The Pomp Podcast - #965 Ric Edelman On Why The #1 Financial Advisor Is All-In On Crypto

Episode Date: May 17, 2022

Ric Edelman is the author of the new book "The Truth About Crypto" and is the #1 Independent Financial Advisor in the country. In this conversation, we talk about the macro environment, Bitcoin, why Ric pivoted to focus on Crypto, the role of Cryptocurrencies in an individual's portfolio, and why the invention of the Blockchain is one of the greatest human inventions of all time. ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp ======================= The Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep is the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. Go to https://www.eightsleep.com/Pomp to check out the Pod Pro Cover and save $150 at checkout. Eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, and the UK. ======================= The world's 2nd largest crypto exchange, OKEx, has dropped the "E" to become OKX, reflecting its evolution from a traditional crypto exchange to a comprehensive, cross-platform crypto services provider. With OKX's decentralized platform and Web3 wallet, MetaX, you have full custody over your crypto. Explore DeFi, NFTs and play-to-earning gaming with the world's most powerful crypto exchange. Visit OKX.com to learn more. =======================

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. Rick Edelman is the author of the new book, The Truth About Crypto. He also happens to be the number one independent financial advisor in the entire country. Rick and I had a great conversation. We talked about everything from Bitcoin to the macro environment, how financial advisors are dealing with their clients and what the role of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are for the average citizen's financial portfolio. I really enjoyed this conversation with Rick, and I hope that you enjoyed as well. Before we get into this episode, though,

I first want to talk about our sponsors. First up is LMAX Digital, the number one institutional crypto exchange. They offer clients the deepest pool of crypto liquidity on the planet, underscored by 100% uptime track record through volatility spikes. They leverage LMAX groups liquidity relationships and ultra low latency technology lmax digital is the market leading solution for institutional crypto trading and custodial services if you've never heard of lmax digital it's probably because you're not an institution they have no retail only institutions they feature a central limit order book streaming spot bitcoin ether litecoin and bitcoin cash all paired with us dollars euro and yen lmax digital they're secure they're liquid and they're trusted

Learn more at lmaxdigital.com slash Pomp. Again, lmaxdigital.com slash Pomp. This episode is brought to you by 8Sleep. 8Sleep is the single best product that I have purchased over the last three years. It completely changed my life. I'm not joking, pay attention. The Pod Pro Cover, which goes over your mattress

by 8Sleep, is the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. You can go to 8sleep.com slash Pomp to check out the pod pro cover and you save $150 at checkout. They currently ship within the United States, Canada, and the UK. I told you it changed my life. It helps me sleep deeper, helps me sleep longer. I feel much more refreshed and I have better energy. You want to know how I have

relentless energy every single day? Because I sleep on an eight sleep. Seriously, go check it out. eightsleep.com slash pomp today. This episode is brought to you by OKEx. OKEx has dropped the E to become OKEx. Founded in 2017 with a mission to deliver a cutting-edge crypto trading experience, OKEx, the world's second-largest crypto exchange by trading volume, has since expanded its scope alongside the wider industry, adding features from all corners of crypto. If EX is about exchange, X is about intersections. Cross-chain, cross-functional, cross-platform, an interoperable future that's not siloed into isolated platforms and blockchains. The name change and the new look and feel represent OKEx's ongoing move towards decentralized finance. With OKEx's

decentralized platform and Web3 wallet, MetaX, you have full custody over your crypto. Connect MetaX in your browser or within the OKEx app to explore DeFi, NFTs, and play to earning gaming, the world's most powerful crypto exchange. Whether you're just learning about crypto, you're a seasoned DeFi degen, an NFT enthusiast, or a pro trader, you're all invited to a better future. Go check it out today and let me know what you think. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions 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. Rick, how are you doing? I'm doing great. Great to be with you. Absolutely. I'm so excited to talk to you. I feel like the last time that we talked, it was in good times. Now we are talking and prices are falling. There's fear and uncertainty and chaos everywhere. Let's maybe just start with a sentiment check. You talk to financial professionals every single day. You're known as one of the forward-thinking folks who

have pioneered a bunch of different asset classes, strategies, et cetera. What are you hearing from people. Are the financial professionals scared and potentially leaving the industry? Or do you think that they now have the conviction and knowledge where they understand prices are down, but they're here to stay for a long period of time? They are here to stay. Prices are down. Their attitude is we've been here before. We've seen this movie play out, everything from 1987 to 2001 to 2008 to 2020. We've seen these kinds of market mayhems in the past. And this too shall pass. That's the general overall sentiment. I think some of that is misplaced, quite frankly, and I think there's a little bit of too much of a cavalier laissez-faire attitude

