The Pomp Podcast - Downtown Josh Brown: Where Does Crypto Fit in Your Portfolio?

Episode Date: October 10, 2018

Josh Brown is famous on Twitter and is the CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management. In this conversation Brown and Anthony Pompliano discuss ghosts, aliens, bubbles, stocks, Bitcoin, Tesla, Tilray, a mysterious fidelity investment report that disappeared, and how Jim Kramer was once harassed in Costco.

Like, seriously, if you died, you outperformed the people who were alive, who were logging in and screwing around with their money all the time. What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Josh Brown is famous on Twitter and is the CEO of Ritz-Holtz Wealth Management.

In this conversation, we cover ghosts, aliens, bubbles, stocks, Bitcoin, Tesla, Tilray, a mysterious Fidelity investment report that disappeared, and how Jim Cramer was once harassed in Costco. This is an absolute must-listen. I hope you learn and laugh as much as I did. This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group, the only blockchain event and media production company I trust. If you're an investor, lawyer, accountant, or entrepreneur and want to attend exclusive events and dinners, visit them at blockworksgroup.io. I promise you won't be disappointed. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek

Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Before we get started, I wanted to tell you about our sponsor, Block Estate, a security token project in the $200 trillion industry of real estate. They've partnered with Polymath and Coinlist Comply API to create one of the first tokenized real estate funds, and they have a unique buyback and burn model. To learn more, visit BlockEstate.com. All right, guys, I'm here with Mr. Downtown Josh Brown himself. Thank you

so much for coming. What's up, Pop? This is going to be a great episode. So you've got this huge social following, and I think everyone says, what the heck does that guy do? So let's go through kind of your background and how you got into asset management and financial planning. Yeah. So I tell people that I kind of like fell into the financial advice business through the back door. I I worked at these third-tier broker-dealers on Long Island, all of them since acquired. No one really paid much attention to them at the time. And essentially, I spent the first 10 years of my career, like most retail brokers of that time, cold-calling. And I had a front-row seat for some really terrible investment behavior, not on the part of the clients quite as much as on the part of the brokers themselves.

And the irony of that was these were the senior brokers, quote-unquote senior brokers. So I watched guys fall victim to every cognitive bias, every mistake that you could possibly make without realizing it over and over and over again, whether it was trading or IPOs or tech stocks or recommending the wrong funds. It was just this endless cycle of fear, greed, and wash and rinse, repeat. So I took all those lessons when I left the brokerage side of the business and I joined the investment advisory side, simultaneously I started writing a book about everything that I saw that I thought was wrong about the way individual investors interacted with

Wall Street. And the book was called Backstage Wall Street. And I think it was kind of like, as I was writing it, I wasn't sure what I wanted it to be. I knew what the message was, but it kind of, I think, formed the basis for how I would run the blog from there on after. and uh november will be 10 years writing the reform broker blog which is millions of uniques and um i love doing it and people come back and people subscribe and uh apparently i still have

every once in a while something insightful to say i try it's i mean it's not easy to like every day say something insightful but if i can say a few things a month that help people or are meaningful then i feel like the blog is just a great outlet for me so that's that's what i do um i'm a contributor to CNBC. I'm on a couple of days a week on the halftime report. And I'm the CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management, which is 26 people, about 500 client households approaching a billion dollars in assets. And we're five years old. Awesome. And so the blog's really interesting, right? First of all, great name in the reform broker. But as you started writing, like, what was the goal? Was it literally just daily thoughts? Was it to share kind of, you know,

historical things that you had seen that you thought were important for people to learn about? What was that goal? Well, so it started as a venting exercise. So you have to understand it's November 2008. It's like two months after the fall of Lehman. Everyone's real excited about finance. Yeah, and I live and work in New York City at the time.

Everyone I know works for Bear Stearns, for Lehman Brothers. They're bond salesmen. They're this or that. Guys walking out of these buildings next door to the building I worked in with everything they have in a box like the world feels like it's coming to an end when bear disappears on on saint patrick's day

and then a few months later lehman is gone and it's just like and everyone else is merging and you're just like oh my god and i think what's different about then versus now the reporters covering the crisis really didn't understand finance now they probably know too much they're i mean we have incredible journalists covering our industry now i really don't think there were that many that understood what was going on at the time and it's not their fault like there was very there were very arcane and esoteric things being bought and sold every day um and they just didn't have they didn't have that incentive the financial media um is selling ad pages and the ad pages are being sold to growth mutual funds and they want positive stories they weren't looking

for negatives that's changed and i think the journalists covering the industry are now very sophisticated but i felt at that time i can say some stuff about what's going on in finance that you might not read in the wall street journal because they're just not quite as you know in the trenches as i was so i had that little edge and then but a lot of the stuff that i was doing was really just editorializing on the news i'm not a reporter so i was just like all right uh bloomberg is saying this or cnbc is saying that here's here's my take um or here's what i'm hearing from people i know in the industry and i think the audience around the country and around the world just love that kind of perspective the other thing is i had nothing to lose i was working

at a firm that was itself on the verge of going out of business like many financial you know brokerage firms um and so basically i was just telling the truth yep it's uh it's so funny because uh i think a lot of people want news but there's a whole nother subset that they want the analysis of the news right and they want it from an individual that's got insight that's got some entertainment humor to it uh and they just want the truth well well if you right so if you just give someone the news and they don't have the context to understand why it's meaningful or why it isn't then people are like okay i don't know what that means for me or worse oh my god that sounds like something i should react to and there are classic examples every day like once a year

we get that article george soros is buying puts now if you're if you're unsophisticated and you don't have the context to understand that he's probably buying puts all year round and it's billions of dollars that he's hedging at all times and he's a hedge fund and he's not investing for college savings like you are you're like oh my god it's like the wealthiest smartest global macro expert investor in the world and he's betting against the market no that's not what's going on And it's always going on And so that's what we do with our blogs And it's not just me

We have like six or seven incredible financial blogs In the firm And it's not that we say nothing matters We try to explain to people Okay you're hearing this news What does it mean to you Should you care Should you make a move in your portfolio as a result of it

And you know frankly Usually the answer is don't do anything And it's been the right stance Like for a long time So that's where the perspective that we're coming from It's a, what's the saying? Like patience and diligence or patience and discipline could be the best investment strategy. Yeah. So that's easy to say now. Yeah, of course. You go to VIX at 12 and you have a 10 years in a row of gains for the total return S and P it's pretty easy to say.

