The Pomp Podcast - #702 Bitcoin Will Protect Institutions From Economic Collapse w/ Greg Foss

Episode Date: October 27, 2021

Greg Foss is the CFO and Bitcoin Strategist at Validus Power Corp. He has spent over 30 years of his career in various credit markets, where he has managed hundreds of millions of dollars.   In this ...conversation, we discuss bitcoin, negative yielding bonds, institutional asset allocation, pricing energy in bitcoin, and why $2 million is Greg’s big number.  ======================= My friends at Coin Cloud will give you $50 in FREE Bitcoin when you buy $200 or more at any of their 4,000+ machines. Use promo code POMP to get your free Bitcoin. For details or to find your nearest Coin Cloud machine, visit www.Coin.Cloud/Pomp Coin Cloud has been serving customers since 2014 and has established itself as the world's leading digital currency machine (DCM) operator. More than just a Bitcoin ATM, Coin Cloud machines make it easy to buy and sell Bitcoin and 30+ other digital assets with cash. To get your $50 in free Bitcoin, visit www.Coin.Cloud/Pomp ======================= Compass Mining is the world's first online marketplace for bitcoin mining hardware and hosting. Compass was founded with the goal of making it easy for everyone to mine bitcoin. Visit compassmining.io to start mining bitcoin today! ======================= AG1 by Athletic Greens, the category-leading superfood product, brings comprehensive and convenient daily nutrition to everybody. Keeping up with the research, knowing what to do, and taking a bunch of pills and capsules is hard on the stomach and hard to keep up with. To help each of us be at our best, they simplify the path to better nutrition by giving you the one thing with all the best things.                                                                                                   ONE scoop of AG1 contains 75 vitamins, minerals and whole food-sourced ingredients, including a multivitamin, multimineral, probiotic, greens superfood blend and more in one convenient daily serving. The special blend of high-quality, bioavailable ingredients in a scoop of AG1 work together to fill the nutritional gaps in your diet, support energy and focus, aid with gut health and digestion, and support a healthy immune system, - effectively replacing multiple products or pills with one healthy, delicious drink.                  To make it easy, Athletic Greens is going to give you an immune supporting FREE 1 year supply of Vitamin D AND 5 free travel packs with your first purchase if you visit athleticgreens.com/pomp today. Again, simply visit athleticgreens.com/pomp to take control of your health and give AG1 a try. =======================

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 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. Now let's kick this thing off. Greg Foss is the CFO and Bitcoin strategist at Validus Power Corporation. He has spent over 30 years of his career in various credit markets where he has managed hundreds of millions of dollars. In this conversation, we discuss Bitcoin, negative yielding bonds, institutional asset allocation, pricing energy in Bitcoin, and why $2 million is Greg's big number. I really enjoyed this conversation with Greg, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.
