The Pomp Podcast - David Mercer On How Institutions Will Make Bitcoin Price Explode #902

Episode Date: April 7, 2022

David Mercer is the CEO of LMAX Group. In this conversation, we discuss the Bitcoin spot market, massive amount of Institutional capital going through LMAX, regulation, The Russia/Ukraine conflict, and where David sees the industry going in the next decade. ======================= Since 2018 Copper has been at the forefront of institutional digital asset development.   From award winning custody solutions, to creating the first truly off-exchange settlement function, Copper pioneers technology, products, and services, in lock-step with a rapidly changing world.    No other infrastructure provider covers as many assets, across as many exchanges, with the speed and security that Copper can offer. To learn how Copper helps the world’s largest institutional investors secure their digital assets, head over to copper.co   Copper - the unfair advantage. ======================= 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 http://compassmining.io to start mining bitcoin today!  ======================= Bullish is a powerful new digital asset exchange built for institutions that delivers the innovations of DeFi in a regulated environment. The Bullish Hybrid Order Book pairs the high-performance of a traditional Central Limit Order Book with automated market making. Powered by deep Bullish Liquidity Pools, backed by the multi-billion dollar Bullish Treasury. So, you can trade with certainty and at scale across variable market conditions.   Learn more at Bullish.com or follow @Bullish on Twitter. Because the future belongs to the bullish.   *Not investment advice. Digital assets and cryptocurrencies are high risk products. Consult your professional advisor before dealing in them. Bullish’s services are available in select locations only and not to U.S persons.    Visit https://bullish.com/legal for important information and risk warnings =======================

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. David Mercer is the founder and CEO of LMAX Group, which also owns LMAX Digital. In this conversation, we talk about Bitcoin's spot market, all of the trading volume going through LMAX, institutional adoption, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and what David thinks is the single most important thing to get more institutions into the crypto market. I really enjoyed this conversation with David, and I hope you enjoy it as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to first talk about our sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by Copper.

Since 2018, Copper has been at the forefront of institutional digital asset development. From award-winning custody solutions to creating the first truly off-exchange settlement function, Copper pioneers technology, products, and services in lockstep with a rapidly changing world. No other infrastructure provider covers as many assets across as many exchanges with the speed and security that Copper can offer. To learn how Copper helps the world's largest institutional investors secure their digital assets, head over to Copper.co. Again, Copper, the unfair advantage. Check them out at Copper.co today. Next up is Compass Mining.

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Start mining your own Bitcoin today by visiting compassmining.io. Again, compassmining.io. Go check them out and let me know what you think. This episode is brought to you by Bullish. Bullish is a powerful new digital asset exchange built for institutions that delivers the innovations of DeFi in a regulated environment. The Bullish Hybrid Order Book pairs the high performance of a traditional central limit order book with the automated market making. Powered by deep bullish liquidity pools backed by the multi-billion dollar bullish treasury.

So you can trade with certainty and at scale across variable market conditions. You can learn more at Bullish.com or follow Bullish on Twitter because the future belongs to the bullish. Now this is not investment advice. Digital assets and cryptocurrencies are high risk products. Consult your professional advisor before dealing in them. Bullish's services are available in select locations only and not to U.S. persons. Visit Bullish.com slash legal for important information and risk warnings. Go check them out at Bullish.com or follow at Bullish on Twitter. All right, let's get in this episode.

I hope you guys enjoyed this one. 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 mr mercer how are you good to see you my friend i'm good listen i'm excited about this i i i have stats i want to

play a game with you okay let's go for those that don't know david mercer is the uh founder ceo of lmax group lmax group owns lmax digital along with a ton of other foreign currency exchanges uh i would argue i can say this i don't think you can you guys are the largest or one of the largest uh infrastructure providers or market makers or market providers in foreign currencies you also happen to be quite popular um in the uh crypto world as well not popular enough no retail all institutions correct all right so i like that you guys put these together i basically i don't pay attention to any of the stats that l max digital's twitter account tweets all month and i wait for the monthly report and i and i go through and i look at it and in the month of

march you guys did 20 billion dollars in total notional volume on you were 74 trades away 174 trades away from 3 million trades in the month and you traded an equivalent of 482 000 bitcoin and this year alone already, year to date, you've done $66 billion. These are like bonkers numbers compared to most other exchanges. It's been a slow year though compared to sort of last year. We did Q1 21.

