The Pomp Podcast - 329: Jon Najarian On Wall Street and Bitcoin

Episode Date: July 7, 2020

Jon ‘DRJ’ Najarian was linebacker for the Chicago Bears before he turned to another kind of contact sport – trading on the Chicago Board Options Exchange. He became a member of the CBOE, NYSE, CME and CBOT and worked as a floor trader for some 25 years. He built and sold a number of companies, including a $750 million exit to E*TRADE in September 2016. In this conversation, we discuss the physicality of the old school trading pits, how Wall Street has evolved over the years, Robinhood, Davey Day Trader, why Jon and his brother are building a company to educate investors, and how much of his portfolio is currently in Bitcoin. ===============================  The BTSE exchange allows you to trade confidently. They are the leader in futures, which means they are pioneering Futures 2.0. With BTSE, you can trade next-level futures: freely choose and combine your margin and settlement assets and trade with up to 100x leverage. You can also sign up for a BTSE Elite membership that gives you unbeatable discounts and bonuses across the BTSE Exchange, OTC platform, and more. Go to BTSE.com/pomp to get a 10% discount on your BTSE Elite membership. ===============================  The Helium Hotspot is a new product that enables the people, not the telcos, to own and operate a wireless network in their city for Internet of Things devices. You can literally earn crypto for helping to build the network and providing connectivity to Internet of Things devices sending small bits of data. Join the movement and get your Helium Hotspot today with $50 off using the code POMP at helium.com.  =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast. Simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. John Dr. J. Najarian was linebacker for the Chicago Bears before he turned to another kind of contact sport, trading on the Chicago Board Options Exchange. He became a member of the CBOE, NYSE, CME, and CBOT and worked as a floor trader for some 25 years. John has built and sold a number of companies, including a $750 million exit to E-Trade in September 2016. In this conversation, we discuss the physicality of the old school trading pits, how Wall Street has evolved over the years, Robinhood, Davy Day Trader, why John and his brother are building a company to educate investors, and how much of his portfolio is currently in Bitcoin.

I really enjoyed this conversation with John, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into the episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. The first is Bitsy. The Bitsy Exchange allows you to trade confidently. They are the leader in futures, which means they are pioneering Futures 2.0. With Bitsy, you can trade next-level futures. You are free to choose and combine your margin and settlement assets and trade with up to 100x leverage. You can sign up for a Bitsy Elite membership that gives you unbeatable discounts and bonuses across the Bitsy Exchange, OTC platform, and more.

Go to Bitsy.com slash POMP. Again, B-T-S-E, Bitsy, B-T-S-E.com slash POMP, Bitsy.com slash POMP to get a 10% discount on your Bitsy Elite membership. The second sponsor is Helium. The Helium Hotspot is a new product that enables the people, not the telcos, to own and operate a wireless network in their city for Internet of Things devices. I've got one in my apartment. The telcos have forever held a monopoly on any sort of wireless network. Now, the Helium Hotspot is helping to democratize that ownership. You can literally earn crypto for helping to build the network and providing connectivity to Internet of Things devices by sending small bits of data.

So join the movement today, get your Helium Hotspot, and help to break up the telco's monopoly. You can be a part of the democratized, decentralized solution. Your Helium Hotspot comes with $50 off if you use the code POMP at Helium.com. H-E-L-I-U-M.com. Helium.com, use code POMP, and you'll get $50 off. Lastly, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com, pompletter.com.

All right, let's get in this episode with John. I hope you guys enjoyed this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital, or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I have the man, the myth, the legend himself. What's going on, John? I love the bang, bang, man. That's my thing too.

Just for the record, John's the first person to ever start the podcast off with finger guns. We're already into the finger guns. We're ready to rock and roll. Bang, bang, bang, bang. So for like the one person watching this who doesn't know who you are, never seen you on television, let's go through your background, kind of where'd you grow up and what'd you do before you got into financial markets? Sure. Pomp, I grew up in the Bay Area, San Francisco. Lived there till I was 12. Loved it.

We used to go down to Haight-Ashbury and drive around and check out the freaks, as we used to call them. That was before I became politically correct. Now I would just call them hippies. But we always had a good time. And, you know, it was never a heckling thing or anything else. We would just, my dad's a doctor. And so that's where I took my nickname from, Dr. J, from my dad. more or less to honor him. But when he was a surgeon in San Francisco and an assistant chief

of surgery there, he would have people fly in from all over the world to learn various surgical techniques because he was one of the first people to successfully do liver transplants, pancreas transplants, things like that. So he would teach people from all over the world. And since San Francisco and Haight-Ashbury was kind of top of mind for a lot of people, they'd say, hey, can we go down and see the hippies? So my dad would say, boys, get in the car. We're going down. But make sure you roll up the windows because those guys have lice. But so we would drive down to Haight-Ashbury. And, you know, it would look exactly like you think it would look. A bunch of wonderful Victorian homes, lots of men and women with long hair,

big glasses, day or night, you know, big sunglasses, and, you know, monster bell-bottom jeans and things like that. Exactly what you think it would look like, that is what it looked like. And San Francisco, you know, the city by the bay, I loved it. I went back there briefly to Berkeley for school to the University of California, because we moved when I was 12, Tom, to Minneapolis. My dad took a job as chief of surgery at the University of Minnesota. So we moved to Minneapolis. Loved that because there was snow and season changes. San Francisco, it's pretty much the same year round. It's, you know, it's cold and foggy in the morning, and then it gets cold and foggy again in the evening. But in between, it could be sunny or rainy. And it was just a fun

city. I loved growing up there. And then when we went to Minnesota, like I say, we had very harsh changes in the season from fall to all of a sudden 60 below, you know, a month later. So the season change was a big deal but that was also fun and I got to go to uh uh let's see uh high school with Prince and uh a bunch of these famous musicians that they weren't famous in high school they were just uh interesting fellows because I got bused into a mostly black high school so I went from from lily white, San Francisco, lily white, junior high school, to all of a sudden being bused into an all black high school. And it was a little not scary, but you know, you were always on edge. So I bet I know how a lot of African Americans or blacks feel when they go to an all

white high school, you know, they probably are on edge too. But some of my greatest friends and friendships were made, you know, from that. And back then, yeah, we had gangs, but the gangs didn't shoot you, Pop. You know, the gangs, worst case scenario, a gang would beat you up. Now, you didn't want that, but, you know, I played football, so all the guys on the team were my friends, but they weren't going to walk me home every day. So I had to frequently run from the football, you know, from showering up after football practice, kind of looking both ways and making a dash to get to a safer neighborhood. Because if I got caught in the wrong neighborhood, again, I think it builds kind of a empathy for somebody who would be the

