend their dollars. They don't go use their Tesla stock to go pay their mortgages. They use their salaries to do that, because they look at what they own and they hold their favorite investments, they don't spend those. And so that's the reason why it's not that you can't use Bitcoin, it's that Bitcoin holders continue to usually be believers in Bitcoin, so they don't want to spend it. They spend their tether, or they spend their dollars in the bank account, or often, what they do is they use their credit cards, because those are still pretty interesting in that they extend credit. It's convenient. It's accepted everywhere, and then at the end of the month, they pay their bill, you know, with whatever it is available. So it's not because Bitcoin can't be used for it. It's that people tend to be believers in their Bitcoin and they don't want to spend it.
Randall Kaplan:All right, let's talk about something different than Bitcoin, known as alt coins. So I remember, excuse
Brock Pierce:my, my vulgar language. Here are also many people refer to as shit coins. Well, I'm
Randall Kaplan:gonna get into shit coins now. Okay, so, well, we'll call them shit coins. But I remember, I was invited by your DNA friends in 2017 18. I forget what the conference was called in downtown Los Angeles. It was, it was the biggest crypto conference in Los Angeles, for sure, one of them in the country. There were 2000 people. There 3000 at the convention center. And I was invited for the lunchtime panel. Is one of five people, I think two or three people pay to be on the panel, and two of us did not pay to be on the panel. And as you know, it was craziness around everyone going into crypto. You everyone was an expert. People who had no education at all, who hadn't grade, who graduated fifth grade, were suddenly the crypto kings of the world. It didn't matter. I remember sitting there on stage telling everybody this was going to end very badly, that 99% of these companies were going to fail, that they're going to be class action lawsuits everywhere, because I had seen the playbook and the.com world, but this was 10 times worse, right? There were inexperienced CEOs who had never managed a Starbucks or made payroll, who had raised $100 million from eager investors on a white paper with a promise of technology that no one could understand or use. That market has gone by the wayside. I think 99% of these companies have gone bankrupt. Right? There were hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth wiped out. So are there any all coins that are not coins?
Brock Pierce:Yeah. So I think that I echoed a lot of what you said. I told people that 9990 to 99% of these projects are going to fail. It's just like the internet bubble all over again. And one of the problems is like the internet of the late 90s or internet 1.0 in this space, as we see with any emerging market, is the asymmetry of information. When there's a new industry that people don't understand and a lot of money being made by some qualified but mostly unqualified individuals, it attracts all types, including some of the worst possible types, including crooks, scammers, snake oil salesmen, some who are doing it knowingly, some who may actually have great intentions and are actually buying their own bullshit, right? But it's a mixed bag, but we've seen this anytime a new market emerges, and so I warned people pretty consistently of the same facts, though, I do think this industry has performed better than the internet of 1999 2000 the 2017 not that much better, not that much better, not that much better. But a lot of those projects actually are still here. Many of the best ones too, but similar to like 1999 2000 the best internet projects survived. They took a big hit. They came back because the best projects are still the best projects actually quite similar, and somehow some of the mediocre crypto projects, even though, arguably they're dead, they still exist and still have value, even though I would call them zombies in the stock market, they. Kind of really did die. And I think part of that is in the stock market, you have to file quarterly reports, you've got reporting, you've got audits. I think that we probably have the same outcome as the stock market of 99 2000 in crypto if those obligations were there. But in the crypto market, some of these almost orphaned projects, for some reason, just continue to exist, because there's nothing there to like, kill them. They just kind of hang on. And some people just kind of hold on forever, even though these projects are effectively dead and out of compliance. I call them zombies. And so you have zombies. And so it's the one strange thing, lack of liquidity in most of them. But strangely, many of them still exist, though they're effectively The Walking Dead, but the best projects are still there. And so same thing, I would say that there are real alt coins, or call it alternative projects, whether it be, you know, the ethereums and some others that are competing to be real technologies that have real things. Nobody jumps in behind white papers with kids anymore. But over, yeah, that's over. No, but projects are still getting done. But you have to have a real project now your project, you have to have an actual working prototype, or a working project that has use and excitement. You have to have real teams with real people that are capable. I mean, that was the problem, and why? I warn you, if you don't know what you're doing, don't go chasing, you know, make the time to be informed. It's why I always give these warnings. I don't ever want to be one of the people that goes to bed at night going I gave you terrible advice and made you lose your money. You know, it's like I'm always warning people about the risks and encouraging people not to get greedy, not to chase easy money, because it just doesn't work that way. The reality is, it requires being informed, taking the time learn and take your time. Don't allow the market cycles and market conditions and what you're hearing and what you're seeing to cause you to become, don't, don't be the fool that is Sue parted with whatever money and and there's, there's, you know, it's a brave it's wild stuff that happens in this space. And there are a lot of scams, there are a lot of rug pulls, there is a lot of hacking. There's a bunch of stuff that, buyer beware. Be careful if you're going to start, start in the top and kind of like, kind