TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #114: Alpha Zeta

Episode Date: November 8, 2019

Join Marty and Matt as they sit down with Alpha Zeta to discuss: - Living through hyperinflation - Repo operations. Is it QE? - Why you shouldn't trade Bitcoin - Stories from Wall Street - Bitcoin's volatility - ETF - HNWI + Bitcoin - much more Follow Alpha Zeta on Twitter: https://twitter.com/alphaazeta Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app. Casa. Use promo code “TFTC” to get up to $250 off your Casa membership … or hit their team up [e-mail] for a free demo, or to put them to the test with your hardest OpSec questions! Subscribe to our YouTube channel: tftc.tv Contribute to the show: https://tftc.io/contribute/

What is up freaks? It's your boy Marty Bent here on a Friday morning here to introduce you to this week's episode with AlphaZeta. Our good friend who's been on the podcast before with the Bitcoin Tina. Earlier this summer we talked about the inversion of the yield curve. We caught up with AlphaZeta as he was in town from Brazil last week on Halloween. an incredible conversation jumped into uh his uh career on wall street his views on bitcoin bitcoin volatility in particular uh the types of uh products that can be built around bitcoin moving into the future and uh the nature of bitcoin's uh disruptiveness i think you guys gonna love this one i loved it it was a great uh conversation we had a lot of fun uh this episode

to tales from the crypt it's brought to you by the cash app as you know cash app is the simplest way to send and save money and now it's the simplest way to try to grow your money introducing cash app investing unlike investing tools that only let you buy entire shares of stock cash app lets you instantly invest as little or as much as you want you can uh you can sell slivers of shares in the seychelles all right we came up with this yesterday on rhr actually we didn't come up with it uh a freak shouted out uh overnight we you can now get slivers of shares um so she sells slivers of shares but in the seashells all right that's what we're working on the cash app what i'm trying to say is you can buy a fraction of a stock just like you can buy a fraction of a bitcoin you

can stack sats now you can stack sans or excuse me we're buying slivers of shares okay and because cash app is directly connected to your bank account there are no four to five day waiting periods for inbound transfers so you can start investing today brokerage services are provided by cash app investing of subsidiary a subsidiary of square and member sipc as always use the code stacking sats you're gonna get ten dollars ten dollars not five dollars anymore freaks ten dollars you haven't signed up yet take advantage of this if anything to get ten dollars worth of sats and they're also going to send ten dollars to owls lacrosse owls all right download the cash app today from the apple store or the google play store this episode is also brought to you by

our friends at casa you guys know all about them already uh does your key setup have a single point of failure gotta ask yourself these questions um or you do have a sovereign recovery package have you thought about this because you always control uh your keys with casa you can never be denied access to your bitcoin and access to your funds can never be frozen even a cost somewhere to go out of business uh this includes a sovereign recovery their their multi-sig packages um their tiered packages so if you engage in one of their multi-sig uh setups and they go bust as a company don't worry you can recover it uh by yourself uh remotely doing your own setup on top of that they're very privacy focused they've designed their business to require no kyc no alt coins

100% Bitcoin no fees on your Bitcoin again they have packages that you'll pay and if you use the code TFTC you're going to get up to $250 off your Kasa membership all this comes with a full set of hardware wallets

for your multi-sig plus the Kasa node, Kasa node 2 now with Faraday bags and early access to all future Kasa products if you're in the Diamond or Platinum membership for Sirius Hodlers it's going to net you 24-7 VIP service, dedicated client advisor and a custom onboarding

OPSEC plan. So, please go to keys.casa slash keymaster. Check out their multi-sig. If you want to email them directly, email them at membership at team.casa. And ask them your hardest OPSEC questions. Alright, freaks. Enjoy this episode. This is a spooky Halloween episode.

I'm getting it out a week later. I think you're going to like it. Enjoy. Take care. Tales from the Crypt When he was first on the podcast, I'd like to reintroduce you freaks to Alpha Zeta Alpha. What is up, freaks? How we doing, dude? Good, good. Straight from Brazil to Brooklyn, to an undisclosed location here in Brooklyn.

So happy to be here with you guys. Well, happy to have you. Very happy. Again, happy Halloween. Halloween's a big holiday in your family? Yes, it is, for sure. My daughter just loves it. So that's why we're here, believe it or not. and yeah it's also white paper day 11 years since the white paper i wrote about it this morning it's hard to believe where were you guys when the white paper what were you doing at halloween 2008 i saw your uh your picture from halloween 2008 looking fantastic yeah i have photographic

evidence of what i was doing that day it was a beautiful day for me uh i was a senior in high school and it was we were able to dress up for halloween that day and just so happened to be And also the day after the Phillies won the World Series. So I was at the game the night they won the World Series and had celebrated after. So that picture you saw of me in the Lieutenant Dangle costume was after celebrating World Series victory with no sleep at 17 years old. So that's where I was. I was 17 years old. It's crazy to think Bitcoin has been around for almost a third, more than a third of my life at this point. I was trying to figure out if I had the job at Wall Street in 2008 at this time.

You know, it was like craziest time in Wall Street. Yeah. So that's your background. Let's jump into it. You touched a little bit on it on the first episode with Bitcoin Tina, that freak. But what's your background? How did you come to find Bitcoin? Let's jump in more to your story. Yeah. And hopefully people can understand me now because the last time the mic was bad. And, you know, if my accent was probably double hard to understand anything. But, yeah, you know, Brazilian, as I said, I grew up in Brazil.

And then I came to the U.S. where I worked in different firms in Wall Street, some of the big ones. Trading capacity, you know, did some fixed income trading and did some sales and trading as well, covering ultra high net worth individuals, family offices, mostly on the side of derivatives. but did a little bit of everything. That's the thing with sales and trading, right? You just touch a little bit of everything, cross-asset class. And then 2015, end of 2015,

that's when I started looking into Bitcoin. And like everybody else, just went down the rabbit hole and still learning a lot. You know, there's still a lot that I need to learn, but it still amazes me, you know, how much it keeps growing. And I think that, you know,

we're starting to see more and more interest from other people like you know as I mentioned from family offices I'm starting to see people asking about it and you know just exciting exciting times ahead of us yeah and you uh were describing to me earlier that you got bitcoin sort of innately because of your experience growing up in Brazil let's jump into that exactly yeah so you know growing up in Brazil in the in the 80s we had hyperinflation when I'm talking about hyperinflation it was you know people don't realize how crazy it really is like money would literally lose value overnight you know i remember my my mother giving me money for lunch at school and telling me like you got to spend that money don't bring anything back because if you do by next week this won't

be worth anything and you know also remember like 30th of the month supermarkets were packed because everybody would get their paycheck and first thing they did is that they convert the paycheck into goods. So they would buy food, they would buy anything that they could. And sometimes we would walk around the supermarket and there was a guy with these pricing machines changing prices as you walk through the supermarket. So my mother would run around like, oh, we got to go ahead of that guy so that the price doesn't change as we're walking through. And it's very hard to live in a system like that because you literally can't hold any money and the bank started adapting also very quickly first thing that we saw is that any real