opposite. You know, like I say, for an African American or Asian kid that was in an all white school where they didn't feel so comfortable walking through that neighborhood either. But like I say, it ended up working out great. I have enjoyed both the friendships and the experience of not being in the high school that I thought I would have been in. Yeah, that's awesome. And then what did you guys do for college? Because you have a twin brother, correct you guys are twins no no everybody thinks that though um and not everybody but a lot of people say oh you must be twins nope six years apart really yep Pete is the youngest of four boys I am the oldest um so I'm six years older than Pete four years older than Paul and two years

older than Dave so you don't know this but I am the oldest of five boys I am eight years older than the youngest and everyone in between is two years apart so uh very similar we just have one more than you do what are the two brothers in the middle doing um one brother david uh he sold a bunch of uh fast food franchises that he started with my brother paul um and now he runs uh um a health club that he owns he owns this big building you know that's got a health club so that's been challenging of course during COVID because by law they had to stay shuttered and he has several ice cream parlors and he kills it with the ice cream he's only open in the summer but he absolutely kills it you know they're scooping out these

gigantic you know scoops of ice cream and people come from all over the city to his ice cream shops because they over-serve so much. And the other one, sadly, passed away of ALS. So that was really a crappy thing. My brother, Paul, passed away now five years ago of ALS. Got it. Sorry to hear that. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And why did you and the youngest, why the kind of bookends, if you will, want to go into the financial markets, whereas your other brothers went more into entrepreneurship? Well, I did it because I was playing football for the Bears, and that's what brought me to Chicago. I was not a high draft choice or anything like that. I was a free agent, which meant that just for the folks that don't know, if you're not drafted, you can go to any team that offers you

a contract. So I had three teams that offered me a serious contract discussions with a couple other teams. I ended up picking the Bears because I thought, you know what, they have a really crappy team. No, but you know, think about it. It's just like, do you do you want to if you're going to join and try to beat somebody out for a job? Do you want to go to Apple, where everybody's a killer? You know, where all those engineers are killers? Or do you want to go to a shitty place where you might be as good as any of the engineers they have? You know, that was my that was how I did it, Pomp, with, you know, weighing, do I want to be, you know, do I want to try to play for New England you know where they're Super Bowl champ kind of things or do I want to go to a

team where they haven't been anywhere forever they suck and the linebackers aren't that good that was my position linebacker and so and that's you know both cockiness on my part me thinking oh I'm better than those professionals which I wasn't but I do think that you'd want to pick a place where you think you might be able to make the team if you're drafted you don't get that choice you just you know you go and if if you're a high round draft pick you're gonna make it you know nobody cuts their first round pick until the second year or third year but you know as far as free agent it was great brought me to Chicago so when I learned the ropes my brother Pete who was like I say six years younger he was still in high school so you know because I came right after college he's still

in high school he's deciding where he's going to go play college football and after he was an all-american and a big star at University of Minnesota he went down and he played for Seattle the Seahawks then he played for the Vikings then he played for Tampa Bay then he played for the Raiders. And each time in the off season, he'd come and visit me here in Chicago. And he'd always say, God, it really has a cool energy, a cool vibe down here on the floor. And I said, yeah, it does. You know, that's why I love it. That's why, you know, 3000 men and women on the floor, that's why they love it. But it's also, I'm sure you see this all the time. There are probably people who are so into blockchain and crypto or digital assets, but they're into it because they

want to make a lot of money. You're into it because you can make money, but also you're into it because you love it. There are probably every year, give or take 700 to 1000 people that leave the floor. And they don't leave because they retired with a big pile of money. You know, they left because they couldn't hack it. They couldn't make it. So that churn just stays there all the time. So of the 3,000 people, 2,000 of them are probably happy and 1,000 of them are probably churning and leaving and coming back and, you know, trying to get refunded and all that stuff. So, you know, if you are somebody who finds that fun and exciting and, you know, that's why pump, I'm always pumping my fist on TV or, you know, shooting the guns or whatever, bang, bang.

Because, you know, it just, I enjoy what I do. And I know you do. Because, you know, we've talked and I've seen the people that, you know, come to your events and things like that, the people that just love, they actually love the idea, not just the idea of getting rich. The idea of getting rich, that's really an easy sell. But it's a little harder to get excited about actually doing this every day and making this, you know, your vocation. Yeah, it's one of these weird things where when you talk to people who seem to be successful and you ask them, why do you do what you do? Majority of the people I've talked to will answer some form or fashion of I enjoy the process selfless, right? The product or kind of the end result takes care of itself, right? It's kind of

a football way of thinking of like, hey, look, we got to do every single play. And as long as everyone does their job, every offensive play is drawn up to be a touchdown. And every defensive play is drawn up to stop them for a loss, right? And it really just comes down to kind of the process and execution, all this kind of stuff. And so it feels like that people who end up being successful, they enjoy that process. And it's the process or kind of showing up every single day for year after year after year that's what ultimately leads them to the success and to your point the people who either don't enjoy it can't you know hack it or whatever it is they're the ones who kind of wash out and go find other things to do in them right yeah that's exactly right and and

you can't really some people will kind of sell their soul to be an investment banker or you know some other job in finance that their heart isn't really in it and they do it for a couple years maybe they make just enough, but they're always looking for a way out. And I was never looking for a way out. I was looking to stay in as long as I could. But, you know, the game changes. And, you know, every financial edge that people think they have goes away eventually. And you have to develop something new. That doesn't mean you can't own, you know, Bitcoin or Ethereum or Microsoft or Apple forever, you could, but if you're trying to make a, you know, a living day by day trading in and out, you know, and all of a sudden computer algorithms are taking all the edge away,

it's a little tougher. For sure. So when you ended up deciding to leave the NFL, where, what did you do at first? Did you go right to the trading pits or kind of what was that journey like and what was kind of the impetus for going into that environment? Sure. It is a very good question because, A, I didn't leave of my own volition. They fired me. They cut me. And, you know, it was one of those deals, Pomp, where literally they come to your door, knock on the door and say, I know I'm going to get cut tomorrow. I know I'm going to get cut. And they'd leave because they couldn't face that. and when it happened to me I was pretty sure that I was going to be cut but I was still in enough denial you know the river in Egypt where I thought well you know a couple of these other guys left maybe they need an extra linebacker to hang around before Singletary you know what if he hurts himself or whatever he never did the guy was like unstoppable and that's the guy that beat me