of like stocks, start with Bitcoin, which is the gold standard, start with your top 10, like the top 10 tokens, like your top 10 companies, the top 10 projects. You're not the likelihood of losing all your money is pretty low. And what I would actually say, if you want to go through my exercise of advice to learn, put $100 in Bitcoin, then take$1,000 put another 400 in Bitcoin, and put $100 into five of the next top 10. And just your process of studying the top 10 and eliminating half and putting 100 into five other ones. By the time you followed that basic set of advice, you'll actually have a reasonably good understanding and be really and then, if you want to keep learning, put something into the top you know, put another $100 into 10 of the top 50. And by the time you study the top 50 projects in the space, and you've chosen one, then five and then 10, you'll have 16 projects out of 50. You're probably ready then to, like, consider doing something more. And that's a pretty small investment to have a thorough, you know, sort of comprehensive, you know, understanding of the overall market. Or you can just stop the Bitcoin. You don't even have to go beyond that. But if you want to go down that process, this is the sort of basic advice and training I would encourage you to take before you know, you know. And if you want to go play around in meme coins, again, play with $100 I play with something you know you can afford to lose, either by losing it accidentally or financially getting wrecked.
Randall Kaplan:One of the many things that you've done is you have a venture capital blockchain fund. So you're also a venture capitalist and non blockchain assets as a venture capitalist, what are the five most important things you look at when funding a company or a founder, well, these
Brock Pierce:are two different markets. So I'll say in general, and there's some differences, because in crypto projects, the founders can come and go very differently than in traditional business. But you know, the main thing I'm looking for is the people, right? I mean, number one, you can have the best idea ever, but if you're the wrong person, I'm not interested, right? It's the people, whether it be the founder and whoever the co founders or beginning team is, that's like first and foremost, because the right people pursuing a bad idea can make it work. Uh, pivoting whatever comes. You know, the wrong people pursuing the best idea ever doesn't really matter, as we've learned. You know, with as you talked about, even crypto projects, a lot of those white papers like 1999 are not wrong. The problem is people chased an idea and didn't really look at the people closely enough, because the right idea with the wrong people is going to be a, normally a failed outcome, in part because we mistakenly thought that crypto projects, the teams, can be changed. You know, in these Dow don't want to take us too down the team, we thought for a moment, didn't matter as much, because the team just fluids. It's a community, and the community can change them out. And it turned out not so much, because those creators kind of held onto the money, which was really not for them to hold on to. It was meant to be held by the project. And things were not there yet. But people, people, people, people, you know, I'd say that, you know, you I look at kind of what the idea is, but the idea is really, what's the market size. I don't want to invest in small ideas. I want to invest in big ideas, because the amount of time it takes me to invest for for you to build, you know, big ideas and small ideas are equally as difficult. So let's focus on the big ones and not spend our time pursuing the small ones, unless it's something I want to learn, right? So it's the people, it's the market, sort of size, the big idea. Like, I'm looking for big ideas. I care about the timing, right? I don't want to be too early. I also don't want to be late. Like, what's the competitive landscape look like? Right? I if, if there's already winners being emerging, you know, in the markets maturing, and you're just showing up, it's like you're a little late. It's kind of like the beginning of the race. You got to be in there early enough where, you know, you have a chance once a market matures. So timing market conditions as well. Right in crypto, I'm actually mostly interested in and, actually all things, I actually like to invest in startups in bad market conditions, as I like to say, 100% bull markets produce bullshit. Bear markets. Bear fruit. You harvest. You know, in the in the bull market, right? You build, you know, in the down markets, right? Because bull markets become irrational. You have to pay crazy valuations. People are quitting. Everybody's feeling rich. I actually like to build in in the difficult market conditions so that you actually have something, you know when the market cycles, because markets go through cycles. So I care about market timing. There's a handful of insights I could get into from a timing perspective, and with that also the market condition of how other people feel about it. You know, in traditional businesses, I also care about location, you know, I can't be everywhere. I care about sector, right, which is, you know, location of its you know, one thing sector, you know, what's going on with the broader industry? You know, there's a number of sort of factors and things that I care about, and other investors, I can't do it alone, you know, back to, how does the rest of the world feel about it, right? I mean, I don't want to be on an island by myself, you know, I can't carry the weight, you know, as a single investor. So it's kind of like there's a bunch of, you know, things I care about regulation. Where are we at from a regulatory perspective? Because that gets, you know, as we look at certain things, you know, I have to have an opinion on sort of politics. The list kind of keeps going, but it depends on what we're investing in. We talked about early stage everything, whether it be called, it old or traditional sort of assets or, you know, current and and some of that is like, I've, I've invested in great businesses, but the industry is not growing because I invested in a incredible idea that is revolutionary, but the sector is not growing at all. Business isn't worth anything. It trades at a multiple that doesn't make innovation worth pursuing. You know, people only buy people only pay up for growth.