So our best month ever we did $60 billion. We call a billion a yard in FX. So sort of 60 yards is where we want to get to. So 20 yards for me is kind of disappointing but you can't change the market I guess. It's been a sort of slow start to the year. Why do you think that it's been a slower start? Is it just price-related?

Is it macro, like Fed policy interest rate stuff? Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, you know as well as I do, if you're looking at it, it's kind of been directionless most of the year. Okay, we got sold off a bit. Everyone's worried about the macro side. Inflation, of course you've got the war in Ukraine. So, and Bitcoin particularly at the moment.

I mean, look, the whole asset class is driven by Bitcoin. we like to think that it's going to be a store of value asset we like to think it's going to be you know digital gold everyone talks about it but actually it's a risk on off asset class so like stocks if you chart the s&p or the nasdaq versus say bitcoin you're just seeing the same price action just a bit of a lag so that's meant it's been directionless i think now um you know doquan buying a whole bunch of bitcoin has helped well look from the start of the year to now we're basically unch right so it's whatever whatever it is now 46 000 it's basically unchanged in the year we're still waiting for that influx of real institutional money because that's going to

make it pop if doquan uh from tara with only three billion dollars i say only but in the institutional world it's not really that much money if he can have the impact that he's had over the last, I don't know, five weeks or whatever it's been. When institutions show up with real size, does Bitcoin go to a million dollars a coin? You're going to be happy. I'm not even sure you're going to be doing this podcast anymore. That's all I know.

You'll be like, David, it's been nice knowing you, but I'm on a beach. What do you think happens, though? It's going to explode, Anthony. I mean, look, so here's the, I've said it again, I think, before on your show. there are 200 trillion dollars of assets in custody today that's a fact the three biggest custodians in the world are the three you know three three biggest custodian banks are you know

state street bank of new york mellon jp morgan they control 100 trillion there are 500 institutions in the world that matter total market cap of crypto today two trillion one percent of those assets in custody i know all these names are looking to enter the market i know all their customers and their investors want access to crypto so if just five percent of those assets in custody go into crypto it's very simple the market cap of the asset class has to be 10 trillion dollars that's 5x we are today so what happens to the price you know as i say and you get the keys and lock the door here i mean i completely agree obviously uh what i think is fascinating I was talking to a pretty large hedge fund manager recently and his perspective on crypto was like, I'm not anti-crypto.

I just know what I'm good at and where I have an advantage and that's in equities. And so I'm going to stick to investing in equities. But it's interesting to me. Help me understand. And he knew that there was 21 million Bitcoin. He understood the idea of supply demand, obviously. when i started to explain the on-chain metrics and the ability to see the illiquidity in the market he kind of you know he perked up a little bit yeah right and he started to say so you

basically have like the structural liquidity but then you have like the actual market liquidity and you can start to basically uh analyze which people have what historical holding versus selling patterns how much illiquidity how long when did they buy what was the and i was like it's all right there on the blockchain yeah and you could just see him being like i'm still an equity guy yeah but like there's more information available here that could have better inform various decisions and so when i see when i take that as kind of an anecdotal uh point from conversation in your guys metrics uh you break out the average trade size by instrument and the chart that i'm looking at uh has bitcoin usd versus eth usd bitcoin usd uh pretty much since

the beginning of last year has had a much more significant average trade size so that strips away how many institutions that strips away how much volume it's just looking at when somebody trades what's the average size why is bitcoin so much larger is it because the market's larger and people feel like there's more liquidity or is there something else going on there 100 i mean And that's where the liquidity is. You meet a bunch of people asking you, hey, what should I buy? And you'll know a lot more coins and a lot more assets than I will.