in what's going on at the moment. Talk to me a little bit about that. Where do you think people are overconfident or they think that there's no risk, but you actually would highlight that there is risk? Well, we're undergoing a generational shift in interest rates. Most advisors, I think most investors, pretty much everybody alive today, our investment experience personally is more recent than 1980. And I don't know too many folks who were investors in the 1970s. Many of us were kids, I was,

and I remember gas lines, I remember gas rationing, I remember standing in line at gas stations on behalf of my parents, waiting hours to buy five gallons with the gas every other day based on your license plate. But I wasn't an investor, I was a teenager. And I don't know too many people

who were investors in the 70s. And so if our investment experience is personally in the 80s, 90s, 2000s, and teens, we have experienced personally only interest rates going down. And when interest rates go down, which is what they've done steadily since 1982, bond prices go up. Well, now we spent the last 10 years with interest rates at zero or nearabouts, historically low. And now in the last several months, interest rates beginning to go up for the very first time in the last 40, 45 years, something that nobody alive today has ever experienced. And we know on paper that rising

rates causes bond prices to go down, but nobody has ever really truly experienced this. And I think for advisors to say to their clients, oh, just keep your bonds, hang in there. It'll all work out. Well, we know that's true in the stock market. It'll all work out in the long run, but I'm not so sure that that's true for the bond market. I think we are experiencing a fundamental shift on global economy due to rising interest rates for the first time in 40 to 45 years. When you think about this scenario, obviously there's pension funds, there's all sorts of retirement accounts, there's a lot of assets that have been allocated to fixed income bonds, et cetera. Is your belief that those individuals who run those organizations or

those pools of money will have to fundamentally kind of drop fixed income in its current form and either go find higher yields or different versions of yield, or even potentially just get completely out of that market because of kind of what you foresee happening with the pricing of those assets? I think many of them already have. You've got the controller of New York City requesting permission to go heavier into alternatives. We have pension funds, endowments all over the country that are doing the same, recognizing that the next 10 and 20 years are not going to be the same as the last 10 and 20 years. And we can't behave as though they will be. we have a huge retirement savings gap in our nation, $4 trillion gap, the amount of money

we're going to need in retirement versus the amount of money we have. We know that pension funds are assuming that they're going to earn 7.5% per year. And we know that ain't going to happen over the next decade. Stock market's not going to earn 10% a year the way it did over the past 20 years, past 100 years. And we know that real estate values are very, very high. We've got the new dynamics of rising interest rates, rising inflation rates. The pandemic is lingering. We've got the uncertainties of what's happening in Ukraine because of Putin. All of these things are conspiring with massive debt loads on a global basis because of the trillions that have been injected to fight the pandemic. We can't assume that we're going to be able to earn money

in the future the way we earned it in the past. And that is why crypto is so exciting. This asset class is going to be the redeemer for so many around the world. I obviously am highly biased, but tend to agree with you. The last question I'll ask about the kind of legacy world and maybe even legacy investment strategy before we get into Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and some of the work you're doing there is as you look at many of these institutional asset managers making changes, right, regardless of what they are. But I do think that there's a trend from kind of fixed income into alternatives or other types of things that have performed better and potentially will in the future, there's a lot of critics that would say, oh, this is like top of market behavior,

right? As people start to push out on the risk curve, people start to seek better and better returns and they're quote unquote getting greedy. Now, I don't necessarily agree with that, but how do you think about like, sometimes that does happen and other times they have to make changes. And so are there things that you either talk to advisors about or clients or maybe even other kind of institutions about when and how to evaluate what is top of market behavior versus like what is necessity to make sure that you're protecting capital over a long period of time? Yeah, I think your observation is correct on all three of those points that sometimes there is a knee jerk reaction to get out of what you held and it's a classic bad market timing. So

you're right about that. On the other hand, there is a sea change going on now, which is demanding forward thinking, to acknowledge that there is a different environment going on right now, geopolitically, as well as economically all around the world. And it's hard for these huge institutions to alter the way that they're conveying their messaging. I mean, you talk to a typical financial advisor. Let's keep in mind, most advisors have been doing this for a really long time. The average age is 62. And most advisors have been in this business for 20 years or more. And the way we have been taught through modern portfolio theory and the efficient frontier, you look at standard deviation, max drawdown, Sharpe ratios, Sortino ratios, all of these