out Mike Singletary so he did a great job he was very good guy too so it would be easy to hate the guy that you know that takes the job from you but this guy was just such a good guy you couldn't hate him and I've always been a guy also that's pretty honest with myself as far as my abilities so when I meet somebody who is better than me could be in trading you know I've met guys that are better than me it could be in skiing and it happened to be in football you know and I was just like yeah I get it he's better than me and the coach was like yeah we're sorry you know not everybody can make it you know how it is john blah blah blah and i'm like hey man i appreciate the opportunity thank you yeah that's awesome and and i mean look to be uh completely frank right

uh playing linebacker for the chicago bears uh no matter how long it was is uh is one amazing and then two to uh to hang out and meet with uh guys like mike singletary and and kind of all of the players that uh that went through that organization is obviously a life experience a lot of people won't have right yeah i i agree and luckily i had one bad injury in high school and nothing after that so you know i've seen guys with their shoulders cut their knees cut their hands my brother pete has broken every finger at least once and his thumbs twice uh so yeah there's a lot of injuries and things that guys get that i luckily avoided yeah that's awesome and so help me understand as you uh decide okay i'm gonna go uh kind of and build a career in finance and

trading did you already know people and kind of have a backup plan was it like okay i got cut and now all of a sudden i gotta go figure this out like what happened kind of post getting cut from the nfl that eventually launched the the career in finance again that's a great question because since my dad was a doctor, and he was pretty famous, I mean, in his field, he was, you know, like, at, if not the zenith, you know, right up there on the top of the mountain. He developed a bunch of anti rejection drugs for people when they got transplants and things like that. So he was very famous. And he's the chief of surgery at the University of Minnesota for like 38 years. So the choices were, I could go up there, but I could stay there, but I'd always

be in his shadow, I thought. And no shame in that, but I wanted to kind of forge my own path. And so my agent was putting some of his representative players, because he had hockey players, skiers, baseball players, that kind of stuff. I mean, famous people like Rod Carew and Alan Page, they were his clients. So he was putting some of those guys on the trading floor because they had what he thought was necessary to be successful in trading. They were disciplined. They were excitable. They were physical. And he thought those kinds of things would make you a good trader. Now, he knew, of course, you needed to learn all the other stuff too. But if you didn't have those things, some people were putting like professional blackjack players on the floor.

Because if you can count cards, you can be a pretty good trader. And I agree, that's a good skill. I knew a guy that could count three decks of cards and, you know, beat you on virtually every hand um and he was banned he had to you know when he'd go to vegas or reno he'd have to go in a wig and things like that i mean you know they he was kicked out of more casinos but he was not good in the pit even though he was a good trader because he wasn't aggressive enough um and so like i say my agent was looking for guys that were aggressive that could learn the other stuff. Some of these guys were like professional chess players, you know, grand masters in chess. And you might imagine that you and I probably know guys, Pomp, that are like that.

They tend not to be terribly aggressive. You know, it's all up here. And so they'd put on a position and they'd walk away. And, you know, hopefully they put on enough edge that they could make money from putting that position on but they couldn't stand down there in the pit and grind it out um like the rest of us could because they weren't aggressive enough it's a physical you know back then anyway it was very physical you couldn't hit people but you could throw elbows and things like that people didn't want you standing in their spot um so being bigger um i'm still about 6'2 and 215 back then i was 6'2 maybe 250 um so i was a bigger guy you know broader shoulders and things so you could intimidate people and that was very valuable in the pit um and john explain

that a little bit more because there's a lot of people listening who have no idea how the pits worked especially back then and when you're talking about uh it being more physical and kind the jockeying for positions and things like that like unpack that a little bit and explain what was happening sure well um so you're in the trading pit and a pit is an octagon just like you know the ufc fights in except um they have steps that go up um usually like three or four feet in the air each step is let's say you know six or eight inches so there might be four steps up, four steps down into the middle of the pit. And each ring, if you will, of that pit is about 18 inches wide. So you could stand on that, but it's not exactly like standing on a two by four,

there's enough room that you can kind of walk around on it. But you could also fall off of it. and um you know so sometimes when traders were standing in their spot if all of a sudden a trade was happening on the other side of the pit everybody would rush towards that side of the pit sold sold sold sold and they're stumbling down the steps and things as they go over to that side of the pit so the pits are set up so that um from the top ring of the pit you can see all the trading desks around the floor. If you're down in the middle of the pit, you can't even see out of the pit. You're just looking at guys' bellies and things like that. So the more active trader you are, you're at the top. And the less active you are, or the newer you are, you're down at the

bottom. So the guys at the bottom tended to hold positions for a long time. The guys that want to buy sell buy sell all day long they're at the top and the brokers want to stand next to the guy that's actively trading because by rule they can't trade against their own paper so if i have an order from a customer i'm calling that paper i cannot take the other side of this trade i have to open out cry it into the pit and say 55 calls and the pit screams back you know one to a quarter and I can say I'll pay 115 and then they might say add a quarter add a quarter add a quarter and then if I can't buy them at 115 and the order is not held meaning I can pay any price I want I might say 100 and 100 I bought 200 I'm out I'm 115 bid for 200 more or whatever so that trade

would happen with those two guys they'd all write each other's names down on the pit on the card rather, the sellers would write down who they sold to, the buyer would write who he bought from, and then they'd turn in their cards. So all of this got processed at the end of the day when I started. Then as trading became faster and faster and faster, it eventually moved to handheld computers. Then it moved to, you know, at almost light speed to laptops. And then you don't need traders on the floor anymore. Now you can make that market pop from New York or from Philly or from Macau. It doesn't matter. So you don't need to be in the pits anymore. So the pits went from very profitable places to be where, you know, if there's 3000 traders down there,

you know, they might be taking a couple billion dollars home every year. And all of a sudden, You know, most of that gets taken by high frequency guys. And now the traders on the floor these days, you know, if you're still on the floor, maybe you make 100, 150,000 bucks, instead of a couple million or 10 million, whatever you could make before. And you multiply that times, you know, two or 3000. So you get where, you know, the big change came from. Now, there's almost no one on trading floors. It's all by machine. Yeah. And it's always struck me at the New York Stock Exchange floor, for example, there's still some people walking around. You look at the old school photos compared to today and it's night and day difference. It almost feels like the people actually on the floor are almost there as more of a ceremonies type thing, right? Where it just feels like we got to have somebody there. We can't just have servers all over the floor. So, you know, let's, I don't know, we'll put 50 people out there. But what are they actually doing? Right? Are they literally there for more of a ceremonious thing? And they just personally, it's their personal preference to be on the floor and kind of just use a computer on the floor? Or is there some purpose other than that?