Absolutely. All right. So you've been going around the country and you've been, you know, pushing crypto and blockchain and why you're excited about it, what some of the risks are and really pushing, pushing is probably the wrong word talking about. Right. Right. But, But having kind of, again, a real truthful conversation with people about, look, this is an investment opportunity that currently exists and how they should think about it. What are those conversations like and what's the response been? So I'm a fairly sought-after speaker at like financial planning conferences. Can we just say you're famous? Okay.

Downtown Josh Brown is famous. In certain circle. Perfect. So I will get recognized like in airports and steakhouses. I will not get recognized at like a shopping mall, which is fine. I'm not looking, that's not what I want, believe me. I had a woman come up to me in O'Hare last week, and she goes, I forgot where I know you from,

but can we take a picture? Perfect. So I'm like, all right, can I just tell you who I am? And I'm assuming she's seen me on CNBC. So she goes, no, no, no, no, no. I want to realize it later. I want to figure it out. All right.

So believe me, I'm good with where I am. All right, but what was I saying? So I go on the speaking circuit, and I talk to, I love it. I talk to groups of advisors. We're high net worth investors, or I speak at like investment conferences to asset managers. And rather than just like give this same presentation all the time about here's the right way to invest or here's how we're building the front, like I've done that already. So I put together this presentation about blockchain, cryptocurrency. I call it talking to your teen about the blockchain.

and it's like i i picture all the questions that the audience has because they only hear shreds of information and they're not doing deep dives and i try to answer them from a wealth manager's perspective i'm not a crypto expert like that's i listen to your podcast by the way so much of what i know is from podcasts like yours and patrick o'shaughnessy's yep like i i don't present myself as okay let me explain the blockchain to you i try to talk about it in terms of investing and and you know fear and greed and the things that i do know very well and um you know one first patrick's uh podcast is amazing i think he does a great job with it and then two is what what is the uh yeah okay it's patrick's famous too yeah uh so what do you

think is um kind of the response from people are they are they scared of this stuff do they not understand it do they uh kind of buy into the hype and they've just jumped in where are they Well, groups of financial advisors are skeptics. Okay. In general or about crypto or both? Both. Both. So like if you picture my industry, 20 years ago, everyone was a commission-based product salesman.

And then 10 years ago, about a third of the industry started to get this certified financial planning designation and moving more toward this fiduciary bent where they're not selling their ability to generate alpha for a client. What they're really saying is I'm going to help you behaviorally, financially. I'm going to help you with your retirement. We're going to use goals-based planning. And now I think all of the dollar flows in my industry are going toward people who are talking that way. So as a result, that's a self-selecting group. These are people that are like skeptical about anything that seems like it's too good to be true or that wild riches await. Like we're just natural born.

And I think that's good because, don't forget, my industry, we're managing people's future cash flows. They need this money. It's not fun money. Some of it might be fun money. But in general, our job is to make sure that somebody doesn't turn around 20 years from now and say, I didn't take enough risk and I ran out of money. Or I took too much risk, more than I needed to, and it drove me crazy and I made bad decisions along the way. So we should be skeptical. However, the financial services companies that financial advisors interact with every day are doing large-scale experimentation with crypto and with blockchain.

And they're not idiots, and they're not doing it because they have excess cash in the budget. So when you think about what F Prime is doing at Fidelity and you think about Vanguard talking about how the blockchain might offer savings on, I think, like trade reconciliation. JP Morgan launching a consortium of 75 banks to do international money transfers or at least experiment. So I think you can't just say to a client if you're a financial advisor and they're like, yo, what do you think about crypto? How much Bitcoin should I own? You can't just be like, you're an idiot. Even if you think it's idiotic, you still have to be armed with data and evidence to have a good conversation. There's a Capgemini study this summer.

They said 70% of millionaires under 40 want to get crypto information from their primary wealth manager. So now if you're a wealth manager, we have this expression. I don't know. Maybe it's just me. Don't let the camel's nose under the tent. So financial advisors use this expression about insurance guys. They say, don't let this insurance guy come in with – get his nose under your client's tent because within two weeks, he's going to be selling this guy asset management and drinking your milkshake. So maybe it's not quite at that point with crypto, but do you want to be the advisor that's like, no, don't pay any attention to it.

It's for idiots. And then it turns out that there is some real-world application for this stuff, and somebody smarter than you is talking to your client. You probably don't want to be in that position, especially if you're young. And also, it's a binary thing, right? You don't want to go kind of say, hey, it's absolutely worth zero, and it doesn't matter, and then you're wrong. Or the other way, you don't want to say, hey, this is the future, and you should go put all of your assets here, right, and be wrong there either. And so I think the balance is what somebody is looking for, especially if they're coming to you, it sounds like, for the goals-based planning and kind of the behavioral guardrails, if you will, that you can put on their financial decisions. Yeah, so you have to understand where I'm coming from.

I'm 41 years old. I started my career in the middle of the dot-com explosion, and I saw it all. And then my formative experience was that crash. And I lived through it as like a junior broker working on a team of more senior people with a lot to lose. And just the scale of that decimation. And they were all in. The whole firm was all in. They were making markets in NASDAQ, dot-com stocks, big ones.

They were taking part in things like Eat Toys IPO from Goldman Getting on the syndicate I watched everyone just be so incredibly wrong But right So right on the idea But totally wrong on the investment implication And

Andreessen talks about that book Can we curse? Can we say F'd Company? So there was a website Called F'd Company and I think they did a book But he said if you turn the pages of that book Every idea that was a blown up dot com stock actually ended up happening yep it just took a little bit

longer the world wasn't ready for it so up to and including selling pet food online selling toys online so um netflix there was a uh actually you know who had the original idea for netflix who enron i swear to god google this enron and blockbuster cut a deal for streaming movies on the internet i swear to god that's amazing so every stupid idea from that era actually was not a stupid idea the world just wasn't there yet yeah or the infrastructure wasn't there so if we think that trading coins that have no you know intrinsic value of no cash flows are backed by shady cabals of people that you can't trust have no oversight all of that is true doesn't mean that you can just outright say none of this will ever have any value so so what do

you think about bitcoin uh i own some i i bought it like 2300 and i announced it publicly because if if you know i'd like to have some skin in the game if i'm gonna if i'm gonna try to take credit for those that don't know when you bought it at 2300 it was like july of yeah people went 2017 people went crazy because there weren't a lot of mainstream um financial commentators famous who were willing to be who are willing to be like yeah i'm gonna give it now i didn't buy it and say this is gonna change the world i said let's see what happens see what happens and but hold on we got to call out when you bought it in july what happened afterwards they were nuts they went nuts and uh well that was the breakout but i don't think i caused the breakout it was just