numbers, all of this academic theory that we've all grown up on over the past 40 to 50 years. Thank you, Harry Markowitz. And thank you to Eugene Fama and Ken French. We are taught, stay diversified, maintain a long-term focus, and rebalance. That's what we're taught. And that has worked wonderfully for the past half century. But this is a different environment that we are in and that we are going to be in. We have a brand new asset class that never existed before, crypto. We have a complete sea change in interest rates. The implications of that on federal and global debt levels, with the implication on real estate and business formation, which is credit-based, it is forcing people to say, everything that I've told you for the past 50 years no longer applies.

Well, how do you sell that to the client who gave you their life savings? How do you sell that to the pension fund, endowment fund, or sovereign fund, which is relying on you and your years of experience and track record when you're saying, oh, this time it's different. Because we all know as soon as somebody says this time it's different, we know not to believe them. And that's the dilemma so many are facing. And it's difficult for people to shift their strategy to turn around that aircraft carrier when we wish we were in a rowboat where we could do it really quickly and easily. You're widely considered the number one, I think, independent financial advisor in the country. And so when you started to become curious about Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies,

and these technologies, and then eventually what I would categorize as kind of a rational proponent for these technologies, it caught my eye. I would say, oh, wow, that's a very, very big deal that Rick Edelman is now interested in this stuff. Where are you in kind of that enthusiasm for these technologies? And how do you think about Bitcoin or other assets within just the average American's financial portfolio today? Well, I've been, as you know, Pomp, been focusing on what's next, what's coming, where are we headed throughout my entire career. I'm regarded as a futurist in the financial industry. And my last book, The Truth About Your Future, was all focused on exponential technologies,

AI, robotics, 3D printing, big data, nanotech, biotech, bioinformatics. where are all these technologies taking us what are the investment opportunities and how are they going to impact our lives careers college planning housing marriage estate planning and so on and that's why i wrote that book back in 2017 and most of its predictions have now come true it included a prediction about the about the pandemic that we would have one by 2020 and so we have to recognize that this is all changing rapidly because of technological innovation. And now a big key element of that is blockchain and digital assets, which has caused me to write my new book, The Truth About Crypto. You know, you begin with The Truth About Your

Future, which mentioned crypto, and now an entire book, The Truth About Crypto, which just came out last week and debuted at number one at Amazon. I'm really excited about how well it's being received. We have to recognize that this is the first new asset class, as you know, in 170 years. The last time we had a new asset class was the discovery of oil in the 1850s. And look how incredibly impactful oil has been on the globe. Prior to oil, we were using whale oil to light our candles. Look at us today. And that's where we are now with the innovation of blockchain and digital assets. This is a huge deal. It's going to be the biggest source of wealth generation over the next 20 years than any other asset class, probably more impactful than any other asset class in history,

And in a truncated period, won't take 100 years to have an impact like oil did. It's going to have an incredible impact within a decade, already has. And this next eight years are going to be amazing. So I finally felt compelled that if I want to help investors, I want to help consumers around the country improve their ability to achieve financial security and pay their way for kids into college, buying a home, caring for aging parents. the most impactful way that I can help you do this is by helping you understand crypto to the point where I have walked away from Edelman Financial, the company that my wife and I built

over the last 40 years to, as you noted, the largest investment advisory firm in the country with $300 billion in assets under management. I walked away from it because I can be more impactful to you. I can help you better by teaching you about crypto than any other single thing I might be able to do. In the book, you talk about basically four major breakthrough inventions, fire, the wheel, the internet, and then eventually the blockchain technology that solved the double spend problem. I want to start, obviously, just with the gravity of that framework, right? Fire, the wheel, things that people just take for granted today. You put this technology there. Walk me through a little bit as to why you believe it's that

important. Yeah, I'm trying to hit people upside the head to get your attention and to make you realize just pay attention. This is a big deal. I mean, to suggest that blockchain is on the same level as the wheel. I mean, you know, it's a Barney Fife moment. You got to be kidding me. And that's really the point that I'm trying to make is that just as the wheel changed everything, our discovery of fire changed everything. The invention of the airplane, the invention of the phonograph and the, you name it, just the incredible inventions, the assembly line that Henry Ford invented. These things changed everything. And that's what blockchain technology is doing. We all know how incredibly impactful the internet was, the ability for us to transmit