Starting point is 00:00:39 First up is Compass Mining. This episode is sponsored by the world's largest marketplace for mining hardware and hosting. With Compass, everyone can mine Bitcoin. Their team makes it easy to start mining wherever you want, at home or in one of their 23 hosting locations around the world. Through the Compass marketplace, retail miners can access mining hardware with similar prices and purchase plans as the world's largest mining companies. Compass miners own their machines. They choose whatever mining pool they want, and they mine directly to their own wallet. Miners who don't want to host their machines
Starting point is 00:01:11 can order ASICs directly to their doorstep. Simple and low-cost hosting agreements coupled with best-in-class customer service are the reasons why Compass is the simplest and most popular way to mine Bitcoin. Start mining your own Bitcoin by visiting compassmining.io today. Again, compassmining.io. Go check it out right now. If you want to get into mining, you should be using compassmining.io. Next up is CoinCloud. Did you know you can buy and sell crypto with cash? I want to introduce you to CoinCloud. They're more than just a Bitcoin ATM company. CoinCloud is the world's leading digital currency machine operator. They've been around since 2014 and they have thousands of machines across the country you can buy and sell bitcoin
Starting point is 00:01:52 and many other digital assets over 30 of them no connecting your bank account no long waits and if you have questions you can speak to a live us-based customer support rep 24 7 365 days a year i've had a lot of bitcoin atm companies reach out but coin cloud is the only team i've found that does things right they put together a special offer for listeners of the show you can get 50 in free Bitcoin when you buy $200 or more at any CoinCloud machine and use promo code POMP. Again, find your local ATM at coin.cloud slash POMP. Go there. You get 50 bucks in free Bitcoin when you buy $200 or more at the machine using code POMP. Coin.cloud slash POMP. Go check them out and get that free Bitcoin after you buy your first 200 bucks. Last but not least is Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens
Starting point is 00:02:41 has a special place in my heart. AG1 by Athletic Greens, the category leading superfood product. They bring comprehensive and convenient daily nutrition to everybody. Keeping up with the research, knowing what to do, and talking a bunch of pills and capsules is hard on the stomach and hard to keep up with. To help each of us be at our best, Athletic Green simplifies the path to better nutrition by giving you the one thing with all the best things. I drink it every day. one scoop of ag1 contains 75 vitamins minerals and whole food sourced ingredients including a multivitamin multi-mineral probiotic green superfood blend and more in one convenient daily serving the special blend of high quality bioavailable ingredients in a scoop of ag1 work
Starting point is 00:03:23 together to fill the nutritional gaps in your diet support energy and focus aid with gut health and digestion and support a healthy immune system effectively replacing multiple products or pills with one healthy delicious drink to make it easy athletic greens is going to give you a moon immune supporting free one-year supply of vitamin d and a five free travel packs with your first purchase if you visit athleticgreens.com slash pomp today again simply visit athleticgreens.com slash pomp to take control of your health and give ag1 a try athleticgreens.com slash pomp go get it while it's hot all right let's get this episode with greg i hope you guys enjoy this one anthony pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions
Starting point is 00:04:08 and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Real quick, before we get into everything, remind everyone kind of your background and the perspective you're coming at it when you look at Bitcoin bonds in the financial markets? Sure. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I'm a 32-year veteran of the hedge fund industry and institutional managing money for institutional clients. I retired from that business in 2016. Subsequent to that, you brought up Cathie Wood.
Starting point is 00:04:51 I met Cathie as we co-invested in a company in Canada. It brought Canada's first Bitcoin-listed closed end fund to the Toronto Stock Exchange. I've been involved in Bitcoin since 2016. I believe it's the best asymmetric risk return trade I've ever seen in 30 plus years of managing risk. Yeah, I come at it from a credit perspective. Again, I believe credit is the most important market in the world. It is the dog and equity is the tail. And if you don't understand what's happening in the dog, that tail gets whipped around pretty hard and lots of people get used as cannon fodder. So congrats to Cathie Wood's Tesla call. Congrats to Elon Musk, who's half Canadian and looking forward to having a good talk today. Awesome. Let's start first with the
Starting point is 00:05:46 problem in the credit markets. There are a ton of fixed income assets and other types of credit assets that appear to not be doing so well. But given that the investment mandates that people have had over the last couple of decades in this 60-40 type portfolio. They're very, very heavy on bonds and various credit assets. But now that we have higher levels of inflation over 5% CPI, many of those assets are actually producing very low returns or even negative yielding on a real return basis. So maybe just outline for us, how big is this problem when we think of the credit markets? Yeah, great question. So first of all, total global credit is $400 trillion. OK, that dwarfs the equity market, which is approximately 100 trillion U.S. dollars.
Starting point is 00:06:32 So you can see why you need to understand and you need to understand what's happening in the dog, because it's just a much bigger market. It's traded by very sophisticated institutions. But within that market, you know, we have government debt. We have municipalities, states. We have corporations. We have junk bonds. We have structured product. It's a it's a big animal. And in various parts of that animal, there's some weird things happening.