But I'm like, look, if you're dipping your toe in the water, go Bitcoin. It's the most liquid asset class. So someone comes to us and they want to buy 10 bucks worth of Bitcoin, $10 million worth, that's relatively easy to do. You try and hit that in one clip in Ether, and you're going to move the market, and you're going to get slipped 180, 200 basis points. You've got to slice and dice it.

You've got to do it in smaller sizes. It's just that all the biggest market makers are trading Bitcoin first. And again, let's look at it. It's 40% to 50% of the value of the total asset class. So when they first come, they're making Bitcoin. I think Ethereum is doing better. Solana is also doing better, but it's very thin.

and when you talk about that institutional money coming in you just see huge price gaps which isn't good for the asset class and it's partly what we have to try and do at LMAX Group and LMAX Digital it's bring bigger, better institutional market makers to get deeper liquidity across the asset I have a customer last week literally beating me up

David look at this slippage all I did was buy 20 ether, 20 million ether I'm like dude this is huge, you're just the biggest in the market today in that asset class. You need to cut that up. You need to trade that in shapes of about $50,000 if you're lucky to get it done. He can't do it in one click.

He trades a bunch of foreign exchange with me. His biggest day in FX with me was $3 billion. And he trades in clips of 20, 30, 50 million. And they expect to be able to do the same in crypto. You just can't today. So let's use this hypothetical person, or real person, but don't say their name. if they trade $3 billion in a day and they're doing it,

let's just call it 50 million at a pop. Are they trading to capture one, 2% moves intraday and they're like, like literally day trading? Is it a human driving that? Is this all kind of high frequency stuff? Like walk me through what they would do in the FX world. If you trade 3 billion in a day and you're trading that size,

what is the goal or the trading strategy? Well, it depends who they are, right? So I kind of have three distinct sets of clients. You've got banks who are basically facilitating trades for their customers. Their customers might be asset managers, portfolio managers. They need to buy 100 million euros, 200 million euros, a billion euros to facilitate rebalancing their portfolio. you've then got brokers a lot of broker servicing retail and they're just back to backing that flow and then you've got the proprietary trading firms they don't like the terminology hft high frequency traders but they're just looking to gain some alpha and get in and out they're trying to make markets everywhere and they're trying to nick half the spread but the one thing that underlies all of that if that's too detailed too complex for everyone is the smartest guys are all using algos to execute the trades now so even you know who's the most famous investor in bitcoin

i guess it's michael saylor you know he's using an algo to work that order he's got a target price he's using a vwap and by the way you can buy these on uh ebay right you can buy these models if you want to you just plug them in and you're just trying to to have a target price right to let you access that so that's really what they're all doing and no one's pointing and clicking and so i'd say that today 90 of all our fx volume are done through api and done through algorithmic trading so when that person comes to crypto yeah they want to do similar size i'm assuming uh if you can't do 50 million dollars at a time then you can't do three billion a day and regardless of how superior your infrastructure technology is

it's a market dynamic issue but if you need it, it's there so remember I've got the biggest institutional market makers on the street so my biggest ever day in crypto May last year we did 6.5 billion dollars in crypto How much money do you make on that? What does that look like just directly?

Look, I'm the guy, for us, or for the customer? For us, we're the guy in the middle, right? So it's a couple of basis points you're making just for every trade. The retail guy is going to recoil in horror. Jeez, we're paying 50 basis points or 10 basis points. No, I'm in the institutional game, you're charging one or two basis points.