Randall Kaplan:What are the three biggest mistakes that an entrepreneur can make when coming to pitch you
Brock Pierce:ones I have often which is not being clear on what it is that you're doing.
Randall Kaplan:Isn't it amazing, by the way, I you get all these business plans. Some are horrible. And I always ask people, in one sentence, can you explain what you're doing, and if you can't communicate to me, how are you
Brock Pierce:going to sell your product? Yeah, it's like, it's shocking. I mean, I was on a call yesterday with someone a group talking about, literally talking with a straight face about how, well, yeah, well, we're go. So you're this, well, and we're this, we're this, actually, we're everything. Go, interesting. You're building everything. Okay, um, focus. Like it's hard to do one thing. Well, you know. And that's, that's, I think, probably the most important thing is figure out, what is that one thing you're going to do? And do it well, you know, you could eventually land and expand once you've, you know, captured some part of a market. You've got a big enough user base, you can look at, what are the other things I can sell? You know, what are the upsells? What are the cross sells? What are the up? You know, what are the product expansion? But until you have a beachhead, why would you be talking about anything other than your I'm going to sell books online. Yeah, that might lead to being Amazon Web Services one day, and Amazon Studios, but, you know, in the beginning, you need to have a simple value proposition to sell it. And so I find that is like, you know, the one that where I just get lost immediately. You know, you start talking about your five revenue streams. There might be other revenue streams down the road. Tell me how you're going to get users, first and foremost, and, yeah, how you make money if you do and keep it as simple as possible. The minute you complicate your story, I tune out, because I know that's 99 times out of 100 you have almost no chance of success. And that's, I'd say, the most common mistake that first time or on proven entrepreneurs make. And, you know, they they overthink their idea, and, oh, I can do this, and I can do that. It's like, No, you know, shave it down to one, you know, one thing really, because it's all, all, I think interesting businesses I've seen are built on a simple insight. You saw something in a market. You saw one thing that's missing, one reason why you, you know, can actually establish a beach head, something the market doesn't see. You know, you see something missing and something that everybody else isn't doing. And that's why I can, I've got an angle in there's a hole in the market. There's a void in the market. I see it, and I'm gonna, like, get in there, through that one angle, I found my wedge. And so that's the biggest mistake, I think, you know, I mean, in this day and age, I think the other important thing is, if you can't, I mean, for most businesses, if you can't how to figure out how to build it on a shoestring. I mean, this day it doesn't take much, fail fast. I mean, right now, with AI and everything, I mean, it's called, you should be able to figure out and validate your market and whatever it is, if you're early stage, like, on very little money and quick, you know it's like, and for you too, don't waste years of your life right now. You You should be able to figure out whether you can do something in under a year, maybe three months. Like, right now, I think it's about minimally viable products more than ever before. And at this point too, it's like, if you don't, if you're not using AI like, I mean, you can build just about anything with a team of six people. Now, it's like, SEAL teams. I mean, I it's not about bodies anymore. I mean, you know, and engineers, I mean, one person can do the work of 6000 it's like, if you're not caught up on what's going on in the market right now, if, certainly, if it's a tech business, like, get out of here, like all the other one this week, which is common, I had multiple meetings with projects where they pitched me on their big idea. I said, Well, I've invested in multiple companies doing that over the years, and I've seen dozens talk to me about how you're different than any of those that have failed before you, and they're like, they go back into pitching. I'm like, no, no, no. That's not what I asked you. I asked you to talk to me about at least one of those that came before you doing the same thing, or something very similar, that failed, and what you learned from them. I go, do you not know any? And they're like, No, I need to research that. I go, you're talking to me about something where I believe there is a future market. I don't disagree with that, but there are dozens of failed businesses that have raised lots of money pursuing this idea over the years, and you've never bothered to like do your you know, history. You've never studied the past. You've never looked this up. You think you're the first person to come up with this idea? I go get out of here. I'm not going to have a conversation with someone so wet behind the ears that they don't have any understanding of all the feral businesses. You should learn from them, the pioneers, you know, the entrepreneurs, the pioneers. We take the arrows in the back. We blaze the trails. We burn the path for you, so that when we fall, you can pick up