right at that moment yeah because i bought it on technicals by the way but well here's the best part is so then uh december 10th right didn't you call love it so that's it you said it was over and so if you look at a chart i saw your blog post yeah when you bought it it's like right before the bull you know the major bull run starts and you literally 10 days or four days before the uh the top of the market so well so here's what i did i came out in december after going to um i don't want to use names because a friend of mine invited me to this event and it was the most embarrassing thing i've ever seen and i the next morning i said i wrote this i said i went to this thing last night it was like wall street ctos like serious firms sent their tech guys and they had

a panel of quote-unquote crypto experts it was the dumbest shit it was like some guy from china saying that he like every question someone asked him about cloud or he'd be like oh yeah we do that he's like it's like like oh and what about if um we could use the distributed ledger but we could use dna and we could figure out if someone's gonna get sick before they do and you could buy in with tokens if you're a researcher and he goes oh yeah we do that too like it was just it was like four charlatans on a panel um or one guy had launched a hedge fund that was like crypto hedge fund had blown up two stock hedge funds and bond hedge funds he's like all right here's my next thing so it's just like the next crater in the earth and the guys i was sitting with and i'm

like the furthest thing from a tech expert but they were technology and so they would ask these really insightful questions they'd be like all right so um in long beach california they have the port and there's a huge expense involved with making sure the right container goes to the right ship and etc and um if blockchain were employed and there were no middle brokers and it was just the ships and the and the containers talking to each other or whatever and they'd be like yeah and so then like an like an idiot i raise my hand i go okay that sounds awesome how does it how is there a coin going up as a result of that can you explain like like can that just can that just be like a technological advance this decentralized computing and peer-to-peer without there being

like a lambo and the guys in the panel like no well of course the coin's gonna go up like what what coin and why and they just they hadn't connected a and b yep so i just like the next day i was like this is all nonsense the the there doesn't need to be a coin if you believe that blockchain now i understand you need tokens in the ecosystem but it doesn't have to be something that's trading like a rocket ship every day yeah so well the the best part is uh on the blockbuster road it literally is you you know a couple days before the bull run starts you bought bitcoin and And on December 10th, which is four days before the top of the market, you basically came out and said, this is nonsense. Yeah, it's the only thing I've ever been that right about in my life.

So do not count on that to happen twice. Absolutely. All right. So how are you talking to clients about allocating to Bitcoin or other crypto, right? Is it, hey, get 50 basis points exposure? Is it on a per individual, like custom goals? How do you think about it? So at the current moment, there is no legal way for a financial advisor to even have that buy or sell conversation because based on the fiduciary standard and I've been through multiple SEC examinations at different firms, FINRA on-the-record interviews.

Like, based on all of my contact with regulators over the years, which it's good that regulators are involved, the one thing I can tell you is if you make a recommendation like that, they're going to say, show me the spreadsheets. Like, in other words, how did you arrive at this decision for your clients? What is the reasonable basis? If I recommend a portfolio of REITs, I can show them, you know, this is the funds from operations. This is adjusted funds from operations. This is the distributions. This is my client's ordinary income tax rate, and here's why I put it in an IRA. I can take investment committee notes from that decision and say this is why we did this.

You can defend it. Yeah, and they're not looking at did it work or not. They're looking at process. Yep. There is no possible way that any fiduciary advisor in America wants to sit across the table from an SEC examiner and explain the process by which they put their client into shit coins. Can you imagine? Nobody in their right mind would do that. Can you not defend it with a person on Twitter saying, when moon?

Yeah, I should print that out. Here's why I put my client's retirement account into a – so I'm not saying we won't get to that point. It's very early days, but I will tell you you're right in your instinct that the institutional market has to come along first. It's always that way. The other thing is I've seen – .com is like one story. In 2004 and 2005, we had a poker boom. You ever hear about that? No.

How old are you? No, tell me about that. All right, how old are you? 31, or 30. I'm not 30. Okay, so... I don't even know how old I am. Is that bad?

All right, so the year is 2004. We're all wearing backwards Von Dutch trucker hats. All right. Paris Hilton is a big thing. We'll talk about it later. But... By the way, I'm in high school. Yeah, that's cool.

So you know. You know what's going on. You listen to Ludacris, I assume? Yeah. Okay. Nelly. Nelly. Yeah, it was great.

Country Grimmer. so uh we have this poker boom on wall street there are like six publicly traded companies that have something to do with texas hold'em either they're providing the software for online poker or they're like b2b with the casinos or they're selling poker lessons one of them is an offshore and you could gamble door and these stocks go bananas and everyone you know for like a six-month stretch i don't understand it to this day is playing texas hold'em it's the biggest show on tv on espn in high school right like for no reason it just happened like it was like a rash it just happened and then it was gone and of course those stocks were all gone with it i'm

not suggesting that cryptocurrencies are quite a great analog for that but some of them individually probably are absolutely and you know this better than i do you see these flare-ups in interest in zcash yep and then it fades and it's like well why did it happen and why did it go away there You can ex-post come up with a reasonable explanation for these things. It's very hard in the moment to figure out why something's doing that. Well, I mean, let's just go right at the most controversial one, Ripple, right? Or XRP. So last week or two weeks ago, it went up like 60% or 80%.

I mean, some enormous double-digit percentage, and nothing changed. Right. Do you find it ironic that the things that crypto enthusiasts are most excited about all revolve around centralization? in what way well everyone's really excited about this backed project yep which is essentially the new york stock exchange inserting itself as a middleman into the crypto environment charging buyers charging sellers warehousing securities deciding what the rules are going to be with the sros self-regulatory organization so you have that uh cboe starting and cme these are centralization

things that involve centralized oversight so how do you like how can you be a uh a crypto hippie or an economic anarchist or whatever you call yourself and then be like this is going to be really bullish when we finally get when we finally get legitimized uh you know centralized trading hold on back up i've never heard crypto hippie before yeah i just i just made that show when you're famous you can do that all right so uh i think that what you're hitting at is uh there's two components right there's the people who actually believe in the decentralization and kind of the the reasons or the ethos of uh of crypto in general right and why that's important and there's people who are looking to get rich right and and they're looking for investment

opportunities etc um i think we're what we're seeing right now is this thirst for validation right or um you know kind of legitimacy in the financial markets and so if you ask kind of the crypto anarchist folks they actually hate backed and they hate you know futures and all the you know rehypothecation and all that kind of stuff is just it's the same game you know different asset so they want to stay poor are you saying stay poor yeah because those are the things that drive price increases in the coins yeah i mean look i think that i think that those people the crypto anarchist types their belief is just over a long period of time this stuff's gonna you know accrue value and so we don't need that stuff in the short term to you know affect it right now if