assets became dollarized very quickly so real estate all of that was cars was all priced in dollars right so the local currency did really didn't have any any value um and then you know the banks also you would leave money in banks and the banks would pay you into daily interest overnight interest in your money because otherwise people just wouldn't leave the money in the in the banks uh but that was you know of course growing up in a in something like that that becomes kind of like enrooted in you and uh it that was i think the first thing that really when i saw bitcoin like okay i see the value on this exactly because of that how did hyperinflation affect like the psyche of the brazilian people do you remember the the lead up to the hyperinflationary uh

the bout of hyperinflation and how quickly people's mindset changed or did it change quickly that it was there was it hard for people to believe at first yeah when I you know when as far as I remember it was already very bad from the beginning like when I you know in the early 80s it was already very bad so you know I think people adapt very quickly because they have no choice right they see money disappear in front of them and and then they they adapt very quickly but there is up until today you see that there is kind of a loss of i think confidence in government in the financial institutions because of that time and hyperinflation still

think really really um tied into all brazilians like you know we we see inflation very differently than than anybody else in in the world right uh because again we live for it and and then it the the route was completely monetary as you would expect. And the fixing it was also, you know, fixing the monetary system. And in 94, we had a new economic plan and slowly, you know, the, I think the monetary base was fixed and then the economy took off from there.

It was at least much better than it was before. Yeah, but those were very interesting times. And because of that, I, there are two things, you know, when people ask me like, you know, what got you into Bitcoin? think that's the first one and the second is you know the the fact that which is related is like I think it was I don't remember exactly the date but we went through a couple of economic plans in Brazil where they pretty much just

froze savings account so you had money for in saving accounts you couldn't take your money out it was limited you could take like the government say I can't take $100 out pretty much what's happening in Argentina right now it's same thing happened and I remember vividly like my father struggling trying to to make ends meet because you know he didn't have access to his savings he couldn't take money out right and that took you know for a few months we really didn't have uh access to to any money so you can imagine and you know this we're not talking about something you know that's like 60 70 years ago this is literally like 30 years ago right 40 years ago and it could

definitely happen in other countries last week in argentina like you said exactly it is it is insane and so for your father in that situation how pissed off was he yeah was he pissed off or sad angry a mixture of all i think you know i remember him being very and i wouldn't say angry but he was worried uh like you know you have these memories that you kind of remember exactly where you were and did exactly how it was this is one of them that i remember where i was sitting i remember him watching the tv with my mother you know like in the in the night and the the the woman that was the minister of finance at the time coming to TV and, you know, making this announcement. I remember that vividly because I remember their reaction. And, you know, again,

it was really, really tough. And I think something that... What was their reaction? He was really pissed off. Like, you know, how come? You know, how I'm going to... I needed the money, right? You know, I was waiting to take the money out. And that's the advantage of Bitcoin, right? Nobody, you know, I have my treasure and it's available anytime I want, everywhere I go. Like, my grandparents also escaped from World War II, coming from Europe to Brazil. And when they did, they couldn't take anything with them. Like, you know, they left behind, you know, all the real estate. You know, my grandfather used to tell me that he had, like, art that he had to leave behind.

All of these things that were store of value for him, but he just couldn't take, you know, as he was escaping from the war. So, Bitcoin fixes this, right? and bitcoin fixes this but going back to like the hyperinflationary about what you were describing in the in the uh grocery store like there are certain goods that are uh are better stores of value for sure absolutely so so your your shopping would be strategic during these times yeah you buy things that you know were non-perishable and uh that you could store um and you know people would have huge refrigerators at home as well you know i remember my mom had like three refrigerators at home because she would get everything that was perishable she needed to get and then store it

there for the for the whole month uh you know we go once a month to the supermarket you can imagine like you gotta get everything right and then put inside and a high preference for you know canned goods and all of that that you know you know wouldn't wouldn't get uh perishable during the month so is there like a transitionary black market currency uh situation going on before between the 80s and 94 when you sort of yeah there was you know a black dollar market uh there are people that made money out of uh just converting uh the local currency into dollars uh they're called the doleros they're just dollar dollar guys right and people go into these places and convert their currencies into dollars because dollars they knew that they could hold like physical

cash right somewhere at home um and there's some of some of these guys made millions and millions of dollars just by converting local currency uh into dollars uh because again it's what that was the preference for the people to hold dollars and then were they accepted like at stores in brazil it it technically the the stores couldn't accept it uh so you know you couldn't go to a supermarket just use dollars that would have been probably the right answer but you couldn't um so people would still have to convert back and then pay things but for anything like real estate real estate transactions were all done in dollar terms right they could be settled in local currency but at the end of the day you were talking dollar terms it would the agreed price would be in dollar terms

right uh so pretty much the economy in terms of price reference which is really what matters it was a dollar economy uh for many many years it was like that it up until today you would see people that you know would uh like i know some large families in brazil and pretty much all of their assets when they do the accounting of their assets they still do it in dollar uh because again first they're used to that and second it's a much more stable currency than than the local currency yeah now that's something we were discussing over breakfast is the dollar is probably going to strengthen a lot going forward if all these weaker currencies keep falling falling yeah i think that you know is uh and this is a theory that a lot of people talk about is um the whole

world is not in a good situation so in comparison the dollar is still much better than anything else in terms i think of economic strength and also in interest rates right so interest rates here are still being and placing the developed countries being fairly high i'm still going to see dollars coming in and you know we all know it's wrong we all know that you know at some point this is going to revert we all know that assets are inflated we all know all that story the question is when it's gonna turn and the answer is nobody knows right I've been definitely wrong about this for a couple of years I've been thinking that you know stock markets are stretched for the last few years and they just keep

getting stretched exactly so it's free money so let's take a step back talk about your Wall Street experience a little bit so what was what was it like number one moving to America from Brazil and is there any culture shock what was that experience like and then number two what was what was it like on wall street what did you see any war stories yeah well it's a lot of things so uh first on the on the cultural difference uh i mean i think america is probably the place in the world that it's most open to to people from the outside right i you know i still look back and i'm amazed that you know somebody from my background i came from brazil right and you know i landed in wall street and at some point i was

managing teams of you know pretty much everybody was american everybody was older than me and you know that apart from here and there you know there weren't really big problems which goes to show i think how much the i think the u.s is open to immigrants and open to to people from outside right and i hope that continues to i know you know recently it hasn't been like that but i hope it continues because you know i'm living proof that i think that uh um for the rest of the world at there's a lot of value in coming here right and i think for america as well this is a country that was built with immigrants right if you really think about it um so in terms of culture there are differences i think that you know whenever you go to a new country uh you have to adapt to