Well, like the New York Stock Exchange, they have kept a couple of carve outs for the traders on the floor. They see certain information, like the end of the day when they say, well, on balance, there's 2 billion to buy, or whatever. They see that first. They know it before anybody else. now most of them are filling paper meaning that they're brokers they're not traders um and that's no disrespect but that's just what it is you know they're they're not trading they are brokers they're filling paper so they're um offering insights and best you know i'm going to try to get you the best price you know and i've had a relationship with this guy for 10 years So I think he's great at getting me the best price and seeing blocks that might come in, getting out of the way and letting it fall a little bit. Then he buys it at a cheaper price for me. That's why they're still there. But most of those traders are brokers. Now, the exception is the options pits at the CME. They have corn options, bean options, wheat options, all that kind of stuff.

You kind of smile and it's like, oh, yeah, yeah, I bet they're really active. No, they actually still trade in those pits. They still have traders and brokers. But most of the other pits around the rest of the world, it's really just like you say they've negotiated to keep themselves in the mix so it's not just ceremonial but there's really not as strong a purpose for them to be there why have some of the commodity pits survived so things like corn etc like why are they still not only there but also active whereas others have kind of gone the way of more electronic trading i think only by

mandate i mean in other words if if the exchange and the members have a deal where they say hey we want you know there to always be some open outcry trading on the floor um that's the only reason it still goes on everything else can be done on computer i'm not saying it's better um Having, for instance, when the crap hit the fan in March, Pomp, and all of a sudden, whether you're trading the S&Ps or whether you're trading in the VIX pit, when things are blowing up, you're better off having everybody getting the information at the same time in the pit than having everybody in offices upstairs and they're all suspicious. because that's what it is they're all suspicious then they see an order coming in and they don't know who it is when it comes in on the floor and they can all see it at the same time they know that's coming in from jp morgan they know that's coming in from black rock or whatever um but when it's upstairs they you know it's silent it's kind of like you know alien in space can anybody hear

you scream. I mean, when a trade happens in the ether, there's nothing, there's no information at all. It's just kind of like the trade comes in, people interact with it. You don't know how big it was. You don't know, you know, if it fell into a guy's lap over on, you know, that you think is a great trader or a guy that's a shit trader. And it falls into weak hands. And all of a sudden, you know, the market moves just a little bit, and everybody's selling, because this guy is scrambling to sell out, rather than if it falls into somebody with strong hands, meaning they've probably got hundreds of millions behind them or whatever. And they hold it for that 10 cent loss, and all of a sudden, it click, click, click, click, click, runs to the upside, and they're making

dollars off of this, you know, huge trade they took down. You know, it makes a difference when you see it in the pit it makes a difference when you can't see it it's just silent and that's when there's a lack of trust things that i've noticed is people who started out in the pits or got exposed to that world when they were kind of really rocking and rolling they have a very different understanding of markets and market structure and and it really seems like they had access to and understand the importance of intangible um type information right so what i mean is you know good traders versus bad traders who's actually sending in that market order who does that person represent from a trading perspective how much capital is behind them

versus not right all that type of stuff and it feels like now that we've kind of gone into this electronic world the people who have that uh kind of historical context and information they actually understand markets better right they do have some level of advantage um do you see the same thing in your experience or do you feel like maybe that's just coming from somebody who i wasn't around when um the pits were really kind of rocking and rolling like that and so it's more of like a nostalgia thing more so than anything else well um i think it's uh it's definitely a skill uh pit trading that's different um and doesn't necessarily translate that well to the uh uh you know screen-based trading um because just like you say um if there's a schwab broker on that

side of the pit and uh you know td broker on this side merrill and you know lehman brothers back in the day bear stearns different brokers are representing different papers so you know coming through schwab it's retail you know it's even though they might try to mask it occasionally with you know a big trader might come in through something that they call a beard you know coming through as a retail trade, you know by the size and how aggressive both the trade and the broker are that it's something different. So in other words, we all want to trade with somebody who's slower than us, who doesn't have as much access to information. And that differential pump back in the day was, you know, Grand Canyon, right? Because it really was, it was huge, you would have

guys that, you know, had news flows that were faster, guys that, you know, we would get, you know, long before news reading algorithms and things like that. There were people that, you know, got tipped off by somebody when news was about to break, as illegal as that might sound. Now, nobody's faster than the algorithms. The algorithm is going to see keywords that somebody has programmed for their buy and sell programs to react to. And you see it, and it happens like that. There's no way to get in front of everything from the employment data to the ISM to Michigan, you know, consumer confidence, you know, whatever it is. So to your point, there were definitely people that had that edge, whether it was informational edge, or whether it was the ability to read, you know, to know the difference between a Schwab order on this side of the pit and an E-Trade order over there. And, you know, that JP Morgan, you know, order that's coming in for a hedge fund. And you don't want to be on the other side of Bobby Axelrod. So when Bobby's coming in and he wants to buy a lot of something, you don't want to be on that ticket.

You want to be the last guy on that ticket. So, for instance, that's what Warren Buffett has done forever. Warren Buffett owns General Reinsurance. And General Reed is always the last one to write that reinsurance ticket. You know, everybody else has piled on there. And then the last 200 mil, the last 500 mil, whatever it is, is Warren Buffett. You know, it's him doing that. Because everybody else is taking the risk.

He gets to look. And, you know, if that thing's not getting funded properly, those other guys are screwed. He's not screwed. So anyway, to your point, the democratization that has occurred with information flows over Twitter, which, you know, there's not a lot of things Twitter is good for, quite frankly. But one of the things that Twitter is good for is information that's almost instantaneous. So if you want to see something, if you don't have a high-speed data feed that costs you $20,000 a month, Twitter's the next best thing. You've got to know who to follow and how to get it.