By the way, in foreign exchange, you're paying a 40th of a basis point, to make it clear. That's the cost of trade FX, yeah. Why is it so cheap just because of gas commodities? You tell me. I'm glad crypto came along. no look you know it's it's it's a very liquid very efficient market again to scale that for yourself and your listeners foreign exchange trades seven trillion dollars every single day

seven trillion what do we think the spot market in crypto is a day 20 30 billion so you know you're talking 200x so one basis point if i'm good at math is six million dollars if that's the biggest day I wish it was 6 million is that what it is 600 600k

is that oh yeah 1% of 6 million see look we don't do public math we already did but like my

my question is how do other institutional exchanges that don't have the FX business how do they build a business if they're only doing

half a million dollars let's call it plus or minus in their biggest days well you look I mean, just look at their, go to their web page and say fees, and it says 10, 20, 30 basis points. I mean, look, I'm saying, I'm calling this out right now

and saying it's too expensive to trade crypto today if you're a retailer, if you're small. But I understand why it's that price, right? Because it is hard to access it. I think what we do for a living is all about providing market access, about providing frictionless market access to any market we offer that means the price point can come down you know that well-known name in

equities is it's free to trade right so the price has gone to zero in crypto it's hard to access it it's hard to get the liquidity in some cases on the retail exchanges they pay liquidity providers and also if someone's trading in size of you know 500 bucks like really dollars and cents you have to have a minimum there so that's what that's why they can charge that but i think over time, you're going to see the price curve just look like this. It's just going to go down and it's going to resemble more what you see in equities and more what you see in foreign exchange. Do you think that we'll eventually race to zero, similar to what happened in equities in crypto for retail traders? Yeah, look, so there's a secret out there, which is it's never

for free. There's always a spread. So a lot of guys go, hey, I trade for free. Okay, what's the buy price what's the sell price but for sure as the market becomes more efficient and that's partly what we have to do at lmax i've got to bring bigger institutions to this marketplace i've got to bring better liquidity to this marketplace when that happens spreads will compress and when that happens the cost to buy and sell will also compress so yeah you're going to see it become much more efficient and a better market for private investors and institutional investors are like. What have you heard from those institutions as to why a lot of them aren't in the market yet? Yeah, look, it's tough for them, right? So again, it's market structure,

right? Those institutions, those 500 names that really matter, they need a regulatory framework. What do I mean? They need regulatory determinism, okay? These are the rules of the game. this is how i access the market and this is how i don't contravene any legislation at the moment with a lack of legislation a lack of regulation they run the risk that there's no determinism and suddenly two years down the line someone says hold on a second you contravened this rule wait that rule wasn't there so that's the biggest blocker um look a bit self-promoting here but we announced that we're going to launch futures with Six Group. Why did we do that? We can offer crypto futures on an FCA regulated MTF. What's an MTF? It's like a swap execution facility in the

US. And that can go through a central clearinghouse with Six Group. Now, the biggest banks, the biggest traders in the street understand that framework. So we give them a framework, we give them a ballpark that they understand and hopefully we give them a pragmatic regulatory framework that allows this asset class to grow and believe you me this is important for everyone crypto evangelists crypto natives retail investors that framework is important for everyone so that's that's the biggest blocker today when you think about um the largest institutions that aren't participating how many of them are doing it because their founder or their uh individual at the head of the organization likes it or uh owns a lot personally versus uh their clients that their

pension funds their sovereign wealth funds their foundations are the ones pushing them to do it so it's the former and it wouldn't even be look i know you're on stage tomorrow with a famous founder who likes it um but when i look at the market makers don't call him famous well let me cut them down then we'll build them back i saw the guy on billions trust me he's famous um mostly it's because they can make the call look to a certain extent if you look at lmax group i'm the largest shareholder of lmax group 2017 we first looked at crypto said hey should we do this I didn't have to go through a lengthy compliance committee, risk committee, board meeting to say, should we do it?

We just sat around a table one day and said, let's launch LMAX Digital. So I think the preeminent market makers, the preeminent traders today are guys who had that lack of bureaucracy and were able to make slightly autocratic decisions. So I think that's why they were first. Imagine if you were in one of the largest banks.