like small things like you know really understand what the uh the micro messages are right in the corporate environment and all of that but also americans are very practical so it's very down to the point you know very there's you know people are very open very honest very transparent sorry very forthright yeah for good or for bad which i actually appreciate that uh brazilians are just the opposite right and i'm generalizing maybe a little bit but uh we're just the opposite like brazilians you know won't tell you straight to your face that they don't like you something you know they don't like something right you kind of have to read between the lines and in the us there's no bullshit right to go straight to the point and you know you put the differences on the

table and that's it particularly in wall street right you don't have time to waste and you move on so i really really liked working here because of that you go to meetings right small example you go to a meeting with uh with a client in brazil and you're going to spend you know meeting the last one hour you're going to spend 50 minutes of the meeting talking about you know small things family you know all of that and then spend 10 minutes talking about business right here's just the opposite you start talking about business get business out of the way and did you get everything done and then the last 10 minutes you talk about your family and everything yeah how's Jimmy doing exactly so so that I think those

were the big differences in Wall Street as I said I did a little bit of everything when I left I was more in the kind of like in the the executive side of Wall Street, which is something I didn't like because I was spending most of my time talking about legal compliance, all of that, internal politics. I like the trading side, I like to be following markets, I like to be with clients. That's what I always like to do. So when it started to be more on the corporate side is when I said, well, maybe it's time to move on and do something else.

But I think there were many horror stories, but since you asked, I think that the biggest one that I remember, something that marked, I think, my time in Wall Street was 2007. It couldn't be different, right? 2007, and there's so many similarities today also, because the whole time, 2006, 2007, we were looking back and we knew something wrong was happening. We knew assets were inflated. we knew that real estate prices were too stretched. Everybody knew about that.

Everybody talked about that. We actually priced a lot of protection to our clients. We went out and funny thing is that a lot of them didn't wanna buy because first either they thought it was really cheap, but they thought it was too expensive or they just thought, oh, this is just gonna continue. I don't know what the timing is that it's gonna turn,

even though we knew that it was, that was unsustainable. Um, but then I remember when 2007 came and no first Bear Stearns and then ultimately Lehman, uh, and that was, that's something that I'm, of course, I'm going to remember for the rest of my life. What was that? Any particular day? Like September? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So Lehman, so, you know, at the time I was, without doxing myself too much, uh, I was in one of the financial institutions that almost went down. Right.

and i remember going home on a friday and uh you know things were stressed but not that bad uh and at some point during that day on friday we actually thought oh maybe things are gonna settle down and we're gonna be fine uh but then i got a call on friday at around 11 o'clock at night from my boss like listen i need you to come back to work i'm like it's 11 o'clock at night like no you know you're not understanding our firm like margin call pretty much yeah our firm is uh by the way freaks i have watched margin call now shout out to american huddle for that recommendation so and he called us like you you gotta come back here we gotta you know we're probably gonna be sold during the the weekend i need to get uh a good valuation of what the business is

uh how much you guys did in revenue this year you know just get me all those numbers as soon as soon as you can and you know and then we got that all done on friday and then between saturday and Sunday, I didn't know if I had a job anymore, right? What was going to happen? And then Sunday comes and then there's an announcement that, you know, we're being sold and all of that was done just completely, like really, really quickly. And, you know, I'm very against intervention from government and all of that, I think as most people are. But I think at that point, you know, I think we dodged the bullets because it would be worse, you know. We need $2 trillion where the economy is going to collapse.

Who said that, Geithner? Was it Geithner? Paulson? Paulson. I think it was Paulson, yeah. Do you think it would have been worse if they did nothing? I don't know. It probably...

Where do you think we'd be today? Exactly. So that's the right question, right? I think that short-term... I think people are very short-term oriented. That's the problem. So short-term, it probably would have been worse. Definitely.

would have been worse long term i think would have been better uh i think biggest problem that we have right now is exactly that we're trying we kept think for the last 40 years 50 years we kept trying to fix and the fed kept trying to fix these short-term problems right and they keep the they fix the short-term problems by creating bigger long-term problems right and that was the typical situation where if they did nothing short-term would have been pretty bad long term it probably would have been better right uh the question is always you know could the us recover uh if you know one of the big companies went down the financial system really collapsed who knows i don't know right i think the the problem was already much bigger from everything that was

done before you know uh everything that we know about so at that point i think they did the right thing uh but but again they were just trying to fix a pro a bigger problem that was done because of other things right yeah but we're here now in 2019 uh over a decade more than a decade away from that uh that collapse and we seem to be right back where we were so we did six years of expansion monetary base went from 800 billion to 4.4 trillion it's insane and we've sanity we've been tightening uh for four years now so six years of expansion four years well we were tightening for four years and now we're loosening the balance sheet again so let's talk about these repo operations what the hell's going on is it qe without calling it qe yeah it's definitely qe

right i mean the fed doesn't fed doesn't want to call it qe but it's definitely qe uh there is injection of liquidity in the system right somebody out there and that's the thing that i really don't understand yet and you know i asked many people i talked to many people i don't know what the source of this but there is a financial institution somewhere that is in need of a lot of liquidity right why we don't know is it because of distress is because of short-term issues we don't know yet but this is not normal that's you know absolutely not normal and this is qe it's an injection of more liquidity in the system right a system that it's already drowning in liquidity and we're putting more liquidity into it and it's going to pump the markets for a little bit longer

right and as i was saying i think that you know it's like you know good parents think there's a semi coming on the wrong way on the highway right you see it's coming the wrong way you're just not going to stand in front of it because it's going to run you over and there's so much money uh on the system that i think stocks are going to continue to go up but who knows for how long right and how do you transition out of this like how well is there anything so you described that brazil got its shit together in 94 and reduced its monetary base and figured out it's it's a monetary house you think that possibility exists for the global economy right now i wouldn't say brazil brazil fixed it i think brazil just went from being like completely um i don't like what

venezuela is like printing money right away to printing responsibly right uh which printing responsibly is just printing you know you're still printing you're just printing in line with the rest of the world, right? But you're still printing. And again, I don't think they fixed anything. They just went from being in line with the rest of the world, right? I think going forward, the answer is obvious, right? And that's why I think we're here. I think Bitcoin is the answer to the monetary problems that we have in the world. Is it going to happen in one year, two years, three years, five years, 10 years? Nobody knows, right? There's so many variables. And I think that's the thing that people still don't get is that, you know, this is a system with too many variables, right?