where we left off if you haven't bothered to take the time to actually learn about like so that you don't have to repeat, you know, if you haven't studied the mistakes of those that came before you You're doomed to repeat them. Why would I want to fund someone that is so, you know, hasn't bothered to do any research you know, like, who are you? You think, as you have an idea that it's, you know, you're automatically entitled to win. No, it's very hard. So this is, like, I'd say, another area that I just you know, multiple examples in the last. Week of you know, people that haven't like, you know, done the work, right? It's like, if you're, if you're, you know, and if you bump into me, and you meet me randomly, and I've told this many times, if you meet me at a conference, you meet me on the street, don't ask for me for money, is the first thing to say, right? Because if you just, if you start out with back to people, if your first thing is give me money, give me money through whatever mechanism possible, you've already lost me. I mean, sure, if you have a meeting to come in and pitch, yeah, I want this professional, you know, you know, we can have a little bit of socializing, but let's get to the point, and let's figure out whether or not I can be helpful to you. But in general, if you meet me out in the world, the first thing to do is figure out how to engage me in an actual conversation. That's human. You know, if the first thing you do is just ask me for money, you've already lost me because you don't have the social etiquette to demonstrate that you have the personality skills if you know, you just cut right to the point, give me money. Give me money. It's like you just bumped into me, or you walked up to me here. The first thing is try to find, establish some human connection, and then generally for me, and that's not everyone you know. I'm interested in, why are you doing what you're doing a lot of the times is why? I don't want to know what you're building first. I'm mostly interested in, what are you doing, and why not, like what specifically. But why are you doing this? Why you, you know, is there some life experience, some hardship, something that happened that led you to this idea? If you know, your first view is, I think I can make a bunch of money. It's like, we'll get to that. Let's, let's first. I'm generally interested in the story, you know, of what, who, why, and get into some of those things and develop some sort of, like, basic rapport, you know, I I usually tell people when I used to do these at conferences, I'd be like, if you don't know what to say, if you haven't found some way to, like, you know, establish a relationship even at the most basic level. Just tell me what your superpower is, meaning, tell me what your gifts are. Tell me what you're good at before you tell me what you're doing, you know, I'm highly skilled at marketing. I'm an incredible engineer, you know, I'm great at, like, you know, predicting things like, I because I care more about what you're good at, then I don't want to go right into, like, in a casual environment, you know what it is first. Let's get to know each other a little bit before you ask me for money.
Randall Kaplan:One of the things that's made me very successful, somebody called extreme preparation. I prepare more than anybody for whatever meeting that I'm in. It doesn't matter what I'm doing. Could be a phone call, it could be a meeting, could be a podcast. How important has and I call that extreme preparation. How important has extreme preparation been in your success? And can you give an exam? You give an example or two where your preparation made the difference between success and failure? Yeah, preparedness is
Brock Pierce:important to some extent. But then there's the other side of it, right? You can over prepare. As I like to say, Perfection is the enemy of progress or good. So I often subscribe to like good enough in the beginning. Obviously, as a project develops, you know, once you once you get greater and greater clarity, you know, around what you're doing, then it's really about being prepared, really clear plans, really, you know that you want to get as clear as possible. You know, it depends on where I am in the process. Like I'm tinkering, sometimes it's just I'm throwing spaghetti against the wall, you know, trying to, like, run through ideas, but eventually, as you're trying to bring product forth, if you don't make something great and you're not well prepared, it probably won't, it won't cut it. And so I view kind of that, that step of where you are in a projects. Is it amorphous, right? Is it still in that sort of fluid state, or is it getting into that hardening? And eventually, here's, you know, we're putting real resources behind this, and eventually, yeah, you need to be very prepared. And if you're not prepared, you're you're, you're not going to make it. And so depends on where I am in the process. But eventually, it's a necessity to, like, be well organized, especially when multiple people get involved. Otherwise you you lack coordination and collisions happen and lack of accountability, and that will usually be your demise. You're
Randall Kaplan:a motivated person at a young age, you've made a lot of money when you were younger. Did you ever think one day I'm going to be a billionaire, and now that you are a billionaire, how does it feel?
