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

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