We're looking at adoption is going to take a long time. You know, when I'm talking about adoption, like to the mom and pops out there, I still don't see adoption with large institutional players, right? You know, I'm so worried, like in some of the meetings that I go with institutional clients, some of them, I don't want to talk about Bitcoin because I know, you know, these guys are going to smirk and they're going to stop listening to everything else. And I'm saying like, oh, this is a crazy guy that thinks about Bitcoin, right? and although they're starting to shift it just shows you also that you know in terms of adoption we still have a long way to go which is great right because we're early on this price is gonna be I think keep going up right and price drives everything you know people say that price doesn't matter I think

they're wrong I think price drives everything on this market because it's an incentive based game theory market right where the incentives are aligned to price from miners to hodlers to everybody else right we all care about price and before anything else right if we say no i think we're committed to the tech it may make sense to get some just in case it catches on freaks um no but you were mentioning before we hit record that you think it's going to startle us right you're gonna what startle us do you think we're gonna be bitcoin success is going to surprise us yeah i think so i think that uh you know first of all forgot who said, but

somebody, there was a podcast I heard recently that said, oh, Bitcoin is like a truth machine, right? And I think in a sense it is. And I think in line with that, there are going to be completely new things that we still haven't predicted that are going to come out and are going to hit us from where we're not expecting in a positive way, right? And I'll go back to, I think, when the dot-com bubble started, I looked at all these companies right the more things that I did at the time was to research the technology companies and I remember looking at all the search engines and all of that

and then fast forward to I think it was 2004 that Google IPO'd I remember 2005 something like that and I remember when Google IPO'd I looked at Google with my eyes of a you know still a tech analyst and I looked at this is a search engine you know this is way too expensive there's absolutely no way that i'm gonna buy this right at the ipo price and boy was i wrong right because there i couldn't see like this whole new market that they had with data analysis and all of that the ad networks that they'll be able to build exactly and i think it's going to be the same thing with bitcoin because uh even stronger because i think here the as i said before the incentives are aligned for everybody uh and it's not it's not a company that it's only internal to

a company this is open to anybody in the world right this is a process where we are all equity holders on on the growth of this ecosystem and because of that it goes back to game theory same thing right people are going to spend time on it people are going to start developing on it people are going to start to figure out some other things that are just going to come out of the blue and i think surprise us uh to the upside at some point yeah i mean what surprised me most recently last couple months is the rumors out of Venezuela that Maduro is actually using it to buy goods from other countries. Not that that's a use

case. That's a pretty straightforward use case, but it's still nonetheless pretty surprising to see that it may be at the game theoretical geopolitical game theoretical level right now at this point. And they already know the price of the oil because it's what it costs

for them to mine it. Yeah, the price for... Like for selling oil. When Venezuela is selling oil, uh their alternative is they can mine with that oil instead right yeah because they have in-house mining operations so that's like their base level price like they don't even have to look at if they in the future they wouldn't even have to look at like global markets they would just know like this is our this is the price where above that we'll take that price yeah yeah and i think that uh

we're hearing from venezuela first but i you know i'm pretty sure that other countries are already investing in mining and buying uh mining equipment because for them electricity is cheap and you know think about the country like brazil and again there's no evidence that this is happening but you know if i'm in brazilian central bank and you know i look at bitcoin and i make a decision that at some point i need to put that in reserves probably the best way to do it's through mining right you have free hydroelectric electricity in the country right buy mining equipment plug it in there and then you start acquiring bitcoin gradually you know without making too much noise and uh and i wouldn't be surprised that some of the spike that we've seen

in hash rates recently is coming from some of that in in places off off the road right i don't know but it could possibly be am i mistaken or did putin come out this week and say that they want to get into to mining i think i didn't see that but i wouldn't be surprised if they are but they would never be oh no there was there was a hit piece that was about different mining ops that are happening in ex-soviet countries and they were trying to say that bitcoin was also used to pay to hack hillary's emails and it was just like a major hit piece but they did have aspects where they were talking about the thriving bitcoin mining sectors in all these different countries and yeah like bitcoin is the ideal money for putin but putin's also not a fucking idiot and he would

never tell people that he's mining bitcoin yeah so that's i think that's what it was yeah the story you described austin storms actually shared that with me i only read the first paragraph at the get it was wired it was a straight hit piece yeah but it was a good article there's no incentive for any government to say that they are acquiring bitcoin there's zero incentive right at least at this point don't show your hands right exactly so i think that by the time that they tell that they are thinking about acquiring they already had gonna have like stacks somewhere global game and chicken well this brings up an interesting uh debate here right so what what what would what would you i mean i think i know what you guys want more of but what do you think will

happen more of is governments mining it directly or governments making so their citizens can mine like with the easiest path forward so i think trump i tweeted this out people somebody yelled at me for uh involving the government and bitcoin mining but i say as i said i think america should incentivize bitcoin mining some people took that as government programs to incentivize like giving out subsidies uh or grants to go mine bitcoin but i think you can do it with tax incentives right say if you use x amount of uh natural gas that would have otherwise been just sent to the atmosphere we're going to give you a y tax break or something like that that's just pure market incentives and just like lack of regulatory burden right yeah yeah it'd be huge yeah um and just

incentivize individuals and entrepreneurs to go do it and would you rather have your country secured by the government mining bitcoin or the the individual entrepreneurs and then you could always down the road you could raise their taxes or you could give them national security letters do you think it's a national security issue yeah i i think it will be i i and I think as a forward-looking person it is already right I think governments that within the next five years don't have a Bitcoin strategy are going to have serious issues yeah I think they're thinking about that the only thing you know that having worked a little bit with government that I think that it's

the only reason why they haven't really jumped into this is that they're all very term oriented right so I bet that you know whoever is making this decision they just don't want to jump the gun because if they're wrong right and they they get me even if it is point one percent of the of the their monetary base into Bitcoin and it goes wrong personally is gonna hit them right so but I think that's gonna one more pump one more pump because I feel like so many times what you're saying three years ago did but so many times with Bitcoin you hear when you hear people's like story of how they got in it's they

hear about it they kind of dismiss it and then they hear about it a second time right and this last pump a lot of people heard about it a lot more than previously so the next time and a lot of them were government officials i think so i think like the next time it happens it'll be like this for sure legitimacy factor for them yeah yeah just did a little mic adjustment there that the thing always droops the the mic might be too heavy for that stand but no i agree like it uh it will be undeniable that is like well what is the the tipping point for these officials to be like all right this is i mean it seems like it's already happening like people admitting like patrick picker henry that it's not going anywhere um even brad sherman he

understands he does brad sherman what a what a villain but uh yeah like when when is it the point what is the point at which people are like there is like a a visible mad dash to to get as much Bitcoin as possible. And I think above all, we don't need it. Even if governments don't jump into this, right, it doesn't matter. I think that Bitcoin is much bigger than any of that, right? You know, anytime that I come from a school,

you know, economics background that, you know, is very Austrian school oriented, so I want minimal government, you know, and sometimes I don't want government. My dream is that they don't get involved at all, right? And then this is what's going to free us at the end of the day. But we've got to be realistic as well. And I think that, you know, it's game theory again.