Starting point is 00:06:58 So let's start with one of the most weird things. There is over 15 trillion dollars of negative yielding bonds in the world. Now, they're mostly sovereign bonds, but there are a few corporate bonds in Europe that they have negative yield, which means the buyer of that bond is actually going to lose money by investing in that bond if they hold that bond to maturity. A lot of them will say, well, I'm smarter than the market and I'm going to buy it now in anticipation of yields going even more negative. And therefore, there's a price gain in those bonds. But that's like picking up nickels in front of a steamroller. Right. It's a dumb, dumb investment policy. But many of these investment mandates have to own bonds. So you mentioned the 60-40 traditional 60% equities, 40% bonds. Those mandates were written, Pomp, when interest rates were at levels that you could make a
Starting point is 00:07:53 decent return. So when I started trading bonds in the 1990s, well, late 80s, actually, US Treasury tenure was double digits. Now it's 1.6 something percent. I mean, you got to understand that that's been a 40-year bull market in bonds. And that is done because it's only mathematics. You can't make excess returns over the contractual returns that are in bonds. So first of all, you have these negative yielding bonds, which are not assets anymore.
Starting point is 00:08:25 They're actually liabilities. So congratulations, you're investing in an asset that's actually going to cost you money. Contractually, it will cost you money. Well, that's $15 trillion of loser money right there. Then you look at some of the bigger things that are going on. So my expertise was formulated in the high-yield bond market. High-yield bonds right now yield around 4%. That's the Merrill Lynch high-yield index yields 4%.
Starting point is 00:08:53 And I need to point this out. That 4% is before expected and unexpected default losses. So you'll say, Foss, what are you talking about? I'll say very simply, look, high yield bonds have an expected component of default because over time, high yield bonds do default, not the whole industry, but a portion of it. So there's an expected loss in that 4%. And then there's also what I call unexpected losses. When you hit a recession, when you hit some sort of contagion, when there's a systemic risk to the market, you get unexpected losses. So it could be idiosyncratic. I'm throwing out a lot of these technical jargon. At the end of the day, you are earning 4% before losses. So let's calculate some expected and unexpected losses in there and then account for inflation, which you correctly pointed out. if you believe the CPI is accurate, you're earning negative return, real returns after inflation and piddly nominal returns before expected and unexpected default losses. I've
Starting point is 00:09:58 never seen a worse risk return potential for fixed income in my 32 years. And I'm going to add one thing, and this is the kicker. If CPI was actually measured the same way as the original formula in 1980, CPI would be 14%, not 5%. Wow. 14%, Pom. We talked yesterday about the difference between the cost of goods index and the cost of living index and how the numbers have been manipulated. So to hear that the old way to calculate inflation would be over 14% is pretty powerful. When you combine that with all of this negative yielding debt, one of my questions is just what is the event that ends that entire part of the financial industry? And how long do we have until we get that to essentially blow up? Right. And I don't think anyone's cheering for it to
Starting point is 00:10:57 happen, but the writing's on the wall. So how long do we have? And then what is that catalyst that ultimately blows it up, do you think? So great questions. Look, you never know for certain. I will say there's a favorite term I had in trading risk. Risk happens fast. You never think it's going to happen. And then all of a sudden, it's all over you. But to be clear, I agree with you. I do not want this to happen. And I don't want it to happen fast. I believe in the long run, it will eventually happen. But what happens? What are the events? Well, let's be honest. The United States currency as global reserve currency today will be the last fiat currency to fail. OK, that's just how it works. You can look in the credit default swap
Starting point is 00:11:42 market. You understand that the U.S. Treasury market is the biggest, the most liquid. It's got the most staying power. But what happens in credit markets is this thing called contagion. And what contagion essentially is, is what you've seen happen with Evergrande in China and it percolating higher in the credit spectrum to where it's actually impacted the credit default swap rate or the expected default probability of the country of China. OK, now China's credit rating is single A, but it's the credit default swap market is telling China, you know what, you're trading much closer to a triple B. You better get your acting gear, kid, because you know what? A triple B credit is right on the cusp of being high yield or junk
Starting point is 00:12:30 And using the pejorative junk, I was a junk bond trader for many years. All it takes is a few downgrades into the junk spectrum and there's a cascade of selling. And this cascade of selling then causes contagion into other markets. So China being the second largest economy in the world, if all of a sudden the debt markets say, you know what, China, you're sort of ugly, you're a junk bond borrower equivalent, they'll be contagion to other economies. pop that it's, you know, even though, you know, China would be a G8 country, absolutely, it'd be a G2 country, but it'll fall down the credit quality spectrum, something I call the risk ladder, and it'll impact countries like, you know, Argentina, which is a G20 country, but it's defaulted four times in my life already. Now, I'm not predicting that I want to see this contagion, but that's what happens in credit markets. Okay. One guy seeks protection by shorting another market. And that guy who's shorting that market causes a cascade of selling in that market.