Brock Pierce:Well, I was far more I was a little arrogant at certain points in my teenage years, you know, having come off of being movie star, having started, you know, sort of billion dollar internet business in 16, 1718, I'm still very similar. But back then I, you know, I actually did think I was going to be extraordinarily wealthy. And then have done it, you know, a couple of times over, and money kind of became, you know, as I achieved more and more success, money no longer became my measurement of success. You know, as I like to say, a billionaire, to me, is not someone with a billion dollars, but someone who's positively impacting the lives of a billion people. But I had the great luxury of. Been successful enough that the way that I measure my success has changed. Wealth is one measurement of success. Once I've won the game of life or money, then it became, what is my new unit of measurement? How do I measure my success? So that's easy for me to say, but that's coming from having been financially successful many times over. And so today I try to measure my success by the, you know, the impact I have in the world, which is, we're probably not going to get too much into it, but I do a lot of philanthropy, health care, I mean, I mean a lot of industries, and most of what I'm looking at is trying to solve the world's problem for our collective future. So
Randall Kaplan:speaking of trying to change lives in 2020 you ran for President of the United States. Did you actually think you're going to win? And why did you run for president?
Brock Pierce:Yeah, no, I didn't run to win because I announced on July 4, an appropriate day for, you know, the United States, but of election year, meaning you can't even get on every ballot in that time period, as we've probably read about ballots with Rok, I broke, I think, every ballot record ever at that point in terms of the time frame in which I had done it. But for me, it was a reconnaissance mission. I wanted to, I ran as an independent, so I wanted to understand all the ways in which the system is rigged. You know, because I had a view, rightly or wrongly, that we need something more than two choices. I was getting tired of, you know, blue and red, left and right, and the simplicity of two choices. And I wanted to see, is there a way to build a middle ground? Because I was becoming more and more concerned about the polarization and division, you know, that we were seeing in the country, and so I wanted to do a trial run to begin laying a foundation for both myself, potentially in a political career as a public servant, but also to lay foundation for other things. A lot of that infrastructure was used by RFK in his presidential run, meaning it mattered. We founded the Independent National Convention, which is infrastructure that is helping to drive an independent movement in the US that got revitalized through this. And so I consider it to be a major success. I also received the first vote for a presidential candidate on a blockchain, which I will forever hold that record. So as we talk about building open source, auditable, you know, election infrastructure, which I do believe is needed long term globally. You know, a lot of great things have come out of it was never my goal to win. It was my goal to deliver a message. Prepare for the future. Lay infrastructure, demonstrate how technology can be used in innovation, and so, depending upon how you measure success, and there's many forms of winning, it's not necessarily winning an election. I believe it was a decisive victory for me.