One government's looking at the other, as you said, it's a game of chicken, right? And like, okay, if I don't do this, maybe, you know, maybe China will do it. You know, maybe North Korea will do it. So maybe I should do some, right? I should step some. And I think that's a risk, a positive risk that we're definitely facing. and i wouldn't as i said i wouldn't be surprised that there's something happening there already yeah so what um do you trade bitcoin at all are you you know no so and this is i'm very you know

i've seen everything in terms of trading trading is very hard trading short terms very very hard particularly on this market uh because it's a market that you know tends to be sideways sideways sideways and then explodes in one direction or the other and yeah what's the quote if you miss five days of uh yeah so i actually you know i i wrote a web app for that that uh you can just plug in and you see that you know if i missed in the last three years if i missed the top three five period uh five best eight years and all of that and it's just shocking like the amount of returns you're gonna you're gonna lose if you're just not invested it's massive uh so i think everybody you know if you really want to trade if you think you have an edge which i definitely

don't have and i think most people don't as well it is a losing game by definition right because of fees and leverage and liquidations and all of that it is a losing game at the end of the day who's making a lot of money with this is arthur with a bit max right everybody else is losing money but if you do want to do it keep a stack that you know this is my huddle stack that i'm not going to mess and don't mess with it you know put it aside put amount of money that you know you know you're not going to need but set it aside forget about it right the hard part is like not touching that after you lose the trading portion right exactly and there's another thing which you know you've guys been around for you know at least a few cycles and i've seen more

people get out of bitcoins when the markets go up than when it goes down because it goes up you start to look at that stack and like oh this actually now makes a difference in my life right this is a real money so i'm probably gonna sell some of that and sell some of that right and then it goes even more than you're expecting up and then you fomo in and you buy more so then it goes down and it goes down exactly so i don't think it's a you know any market any currency market uh any commodity marks already very hard to trade and this is not one or the other it's kind of like different this is even harder because you know you have fat tails uh in both directions and the chance that you're going to be misallocated either in one direction or the other it's

massive so i'm completely against training uh you know i know a lot of people follow ta i i don't follow ta it's not for me um i tried a few times i actually studied a lot of ta in the beginning of my career i had um it was one of my bosses that did a lot of ta and i just saw him lose money you know time and time again and i think that's probably why i don't like it right so we all have our own experiences to drive our thoughts and uh i know people that make money with it but I'm convinced that it's a small percentage of people that are really going to make money on this, particularly on Bitcoin.

So I think the best thing to do, and you guys are huge proponents of this, is just keep stacking, keep buying, wait for big drops like what we had a month ago, get in, buy some more. Don't overdo it, but just keep converting as much as you can with time. I actually you know in the when I started when I when I got into Bitcoin

it was right after Mt. Gox so price collapse right and I was kind of I kind of heard about it before so I was looking at it but really not paying that much attention but when price collapsed I remember looking at it was around $100 and I saw the charges oh this thing was at $1,000 at some point now it's at the hundred and that that got my attention like okay maybe you know maybe if this doesn't go to zero which could maybe it go back to a thousand right so I started buying a little bit and then I bought like at 100 150 you know a little bit of 200 and then it went up to 400 500 like okay this is a massive run I'm gonna get

out so I got out and then I was I wasn't allocated for a while you know and I kind of like left it on the side uh and then by the time that i look again it's above a thousand which was what i was looking at right and of course i bought everything back at a thousand and it went down again so again i'm not the best trader so i'm probably not the right person to to ask that question uh but i you know you guys see it on twitter all the time there are always people with calls here and there i haven't seen anybody with very very exceptions that you know through this whole period to 2015 Chanel, they are still making the calls and that on average are right. And that on average would have also like a recordable metrics that you could follow because

it's very easy to say, oh, it may go up, but it may go down. But somebody that will tell you like, I have a fund or I have somewhere where I'm tracking my- A P&L sheet. Yeah. Simple P&L sheet. I would take the bet every day that in a period of two years, three years five years bitcoin would outperform 95 percent of the traders out there yeah right it's just uh again it's a benchmark that is very very hard to to beat what are what are your thoughts on the future of bitcoin volatility i know bitcoin teen is a bit of a contrarian thinks it's going to get more volatile from here what do you think so i think one of the things that

will drive volatility maybe down is the fact that we now have more options market right and you make money on options market not by buying volatility you make money by selling volatility right so if you consider consistently sell volatility on equity more on equity markets for example you make money right it's been you know one of the the risk parity strategies that have worked for for a long period of time why because typically implied volatility which is what is pricing the options is higher than historical volatility right so in tech and it should be there should be a premium for insurance right and if you actually look on bitcoin options and i actually started

looking at this a little bit recently implied volatility is very high historical is very high as well but implied is very very high um look at the ledger x options for example 2020 options are trading at close to 90% implied volatility and options that are like 7,000 strike puts. So there's a lot of premium to be gained there. So if you're systematically selling options, if you sell call spreads and put spreads, for example, you're capturing that premium. And I think that may drive implied volatility down, which doesn't necessarily mean that realize volatility is going to go down right because it's the tail it's not the dog right

but ultimately it may because remember that everybody that puts a risk trade out there they need to hedge that risk somewhere so by hedging that risk you may actually see volatility being driven down and also you know it's a market that it's consolidating it's a market that you know i think that uh there's kind of like there's significantly less let's think about fundamentally right there's significantly less um uncertainty today than there was in 2015. 2015 i remember putting you know a few hundred dollars into bitcoin and thinking this is gonna go to zero right like that was like clear but this is gonna you know i'm okay if this goes to zero there's no chance that it's gonna go to zero today in my mind no chance right uh no i mean

it's a completely different market why do you say that what no chance at all i've very i wouldn't see no chance at all but uh you know because there's a chance for everything right but the chance are minimum at that point the chances were like significant and i would think about the 10 15 chance i agree i think bitcoin's biggest hurdle is going from zero to one everything after that is well the market has matured tremendously i mean and and just liquidity has gone up and and we have so many more exchanges like on ramps off ramps i mean i remember there it used to be like and still kind of is but every big move like coinbase goes down yeah right and if coinbase is dominating the volume and they're the only ones where you can trade then a single exchange

going down really fucks up the market increases a shit ton of volatility right yeah at that moment and but i you know answering your questions volatility going to go down and up i think that you know i'm going to take the other side now right because of that there's a chance that volatility may actually go up. Because let's say, for example, we start a new run and we hit all time highs, D1 ramps are all plugged in. So people may just decide and FOMO in and say, well, you know, I just want to jump back in. And you may have this flood into the market that we haven't experienced before. And because of that, we may actually have spikes in volatility that are much higher. So I think what we're going to probably see is that volatility is gradually going down,

but with maybe higher spikes in volatility than we had before so the second derivative of volatility is actually is actually going to be higher than what we've seen before i think we see a bitcoin vix like derivative soon in the future sorry do you think we see a bitcoin vix like derivative oh yeah absolutely at some point for sure i have no question uh that we're gonna have that technically one could create an index already right because we have options available so vix basically just 30-day uh options on the smp right you have a it's a systematic index that it's constructed in you so the same thing we are going to see in bitcoin actually that creates me an idea maybe we should create something like that and put it out there right look using uh ledger x api