you go to the other side and what's probably more like invest the investment side yeah the retail traders and i mean frankly the people who are on twitter you know pumping stuff and doing all the kind of the craziness right i mean look one these people have no clue what they're doing two is you know my favorite thing is when people ask me about coins i tell them penny stock uh tickers right and they literally think they're coins they have no clue they have no clue right and they're essentially the same thing uh and then the third piece i think that that becomes really interesting is on the uh on the alt coin side um you know your point about why do you need a token or why do you need a coin probably 60 of the pitches that i've heard it's oh because this is our currency like it's a

proprietary currency it's like okay so we got gift cards that were worth five dollars now they're gonna be worth 15 i don't get it i think you know we've come out publicly and so we think you know 90 of those are going to go to zero well wait it's that's not it's not why do you need your own currency i understand it's you know why would a secondary market form around your that's the that's someone's like well should i trade like file coin or well are you going to use it no i just want to speculate in it when you think about uh frequent flyer miles let's say you have five thousand dollars worth of delta miles and you know you can't use it and you actually need the cash right this minute yep so wouldn't you wouldn't you want to sell those five thousand miles for

four thousand dollars if you could have the cash today yep but there is no that doesn't it's not a thing that people are doing yeah no one's buying and selling chucky cheese tokens outside of the the ski ball pit like there are not secondary markets for everything just because it has a price nor does there need to be so that's the my talk i understand why you would build an ecosystem that's got its own currency i don't have a problem with that the second derivative of and people are going to drive the price up because they're bullish on the service why why would they do that yeah well well it's some of its uh the speculators are coming in and driving their price up and then the other piece is there's financial engineering going on right so if you look at um you know this

happens, take the Tilray stock, right? I mean, that thing exploded. And some of it is, you know, just hype and kind of everyone rushes in some of its financial engineering in terms of the circulating supply or kind of the float and, and how they're doing that. And so I think what we're seeing is like those more sophisticated models and, you know, kind of methodology being applied to a super nascent market where there's very little controls, it's not as nearly as liquid. And so when you execute that stuff, the repercussions are on steroids, basically. So I'm glad you brought up the term supply because actually one of the arguments that I mock in my presentation is the scarcity argument about any crypto. So I come from this – from the standpoint that anything man-made, there's no such thing as scarcity.

Man can make more. And so I know – I understand the 21 million bitcoins and there will be more, blah, blah, blah. Okay, but if there's forks, then maybe there's 21 and then another set of 21 of something else. And if there are altcoins and some of these begin to be taken seriously or have a real use case and become a thing, well, then that can be infinite too. And Tilray, this is the big marijuana stock that went absolutely crazy over the last couple of weeks. What did it go up like 600% or something? More. It was like $15 went to $300 or something.

It was hilarious. But why did that happen? Well, Constellation Brands took a stake in another publicly traded company, a very big stake, and that stock went crazy. And everyone on Wall Street and off Wall Street said, well, what's the next blank? And so they found Tilray, which I'm not saying it's a fake company. It's got, I don't know, $20 million in sales or something. And they've got apparently licenses from the Canadian government to sell THC-enriched products or whatever it is. And maybe it will be successful.

It's not going to be a $25 billion company overnight just because it's the only other marijuana stock that publicly trades. But that's the – so it trades on a real exchange. It's got a decent-sized market cap. It's liquid for institutions to buy and sell. so that thing becomes you know it becomes like the thing to gamble on for everyone and then well it's greater fool theory and then the shorts come in and they're too smart for their own good so they start betting against it way too early they get taken out in body bags and before you know it you have this phenomenon where people's grandmothers are calling them up should i buy

some tilray and then of course that's the end um this one was a boom and bust inside of 10 days It was pretty remarkable to watch. The sole reason that went on is scarcity. If there were 10 Tilrays publicly traded or if Tilray had 5 billion shares in the float, you would never have seen that level of excitement and enthusiasm. And what Wall Street's really good at is feeding the ducks. When the ducks are quacking, Wall Street is very good at feeding them. And what that means is coming up with more supply. Oh, they like this?

let's do seven ipos and we'll call it right oh they like uber well this is the uber for clothes and this is the uber for food and this is the uber for you know whatever so that i mean i've watched that cycle play out probably five or six times um so wall street will give you more till raise yep you'll have 20 of them by the end of the year if that stock stays above 100 i promise you yep now they'll be of lessening quality yep and you won't know which one is going to survive of course but that's the risk that's in the market but and all they're trying to do is steal market share yeah but if you're right so if you're if your base case like investment if your investment thesis for anything i don't care if it's a coin or if it's a stock or or or a commodity um is

scarcity understand that the demand in the marketplace will be met this is capitalism it's going to happen may not happen overnight or it may happen already and you're not even expecting it so soon so i think like people need to have a better reason than just well it's the only game in town yeah absolutely um what percentage chance do you put on bitcoin becoming the global reserve currency i so if i don't have a philosophy about crypto but if i did i would probably be a bitcoin maximalist okay so i don't care either way i don't have like a i don't have like a dog in the fight but but just just if i think the best thing for cryptocurrency in general is for one of them to become like really legitimate and for that to happen everyone should stop

working on everything else stop funding everything else stop playing games of tokens just make that a real thing build layers on top of that to make it more useful yep um you know doing transactions is a joke right now um the store value argument is stupid when there's no custodian you can trust like all of those things have to be addressed and if i feel like if you get your foot in the door with mainstream with with the wall street mainstream by actually having something that's usable for both transactions and for investing yep then all of these other projects should be addressed it's interesting to hear your perspective too because you i mean you are very much boots on the ground you're talking to retail investors you're talking to financial planners etc right

and so things like there's no custodian to trust right is interesting words uh even with uh so bit go uh maybe two three weeks ago got uh finally got a qualified custodian license right and so um how much of your money did you put there well so here here's what i was going to say is that is the legal bar to have been met right in terms of they okay now they check the box we are qualified custodian not an emotional bar though but but it doesn't mean that they're trusted yeah right so it's hey we don't trust is very different than did you meet the legal requirement right and so i think that that gets lost a lot in crypto is that people are oh we here's the box we need to check okay we checked it we checked it we checked it when's the etf right so you could listen the

emotional argument is different right so on on wall street you've got you've got custodians that are that are both trusted and legal and go under mf mf global uh was one of the biggest broker dealers on the street and they had thousands of customer accounts and they were run by a former ceo and former governor of new jersey uh a former ceo of golden sacks and former governor of new jersey john corzine and when mf global went down because of proprietary trades they were doing during the european crisis thousands of retail customers had to wait to find out whether or not their funds were co-mingled in some of these seriously that's not um that's nuts and so and And they were managing billions and billions of dollars of like traditional broker-dealer money with FINRA oversight.