Starting point is 00:13:37 And it's just like we saw in the great financial crisis. Okay. It starts to accelerate. The second derivative is the most important. Okay. The acceleration of the change will cause, am i saying this a u.s treasury bond auction to fail highly unlikely but what about a canada bond auction failing oh and canada's a g7 okay so look i don't want this to happen and this is why we need this parallel network we need to develop the bitcoin safety net we will have a bitcoin store of value savings account and we will have a fiat currency checking account but don't save your money in a fiat currency checking account. So when you think about all these pension funds and financial institutions that are holding so many bonds, what happens when they all drop it? Is
Starting point is 00:14:26 that the acceleration you're talking about? Do they start to say, hey, look, there's, you know, 14% inflation based on the old calculation. There's 5% on the new calculation. I can't possibly continue to hold these treasuries because I'm actually losing purchasing power and not protecting my assets. I have a fiduciary kind of responsibility to protect these assets. So I've got to get into some other asset. Does that just accelerate everything? Once one starts to do it, they all start to do it? Yes and no. These are investment mandates that have been written over time. There's investment policy committees. These things don't change on a dime. Now, maybe the smart people are sitting there, much like the Houston Fire Department
Starting point is 00:15:08 or the guys in Chicago, if you haven't heard of them, the blue collar Bitcoin team that is a bunch of first responders in Chicago who are very concerned that their pension plan owns a certain number of fixed income securities because it's in their investment policy guideline. I mean, if the pensioners rise up and say, what are you holding these things? You're guaranteed to lose money on a real basis. Maybe it percolates to the investment policy committee. But remember, these investment policy committees are dominated by people who want to cover their ass, right? They don't want to make these decisions. What happens, though, is if one person, a big fund, let's say CPPIB in Canada or CalPERS in the United States says, you know what, this 60-40 model is pooched. uh, I'm going to go 60, 20, and then 20 in alternative assets that do include a certain
Starting point is 00:16:05 amount of, uh, Bitcoin that really gets the ball rolling because it, it, it takes the, uh, pressure off of the theory of agents. They call it, you know, as long as one of the big guys moves in that direction, then I can cover my own, uh, investment policy decision. When you start to think about the timeline for this to occur for them to all start trying to move a capital because of this uh this mechanism is this a five year a 10 year or 15 year thing how long do you think it takes yeah uh it's it's a process so some will move early and some will be the last and uh as a canadian i can almost certainly guarantee you that the canadian knuckleheads will be uh one of the last ones to move okay so that that pains me because you know canada we've sold all our in our
Starting point is 00:16:47 central bank we've sold all our gold uh canada does not have the safety net that the u.s does we're not as big a country. Obviously, we don't have the vertically integrated and horizontally integrated economies that you guys do. Listen, it happens because out of necessity. Let's do some quick math. If CalPERS has a 8% return bogey and it's a 60-40 mix and 40% is in bonds and those bonds to be generous are earning on average over their whole asset mix. Let's say it's earning 3%, right? So 3% times 40%, that's 1.2% they're getting in their whole portfolio from bonds. That means the 60% that's in equities has to earn the difference. 8 minus 1.2 is 6.8%. 6.8%. So 6.8% divided by 60% of the portfolio means equities have to return 10% forever going