and then it's an easier way to track uh authority the only the only thing that i think it's a little bit hard is that uh the strikes that we we don't have many strikes in in uh bitcoin right now so you know to pick like vix is very straight in terms of like uh how much out of the money you are um to create the index but still i think it's something that's definitely absolutely doable yeah and i think we're actually going to have a market to buy and sell any uh volatility volatility yeah yeah so if you freeze it on the vix is the index that measures the volatility the s p 500 index very popular derivative yeah you know and and i what is it vix above 20 it's very volatile it's like crazy right yes yeah fairly fairly high not crazy but fairly high like 2007 we had the

spike to close to 100 because that's bitcoin volatility uh and people are you know people forget risk very quickly right and they forget that you know we had a period of 10 years in the s&p where the s&p didn't go anywhere uh you know and up until recently and we had a period in s&p where the S&P volatility was close to 70%, 80% as well. And I guarantee we're going to see that again. I don't know if it's going to be next month or it's going to be three years from now, but we're definitely going to see that at some point

because prices are just, again, being inflated for the wrong reasons. Yeah, no, it's crazy. If you guys are interested in Bitcoin derivatives, in particular, CoinGecko actually just came out with a really good page, with a really thorough page with derivatives and options products across the market.

So go check that out, CoinGecko. It's actually a really cool page. What I want to jump on from here, the, what was I going to say? Let me gather my thoughts here. Just going back to that, I think that one of the strategies that we did in Wall Street, and this is interesting, I think that,

and going back to your question regarding a volatility market for Wall Street, 2007, 2008, when we were looking to the market, To buy protection in the markets right and I kind of touched this in the last time that it was in the in the podcast And we looked into buying options. Yes, I mean buy put options. That's the first thing comes to your mind, right? I want to protect myself. So I'm gonna buy a put option on the S&P S&P goes down I exercise that option I make money right the problem with that is that first you need to pick a period so you're gonna say Let's say I buy a one month option, right?

So next month I need to do that again and I need to do it again and I just hear you So you're losing money losing money until you make money But the biggest problem is that the time that you really need the option It's probably the time of volatility spiked up and you're probably gonna say I don't want to buy it at this level volatility right So you just spent you know a long time of paying premium and then the time that you really want to make money first You know the option may not perform as well because you're dealt and other things but second it's probably gonna be expensive, right? So one of the things we we did a lot at that time is actually flip it around into the opposite self

systematically sell volatility on the S&P. And that actually worked really well as a protection because of periods of distress, what happens at the implied volatility, which is what's pricing the options, spiked significantly and significantly more than historical volatility, right? So you're capturing a lot of premium in times of distress. And that ended up being a very good strategy to protect portfolios at the end of the day, right? Of course, for the last 10 years, it didn't work. you would have lost a lot of money because, you know, again, implied volatility is collapsing. Historical volatility is collapsing as well.

The premiums are very low. And then whenever you have a small spike, you lose a lot of money. But in periods of distress, that is a good strategy. Play that ARB. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that it's something definitely to consider in Bitcoin, selling calls and put spreads and just getting the premium every month, right?

Yeah. No, and I finally remembered what I was going to transition to and it just went out my head again. marty concussion marty oh exactly what i wanted to ask you so uh very interested to get your insights on this uh the room we're not rumors just the theories that uh not not rumors all right let's talk about so the cftc ex-chief chris g christopher g and carlo came out at a a conference the beginning of last week and basically said that the trump administration gave the okay to the cftc futures for bitcoin because they wanted to quote unquote pop the

bubble. So a lot of people think that these futures markets may be used to manipulate the price of Bitcoin and suppress the price of Bitcoin more importantly. What are your thoughts on this market structure? Obviously, you think these products are important. Hard to say. At the end of the day, futures shouldn't drive direction one side or the other. They should just add liquidity to the market, right? So the liquidity will flow to wherever it needs to flow, right? So if there was a restriction in liquidity on the buy side or on the sell side it would have flown it that way right but by itself it shouldn't pop a bubble unless you're in a market is extremely restricted right like think about a

market where you can't sell short there's you can only buy right in a way it's kind of like what the US equity market is much harder to sell it to short a stock than it is to buy a stock right so when you add futures on individual stocks, you may actually give the ability for some people to kind of like bring prices down. I don't think it's the case with Bitcoin. I think we've had so many different options. BitMEX was around already. BitMEX has a massive volume. It's not open to US clients, but US clients have other options as well. So I think he's giving himself too much credit for that it was a coincidence more than anything else and he may just be trying to be more relevant but

who knows right uh but i my personal view is that that wasn't the the reason for prices to come down it's hard it's hard to find a direct uh cause for a price movement right exactly well i mean like the day the cme announced futures bitcoin was trading at like 9k right and then And on the eve of the launch, we hit 19. So maybe we wouldn't have even pumped as high as we pumped this run if it wasn't for the CME to begin with, right? And in a bull market, everything is good news, right? So markets, people just look at anything that comes out

and use that as an excuse to fear to buy a position and to accumulate more and to get more leverage, right? But that was good news, right? That was good news. It's huge news. Yeah, exactly. Because it's bringing more liquidity to the market. it's bringing more legitimacy to the market right because now it's a market that is priced in the

chicago exchange right and all of that so it is good news uh but it brings pressure to people that put potentially shorts more uh you know i haven't looked at the numbers would it be interesting to see you know what the kind of like the open interest positions were after it uh it opened uh i would doubt there is a correlation with price there but again i don't know i haven't the big gold bug theory is that uh the powers that be are manipulating gold prices via futures markets um what are your thoughts on the etf do you think we need it do you think it's important do you think it's valuable will it have the same effect so we don't need it it would be valuable because uh price that takes everything and i guarantee price would pump significantly because

of that right of course apparently one just got okayed in canada yeah but i think the big one is the us right when we have one in the us and everybody can come in and you can buy in your brokerage account you can buy some bitcoin uh that is a game changer there's no question about that that's going to drive price ridiculous high very very quickly right and i think ultimately is also going to drive price through same thing happened with both right when i had the gold atf yeah And ETFs in general, when they come out, you know, they tend to drive prices of the underlying assets up. Same thing with bonds and all of that, right?