Randall Kaplan:So a lot of people have immense wealth, like you signed something called the giving pledge that Warren Buffett and Bill Gates said, at some point in your life or after you die, you're going to give away at least 50% of your wealth to charity. In your case, you said you're going to give away everything you have as many billions of dollars during your lifetime. What's your goal in doing that? And where are you going to focus your efforts? So
Brock Pierce:first well, so first of all, I'd rather give it away while I'm alive. Giving, I think, is one of the greatest gifts there is to experience the pleasure of helping, you know, and giving, it's, it's something I wouldn't want to miss. Like to give it away after you're dead is to miss out on, like raising your children, right? The pride and the joy that comes from, you know, the impact right, of the work that you're doing, you want to be there to watch it. You know, because it, you know, it's the pride that comes from being a father, right? You know, when your kids do something, well, it's the same sort of thing. It's like, why would you want to miss out on that? So I encourage giving while you're alive. You know, even if it's 10% right as you're alive and and if you become successful enough, maybe then it's 50% as you go. But I encourage people to give now, not not later. And that doesn't necessarily mean everything, but I would be giving as you go, if you can. I believe that's important, and so I focus on all sorts of things. It turns out that giving money away is much harder than I thought. I used to think that charity would be easy. It turns out kind of like venture capital, giving away money effectively, is almost as difficult as investing in startups and seeing an impact, because I don't want to give it away and see it squandered and lost, you know, which is what I used to do when I gave money away to charity and give it to good causes. But there's not good reporting and measuring of impact and the things as someone that does what I do, you know, I I expect to see. So I've been working on charity for seven years. We've gotten very good at delivering my. Multiples. One of my donations recently, I think we got 191x on our donation. So in the same way that you have return on investment, we have return on impact. And what we learned is, instead of giving $1 away and seeing 1020, 3040, 50 cents go to the underlying cause, when we give away $1 we don't even see $1 go away, we choose to give money away very thoughtfully, like it's an investment to see multiples. And so one of the things that we've gotten good at doing at my foundation is writing grants. So for example, we subsidize the grant writing to for the preservation of the bioluminescent Bay and Vieques through integral it cost us$15,000 to get a $2.9 million grant. So we found we we've given to 185 non profits in Puerto Rico in this particular Foundation. And what we effectively do is underwrite and find the most effective organizations possible that are good at what they're doing, are efficient with resources, and then help them unlock big numbers. So we have 10 baggers, 20 baggers, you know, standard. So it's basically, we've cracked the code, I think, a new form of giving that I've not seen others really do. And so I'm trying to, I'm an innovator in everything I do. And so I'm trying to innovate around charity. And another part of it is going in and effectively investing, you know, into a lot of things. So like, for example, bought a hospital last year out of bankruptcy because I was watching, you know, you know, some of the healthcare issues that we have, and that's been a, you know, a very interesting one. It is a for profit hospital today. But you know, this is I do a lot of this sort of work, as I'd call charity, because I've got a massive amount of economic exposure, and I can easily lose all of my money, though, it's playing with wealth. And I'm actually a little bit skeptical on traditional charity. I believe that you can give sustainably into, you know, B Corporations and other things. The main thing is, what am I giving it to? You know, I'm investing in things, often without the desire to make money. But how am I doing it sustainably so that I'm ultimately driving the impact that I want? Another cool company I'd recommend looking up is a thing called the dollar donation Club, where you can give away $1 a day, $1 a week,$1 a month, $1 once more, if you can, we've created humanities checklist and so all sorts of really cool, impactful things. And these are businesses that charge nothing other than tips that almost no traditional investor will fund, because impact investing kind of has a bad name. It kind of got, it needs a rebranding. You know, like, a lot of things back to like, even like, tokenization. It's one of those things where, you know, we have to kind of reinvent ourselves through these market cycles. We're at the
Randall Kaplan:end of our show. And I always conclude the show with a game I called fill in the blank to excellence. Are you ready to play?
Brock Pierce:Yes.
Randall Kaplan:The biggest lesson I've learned in my life is never quit. My number one professional goal
Brock Pierce:is to change the world in a positive way. My number one personal goal is to leave a lasting legacy, and for my family, my
Randall Kaplan:biggest regret is fear or giving up? Well, that was my last question. My biggest fear is quitting,
Brock Pierce:not living up to my fullest potential.
Randall Kaplan:The craziest thing that's happened in my career is
Brock Pierce:there's a long list of those, but it's yeah, the craziest one is this one might, I mean, I'll give a very short one, which is, I in the Puerto Rico market. I've invested a lot of money in real estate and things that I think are important, and there's almost no lending, there's almost no debt. So most of the things I've done there, I've had to do all in cash, and a lot of those things was with Bitcoin and Ethereum at very low prices relative to today. We're talking about like nine figures. Had I not done that, there'd be a few billion, probably, dollars of additional cryptocurrency in my life, and I only found out, like two months ago, that the brother of my CPA would have likely lent to con all those projects that I never bothered to ask my own finance person for advice on where you know, sort of lending on traditional things would have been available. Meaning, I basically, I started to cry, you know, just the humiliation, the self humiliation that I I had the answer the entire time, but I never bothered to check, you know, my own pockets and ask my own team for advice. So it's, you know, it's one of those crazy. Is he embarrassing? You know, sort of like, really, I've sought everywhere for this answer, but the answer was, you know, with me, fought in the very beginning.