Starting point is 00:17:51 forward in order for CalPERS to make their bogey. I don't know. Yeah, there are going to be some good years, but over time, you don't hit that 10% bogey, especially when you're at all-time highs in the S&P, which you just pointed out. So there's a lot of stuff going on. It's absolute certainty, the mathematics of it, almost certainly unattainable. And if it is attainable, it's only because the fiat currency is pooping the bed so bad that it appears that your equity markets are actually going up when in fact, it's just the unit of account is going down, right? So you and I, I think, see eye to eye in terms of Bitcoin being a way to protect a portion or a material portion of a portfolio, whether it's from economic collapse or just high levels of
Starting point is 00:18:39 inflation, regardless of how severe you think the problem is, Bitcoin can serve as a piece of the solution. It also can do that for an individual or an institutional investor. And so talk about what are the properties of Bitcoin that you think protect that portfolio? And then how do you see institutions starting to really flood into Bitcoin? Wow, man, I love your question. So here's the cool thing. I've been trading risk for 30 years and every single asset class out there is essentially short volatility, which means when vol explodes, equity vol is the best way to look at the overall volatility in markets. When equity vol goes from its current sub-20% annualized level and some catastrophe causes it to spike to 85% or even over 40%, markets cease to function.
Starting point is 00:19:35 when equity vol exceeds 30%. By that, I mean no new issuance comes to market. Markets are collapsing and all of your assets are generally getting crushed. Why? Because you are short volatility in those assets and volatility has just skyrocketed. So you're getting killed. What is Bitcoin? Bitcoin is the quintessential long volatility asset. Okay. It means you own insurance. It's the insurance against the system unraveling, which means more and more people will begin to understand they need this asset in their portfolio because it hedges all the other exposure they have, which is basically being short volatility. This is like owning options on things exploding. Now, you don't like to think that things explode, but on a regular basis,
Starting point is 00:20:31 they do. OK, so my opinion is Bitcoin is credit default swap insurance on a basket of sovereign currencies. The more that those currency and the credit quality of those currencies like China deteriorate, the more intrinsic value you have in Bitcoin. Everybody needs that insurance. Don't mess around with your fire insurance when you live in a fire zone. Own the insurance and by God, don't sell that insurance once you see the fire coming down the mountain. You should actually buy more. So Bitcoin is the perfect asset for everybody who needs insurance against the inevitable unraveling of the fiat system. When you think about individuals, corporation balance sheets and then institutions. Do you think of a kind of asset allocation differently
Starting point is 00:21:24 for those three buckets or is it all a portfolio and they should all think about it similarly? Yeah, I do actually believe they should all. There's no difference, right? I mean, if you're managing your own money, your incentive is to achieve high Sharpe ratios to get better risk adjusted returns. Measuring measuring risk is is as much a subjective as it is or it's a qualitative exercise as much as a quantitative exercise. Every single asset allocator out there needs to do their homework on Bitcoin. Because just like myself in 2016, my first thought was, oh, Bitcoin has to be a Ponzi. The reality, though, is you do some work, you see the blockchain in action, you see the beauty of math and code and decentralization,