And so like now somebody comes along and gets a license. All right, that's great. Call me in 100 years. I'll tell you if I trust you, right? When my ancestors live and die and their accounts are on your platform. I was in Europe speaking to financial advisors there. They don't even call themselves that. They call themselves fund selectors.

And here's why. They can't get fired. Really? Cannot. You know why they can't get fired? because there's nothing they could do that would ever get a client to move their money. You're talking about the Netherlands.

They have banks that are 400 years old. Italy has banks that are 500 years old. Italy has banks today that date back to the Renaissance. The traditional wealthy people in Europe, in each one of these countries, Spanish people, English people, they have had money in these banks for like 20 generations of their family.

It will never move their money. They will never move their money Some of these banks are in horrible shape financially You read about them in the Financial Times As the next bank to go under People still don't move their money So when you talk about trust and a high bar That's like centuries of

Well, my family for as long as time goes back Has had money at this bank in Amsterdam And I'm not moving it So the guys that work there as advisors They really can't get It's very hard to get fired So when you think about a custodian Coming into this business

it's got to be bank of new york melon it's got to be schwab it uh or fidelity like i feel like anyone lesser than that will not address the problem before we move on i want to tell you about our sponsor block estate a new security token project in the 200 trillion dollar real estate market they've partnered with polymath and coinless comply api to create one of the world's first tokenized real estate funds tokenization is the process of creating a digital token that represents ownership in a real world asset. You've heard me say it before, but a clear use case for this is real estate. Block Estate aims to bring increased liquidity to this massive market. We're really, really thankful to the Block Estate team for their

support. So we'd appreciate if you checked out their website at blockestate.com to learn more. If you're intrigued by what they're doing, feel free to reach out to them or give them a tweet on Twitter. Thanks so much. You hear a lot about kind of the knocks against crypto, right? Custody is one of them, but money laundering, you know, all these different knocks. And I think that a lot of people in crypto who might not be as well versed in kind of traditional finance and kind of regulation and et cetera, they turn and they look and they say, yeah, but the U.S. dollar is used to launder more money or, you know, the criminal's choice of currency is the U.S. dollar. And, you know, we love it because, you know, I think it's hilarious that, you know, the Wall Street Journal

came out the other day and said, all this money laundering is going on. We looked at 64 exchanges over the last two years and we found $90 million of money laundering. Yeah. Right? And you look at US dollars. I could get past that.

That's not a... Right. So look at HSBC six years ago. There was like a crime wave going on. They were like laundering money

for the triads and for... Well, the Donks Bank or whatever, right? They did like $235 billion in one location. I can get past that.

I read some statistics that 90% of all $100 bills have cocaine residue on them. Yeah. So US dollars could be used for anything

that crypto could be used for. So it used to be 90 and we recently looked and it's 70% now. So the printing machine is diluting out the... Diluting out the cocaine. The cocaine bills.

I'll have to switch my currencies. Good to know. So how'd you get such a large Twitter following? I think I was early. You're wild on Twitter. You're famous and wild on Twitter.

I think I was early. I mean, I chalk up a lot of my success to just going there and spending a lot of time there and making friends with the other people who were there early

and we invented it like there was no in 2009 when i started tweeting there was no one in the industry yep that was like other than journalists who don't have the same restrictions but i got permission to be on twitter and there were things i couldn't do which i didn't want to do anyway did you have your real name on it from day one oh yeah yeah yeah i know i never i've never written anything anonymously in my life um i feel like if somebody i understand why some people have to yep uh i didn't have to so why would i i don't have anything to hide if i have an opinion i want people to know it's my opinion all right perfect so let's talk about uh another guy with a large twitter account uh musk and uh and tesla what do you think i feel i i don't know i go back and

forth i feel like he's i feel like he probably like three years ago should have been like i'm not the ceo of tesla specifically yeah well i don't i think he's like just obviously brilliant and has come up with just these amazing things and his pursuit of things that people said was impossible. Now the whole industry is following him into electric vehicles. And like, I don't have a problem with him personally,

but I just, I feel like certain leaders know when it's time to say, I was the right person for the company up until this point. And now I'm no longer the right person. And sometimes that ends up being wrong and the founder has to come back. Like Jobs, like Schultz at Starbucks.

Like Charles Schwab, sometimes it's not quite that black and white. But I think other times it's like, all right, they needed a visionary for X number of years. They needed somebody who had the guts to make these bold moves, and I did that. And now the company is in a certain place where maybe operationally we're better off. And I'm going to tell you something interesting. There's a school of thought that Tim Cook Is not as good as Steve Jobs At the job of CEO

And I would say When Steve Jobs died Apple was worth $200 billion And now it's worth a trillion So Tim Cook has delivered 4x the amount of shareholder If you want to do it just by Date and time That's an aggressive statement

But I'm making the point that Maybe Jobs would not have been the right person Of course Now that the iPhone was conceived and put on the market, maybe what you really needed was an operational person who could get it to the point where they could sell four billion phones. And I don't know that that's definitely the case. And the other thing is Jobs was very bold and a visionary and invented amazing stuff. He might have sunk the company with a very bad investment and a terrible idea or a huge, bold, sweeping move. It's counterfactual.