We've seen it time and time again. So I think when it happens, it's going to drive price up and price is the most important variable in Bitcoin. So it's going to be good for Bitcoin because of that. Do we need an ETF? Absolutely not. If I am a purist and I say, listen, you know, I think people should have their own keys and you know, at the end of the day, they should control their Bitcoins and we don't

have a huge fidelity or whoever it is that issues the ETF that is holding like a massive position that could be hacked and all of that. ETF is bad, right? But again, I think the pros that we're going to get out of this in price are much bigger than anything else. So I would love to see an ETF to be approved. And I'll go further. I look at 90% of my colleagues in Wall Street. I'm not comfortable you know i actually i i have a a wallet where i hold bitcoin for a friend of mine that i know that you know there's no way that he can hold the bitcoin because he's gonna either lose the wallet or he's gonna forget his seed or whatever it is he's just not technical enough and this is a guy that you know again it's wall street you know it's not dumb it's just not

technology savvy enough to to do this right so an etf would give access to a lot of people like that and there are we kind of like you know look at this our twitter bubble where everybody you know we want to be purists and we want to hold our own keys and that's what i do that's what you do right and i think ultimately everybody's going to get there but between where we are today and that point we need other steps right and an etf i think it's a my view is that it's an important step to that yeah it's a vanek has been trying getting shot down what do you think their biggest hurdle is it's very like unclear at this point to me yeah again you know having dealt with regulators in the past it's uh it's hard to read into their incentives uh and you know put yourself in

the shoes of these regulators as well personally they have a lot more downside than they have upside these are not guys who get paid bonus at the end of the year i mean get paid bonus but it's not tied to anything there's no monetary incentive for them if an etf is launched and it captures I don't know billions and billions of dollars that's not gonna change anything in their compensation right but if an ETF is launched and there is a hack and you know an ETF goes down significantly they're gonna be to blame so they're in very tough shoes right now that you know again the the pressure that they have on the other side is that if they don't approve this

right I mean it's a dear miss exactly and it's innovation that you know that the u.s needs right uh so i bet that they're getting a lot of pressure on the on that side but personally as an individual right whoever is making that decision they're going to try everything that they can my view at least is that that you shut it down right there's very little on that for them yeah yeah no it's um it's just been i mean it's something we've been parroting on tftc for a while don't hold your breath for the institutional money it'll be really good when it comes yeah it's been uh been pretty hard for them to get these products out there i mean ledger x um i think i'm actually speaking with paul tomorrow uh and their situation with the cftc

seems a bit uh very competitive uh if you will um but one thing i'm interested have you been following the debate around the stock to flow model uh yeah yeah i mean i think everything everybody else yeah i've been i've been looking at it so what are your thoughts But I think it's a very good model for the long term, and I think ultimately it's probably going to play out if we go into hyper-Bitcoinization of the world. But again, I think it's too early to know, and I think that the order of magnitude we are talking, it doesn't matter if the model is right or wrong. I think fundamentally it makes sense.

I also think it's a very good story to tell, right? I think it's something that the people that you go out and you tell them when you put it in terms of stock to flow and you compare to other commodities and they can see it, and then they kind of start to understand the value of a limited amount of Bitcoin out there and the limited amount of issuance of Bitcoin out there. So I think the value is more in that than anything else, right, and how people are going to look at this right in the story that uh that you can tell uh and i think that the the again it's a very limited number of data points but so far it has been proven true to be right it's a pretty

impressive model up to this point yeah um yeah don't don't tell bitcoin tina or a lot of it's very it's a lot of contention right now um because i i do believe that if you can stomach the assumption that bitcoin's network effect gives it a gives it an advantage over other blockchains i think that does make sense to apply to there are no other blockchains no i'm that serious there are no other blocks why do you say that because you know again i think between already you look at any metric that you want right look at hash rate look at market cap like and i know market cap has its flaws. But Bitcoin is far beyond anything out there. And again, I think the way that I looked at this coming more from the economic, the game theory side, I never really

look into the tech side. And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there is something that's going to come out there that it's completely different. But I don't believe so. I think that everything that I look at the market is proving me that Bitcoin already won this game. And if something comes out, I think that at this point, there's so much adoption, so much development behind Bitcoin and so many people behind it. If something comes out of other coin that is very, very good, Bitcoin is going to try to adapt to get that, right? The incentives are completely aligned for that to happen. Yeah, what I wrote about this morning was basically, I'll fix that in a second before I get to this, or after I get to this. What I wrote about was, what did I write about?

i wrote about bitmex research just put out a research paper on bitcoin's time stamping mechanism and uh specifically around difficulty adjustments this mechanism is very important and what we found when bitcoin cash had to fix their do their emergency difficult adjustment it really up their blockchain specifically with difficulty adjustments and made them more susceptible to miners mining blocks a lot faster and this one time stamping mechanism just one part of the the design and satoshi thought it through so thoroughly and he wasn't even a good coder so that's the point i make like satoshi wasn't a good coder but like from an incentive design system he was like michelangelo like this the incentives are such uh that the tech is almost secondary to

the incentives i would argue exactly it's exactly right it's all about incentives right and everything is aligned and the difficulty you know same thing like we hear about the the depth spire or not doesn't matter right because the incentives are aligned if you know if the depth spire happens you know difficulties are going to come down and we are going to ultimately be be fine so one of matt's favorite topics the death spiral you and ari going back and forth man yeah i mean apparently he wasn't calling for a death spiral so i guess there's that there'll be more next cycle we'll have death spiral it's not done we haven't approved it we have all the tweets to retweet the next time exactly all

these cycles now i just have a database of tweets to retweet you don't have to send out originals Yeah. And we were talking about the ETFs. Just to go back to that a little bit, because you kind of touch into the institutional side of the business. And, you know, everybody says, oh, institutions are here, institutions are already investing. They're not. At least my experience with the people that I talked to, as I was saying, I'm still embarrassed in some of the meetings to talk about Bitcoin, because I will get the eventual smirk or somebody will look at me like, oh, this is the crazy guy that's talking about Bitcoin again. And that happens still to this day a lot with some very large family offices. You know, you go meet with them and you talk about, you know, typically what I'll do is that I'll talk about different asset classes, about equities, commodities. And then eventually when you get to currencies and commodities, that's kind of like when the Bitcoin conversation, you know, I hint things here and there that, you know, I just wait to see if they get the bait and they will talk about Bitcoin. and it's one out of I know maybe 15 family offices that will say that they are doing something actively a lot of them will say that they're looking at it they're researching but pulling the trigger and having investors like

minority of them and most of the ones are investing are the ones that come from founders that were you know have technology background because then that the founders will tell the family office like hey I heard about this I went to a VC dinner or whatever it is and somebody's investing I want to buy some So it's coming from from the the head of the family the client side exactly. Do you think backed helps at all here? It is more liquidity for sure. It helps. It's a different vehicle You know having Bitcoin settled futures is definitely good good for the market It's pretty good to see how much volume they're they're picking up in the last few weeks, right?

You know now it's actually decent And I'm a little surprised how they launched. And I would have expected them to launch with kind of like some demand already lined up in the background. Like market makers or something. Exactly, yeah. What is going on? They had, what, 70 Bitcoin worth of volume the first day? But maybe it was by design.