our words to somebody else instantly and for free, you know, via an email, our ability to connect with friends online via Facebook. That was the original internet, the connection of people. Well, then we have the internet of things. My phone talks to my car. Now we have the internet of money, the ability to move money around the world as easily as we send a text, doing it as cheaply, as safely, as securely, and as transparently. This is huge for global commerce because businesses are always trying to figure out how can I move faster, safer, and cheaper And that's what blockchain technology is all about. And if you think this isn't going to be a huge deal, you're not paying attention. I'll give you one illustration. We all heard the statistics, which you know, that 90% of the world's banks are developing blockchain technology.

My favorite data point is this. Last year, Bank of America, all by itself, filed 161 patent applications. How can you, I didn't even know there were that many things to invent in this field, first of all. That's just one bank, one year. VCs are putting about a third of all their money into blockchain technology. You can't spend $100 billion over a five-year period and end up with nothing to show for it. The incredible impact is going to be huge.

And the sooner people learn about this and understand why this is a big deal for business and how it's going to be impactful and the investment opportunities that are available, the sooner people figure that out, the more wealth they're going to be able to create. But Bitcoin's already $30,000. Look at how much you've already missed. How much more of it are you going to miss before you finally say, I need to add it to my portfolio? So you mentioned Bitcoin, and maybe let's start there in terms of, there's a lot of folks in the institutional asset management world, financial advisors, who they were very bearish. They were critics. They said, there's no way this is going to work. I think now we've gone from kind of

contrarian to consensus being, okay, fine, let's put 1% of assets in. There may be some non-correlation over really long periods of time, or there may be some asymmetry, but let's not get too crazy. Let's not try to get too confident here. We'll put half a percent, 1%, maybe 2%. How do you think about the sizing of these assets, especially when you look at five-year sharp ratios and you get more sophisticated analysis? Is this something where you think people will stay kind of in that low single-digit percentage allocations? Or do you already see financial advisors talking about, no, actually, we want target allocations of 10%, 20% to the space? Or what are you seeing and hearing? What do you think people should be

doing? I think advisors are still in the low single-digit area. That's where I am in my advice to consumers. In my book, The Truth About Crypto, I talk about a 1% asset allocation. And I say that because it's a safe, easy, non-threatening way to get started, meaning if you put 1% of your portfolio into this and it blows up on you and it goes bad, so what? You'll call it annoying, not devastating. In other words, if you put 1% into Bitcoin and Bitcoin blows up and becomes worthless, you're not going to destroy your financial security.

You're not going to find yourself in poverty and retirement. In other words, it's okay to invest 1% because if you do 1% and things go as well as many hope, that 1% will materially improve your financial future. You might even be able to retire sooner or with more money. So the upside reward dwarfs the downside risk with a 1% allocation. Many people are arguing that a more effective approach is 2% or 3% or 4%. One study from Yale says 6% of assets is all you need, but everybody's talking low single digit. My assumption, my belief, my prediction for you, is that over the next 10 years, as people invest 1% or 2%, they're going to discover that it grows faster. It doubles faster than any other asset class. It'll double faster than stocks or bonds or real estate or gold or oil. And as a result, the 1% allocation will become 2% and then 4% and

then 8% and then 16%. And they're not going to want to sell because they're going to realize that the price appreciation potential still persists and they're not going to want to sell. So while they might start out with a low single digit allocation, inertia will take over and they will discover, they'll turn around one day and they'll say, oh, I do have a 10 or 20% allocation simply because the one or 2% I bought has grown so much in value relative to the rest of my assets. And when you think about that, is there a rebalancing that you usually advocate for, or is it something where it's just a buy and hold it forever? And if it grows to be you know, 50, 60, 80 percent and kind of all of the promises of the technology end up being

realized, just leave it and don't incur taxation or whatever. Like, how do you think about if you are so fortunate that you make the right decisions and it grows in size? How do you think most people should deal with that? If you are going to manage the money the way you're supposed to manage money under modern portfolio theory and effective money management, you should rebalance. It helps you take money off the table, it captures your profits, it secures them. And when the prices occasionally dip, as they're doing right now, it creates a buying opportunity. So yes, you should rebalance. Having said that, I will tell you that I have never rebalanced my crypto allocations, which is one of the reasons I am very overweighted in crypto right now, because my wife and I have