We don't know. yeah it's no way to know yeah yeah so i i like i hate when people say so my so here's a point on musk maybe it's maybe the best thing that ever could have happened to him is this sec settlement and now maybe he's the ceo but an adult comes in as chairman someone that maybe knows the auto industry and focuses him and keeps him out of doing having to do certain things absolutely what uh would your head explode if he did a uh an ico to uh to fund tesla uh i so has he talked about crypto at all i know he was a paypal guy back in the day has has he said anything about blockchain no i don't think that he specifically said anything as much

as i think a lot of people and look i've even said it that uh if there was a major company right or kind of a larger company that's in the news a lot uh that would make sense for right so if you take a tesla for example if he was to issue some sort of token uh and use it as like credits on the charging stations or something like that, right? I could see him... But why does somebody need that? I guess would be my question. Well, so there's already credits, right? So the whole idea here is he

would use it... Right, but why does there have to be a tradable market in those credits? There doesn't need to be. He would use it as a fundraising mechanism, right? It's basically, he would... Do you know what the bears would do? Of course, of course. And by the way, I'm not saying that this is the... People would flip out. I'm not saying this is the best thing for them to do, but I'm saying you take

a founder who has a lot of historical precedence for pre-selling, right? So he pre-sells cars, he does all stuff. So to pre-sell the credits, not out of the question, and then to do it in a way where his media presence and their ability to tell stories could actually inflate price over a long period of time, drive more revenue to the company. You could very quickly draw, somewhat squiggly, but still draw a line between where they are today and having a tokenized credit system that brings a lot of capital to the company. yeah but so that but then if you're talking about a guy that just settled the sec well now yeah man

now i might be out of the question the sec is is is saying that icos are securities yep um they have a test i forgot the name of it but how we test yeah so from the orange grove they said basically you're so you're selling an operating business um and shares in it and an interest in it you're selling a security you you might say well it's just orange trees but to us it's a security and uh it's a little nebulous like they they can apply that where they see fit this guy just settled he just lost his chairmanship um he got all he i mean he got a pretty good deal though right no comment on that i don't know i don't know the i don't know what's going on in the background i just i just i just say like is that the kind of thing that he wants to now do

is start issuing different types secure i would say if you if if if you think about pre-selling and having a credit he's already got bonds out there and the bonds trade like crypto so you're not you're not there's no shortage of instruments that you can bet on or against uh uh the tesla ecosystem you just you you just have to look absolutely um all right so let's talk about uh markets market cycles etc uh you you're recently going back for somebody about um i think it's uh let me see here, 1938 to 1975, was this like 35 year bull market in the stock market, right? And you're basically making the point that look, every bull market ends at some point, but it doesn't have to necessarily one end with a crash and two, it's not just, you know, 10 year cycles.

Well, so yeah, so what we were looking at, so we get this question. All right. So I was talking about the financial media earlier. Now let's talk about the financial blogosphere. There are a lot of people who do their best to attract attention by um making these extremely bearish calls and predicting crashes and then the crash doesn't happen and a week later they're predicting a new crash and if you call a crash every week you eventually get it right yeah well yeah but it could be decades of course is the question you just asked me so so like we're we're trying to help people invest for 30 40 year periods like that's what we do and we expect that there are going to be like terrible market events so we build portfolios that we think are durable enough

to allow for those things to happen however we don't take the next step where we start making outright bets on crashes that's not what we do there are hedge funds that do that it's fine i'm a problem with it it's not what retirement planning is what we're trying to do is match future cash flows with future liabilities for people on an individualized basis what we're not trying to do is call the next 1987 but i understand that there are people who get in the media and the way they do it is saying these like outrageous things it's fine um they're counting on the short attention span of the media and the american public so there's gonna be a crash gonna be a crash gonna say like eight times in the ninth the ninth year you say it there's a crash

write your book go on your speaking tour you're a genius now we will not let the world forget That that's not how it worked So that's what we do with our blogs We're not going after people personally We're just saying like Here's why you need to tune that noise out So to your question From 1938 to 1972

We did some research looking into Crashes versus ordinary bear markets There were plenty of 20% declines During that period 20% declines hurt for a stock market They're not fun There were no crashes Not one

You had one in 73, 74 um you had the the beginning of the last crash in 37 38 and that was it so you had entire decades 34 years 34 and a half years of just normal ups and downs in the stock market buyable downs you know rideable ups um and people forget that whatever the bull market we're in right now sure it could end with a crash but doesn't have to yeah it's it's it's not a it's not a foregone conclusion. The reason why people have trouble understanding that or realizing that is the recency bias. The last two examples we have of cycles ending were 2000 and 2008. So inside of a 10-year period, we had two 50% crashes in the S&P. Think about what that does to psychology.

So the next time stocks start moving down 10%, 15%, the crash calls are going to be really loud. This has to end with a cutting in half of the stock market. That's what people are going to be saying and we will be out there on the front lines helping people understand that while that is a possibility it's a very low probability possibility and that it's more likely we just have a run-of-the-mill cyclical downturn and then recovery got it what's the number one uh financial advice question you get right when you're talking to a client what are they should i buy apple apple yeah not not from client like on the street yo should i sell my apple should i buy apple why why that company it's just like a trillion dollar stock it's the most widely known company in the

world at this point it's uh it's the most widely held stock for obvious reasons it's made people a ton of money everyone has some if people don't own it individually it's the largest holding in their portfolio by virtue of its position in etfs um so people have when i when i see people on the street they want to ask me a question nobody ever asks how much should i uh count on withdrawing each year for retirement or like nobody or how when do i when do i have to start putting away money for college yesterday is the answer by the way um but people like what do i do with apple sometimes amazon do people like yell this at you like you're walking through the airport and they're like yo downtown josh like what do i do with apple you know uh when i one of the first times i ever

met jim kramer um we were writing a book um and we were writing a book about financial pundits and what it's like to make public calls in the markets and then live with the consequences or the victories and i was asking jim about that and jim's been jim's like one of my earliest idols and i started reading him in 1998 and uh so jim was telling a story about he was in costco i think he was maybe with his daughter or his wife or something i forget but he was saying like in one aisle um a woman runs up to him and wraps her arms around him thank you so much you got me out of Lucent Technology and I was able to take $200,000

out of it and I would have lost all of it and it was like this really warm touching moment so he's in like the dairy aisle and then he wheels the cart around to the next aisle, I don't know, poultry, whatever and this guy's just berating how dare you

tell me to buy, you know, whatever this is a guy that said buy sell on a thousand stocks a year for 20 years so it's, you know can't believe you got one wrong i mean it's like insane the the so and here's what's interesting about i thought about this espn versus bloomberg and cnbc like espn every week they have the fantasy guys play this guy don't play that guy or um you know people talking about they don't talk about

spreads but they talk about straight up chicago is going to win this week um no philadelphia's going to win people don't like berate these people on the street but for some reason with finance because I guess gambling is not legal and investing is. It's the same level of thought that goes into both. Like you're trying to guess at an uncertain future. You're doing your best to incorporate the information you have. But this idea that like someone's an idiot because they were wrong on a – you know how many stocks Warren Buffett was wrong on?