I've said this to you before, but one of them told me they're going to trade it this year I know they'll trade it, one of the biggest banks in the world but they've been through 26 committee approvals so far I think they've got 30 more to go It feels like the other thing that's happening is the individuals are becoming institutions

we were talking before the show there's a gentleman who started a hedge fund three years ago um he put an enormous amount of money for an individual nine figures personally in the fund to get it started he's probably the biggest lp right he's bigger than all the institutions are in the fund and so it feels like as the currency gets devalued asset prices go up rich get richer you now are getting in this weird world where like individuals are becoming institutions and i think that like they're the ones who transition first we've already seen a number of family offices all those folks all come into it i think what becomes fascinating is like they talk to

their friends who aren't big enough to be institutions but work at the institutions and that's how it spreads it's less about the bitcoin community convincing them and it's more about i'm watching my friends sit here and just pick up you know profits over and over and over again with the volatility of you know bitcoin or crypto markets eventually i'm saying to my colleagues at work we got to get in this game and it's more of a an envy thing a a competition thing than it is like we have some big macro perspective on you know interest rates and that's what's going to lead us to bitcoin like i think that we forget like the human psychology of this is like my friends making money they're making more money than me what are they trading i'm good at trading

like i should go trade that too if they can make that money imagine how much i can make and that's what pulls in these institutions yeah no i think that's fair a lot of points in there anthony i'll try and remember them but uh look it is true there's a lot of big names now in crypto who started as individuals maybe they started mining they stuck together an exchange or a platform really quickly they launched a purpose swap they're now worth a lot of money and that in itself is self-fulfilling what i would say stepping back again you know that capital markets It's so much bigger than any given billionaire in crypto today, right?

Back to that $200 trillion today. So what I'm looking at is five years hence, that efficient market structure that will mean Bitcoin and crypto can overtake gold. Gold's $10 to $12 trillion today. And yet, guess what? Then when you have deeper liquidity, a more efficient market,

it'll be harder to make money. You'll have to actually be a really good trader, right? Right now, you can just sort of, you know, put it all on red, put it all on black, right? If you're a believer, it'll become harder, but it'll become much bigger. And by the way, this is the natural evolution of things. You know, I'm old enough to remember .com.

Not everyone got it right. Not everyone backed Skype. Not everyone backed Amazon or Google. But it's important that some of that intellectual capital or move from traditional markets into the new one. And that's happening today, and I think it's a great thing for crypto. And guess what?

I also think it's great for traditional finance because some of that's going to feed back into traditional finance and make that a better market as well. Russia-Ukraine is another topic that I know probably is having an impact on your business. What's going on there? Obviously, when you have some sort of conflict,

commodity prices, currencies, the whole kind of macro engine starts to move. What have you seen both in the non-crypto and the crypto part of your business? So I think first and foremost, the hardest bit has been the humanitarian impact. I mean, this is a human catastrophe. And people say,

oh, you were dealt three conflicts before. We haven't. This is war in Europe, right? This is war with a nuclear superpower that is interwoven throughout the fabric of society, throughout the fabric of capital markets. you know i've got russians and ukrainians sitting in my tech team on my desk every institution does this is tough to deal with but but we're in capital markets okay so our job is to deliver

efficient capital markets at all time credit crises banking crises pandemic the atrocity of war you need to have efficient capital markets right goods still need to be paid for so that's what we're trying to do now so let's park the humanitarian bit for a moment crypto has had a great period why again you've seen the robustness and the resilience of this asset class we discussed the price action this is really positive we've seen that crypto can be used for good right frictionless borderless payments again you know people wanting to contribute all over the world in crypto to that guess what we've it's spurred the regulators into action you know it's no fluke that suddenly president biden issues an executive order that senator warren tables a sanctions bill

the ecb european central bank the bank of england suddenly accelerate their crypto frameworks that was good and probably the the last thing is it debunked the myths everyone told me hey and look at it look what happened in the u.s crypto is going to be a sanction buster incorrect you knew you knew this i knew this how can they circumvent the sanctions let's look at it aml guidelines worked well it's quite hard to buy stuff with even bitcoin today i've never tried to buy munitions or tanks or jets but I'm guessing that's pretty tough

and it's probably easier with a suitcase of dollars than it is Bitcoin oh guess what everyone Bitcoin and crypto is pretty transparent have a look at the blockchain and lastly President Putin didn't believe in it why didn't he believe in it

he couldn't control it so he spent no time developing crypto so I think those myths have been completely debunked. So overall, it's been a very positive period. Again, like the start of the pandemic, a positive period for crypto and for this asset class. Yeah. Joe, John, what questions you guys got?