been buying since 20, we got started in Bitcoin in 2012, started buying in 2014. We've never sold any of our positions because although I, of course, believe in rebalancing and I do it everywhere else in my portfolio, I continue to believe that the upside is incredibly strong and I'm not willing to pare back because I believe it's the best asset class in my portfolio and I don't see the point of rebalancing. I recognize I'm taking bigger risks as I do it. We are willing to take those risks. We can afford to take the risk. We don't have children, so there's nobody's inheritance that we're destroying. So, you know, we're just having a good time with it. But for most folks, I would say, yeah, rebalance, be prudent, do the right thing. And I'm going to

throw another thing out there that you quickly mentioned in passing, and that was taxes. Taxes are a very big, significant issue for crypto owners, like all investors, because you got to pay taxes on the profits. This is why I'm so excited about Fidelity's announcement that they're going to allow the 401k plans that Fidelity manages, the world's biggest 401k provider here in the US, 2.7 trillion in assets for 23,000 employers, over 10 million workers. They're now going to let all of those workers buy Bitcoin inside the 401k. This is great news because the 401k or IRA is the best place to be buying Bitcoin because you're doing it in a tax deferred environment where you can trade without having to incur taxes as you do. And then, Rick, when you start to think about

the other areas outside of Bitcoin, how do you think about allocating there? And what immediately jumps to mind, obviously, given the market drawdown in super volatile assets is meme stocks, the long tail of crypto. This is all gambling. I've seen people tweeting about it on Twitter and elsewhere. How do you kind of sift through where is their signal, where is their noise? and for financial advisors where this is just one of many, many asset classes or markets that they're paying attention to? How do you kind of help them understand what's real and what's not in some way? You know, a lot of people think that crypto is new and different. They don't understand it. And that's not true. You understand it much better than you think because it has a lot

in common with the stock market. There are a lot of day traders in the stock market. There are a lot of market timers who are trying to get rich quick in stocks, technical analysts, quantitative analysis. People that are trading stocks, they have no idea what the companies are that they're trading, and they don't care. They're just looking at charts and data and graphs, and they're buying and selling on a daily basis, often hourly or more. They're trading options and futures all in an effort to get rich quick. They're doing it on margin, borrowing money to amplify the amount of money that they're investing. Stock market's filled with people like that, and that has nothing to do with long-term investors, little old ladies who own mobile Exxon, Exxon Mobile or Disney or

AT&T or IBM. In other words, the stock market is filled with long-term investors as well as short-term traders. And the crypto markets are the very same thing. There are some people who are trying to get rich quick, capitalize on all this mania, the hype, the opportunities to do that with NFTs, with tokens, with coins, with airdrops, with ICOs. Fine, knock yourself out, have a good day. Or you could just instead say, Bitcoin is about half of the market. Ethereum is about a quarter of the market. Between the two of them, they're the Coke and Pepsi of crypto. Just buy Bitcoin and Ethereum, call it a day. You want to knock yourself out and go beyond that? You have a wide variety of investment opportunities offered by Grayscale, Osprey, and Bitwise, such as the

Bitwise 10 crypto index fund, which gives you the top 10 coins. You've got a lot of funds issued by Anthony Scaramucci, for example, at SkyBridge. You have Galaxy and you have a whole bunch of other funds, multi-coin, that are giving you the ability to invest in a wide variety of coins and tokens. There are funds of funds that go even further. There are SMAs and TAMPs that advisors can use to custom build portfolios. There are proxy stocks like MicroStrategy, actually publicly traded ones like ride blockchain and coinbase in other words however you choose to play in crypto just like however you choose to play in stocks there's a way for you to do it for most ordinary mere mortals bitcoin and ethereum call it a day as you would get engaged

as you learn more as you read my book the truth about crypto you'll understand the different ways and you might get more interested in pursuing them and increasing your asset allocation and your diversity. That's what my wife and I have done with our crypto portfolio. Or just do Bitcoin and Ethereum, call it a day. You'll be directionally correct. You might not be the richest person in the space, but you'll do a whole lot better, a whole lot better than the person who does zero. And then when you think about kind of the average client, they got lots of questions. They're constantly asking, what about this? What about this? I heard this thing I saw on the news. My friend told me that my taxi driver got rich, the whole gamut of stuff. What's your either advice