Like destroyed an IBM like last year, finally admitted defeat. Spent five years averaging down an IBM and then took a loss on the whole thing. horrendous on an absolute basis horrendous on a relative basis even worse because the entire tech sector tripled in that period of time so warren buffett's an idiot right so like that's the i think that that gut instinct that people have to look at someone who's been wrong about something and then just extrapolate you're a moron you don't know anything well no i just was wrong about that one thing no idiot i decided so i think you have to like you have to accept that that comes along with the territory of having opinions you know public opinions i've never actually uh heard

somebody say oh that person's always right right there whenever run away run away if someone's always right well just whenever somebody comments about uh talking head a you know analyst uh anybody who makes a call whatever it's oh they always comment about the negative it's always that person's never right that person's never right oh do the opposite of what they do no one ever says oh that person's always right that person's right more than they're wrong and i think part of it is uh the losses hurt more than the gains and so that's what people remember right it is all that that person led me to the slaughterhouse well right there's a there's this behavioral uh science backing that idea that um losing money feels like almost twice as bad as

making money um because it's something being taken away from you is more powerful feeling than trying to get something and not getting it that you didn't already have um i i went to like belmont to the the horse tracks like three years ago for a goof and there are like all these old guys sitting on the bench and they they show up every race day in the summer and they're wearing their finest members only jackets and you know plaid sports coats from the 70s and the world has kind of left them behind and but this is their thing and they they bet and i went with like three friends and we don't know any i couldn't name one one jockey one horse i have no idea i know i don't watch this stuff i'm not even a gambler we go up to the window and we start just randomly asking

for things we don't even understand what they are it's hilarious drinking so so one of these guys comes over and he whispers to one of my friends say come here he sees that we have a lot of cash with us he's like come here here's what you do and he gives us like this really complex thing and we do it and it hits oh man so this guy's like walking toward the exit and my friend steve he's like get that guy get back here he chases guy down the hall and i'm and i'm like leave him alone stop it the guy doesn't know anything he just he was lucky he goes what are you talking about this guy's an expert i look at a guy he's like smoking a newport he's like in the most miserable physical condition no he's not an expert he's sitting at belmont on on a saturday by himself literally

smoking cigarettes not an expert in anything but that that's how easy it is for us to see somebody have success. And then just assume that there's some repeatability. And it took me a long time to realize there are going to be people who get things right and wrong. And you can't expect absolutes in either case. Yeah. Well, and a lot of it is

focusing more on the process than the outcome. Because I think even take horse picking, for example. People put machines against them and they still can't figure it out. Right? Because it's just that it's almost impossible. Also, outcomes or process is invisible. Outcomes are very visible outcomes are what pay you so um everyone likes to talk about their process

but in the end if they make a ton of money on something and it was totally wildly outside of their process they're not going to be like put an asterisk next to that shit they're going to be like look how smart i am of course so that's human nature all right let's do uh let's do some rapid fire questions real quick before we wrap up um what's the most controversial thought that you have in finance or crypto like if you were to right now tweet whatever this thought is you would get just murdered on the internet so say it on your podcast the most controversial thought uh i don't know i i don't what do you believe that just a huge percentage of people disagree with you on all right so all right so i think that my most controversial thought just on investing in

general is that as a financial advisor we put so much time and effort into educating clients and um speaking to them all the time communicating every day blogs podcasts twitter tv we're just constantly messaging clients but actually be better off if they totally ignored us and they moved to a desert island or they were like heaven forbid like in some situation where they had no electricity for 25 years that would actually be better than um all of that constant communication the thing is because so there's this apocryphal uh fidelity study i'm convinced it existed and they buried it um other people have said that they've seen it and i know i've seen it but nobody has a link to it nobody can find it on a google search no one has evidence that it

existed but the study was fidelity looked at who their top performing self-directed retail accounts were and it turns out it was people who lost their passwords people who died Like seriously If you died You outperformed the people Who were alive Who were logging in And screwing around

With their money all the time So Now That's So that opinion That's a wild study Now Now you know why they killed it

Because they want you logging in You don't do trades And you don't log in Right Man if somebody out there Can find it Let a Just tweet at one of us

No one will find it Believe me I put a bounty I put a $5,000 bounty on Twitter Anyone who could produce The original PDF or whatever Format

um and i think fidelity a reporter called fidelity and they denied it i think jason's called up to see if they had ever heard of it and they said no um can we up can we up that bounty i'll match you well yeah do it in uh do it do it and do it in ripple it's fake anyway just kidding all right just kidding stop i love ripple wearing a ripple t-shirt right tell them so um oh so what was i saying so i i think like the most controversial thing i think is that people should pay almost no attention at all it should be it should be like the weather channel the only time you should look is if a tornado is headed to you um but since that's not going to be the case yep and it's people's money and they are going to pay attention i think what we're doing is the

next best thing which is giving them information every day that calms them down or gives them the bigger picture yep and i think mutes the scare tactics being used by others absolutely um all right so uh aliens we got to talk about them real quick uh let's just we we got to admit they're out there somewhere uh do they have pets or not are there animal aliens and human aliens we got to admit that they're out there i i would believe are you are you a a non-believer in aliens i would believe in ghosts before aliens really but i don't believe in either why do you ever read uh do you read uh where is everybody no so um where are they the what's his name uh enrico ferme uh had this like had this had this question and nobody could like uh if there was intelligent

life where are they or and then i this book has like 20 chapters of different theories my favorite theory is that we're in a zoo um and we're being monitored by them simulation almost yeah i like that i like that one but uh i would i would in the hierarchy of things that i find the most plausible i would say like ghosts are more plausible than aliens really yeah oh man i know that's pretty controversial yeah that i'm offended by that because people look at like the vastness of the universe and of course there should be no i think uh i think it's more probable listen do you know that there's uh i saw recently they discovered like the 1037th planet yeah there's nothing there like listen when in high school they were telling us there was nine right like

now they've got a thousand of them now we're downgrading planets we're saying like which is the one that they that they said they're like oh actually it's just a rock and and you failed fourth grade it turns out they're like they're ripping down all my monuments they're saying now pluto's not a planet i well i think uh like literally they were like there's nine planets and then there's like now there's like there's a thousand yeah well so i i think that um the the best movies those science fiction movies are those the alien movies though like the what was the one where they needed a communications expert to talk to these things that's like all of them no this was really good it's like two years old i'll think about i'll tell you later uh the audience probably

knows they'll tweet at us yeah um all right before uh before i let you go you can ask me one question what do you want to ask um i want to ask what you think is the tipping point for institutions and individual investors where it's no longer a question of do you believe in bitcoin or blah like when is the what is the thing that has to happen that's the moment where everyone says yeah yeah why wouldn't i invest in that yeah or maybe it's not a moment maybe it takes long i don't know so uh first caveat is i'm only worried about bitcoin the rest of kind of altcoins etc or we'll see. But I think Bitcoin's got the most serious chance