Randall Kaplan:The funniest thing that's happened in my career is,
Brock Pierce:yeah, the funniest one is, you know, it's often in the for me, it's, it's back to, what do I find funny? It's like, it's kind of like the last story. It's, it's one of those where I've made the wrong turn, you know, and failed or didn't have the tenacity and quit early, you know. And I tend to laugh at my own, you know, sort of failures, you know, because it's kind of like, If only I had known this, had only I had learned that, you know, and it doesn't bother me, and that, you know, I'm upset by my, you know, the loss, you know, I think the greatest value, the most valuable thing we have is, is what we've learned, because that can never be lost, you know. And I do this over and over enough again that, you know, I I'm just grateful for having learned the lesson so I can put it to work the next time the
Randall Kaplan:best advice I've ever received is to dare, 10 years from now, I'm going to be doing
Brock Pierce:probably serving in public office
Randall Kaplan:20 years from now, hopefully
Brock Pierce:advising Well, 20 years still might be public office, but hopefully not. Hopefully I've done my tour of duty, served to the best of my ability, so that I can just be advising you. I mean, broadly that is,
Randall Kaplan:you can still advise me. The one thing I've dreamt about doing for a long time, but haven't, is, oh,
Brock Pierce:for me, most of that is all the bucket lists, you know, all the top three. I mean, I'd love, I'd love to go to space, you know, which we're on the verge of being able to do, you know, I right now, it's probably not very popular, but I'd like to, you know, take a sub deep down into the ocean and, you know, somehow end up at the top of the top of the highest mountains. It's mostly the, you know, it's the bucket list things.
Randall Kaplan:If you could go back, if you could go back and give your 21 year old self one piece of advice? What would it be? Again?
Brock Pierce:A lot of it is in these sort of moments. I've often thrown in the towels early. You know, I've almost never been wrong about a market in its future. What happens is, I just, you know, sometimes in the middle of that process, it gets so difficult that I eventually start doubting myself. And I think it's probably in my instance, to not doubt, you know, my myself through this process, even though the circumstances really make you question, you know what it is that's happening, and am I right?
Randall Kaplan:If you were president today, what's the first thing you would do when you sat down at that desk in the Oval Office?
Brock Pierce:Well, today, I like some of the things that are out there, but I the one that I talked about previously, and I'm going to stick to it, because it's the first commitment I made, which is, was to on the criminal justice side, to at least everyone federally, you know, in prison for I don't really smoke cannabis, but, you know, we've legalized this far enough that there's so many people that are there for non violent cannabis related crimes, you know, release all of them and expunge their records so that they can get back to work. It's something that I talked about in 2020 and so I feel I have an obligation to start with what I already committed to.
Randall Kaplan:The one question you wish I'd asked you but didn't, is, how
Brock Pierce:can I meaning us? You know, what can we do, you know, to make the world a better place. And, you know, certainly on the political front, what can you know? What can we do? You know? What advice would I give the American people, for example, right now, if
Randall Kaplan:you had one piece of advice, what would it be?
Brock Pierce:I mean, right now, the future is going to happen to you, or it's going to happen with you. Whatever you think is the right thing to do, you have to be part of the solution, which is to exercise your civic duty, your civic responsibility, to participate. A lot of the problems that we've encountered is due to our lack of participation. Be part of the solution. Be the change you want to see in the world. Get involved. Probably
Randall Kaplan:I appreciate you being here. I mean, this came together at the last minute today I ran into you. Said, I'm in town today. You want to do the show today? I said, Yeah, let's do it today. So
Brock Pierce:back to now, right back to now, back to like no time better than the present,
Randall Kaplan:back back to now. But I've been a big fan for a while. I've known about your career, very impressive, and this was awesome for me getting to know you better. And I think a lot of people are going to be very motivated by what they hear today and learn a lot about subjects I didn't know anything about. So appreciate you very much.
Brock Pierce:Well, thanks for having me. This is was not part of the plan today, but I'm glad it all worked
Randall Kaplan:out. Awesome. You.