I'm curious to talk about, so Bitcoin specifically, a lot of these institutions are rumored to want to get access to it. What about Ethereum and Solana? Are you seeing demand for those as well? Sure. But look, ultimately it comes down to liquid asset classes. I'm in foreign exchange.

Eurodollar is the biggest traded asset class, biggest traded instrument. So any given day, Eurodollar is going to make up 30% of all the FX trading. That's just it. So Bitcoin today is going to make up 40, 50%. So Solana, yes, it's coming. Ethereum, yes, it's coming.

But the most liquidity still gravitates to the number one in that asset class. So it's up, I'd say to the founders, the engineers behind the other coins, you got to keep proving that point, right? The argument is, oh, Bitcoin for payments, Ethereum for utility. Okay, well, you got to start showing us the utility.

And the same with Solana, right? If you want that to trade more, if you want that price to go up, if you want to have more liquidity, you've got to keep proving the utility of those coins. And you don't think Bitcoin has to prove that? i think it's proven for me you know the more you look at it the more you research it bitcoin's proven what it's been around what 13 14 years now i don't know how long satoshi

thought about it before he created it it's proven and it's been through the peaks and troughs you know yeah i said it i've said it before look at their you know march 21 was march 20 the start of the pandemic every asset class got sold off oil traded below zero bitcoin chart said it was going to zero it didn't right it found a level and it bounced back and it traded what 64 000 the end of last year now trading 46 000 this is now a robust asset so i don't think it's got anything anything left to prove and um you know you're not seeing many level one protocol breaches with this asset, I'm as comfortable holding that as I am holding FAANG stocks

or holding gold in my portfolio. And I think that's why it will go from strength to strength and the others still have a lot more to prove. When it comes to your business specifically, LMAX, how do you guys think or project that crypto as a percentage of your business will look years from now? I'm assuming it's still a smaller part given your head start in FX and whatnot.

But where do you think that this goes? does it become a meaningful portion or just talk me through kind of your thought process there? It could become 50% of it. So why do I think that? So we trade over 100 instruments in foreign currency.

So we trade, you wouldn't believe it, I'm sure you never want to trade it, we trade Norwegian kronor against Swedish kronor. Who wants to trade that? Well, guess what the Scandinavians do, right? So, but at the moment, most things are against dollar, right?

So the S&P is quoted in dollar, NASDAQ is quoted in the dollar, gold dollar a little bit of gold euro but actually 90 of it is gold dollar dollar gold sorry for any currency guys that are out there um so what happens with crypto at the moment it's you're trading bitcoin dollar ethereum dollar you're going to start trading bitcoin s&p bitcoin gold bitcoin swedish krona norwegian krona we have it right now in the crypto space oh it's bitcoin dollar david you also have um usdc it's the same guys don't worry about it it's the same order book right so i can actually merge the dollar order book with the usdc order book so i think it could

become a lot right now first step let's get past gold gold will be five percent of my book um but i really think as we start to accept certainly the currency related or the currency like cryptos that's what i think bitcoin is i think you're gonna see that traded against everything we're launching an exchange in singapore first time ever within lmax group we'll have an fx exchange and a crypto exchange on the same infrastructure under the same license right the uh our customers love that right one account trade bitcoin trade euro trade gold trade nasdaq how good is that going to be for the asset class again and hopefully of course good for LMAX groups

of course you get one magic wish in the institutional world for Bitcoin you wave a magic wand it happens what's the thing you wish for I want a regulatory framework

in the United States and the United Kingdom tomorrow so that the biggest banks in the world can just go trade the spot and the future together. Because at the moment, banks can't really trade the spot. They want to trade the future and the derivative. Within LMAX Group, they can trade the spot on LMAX Digital

and the future on LMAX Exchange. So that's what I want to happen. And actually, I think it is happening, but it takes time with these legislators and these regulators. You think it's that important? That's like the number one thing. The number one thing. If you want this market to grow, Anthony,

we need regulatory determinism. That's it. It's all very well. There's only so big this market can be built on retail and private investors. I'm very happy when they keep growing and they keep doing well and making more money. But you want that weight of money.