and kind of the most security. So we agree on that. Yeah, absolutely. I think that there's two, quote unquote, tipping points or kind of inflection points of what can happen. So one is, I really do believe that if all of a sudden a government, a sovereign wealth fund, some large nation state related entity

all of a sudden comes out and says, we bought 5% of the network. Like the, quote unquote, scarcity, the musical chairs that just that race for 21 million bitcoin explodes why would they do that why wouldn't they just buy 20 then and say that well they could whatever you know 20 look i mean people have said uh why doesn't china just buy all of it right i mean people could do all kinds of different things but i think the second that people realize hey this is now be gone from a technology or this has gone from an investment opportunity to there's a nation state that

believes that there is global wealth and global dominance tied to it i agree with you that would be a major major like watershed moment if some like maybe it depends on the nation well we'll just as well it does it i don't know if it's as bullish but yeah but but take a uh take china for i mean chance for example china comes out says bam we just bought 20 of the network us is doing something right the other nation states are doing something so this so but so the knee jerk would be oh my god i have to buy what then the second reaction is wait a minute they're gonna they're gonna pervert it they're gonna do what they always do they're gonna they're gonna um rewrite the rules or they're gonna start arresting people who don't they can't they can

arrest they can arrest people who own it right but they can't they can't no arresting arresting people running the nodes i i mean but so doesn't stop it that's the beauty of it they can't kill it right so all right so let's just hold up so a nation state or related entity makes some massive move publicizes i agree it would be a big deal people yep oh shit we gotta jump in right the second thing is uh what we're starting to see now with um all of the currency issues and the economic chaos uh i don't i'm not a believer that it's going to happen like the inflection point is going to be a third world country or like a developing world country right because i think we already see kind of venezuela argentina iran turkey we can go through the whole thing right

it's been going on since before we were born forever yeah every year it's another one of Of course. And so I believe that this idea of like the fiat experiment is failing in some places. Absolutely believe that. What I think would be the other inflection point is if all of a sudden inflation starts to tick up and people, whether it's actually going to happen or not in the developed world, but they believe that it might happen, then all of a sudden what you get is you start to get people who, again, they're not going to go take 100% of their assets and move into the asset uh into bitcoin but if they begin to take a portion why why are you so sure that people will think that cryptocurrencies offer an inflation hedge in that scenario well so i think they're

worse i think that there's two things right so one is we know that bitcoin for example is disinflationary and eventually we don't know that deflationary why not how much data do you have what do you what do you have two years of data well no but it's not on historical data we can actually see the code that there's only 21 million that will be created yes but if there were five other rivals to it that also gain legitimate at the same time they can't legitimacy at the same time oh so he all right you ready here here's uh so then here's some controversial scarcity that that that that disinflationary argument goes out the window no no here's two controversial thoughts for you so one is uh i tweeted this uh the other day and people went nuts uh bitcoin is

more transparent than the fed right because here's why so i can see the design or i can see the actual code of how the system's designed i can see every single transaction that's ever occurred from the beginning of Bitcoin till today. And then I can also see what's happening right now at this moment, right? How much is being created, et cetera. Did people flip out on you? And then I can see what's supposed to happen in the future.

And if that doesn't happen- But do you know why people flipped out on you? Why? Because the Fed is supposed to be, the Fed is supposed to be autonomous and centralized. It is the lender of last resort. Prior to the Fed, it was J. Pierpont Morgan. Would literally put people in a chokehold

and make them buy securities to stabilize the system. So the Fed came along to do that in a more systematized way and not have it be reliant on one person with a cigar. So the Fed is – I don't think the Fed's primary – I don't think the Fed's prime directive ought to be transparency. I think it ought to be the institution that stands up and says, we are the centralized buyer of last resort. Bring everything to our window. We will give you cash for it. there's no one in the bitcoin ecosystem that a could do that b has a vested interest to do that so i think just comparing the two things is probably the original sin there of course so

whether or not one's more transparent it's like me saying um uh an octopus is is uh has more legs than a guitar like all right the fuck is your you know what's your point how did you come up with that well that's i mean it's that you know so that's where you think i don't mean to shit on your tweet i'm sure it's a great tweet rt you favorited it you don't even remember i just air favorited it uh and then the second thing is um if bitcoin fails as a currency or store of value the whole thing goes down and the thought process here is i can't take credit for this idea but i really like um it's around game theory right so if it is the largest most secure today and it ends up being eclipsed by another currency that is given the kind of the king of crypto um you know

label and it becomes the greatest store of value all of a sudden people are less likely to put their assets into that store of value because they're always looking over their shoulder that just another one is going to eclipse it you can't have a store of value if you have two stores of value exactly oh shit that's next level i haven't really thought about that um to tweet that and then and then think about it so how well so yeah i like i think gold was permanently disrupted in 1982 and it was disrupted not by another commodity it was disrupted by uh information so it's not so gold has never made an inflationary inflation adjusted high yep beyond the levels of 1981 1982 like that was the all-time high in real terms which is the only terms that matter so it's gone

up and down over the last 35 years but it's never gotten above those levels and it's not an accident it's not a coincidence that that coincides with the pc revolution um the reason why gold had this store of value quality to it and this and this importance in the global economy is because up and down the silk road a stretch of 5 000 miles of a caravan knew what real silk road not the crypto real thing right but so somebody selling rugs on one end um you know in eastern europe knew how much gold they could get for their rugs

on the opposite end in Africa or in Asia and so it was this thing that if you weren't bartering here's a goat give me

you know give me a stick if you if you weren't bartering then what you're essentially doing is trying to exchange something for something

and gold was like this universal agreed upon thing in 1981 all of a sudden everyone had a PC on their desk instantaneously

around the world everyone knew the price of everything you no longer needed that thing in the middle that was this ultimate last resort exchange vehicle um and i don't so i don't think it's a coincidence that we saw the inflation adjusted high of gold at the same time as the pcu evolution swept the world um and so when we're talking about stores of value yeah i i think i think it's a very good point that you make that you could have this king of crypto kind of thing and then something new comes along, neither will work if you scare people into thinking that,

hey, there actually is no commodity that's a store of value, it turns out. Yeah. All right. Did I blow your mind, man? Nah, we're pushing you farther and farther down the Bitcoin maximalist path there. I'm almost there.

All right. All right. The famous downtown Josh Brown, thank you so much for coming. Thank you, Anthony. This was a lot of fun. All right. Thank you.

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