Starting point is 00:22:16 And you're like, my God, this is something I've been searching for for 30 years. Why? Because the real Ponzi is the fiat. The fiat currency has consistently been bailed out by Fed printing and quantitative easing. Now, that's the exact definition of what a Ponzi is. Bitcoin is not the Ponzi. Bitcoin is the solution. And again, you got to have two parallel networks. I like talking with Jeff Booth about this. We don't want it to happen quickly, but we both believe over time it is inevitable and you need to start this network transfer. And when you do a network transfer, as you know, you don't turn one network right off. You transfer the network over time. I think we have five years, Pop. But in Jeff Booth's words, we are going to see 100 years of change in the next 10 years. So who knows? How do you think about your portfolio? What's your portfolio allocation? How do you think about Bitcoin versus everything else? I own about 40% exposure to Bitcoin, but that's because when I first got into it, it was smaller and that little nugget has grown. But I also have other hard assets. I need to be honest. I've never gone all in on one asset. Why? That's not the way I manage risk. I believe that my price target for Bitcoin and here's a neat segue. I love the guy you had on earlier, Colton. So he 250. I think he's meant 250. Right. That's his year end price target. I'm not up to the to the kids, the kids talking, you know, 250. but if he's 250, my long-term price target on Bitcoin is over $2 million in today's dollars
Starting point is 00:23:59 of Bitcoin. I'm going to be just fine. I don't need to go all in for my portfolio to go where I think it's going to go. That being said, I mentioned to you, I own hard, other hard assets. Why? Well, I own real estate because I have a house that I live in and I have other real estate investments. I do own gold. Oh, God forbid you own gold. Fox, what are you a knucklehead? No, you know what? I love Larry Leopard. Lawrence Leopard is a beautiful guy who knows how to manage risk. And we both think about risk the same way. OK, sometimes when Bitcoin is getting crushed, you can sell some of your gold and buy some Bitcoin and you can trade that delta all the time if you're a trader like I am and Larry is. I also own silver, but I don't own any bonds.
Starting point is 00:24:45 absolutely don't own any bonds. And in fact, I would encourage people, if you are not properly levered, you're supposed to go out and borrow money, provided you are not excessively leveraging yourself and borrow money at historically low levels and invest in these hard assets. So what does that mean? Don't run to pay down your mortgage. Actually, make sure you're fully levered to your mortgage and take that money and put it in other hard assets. Why? I don't know. Just because interest rates are the lowest they've ever been in history. So you're supposed to take advantage of that. So, you know, manage your own personal portfolio like you would manage a hedge fund or a company or Michael Saylor. Look, the guy is rewriting capital markets and he didn't just fall off the turnip truck. That's for sure. But he certainly understands when people are throwing money at him on a contractual basis that he can easily meet with free cash flow from his company. Yes, I'll take that and I'll put it into Bitcoin.
Starting point is 00:25:47 Brilliance. I've got two of my brothers here with you. What questions you guys got? Hey, Greg, that was hilarious, by the way, the 250. That was great. So you mentioned that you believe Bitcoin will eventually be at or greater than $2 million per Bitcoin in U.S. dollar terms. My question would just be, how do we get there? You know, the chart that Pomp was showing, right?
Starting point is 00:26:09 That's cool. Like Bitcoin's moving up on the, it's too, it is now too important an asset for most of the world to ignore the investing or asset allocating world. And very simply, total global assets are 900 trillion US dollars. So just do some sensitivity analysis if Bitcoin captures X percent of that market. What does that equal? 900 trillion means it's 900 times the size of Tesla. So that means there's an awful lot of money out there in other assets like real estate, like bonds, fixed income, like commodities, currencies, fixed, sorry, fine art. You got it. Equities, I mentioned 100 trillion. Bitcoin's going to eat a portion of all those assets. The biggest one it should be eating right now is the bond market because it's the most
Starting point is 00:27:02 mispriced. But over time, if you get 5% of $900 trillion, that's $45 trillion in today's dollars. What's $45 trillion divided by $21 million? There's your $2 million price target. John, what questions you got? Yeah. Hey, Greg. Nice to see you again.