I want those 500 institutions in the space. They just need to know the rules of the game. so let's get moving let's do it and you know no apologies for this offshore regulation is not the way island regulation is not the way we all have to do it to a certain extent while we're growing we need the leaders yeah you need the cftc the sec the fed the bank of england the fca the mas in singapore you need these guys to create the framework right because it's a pragmatic approach again you want those pension funds and those asset managers to be able to access the market when they access the market this thing is just going to go pop pop pop i ain't gonna say nothing

else after that ending where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about elmax it's pretty easy right elmax.com or elmaxdigital.com and i'm david.mercer at either of those we gotta get uh we gotta get you tweeting more do you know yeah i don't think people just not much not that much fun am i you know i'm sort of i'm sort of the status quo i'm just a little bit you know the old gray head guy where's your cover photo from that one that's the north pole so i've got a world record for the most northern game of rugby uh at the north pole so glad i asked it's quite fun when you uh speak to any canadian i always say them i bet you i've been further north in your country uh than you have and they're like really like yeah how far you've been north

pole i got two questions how'd you get there and what's the weather like up there oh i nearly swore um it's uh bloody cold but then again the guys in chicago kind of looked at me look at me like yeah it's not that cold you know what was it david minus 35 minus 40 yeah it's kind of like a normal day in february for us um a whole bunch of planes from london and then i trekked 130 miles pulling a sledge with a bunch of buddies and hoping it would all be over very soon. You played the rugby game outside? Yeah, in shorts.

That's how rugby does it, John, in shorts. My dad would disrespect. Was that a requirement for the world record or you're just crazy? I'm from Belfast and all the English guys were like, you're Irish, you have to wear shorts. I'm like, yeah, hell, I'm wearing shorts. But we had to set up, it was quite interesting, right?

We had to set up the pitch. We had to put bags full of snow down so that the plane could land to bring the kit to set up the pitch. We had to put the posts up, draw the lines, the whole thing. One of my great marketing guys at the time, he brought a drone over to take a video of the match. The battery's frozen within a minute and a half, so we didn't get much footage.

That's amazing. That is awesome. Now I've got to think of something that we can go do that's not at the North Pole. I hate the cold. Maybe I'll go somewhere. Where's the hottest place in the world? Sahara.

You don't want to do the South Pole? That's on my bucket list is to do the South Pole. Maybe go and play some rugby there, and then I'll take them both off. The hot, you can do that with my COO. He's from Africa. He likes the heat. I struggle with that.

Heat is way better than cold. no you you like like you know 90 degree weather you say that's hot nah i was at 130 degree weather i was chilling all right we're good don't worry the cold though that's not my thing minus 10 degrees and stuff like that it's bad enough i mean i played golf with a buddy of mine and actually he runs lmax exchange and on the fx side in scottsdale arizona i went hey this is really cheap the hotel the golf is cheap he was yes great you'll love it with 120 degrees i nearly in miami what happens is uh during the summer we always go golfing because it's cheaper it's no competition for tea times anything we're not good at golf but it's fun whatever uh the second

you start getting into the fall you see the prices jump because it's getting cooler right so they know like all right it's actually the inverse most places in the summer is more expensive here it's the opposite because it's just hot correct not not scottsdale's probably even worse than uh than here all right my friend thank you so much for doing this we uh we enjoyed it uh i'm hoping for you that uh 60 billion dollar months come back 60 yards that means 60 yards there you go that means uh that's good for everyone i'll come back and do 100 yards in any any given month That's the goal. 100?

Yeah. So a 5X from here? Yeah. Yeah, by the end of the year. It's open. Book it. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you guys enjoyed this one.

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