Maybe that's what they wanted to do. You know, I don't know. Ease into it. I don't know. Exactly. I don't know. It's still negligible volume compared to CME. It is, yeah.

You're talking about, you know, at most I think they did like 1,000 Bitcoins a day. Yeah, it's the one thing I messed up on our chart a couple weeks ago. cme contracts got five bitcoin underlying backs only got one so the each contract is five yeah i'm pretty sure six five six six six yeah six so it's six so you gotta multiply the cme volume by six and compare it to back to that yeah i mean it's a minuscule amount yeah yeah yeah yeah the most amount i think that what's really drives short-term prices it's still the leverage that you have on you know bitfinex bitmax all of those uh exchanges uh 100 times leverage is something that you know the first time that i saw that i like this is wrong there's absolutely no way that

you know you can get a hundred times leverage it's just marketing no one really uses that yeah the average leverage on bitmap is like seven and a half x yeah yeah i mean we saw in both directions when we went down like 2000 yeah relatively quickly it was like 180 million dollars of the liquidations on max 500 million dollars of liquidation we went up right when we went to 40 percent again yeah so it's insane it's insane so people are leverage uh definitely too much right half a billion dollars it's crazy it's insane so that kind of like it's an animal that feeds on itself right because price starts to go up you have these liquidations right and then you know in order to have liquidations it's somebody that's short they have to buy it back right so

you know they buy it back to close the hedges because somebody's had somewhere right and that just keeps driving it up so we have these explosive moves up and down right yeah the liquidity crunches are very very crazy in this in this asset class is that surprising stack sats and make it more liquid so it's a let's venture into somewhere else for a little bit here you said you're running triathlons what's that like how'd you get in triathlons yeah actually you know i'm uh a long time ago so when i got into this was uh i think when my daughter was born you know i was 30 pounds overweight uh you know i had like massive migraines um my cholesterol was off the charts so and i kind of like went through a little bit of an existential crisis i look at my daughter like

i'm gonna die at some point working like crazy hours in wall street traveling like a crazy man and I thought I gotta do something and I remember exactly the day where I decided to to make a change was the day that you know I used to work down at Wall Street and I used to catch the ferry every day so one of the days I'm coming down I try to run for the ferry and it's like I don't know maybe 200 meter run I get to the ferry and I'm like shaking uncontrollably like I gotta do something about this man uh so the next day I went out for a run because I thought you know since I'm traveling a lot i can probably just run anywhere i go i take my running shoes so i ran for 10 minutes and of course i came back home sweating like a pig you know my legs are like shaking

um and i this is not right and i'm in my early 30s uh and and i'm gonna have a heart attack and then i go to the to the doctor and of course you know my blood exam cams like horrible in terms of collapse or everything so i started running um and you know wall street used to have this 5k that they did every year uh the running of the bulls i don't know if they still have that and i signed up for that uh and then i did a 5k and then a 5k led to a 10k led to a marathon uh and then after a marathon like i got a you know typical wall street a type personality right oh i'm gonna do an ironman extreme and no idea what you're doing right and they're just jumping to it so uh i did in 2010 my first ironman and since then i've done uh i've completed 10 ironmans

i've done 12 two of them i didn't finish uh i've done uh ultramarathons uh and again i think this is a huge part of um i think my life and being able to do other things because you know if you don't have balance you know if you i always look at life like in three different points right you have your health uh have your professional life and have your family uh if one of them is not in balance right you the rest is gonna suffer uh so triathlons is where i kind of found the balance the balance yeah for for my health side and what's it like preparing for an ironman so how long are there's a hundred so you in miles you swim 2.4 miles you bike 112 and then you do 42 kilometers run a 26 mile run at the end a marathon at the end right so

it will take my fastest one I've done in a little bit less than 10 hours my slowest one I've done in 12 hours and change how do you how do you stay active for 10 hours straight yeah what's that even like you'd be surprised i think that your body can do things that you don't know it can do uh it's just like stacking sets you start slowing start building right uh i had to get the parallel and then you know before you know it as i said i started with a 5k a 5k for me i could when i did a 5k i couldn't even think about completing that thing right uh but again we can all do i think much more than we we think we can and as you start training and then honestly now you know this is probably gonna sound wrong but i look at an ironman

now and it's like no big deal anybody can do it right and i mean it i know that anybody can do it if you really you know think about training and you'll be disciplined and uh it's mind over matter yeah exactly exactly that's uh one back in my athlete days i used to be in very good shape freaks but that was uh i used to work i'm getting back into it too but mine never matter like when you're doing like a long run just like faster i run the sooner i'll be done and some of the i think some of the best thinking that i get it's doing long bike rides doing long runs because you're just you know today we have too much of electronics so we're always on the electronics so when you go out on a run when you're out on a bike ride you're not looking at anything right you're inside your

mind and uh it gets you to think a lot about the different things and i think that's one of the biggest values that i take out of it that is my time to really be introspective and forget about the do you listen to anything while you're running sometimes i actually listen to podcasts sometimes while i'm running but there are a lot of times that i prefer to just you know shut it down you know sometimes i run most of the times i run with a gps watch but there are times that i just don't don't want to run with anything just disconnect because that's the purpose of it is to disconnect and kind of like think think differently and bike rides are even better because in bike ride you can't put have anything in your ears because you have to listen for cars and things like that

and it the in terms of hours and i'll go out on a bike ride for five hours seven hours uh yeah and you're not imagined listening to anything you're gonna think i used to tell my my wife like listen and I have a problem, I go out on a bike ride. If I come back with the same problem, I'm probably not going to find the solution to that problem. It's not within me, right? That's a good heuristic to use. I like that.

It's a good story. So you were in your early 30s when you got into this? Yeah, so now I'm in my late 40s and still doing it. Looking young and spry. Thank you, thank you. um yeah so thanks again for coming in dude that's my pleasure thanks for everything you guys do you know as i said this is one of the best podcasts out there i learned so much from you guys and that's yours and i think that you know there are a lot of people out there that uh look at their

bitcoin experience and a lot of it they owe to you guys that's serious about it yeah thank you dude that's why we do it thank you yeah and it's yeah it's like i was telling you before we record i stumbled into this, I was forced to start a podcast by somebody who wanted to learn more about Bitcoin I'm just very fortunate to have been serendipitously in that position is there anything

Bitcoin wise, parting notes, you want to any thoughts about that we haven't covered that you think as I said, you know, just stay humble, stack stats I guess and that's serious, you know, don't if you really want to get into trading

think twice before doing it make sure that you know you don't do with huge amount of money and uh because chances are you're gonna get hurt yeah yeah that's uh i can i can uh confirm that that that sentiment right there it's not worth it if you especially if you don't know how to trade you're talking to somebody who's traded in his life before it is not easy to just jump into yeah alfazena it's been a pleasure meeting you in person breakfast was lovely uh i hope you enjoy your afternoon trick-or-treating and hoboken thank you um man anything love you guys peace and love peace