for financial advisors or actually for end clients as to how to best work together? And I think this is something that you guys have done a great job of, of like, how does the financial advisor best communicate with the end client? And then if somebody is a client and has a financial advisor, what's the best way for them to work with the financial advisor as they look at a space like this? The problem here is that this is a totally brand new asset class. So even if you've been an advisor for 40 or 50 years, you don't know anything about crypto any more than your client does. All of your training, all of your experience, all of your professional designations and your college degrees are of no value in the crypto space. This is why Jamie Dimon says silly things

like Bitcoin is worthless or has no intrinsic value. He's applying the traditional economic environment to something that is completely new and totally different, square pegs and round holes. And that's why his head explodes. So you've got to recognize, even if you're an advisor managing huge amounts of money for very large numbers of people, and you've been doing it for a very long time, this is totally different. And you must begin from scratch, just like your client. You've got to get yourself educated because this asset class is different from all others. It's a brand new invention that's only 12 years old. So you need to get educated. And that's why I created at DACFP, you mentioned earlier on the Digital Assets Council of Financial Professionals,

it's DACFP.com, we created the Certificate in Blockchain and Digital Assets for Financial Advisors, a deep dive, 11-module online self-study course, 13 CE credits to teach you about this tech. First half of the course, what is Bitcoin? What is blockchain? How does it work? Second half, all about practice management, the investment thesis, how do you build a portfolio? What are the opportunities? What about regulation, compliance, taxation? And as you said, how do I explain it to my client who doesn't know anything except what their teenagers are telling them and Matt Damon in a TV commercial? So it's really important that advisors get up to speed, build their knowledge base so that they can actually provide the services to their clients

that their clients are demanding. And to help advisors, we not only offer the certificate program, we also created the advisor directory, an online source for consumers who are looking for an advisor who's knowledgeable, the online advisor directory at DACFP is free for everybody to use, and it'll connect you with the hundreds of advisors who hold the certificate and who know what they're talking about in this space. As I always say in every aspect of personal finance, you shouldn't be doing this all by yourself. You should be using the services of a professional, a financial advisor, an attorney, an accountant, a mortgage broker, a real estate agent, People who are skilled, trained, experienced in helping you achieve your goals, serving your best interest. And in this new world of crypto, you need to make sure your advisor knows what they're talking about. The overwhelming majority of advisors don't. They know no more than you. And you need to make sure you're dealing with an advisor who's knowledgeable.

Ask them if they have read the truth about crypto. Ask them if they have gone to DACFP, attended our webinars. Ask them if they've ever heard of POP. Because if they've never heard of you, how can they claim that they know anything that's going on in this business? Rick, you're a consummate professional and you continue to be a pioneer in all things financial professionals. Obviously, the business that you built previously speaks for itself in terms of its size and probably more importantly, the positive impact that it had on so many different people's lives. It's awesome to see you now as a proponent of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. And the book, The Truth

About Crypto, is fantastic. So I highly suggest people go check that out. I've just dropped the link into the chat here. If you had to leave everyone with one last message, what's kind of the one or two sentences as to why they should spend time on this stuff? This technology is transformative, and it's changing the way business is conducted on a global basis. Governments are all racing to support the innovation. You don't want to say I could have invested in crypto in 2022 and failed to do so. You want to be able to say that you grabbed a hold of it, you learned about it, and you figured out how to incorporate it into your portfolio. Now's the opportunity to do that. And I hope you'll take advantage of it. It comes along once in a generation.

I love it, Rick. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on here. Anyone who has not gotten the book yet, I highly suggest you go get The Truth About Crypto, a practical, easy to understand guide to Bitcoin, blockchain, NFTs, and other digital assets from the number one independent financial advisor in the world, in my opinion, number one in our hearts for sure. Rick, thanks so much. And we definitely will have to have you come back as you kind of keep pushing forward into this industry. We're glad to have you. Thank you, Pomp. And I need to get you on my national radio show. Can we book that real soon? I'm down. The reason I like radio is because no one has a look at my ugly face.

So it's like the perfect setup for somebody like me. We'll get that booked. I look forward to it. Always a pleasure, Pomp. Thanks so much. Talk soon, Rick. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you guys enjoyed this one.

Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to pompscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry.

It's a three-week intensive training program with over 50 events packed into that three-week time period. Go to pompscryptocourse.com to learn more and I'll meet you guys for the next episode.