Starting point is 00:27:21 Hi, guys. Can you just talk about why aren't you 100% allocated to Bitcoin if you see that $2 million price going, right? So it's $2 million is about a 33X from here. Great question. Listen, man, I got to put a probability on it though. I'm not 100% certain, right? I mean, I'm highly confident and this is where I'm going to use some math to back out how if I was going to the racetrack, how I would play this, okay? So I've been studying this pony. This pony is the most beautiful pony that i've ever seen in my life i've watched it run in kentucky uh you know in the kentucky farmland it absolutely rock and rolls okay and i think this pony has a chance of winning
Starting point is 00:28:00 the kentucky derby the problem is i go to the race store it's not the problem i say in my head i think this guy has a 25 to 1 chance of winning okay i go to kentucky derby and the odds makers which is basically the guys that are taking all the bets say it's 101 odds i'm like these guys haven't done their homework. They haven't been sitting there watching this guy go around the track, watching tradeblock.com. They haven't seen this. So they're laying 101 odds, and I think it's 25 to 1 odds. Sold to me, sold to me. And imagine I had so much money that I could impact the amount of bets so that it would go from 101 odds down to my target of 25 to 1. That's how much money I would lay on it where I was getting an expected return based on the risk. So backing that analogy
Starting point is 00:28:50 out of what the high, excuse me, what the Bitcoin market is, odds of me getting my price target right now is if it's at 60,000 US a coin today, that's effectively telling me that there's the the market only sees a 3% chance of it getting to my $2 million price target, right? 3% times $2 million is $60,000. Look, I'm not 100% certain, but I'm way more than 3% certain it's going to my price target. In other words, if I had all the money in the world and I thought it was at least a 20% chance that it was going to my $2 million price target, I would be buying Bitcoin and making the price of Bitcoin go up until it was at $400,000 of Bitcoin today. Then I would sit back and I'd say, I've laid my bet. And that's a pretty big ass bet, isn't it? I don't have that much
Starting point is 00:29:48 money. So that's why I don't put all of my money into it because I'm not 100% certain. But do I continue to buy it when it's anything less than $400,000? Of course I do. But I don't have the ability to put everything all in one, in one, uh, uh, on one bet. Why? Well, I got three kids. I got to pay expenses. I got other real estate assets. I'm supposed to be retired, but I'm actually working in a pretty exciting company. That's, uh, actually that, you know, providing electricity to Bitcoin miners, all that to be said, I've never managed risk by going all in on one bet and i won't do it now appreciate that greg one of the things that's uh uh just blowing me away right now while we've been on this conversation uh the news just broke that the
Starting point is 00:30:38 fdic chairman said that the banks and the oversight of fdic are working to come up with a framework so that banks can hold bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and also trying to figure out how they would use it as collateral hold it on the balance sheet etc holy moly holy moly seriously i swear and this is a real headline, right? This is what this is. Reuters put it out, not TMZ. So what's your thought process in terms of U.S. banks if they start to hold Bitcoin and use it as actual collateral? It's the it's the pristine collateral of the world. Like that is why I think the U.S. has been served up a gift by China, by China pushing Bitcoin mining to the Western countries this is a gift for me and my children and for you and your i know you don't have kids
Starting point is 00:31:27 i i don't think you do but anyway at the end of the day your future kids right this is why we need to take this gift and embrace it because you will have a store of value pristine savings account and you will still have the u.s dollar reserve currency or checking account for the world. And together, these dual networks will allow the U.S. to remain supreme freedom and it will be a supreme economy of a global economy. This is what the world needs. This is certainly what Canada needs. Canada needs the U.S. because we're your second largest trading partner and you are our most important trading partner. I need that for my kids. So I love the USA. I don't ever want it to fail. This is good for business. It's even better for freedom. And I just want to