But it's there. So if you're looking for certain keywords and things like that, you will find them faster on Twitter than you will doing a Google search or anything else. but um do you really want to try to trade against you know basically guys that are much much faster than you and my answer is no i want to follow those guys and coattail those guys that's why pete and i always call what we do following the smart money but i don't want to try to compete with those guys they're always going to be faster than me unless i want to spend a hundred thousand bucks a month and then have an IT staff the size of Goldman's or Virtu's or DRW or any of these

guys. Unless you can do that, you're not going to be as fast as them. I think it makes a ton of sense. Help me understand what you guys are doing with Market Rebellion. So you had it up on the Zoom background and you guys have been talking about it a lot online and everything. What is market rebellion and what are you guys doing with it they're happy to um we are over at market rebellion we're um basically uh using the same sort of uh techniques that we used to train people years ago that were our own traders so in other words when you came down to the floor and as i said if you're a chess grandmaster or if you're a card counter from vegas and you learn some of the basics of floor trading, you can start to understand how to make markets. But you still

have to be big or at least aggressive. And then you have to know how to lay off risk and all these other things and know how to cut your losses, let the winners run. So we trained hundreds of our own traders over the years. And once they got good enough, they'd always leave. As they used to be kind of a joke, they'd say Lincoln freed slaves. But, you know, when you're a trader backing another trader, there's no greater compliment than that trader leaving you and going off on his own or her own. Because that means you really trained them, they know what they're doing. And none of us, at least I never did, try to tie anybody up to a contract and say, no, you gotta work for me for three years you know you know you know it that's that's crazy um but

some people did it um most of the time what traders would do when we were training a trader is i would put up the money for you pop and i'd put up say 50 grand and i'd say okay you know you've been clerking with us you understand what you're doing i have confidence in you here's 50 grand, go out there and make us some money. And you go into the pit and start trading. And if you started losing money really fast, we'd cut you off. But if you know, since we trained you, we taught you what to look for and all that kind of stuff. You probably started making money. And all of a sudden, I give you more and more money. Now, eventually, I've given you a quarter of a million dollars and you're making money. Once you've made me my quarter million back, I'm probably on a

like a 60-40 my way split on that. So when you make $200,000, you don't get $200,000. I get $120,000, you get $80,000 kind of thing. Once we get to you've paid me my $200,000 back, now I'm like, okay, Pop, I'll do a deal with you where it's 60-40 your way. And you're like, okay. And now you're really grinding hard. And then you're making money. And I say, okay, now it's 70-30 your way. And then eventually you leave because you're going to say, I want to make all the money for me. And I'm like, yeah, you should. So you're out there trading those. When you say, what is Market Rebellion. We took all the same training that we used for our traders, and we basically systematized it, put it online, and people can go through it chapter by chapter and learn,

here's how you manage risk, here's how you cut losses, here's how you take profits, because you got to be pulling profits off the table just as aggressively as you're cutting losses. And then here are a bunch of spreads. Here's a bunch of different ways you can make more money than just straight out scalping. So market rebellion is our version of what we used to give our traders. And we have basic, intermediate, advanced. We've got coaches. We've got mentors. you know depending on how much time somebody's got they might just learn at night because you know it's it's just a distance learning product they can log on anytime they want watch it for 20 minutes go put the kids to bed watch it again whatever they've got to pass a test every chapter to get through it and that's not so we we don't get any additional money but that's to make sure that you know what you think you know before you move on uh because otherwise

you know you you could end up getting in trouble instead of making money yeah absolutely and and so it feels a lot like um you know regardless of the assets trading for the most part right a lot of the things you're talking about is very systematic right there's things around understanding the market structure understanding risk understanding when to take profits off understanding options you know all this type of stuff and do you feel like investors in general not just ones who go through market rebellion but just investors in general are kind of waking up to this world of now there's the ability with everything fractional shares the zero cost trading like more and more people are saying hey look I want to go play in the financial markets

and there's more access but they are seeking out that type of education or are you still have a fear that there's so many people going into the markets that just don't have the knowledge really necessary to to set them up for success well um i see both um and quite frankly through one of the main things that you kind of identified indirectly which is uh um robin hood um you know one of the free trading place and you know i admit when it first when i first started to see a lot of the flow from the Robin Hood type traders, I would somewhat dismissive of. But especially in light of COVID, I've seen a lot of smart young men, and I imagine women that are doing smart trades. And this isn't rocket science. You know, if it was, I wouldn't be doing it.

um it's trading like i say is addictive it's fun um it's especially fun when you're when you know enough how to not lose a lot uh because that's what it's all about it's not about making a lot it's about not losing a lot um because then when you have the experience just as you know obviously Now you can lay into bigger and bigger trades and feel more confident about making money. So, for instance, Robinhood, well, our business has doubled every month of this COVID. And I say that not because Pete and John are so great and we've got a great staff of men and women that work with us, But literally, we have doubled in March, in April, in May, and in June, double the size of the business. And I think, Pomp, it's because, you know, I'm not on TV more now than I was then. I'm on less, but I do broadcast a lot. I mean, I put out my own podcasts. I do various, you know, reaches to the public through, you know, Instagram and all the rest. But I don't think that's it. I think that augments it. But I think there's a lot of people that are at home, that have time, and an awful lot of them are really well versed in how to use the internet.

um so robin hood just being an app because it's not really a trading platform it's an app um and again that's not meant to be derogatory you know i'm not meaning to denigrate them when i say that but when you have a bunch of people that are used to you know typing with their thumbs and checking out their phone all the time and they know how to you know follow people on twitter and on instagram and on snapchat and on tiktok even you know and they're getting all this information many of those things i just named you can get information damn near instantaneous and so you've got a guy like davey day trader global right you know you've got portnoy and a lot of these people probably watch him and listen to him and i should be a freaking comedian i mean he is and he's a

pretty good trader too by the way um i'm not just saying that you know watching what he does and how he does it i'd say he's a pretty good little trait and he's self-taught from what i can tell and i love the way he goes after buffett and me probably i haven't heard that but you know i could easily see him you know i've got the tie on because i just came off of cnbc but you know he hates the suits he's always talking about oh he's freaking suits they think They know everything. What does some 94-year-old guy in Omaha know that I don't know? Nothing.

You know, I know numbers. I know, you know, airline seats. I know this. I know that. You know, he's just, I love him. But I think a lot of that entices the folks that are at home and that are watching him and they're kind of chuckling. But then they're kind of also seeing, wow, you know, he's talking about Carnival and

it's up two bucks today. You know, that's 20% for a $10 stock or whatever. Wonder if I could make some money trading in Robinhood. So they go in there and like you say, fractional shares. Oh, you don't have enough for 100 shares? Here's 20 shares. Here's one share. And they kind of learn it and they're getting the hang of it.

And, you know, I'm sure there are some spectacular losses because there always are. Like I said, in a professional environment, like down on the trading floor, we would turn over almost a third every year. And most of it isn't people that are leaving because they got rich. You know, they're leaving because they couldn't act, couldn't take the pressure, couldn't take the losses, lost a backer, whatever it might be. You know, they couldn't do it. So, to think that you probably have about the same from people at home, home gamers, as we call them, you know, people that are trying to trade and make a living. But it's also one of the things that I've observed forever, Tom, is that if I want to make, you know, 100 grand a year, 200 grand a year, I could do it all in and out of bed. because I've done it for a while.

So it's not hard, you know, and think about that. If I want to make 200 grand a year, there are 256 trading days in a year. So I only have to net, you know, let's say what, seven, 800 bucks a day. If you can't do that sitting in front of your computer all day, moving the odds in your favor, you know, you're at a blackjack table.

It's the way we always tell our traders. You're at a blackjack table. You don't have to accept, you don't have to bet. You don't have to put even, you know, you don't have to ante anything. You can just sit there and sit there and say, I'm waiting, I'm waiting, I'm waiting. And all of a sudden, you've been counting the shoe, and the dealer's got a bunch of face cards in there. You're like, okay, I'm in. I'm buying 500 shares of Carnival. I'm buying 500 shares of Apple. I'm buying 1,000 shares of Facebook, whatever it is. And all of a sudden, those things, because of the setup you think you saw that is actually working now, all of a sudden, that 1,000 shares of Facebook moves a point and a half. You just made 1,500 bucks. So now the deal is, are you smart enough or are you too greedy you only needed to make 700 a day to get to your 200 000 or quarter of a million gold so take that freaking money off the table or at least take most of it off the

table carnival's starting to move for you or against you cut it or add to it or whatever but again keep in mind you were there to make your fifth you know your 700 or a thousand bucks you don't have to push it to three or four thousand if you can do that you're talking about six hundred thousand eight hundred thousand a year but if your goal was 200 and now you're pushing it and maybe you're out on the ragged edge because you're leveraged you know you're in margin and god knows in your world pop you know you could be you know getting 50 to 1 leverage uh on you know various digital assets and on the options on those digital assets which is you know risk on crack you know you could do all that but is that the right thing in other words i think there are

plenty of people who can do it and there's a lot of people who get enticed into or fool themselves into thinking yeah i i'm davey day trader global you know five thousand a day if i do five thousand a day i'm making a million a year and all of a sudden you know the market reverses and they're sitting there and they're going oh my god you know i was up 1500 and i pushed for five and now i'm down 3000 that means i've got to make you know four days worth of 700 just to get back to break even as long as they're disciplined they can win in this game but there will be a lot of them that will lose because they don't have the distance. I think it's a great way to look at it. It's just breaking it down into kind of day by day. And again, going back to kind of how we started the

conversation about just showing up every day, right? In and out and understanding and believing in and enjoying that process. You and your brother and a number of people around you have become very big, or maybe not big, but have become more excited about Bitcoin and digital assets and have started to actually make investments in the space. So maybe just talk us through kind of how you guys evaluate Bitcoin and the crypto markets in light of kind of the rest of your portfolio and then what you guys have done in the crypto space.

Sure. Well, I've probably got somewhere between and on a monthly basis, because I don't trade that often. I'm not like in and out, in and out during the day like you, Pop. But on a monthly basis, I probably have between 5% and 10%.

in digital assets, and almost all of it's Bitcoin. A little Ethereum, but mostly Bitcoin. I've got a little Litecoin, a little Stellar. But really, I'm about Bitcoin. And I'm there because guys like yourself, guys like Peter Brigger over at Fortress, who really got me, you know psyched about it um max kaiser always likes to tell me oh yeah i told john to buy it this i love you max but i don't remember you telling me to buy it when it was freaking 40 you probably told a bunch of people but you didn't tell me i would have loved it if you did um but uh i love max i mean he's a funny dude and he you know randomly pop he will put out a tweet that says i told all these guys and he'll list like 10 of us uh to buy bitcoin at 40 bucks or

whatever and i'm like okay whatever i wish you did because if you did i'd be rich um but i first got involved at about 300 realized i didn't know what the hell i was doing in it um didn't get involved again until it was closer to 1700. So I missed an awful lot of that. And I didn't sell when it got over 18 or 19,000. I didn't liquidate. I would have looked like a genius if I did. But then we all would. I right now, Pete and I put an investment down on Voyager. You know, a crypto broker run by a friend of ours, Steve Ehrlich. And there were a bunch of smart investors that got into this latest round too. So I wanted to get in because I think these other investors are smart. I think Steve is building the business in a good way. And I've met so many. So for instance,

I know a lady that runs the Winklevoss family office, great lady, smart woman, Stanford grad. I think she's a chaos mathematician. And, you know, I think what the Winklevii did, buying into the, you know, buying into Bitcoin in a big way and getting involved in the space, creating Gemini and all that. This is all good stuff for the space, the way I look at it. You know, Novogratz, Peter Brigger, and these guys, Fortress, Pantera, you know, all of these different groups that have come in in bigger and bigger ways. I don't think they've wrecked it. I think they've made it better. And I think that it'll, you know, it's still just got a foothold that's this big compared to everything else, compared to gold, compared to stocks, compared to futures.

um but i i think that people will you know and again nothing better than covid pump for people to realize now it hasn't hurt the dollar yet but eventually what we're doing printing money is going to hurt the dollar and it's going to hurt my kids um it's going to hurt you know for years out into the future all this printing of additional capital and that's what i love about digital assets like Bitcoin. You know, I love that it's, it would really have to be a mutually assured destruction for us to have more Bitcoins than Satoshi Nakamoto, Satoshi, and whoever that group or that whatever is, had created as the top level of the amount of Bitcoins out there. You know, it would take a majority of us that own coins to say yeah let's let's make more and i don't think

that's in the cards for sure and i guess part of this and what's really interesting is we kind of have two forces at work here right you have kind of the um bullishness and the market growth and the innovation that's happening in uh bitcoin and the crypto markets and that by itself i think gets you know a good amount of people excited but then you bring up the other point which is and then you have the traditional world absolutely in chaos right and yes the stock market's hitting all-time highs and yeah there's people who basically saying hey look i know the world is basically burning but i'm making money right so there's kind of this this cognitive dissonance if you will uh but at the same time it's only going up right as uh portnoy would say because of the structural thing

of we're just injecting trillions of dollars into the market. So of course you're going to get the inflation of asset prices. Do you feel like the damage to the dollar, is that more something short-term you're worried about, medium-term, long-term? Like how do you think about when that damage actually kind of comes? And it sounds like you're of the belief that Bitcoin would be kind of a beneficiary of some of that kind of collateral damage to some degree. Yeah, well, and you'd be much more eloquent speaker about the topic. But here's some of the things that I've heard from folks like you, and from you, that I think play into that. So longer term, yes, I think it does impact the dollar, not in the short term. In the short term, we're a safe haven, just like Japan is a safe haven. Japan still prints more money than we do, you know, borrows a ton.