Starting point is 00:32:24 summarize with one thing here. I do believe there will be a time when energy, oil, and natural gas is priced in Bitcoin. I think Vlad Putin is thinking of that right now. And to do that, he's basically think, how does he get out of the petrodollar? He doesn't want to hold US treasuries in reserve. Those are fiat contracts that are programmed to debase. What if he took Bitcoin in payment for his energy? Wow. Then he's starting to build up a reserve of the most pristine collateral ever. Digital energy being paid for natural resource energy. I think it's inevitable. I'm an engineer like Saylor. I'm just playing the odds. And then if that happens, 5% of 200 or of 900 trillion quickly becomes 20% of 200 trillion. And all of a sudden my price
Starting point is 00:33:17 target for Bitcoin isn't 2 million. It's something like 20 million a coin. Play the odds guys. This is the racetrack. This is how you manage risk. Talk to me about how energy gets priced in Bitcoin. Like what would that sequentially look like? All it takes is one of the big non-OPEC guys like Russia to just say, hey, why don't you start paying me in Bitcoin world? You can either pay me in Bitcoin or you can pay me in the US dollars and I'm going to buy Bitcoin, but it'll be, here's my price of oil in US dollars and here's my price of oil in Bitcoin. And what if it's a 10% discount to get it in Bitcoin? I don't know, pretty smart people in the world will say, well, okay, here's your Bitcoin, Vlad. And then all of a sudden it
Starting point is 00:34:00 becomes a basis where there is a market much like, you know, you have Brent North Sea Oil trading against West Texas crude. It's different markets trade on different at different prices for different reasons. And again, as an engineer, why wouldn't it be that way? Why would you be selling beautiful natural resource energy for useless fiat dollars in the long term? Fiat is very valuable in the short term. What does it do? It facilitates international trade. It eliminates the need to barter. But what it is not good at is storing value over time and space. That is what Bitcoin is. So it just takes a step away. Listen, I tend to think that you understand this pretty well. And I think that you're more right than wrong on a lot of this stuff. And without disclosing too
Starting point is 00:34:50 much. I've seen a number of very large companies say, well, if we bought some of this and then we priced our goods or services in it, that would probably have a material impact and would lead to our balance sheet growing. And I think you see that, you know, Tesla is kind of the elementary example where, hey, if we accept this for payments and then we also put it on our balance sheet and the price goes up, that our balance sheet expands and we're acquiring more of it from customers, that could be pretty interesting. And so we'll see how this all plays out. But but it's absolutely fascinating to kind of watch it. Where can we send people to find you on the internet
Starting point is 00:35:23 if they've got more questions or want to follow along as you keep talking about a lot of this stuff? Sure, I guess my best platform is Twitter. I've just sort of found it. I met Foss, Greg Foss, there's me. That's actually my granddad in World War I beside his fighter plane. So yeah, my granddad would have been a Bitcoiner.
Starting point is 00:35:43 I just want to take this chance to shout out all the great work you're doing, Pomp, and talking yesterday about the Lightning Network and how it exceeded everything. I'm in touch with Jose Lemus from Ibex Mercado in El Salvador. I love the guy. I've made a commitment for a personal investment in his company. They are doing unbelievable things for a country, okay?
Starting point is 00:36:05 This is good when companies get involved, but now countries are leapfrogging companies. Come on, USA. You know, you guys in your PGA or your Ryder Cup, USA, USA, USA. Come on, USA. Embrace Bitcoin. The world needs it. Thank you. I tend to think so. If you weren't Canadian, I'd tell you to run for U.S. president, my friend. We ate on that note. I gave a presentation to 45 members of parliament in Canada on Bitcoin. Not every single political party is asleep at the wheel in Canada. OK, 45 members of parliament
Starting point is 00:36:43 led by a good Canadian, Pierre Poilievre, okay? He understands Bitcoin, he owns Bitcoin, and he is challenging Canadians to do more work on this pristine asset. So well done, both sides of the border. This is a process, but it's only 12 years old and it's the fastest entity to achieve a $1 trillion market cap in history.
Starting point is 00:37:09 And it is going higher, it's only mathematics. You guys got any last ideas, thoughts, comments, concerns, complaints? No, I like, I like Greg's energy and the 2 million price target. I heard 20 million. Just, I'm just saying. Here's the funny thing. It's got to get through 400,000 before it gets there too. Right, boys. So lots of, lots of work to be done. Okay. This is a, this is a learning process and your platform is teaching an awful lot of
Starting point is 00:37:35 people, some really good stuff. So I appreciate you having me and I look forward to our next chat. Sounds good, buddy. Talk soon. Thank you.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.