And yet people haven't abandoned their currency. It's just the opposite because such a country of savers and so forth. I think one of the things that probably hits Bitcoin in a positive way, Tom, beyond that we're printing money and it's making other currencies worth less, again, like Buffett says, not worthless, worth less, is that I think we're likely to see people get frustrated by things. you know could be biden supporters could be trump supporters it could be blm it could be a whole bunch of things that have caused people to say you know what i don't know if i want uh especially like here in chicago where are you right now pop are you in new york i am yep in new york okay so new york and chicago they burned our cities and they you know i'm not saying i'm not blaming the cops. But I'm saying the cops were told to stand down, I believe, in both cities. And then they

burned up and down Lexington and Madison, and they were obviously down on Fifth Avenue and destroying things in New York, where I love to spend time, destroying things here in Chicago, up and down Michigan Avenue. And we know that wasn't, you know, peaceful protesters, that was more or less career criminals that just used it as cover for them to do what they do. But I think it woke a lot of people up. And a lot of people realize that there's going to be a lot of stress on the system. And maybe they want to get somewhere other than where we are. um and the most portable wealth on the planet is bitcoin um it is the most portable because all you'd have to do is have it up here um you don't have to back in the day before there was

bitcoin comp it would be um i'd hear this from my friends in israel or i'd hear it from friends in the middle east and they'd tell me i bought bought a bunch of american express travelers checks remembered the the serial number on the first and the last and i burned them burned them why because now i can go anywhere and then walk into the american express office in geneva switzerland and say here's the here's my american express um travelers checks here's the first here's the last you know they got destroyed give me my money and they would but you're giving up you know three percent or four percent to do that trade um and meanwhile in bitcoin you can be jumping back and forth from bitcoin to stablecoin and doing all kinds of things um while you're trading these

other currencies and jumping back and forth into a stablecoin or whatever without even taking the market risk of the bitcoin um and move anywhere you want with your money with your wealth and that I view as a constant demand feature, the more people that figure that out. And I know you and everybody who's been a longtime Bitcoin or digital asset proponent, they have said forever, yeah, you know, how do you take my Bitcoin? You know, you can't, you can't take my but you can screw with my bank account. You can basically put an exit tax on me if I want to leave America or you know, leave the country and give up my citizenship and go over to Switzerland or go to Italy or go to wherever. But if you have Bitcoin, they can't do that. I mean,

you could literally go anywhere on the planet. No, I'm not saying that there's lots of places better than America. But I'm saying it's a nice insurance policy to have something that is portable wealth. And it doesn't have to be like when my great grandfather came here because of a genocide of Armenians. He came here with bags filled with gold. He wasn't that rich, but you know, obviously, gold back then versus what it is now, he would have been crazy rich, because gold wasn't $1,700 or $1,800 an ounce, but he had literally bags of gold, heavy to transport, you know, pretty significant risk of theft and all the rest. Meanwhile, Bitcoin, nobody knows you have it. I loved when I would travel back and forth in Europe over the last couple of years

and I'd be at the border and the guy would say, yeah, anything to declare, you know, over 10,000 in currency or whatever. And I'm like, nope. And yet you got whatever. I mean, you know, could be tens of millions of dollars in Bitcoin and nobody's the wise. Just words in your brain. That's how it works. One of the things is it feels like Wall Street's waking up to a lot of this, right? And so there's the kind of qualitative argument, how I describe why Bitcoin's important. You just did a great job of articulating it and you don't give yourself enough credit for understanding kind of the intricacies of it. But then there's also more and more investors who seem to say, hey, look, wait a second, this is a tradable asset as well.

So we've seen, you know, Renaissance Technologies obviously put in one of their filings that they're now looking at Bitcoin. I can't actually remember if it was spot trading or kind of options type trading. We've seen Paul Tudor Jones come out and say he's put about 2% of his portfolio into Bitcoin. And so we're kind of like now, okay, there's more kind of cover your ass going on, right? There's more people with big names and great track records that are starting to actually get exposure to Bitcoin. Do you think that that really wakes up Wall Street and we're going to see this like massive capital inflow? Or do you think it's still something that just slowly but surely over time, more and more people will opt into it? It's just going to take, you know,

three, four, five years to happen. And I don't have that crystal ball, so I don't know. But I do know that all those people you named, as well as a friend of mine, Mark Lazzari. Mark is a distressed asset buyer. That's what he does. So he finds distressed assets and buys them. Now, he's not saying that Bitcoin is a distressed asset. He's saying, I put, I think he said, 2% to 5% of his net worth, and it's in the billions, into digital assets, Bitcoin being the most prominent, I think. And I think you'll see more and more of those folks doing that. I mean, I got to believe John Paulson, who was such a proponent of gold and, you know, famously caught the financial crisis and got on the right side of that. And then he got into gold.

And since then, he's kind of, you know, sort of said, now I'm shutting it down. I'm just going to run my family office. I guarantee you he gets into Bitcoin if he isn't already. But I think a lot of them will want to keep it quiet as they're getting in. Because, you know, they'll run it. I don't mean that they'll run it in terms of how it operates. I mean, they'll push the price too far, too fast. So for the exact same guys that know that you don't want Goldman knowing that you're buying, you know, FireEye or Uber or Microsoft because they'll run it ahead of you.

And those same guys are sitting there thinking, I really like this play in Bitcoin here, but I'm not going to say a lot about it until I got enough of this stuff. Because, you know, we both know that blocks of it stand out. And so they've got to stay under the radar with these accumulations. And forever I had guys coming to me. Two years ago, I probably had five to 10 calls a week from people telling me, oh, I want to buy 200 million in Bitcoin. And I'd say, no, you don't. And they'd say, oh, yeah, I do. I'll give you proof of funds and all that.

And as soon as I'd ask for it, then they didn't have it. You know, same old crap. And it was when Bitcoin was falling from 18 on down to 35 or 3200, whatever. And it seemed like more than anything, they were trying to hold the price level by telling people like me that they had it to buy. So I would go to people, and then these, you know, that had large quantities, and these people would say, Okay, give me proof of funds, I'll do 50 million, or I'll do 100 million with them, and blah, blah, blah. And these were at $4,000 and $5,000 per Bitcoin, USD to Bitcoin. And I did, I think, two transactions out of at least 100. And most of them were complete BS. And I think they were just trying to manipulate the market or whatever. Same is true when it's, you know, stabilized and hanging near 10,000. Now, the people are probably not wanting to see it jump to 12 and 15 and 20 again, too fast, because they're going to try to accumulate it at a level. I think that's exactly what's happening. You understand that the people who want to buy a lot don't want the price to go up, right? And I think that's what we're seeing. Before I wrap up, I always ask people the same two questions, and then you're going to get to ask me one to finish

it. The first is, what is the most important book that you've ever read? Hmm. That is a tough one. One of the most important would be Ayn Rand. And I don't mean the Fountainhead. um but uh uh john galt i just love uh you know i know not everybody's a big fan of uh libertarianism um and you can be uh you know i know alan greenspan was and atlas shrugged is one of you know those books that sort of changed my outlook i mean for a long time pump. I would start the book and couldn't finish it. And some of that is because I'm dyslexic. So I don't enjoy reading. But I enjoy books. So now, all I do, as far as books, I read

newspapers, because you know, I have to or, you know, online stuff, because I have to. But as far as a book, now I listen to them all on tape. So I love it, because I can do it when I'm walking, when I'm working out when I'm flying in a plane you know driving a long drive or whatever I love it so that was my best way to get through Atlas Shrugged because it is you know a lot to get through but I I loved a lot of what she wrote and how passionate she was about it and that Greenspan was such a big fan and then after going through it twice now I'd say that's probably the for me that I would say that's a great answer and I'm a almost 100% audiobooks as well so I'm there with you the second question is more fun aliens believer or

non-believer believer why so I I believed that I saw some activity that I I could not describe any other way except to say it was alien because I was coming out of an artist studio in college and because a girl was screaming outside. So I was coming to her rescue being a gallant young lad. So I came out and she's pointing up in the sky like this. and it was about two in the morning. Um, nobody else was around. And I looked up at what she was pointing at and it was, you know, as many have said, a cigar shaped object, um, that was lit up and I couldn't tell how far away it was. And I'm sitting there looking at it going,

what the hell is that? And we're both just staring at it. She wasn't screaming anymore. um and i said how long has it been there and she said it's been there for like three or four minutes it's just sitting there and it appeared to be over a building that was about maybe an eighth of a mile to a quarter of a mile away not too far um and we couldn't tell how big it was from that distance but it had a steady glow not lights going around it or anything just a steady glow and wasn't a balloon or anything else. It stayed at that exact spot. And then all of a sudden, Pomp, it just went, you know, like back and forth like this and then boom, straight up and gone. And so we were both just, what the hell was that? Now, flash forward to a Joe Rogan

podcast not as popular as pop but you know right up there so i'm listening to this navy pilot talk about seeing the same tic-tac shape thing you know cigar tic-tac whatever out over the ocean about i think four or five hundred miles off the coast of california and he's talking about he's pinging it on radar and it's not there and you know his co-pilot you know the guy behind him the weapons officer or whatever behind him is going, I got nothing on it, Skipper. And he's going, he says, all of a sudden, then it starts jamming them. And he said, in the Rogan podcast, I believe he said, jamming us is an act of war. He said, if you're jamming, you know, our planes when they're out there to defend an aircraft carrier, because just a routine trip that he is

out there and he says if you're actively jamming us he said that's an act of war so he says we go close to this thing now because he said i'm you know thousands of feet above it at this point but he said we go right down at it and he said it is down on the water just above the water and there's something beneath the water that he says looks like it might be controlling it or something and it's a big thing, you know, like the size of a submarine or bigger under the water. And all of a sudden, this little tic-tac-y thing that he's got video of it, but he's got no radar back from it. It's being blocked or absorbed or whatever. All of a sudden, he says, this thing just goes at not the speed of light, but faster than anything. He says that any object that we know

that can fly cannot move this fast and he said it just goes straight up and gone and he and the co-pilot are just like what the hell was that and he gets back to the ship and they say you were chasing ufos again huh huh captain and he goes yep and they go you see any and he throws him the vhs tape and he goes you tell me and the navy has released that tape it's scary it is scary there is something out there my friend i listen i uh i'm a believer i don't know if they've come here if they're not but there's things that we can't explain and the math suggests that uh that they're out there somewhere yeah well so then my question to you would be have you seen them no so i i've never uh never seen aliens the reason why i asked the question is uh again by the way i haven't seen

aliens yeah you just like what i think is evidence of a ship or a vehicle of some sort but i can't explain how it's not there or how it moves yeah and and the reason actually why i came up with the question this is now almost two years ago was i was laying in bed one day and i literally was thinking do aliens have pets which is a weird question to to think about but if you think if somebody came here they back wait a second so the big animals have smaller animals on leashes and that live with them right and can all this stuff and like we just think of them as pets but does that mean that there's like a multi-species alien you know kind of uh civilization out there and they've literally some of the aliens are kind of in charge or more intelligent and they've got pets

of you know other things start just thinking about that like we have no clue we literally have no clue and and so you just like you could get lost thinking about all this stuff and one of it's just fun right too is it's kind of this like intellectual curiosity uh exercise but it just does feel like uh we'd be pretty selfish to think that we're here alone yeah um and the more you see you know again people credible people like that navy pilot um he's got a lot more credibility than me and he's seen a lot of weird stuff i'm sure when you're up in the atmosphere as often as those guys are um just like some of the astronauts are now admitting that they've seen stuff up there there's stuff you just can't explain now could there be another explanation

for it no but to see it that close and to see a move that fast without a sound again and he said they were putting it even that pilot was saying we had it on infrared nothing there's no exhaust plume there's nothing coming off of this thing and he's like how the hell is it moving you know crazy yeah absolutely nuts john where can people find you on the internet and where uh where can they find market rebellion oh you can go to uh market rebellion.com um and it's just like the name sounds market rebellion comm forward slash get started that's all of our educational stuff and and if they want to follow me on Twitter just at j-o n n a j a r i a n just add John Najarian you're a legend my friend thank you so

much thank you so yeah listen thank you for doing this I think that you know people get to see you on TV every day and kind of see everything that you're talking about. So it's awesome to kind of hear your thoughts, both about you know, your background and story, but also how you look at Bitcoin and digital assets. So thank you so much for taking the time to do this. Thanks very much, Bob. I appreciate the offer. For sure.