Jeremy Boynton, Founder of Laureate Wealth Management: How Rich People Invest Their Money
00:00 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. Jeremy Boynton is the founder of Laureate Wealth Management, a comprehensive wealth management for affluent investors generally ranging from $5 million to $25 million in total net worth. We discussed a lot in this episode, including the difference between how rich people and rich, rich people invest their money, what types of alternative investments jeremy is currently excited about why he has been drawn to bitcoin and crypto what his clients are currently saying about the industry and what jeremy believes is necessary for every wealthy
00:37 person in the world to own bitcoin this episode was a lot of fun to record and i hope you enjoy it before we jump in though i want to talk about our sponsors that made this episode possible the first is adams that's right adams.com they're the ideal everyday shoe they're precision fit Lasting comfort, premium materials, and they've got quarter sizes. I wear them every single day. Wakasa and Sidra, the two founders, are from Pakistan. They came to the U.S., and they've built the most comfortable shoe in the world. Whenever you see me, check my feet.
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03:17 let them know that Pomp sets you. eToro.com. So go check out Adams.com, DelphiDigital.io, and eToro.com. Go thank them for making this episode possible. Now let's jump into this episode with Jeremy and let's learn what the rich, rich people are really doing. 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
03:59 All right, guys. Bang, bang. Jeremy's here. Super excited about this. Thank you so much for coming. We got a lot to talk about today because you come from the non-crypto world into the crypto world. Let's start with background first. You started out doing everyone's favorite activity. Tell us what we got started. All right. Well, first, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here. Background-wise, I started as an auditor after getting a degree in accounting and discovered in about six months that I hated it. It took you until after the degree to figure out you hated it? You know, as bad as that sounds, I guess I was naive. I was pretty good at it in school
04:48 and it just didn't really dawn on me that I wouldn't enjoy it after I got out of school because the school life and the actual career life are pretty different. When you talk about being an auditor, are you like flying to the location? You're locked in the room that they've turned the AC up really high to get you out of there quickly? Yeah, more or less. I mean, it was all in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex area, so not really in airports for that.
05:13 But it was insurance companies and very much in the darkest corner of wherever they could put you. Very much stereotypical. I hope that your calculator ran out of batteries or something, right? Yeah. All right. So you did that and then figured out maybe you wanted to do something else. What did you do next?
05:32 Yeah. You know, I wanted to get on the right side of the income statement. I was keenly aware that no matter what I would do with my career, I was always going to be an expense. And I wanted to get on the revenue producing side. I actually took a position to open an office in Austin for a small third party administrator, which runs corporate health plans. So larger companies would partially sell funding, kind of create their own health insurance products. It was a really interesting B2B application to the insurance world and launch an office for them in Austin and had a lot of fun doing it and did well. All right. And so how do you go from doing that to, uh, managing the wealth of, uh, what I think
06:14 we've already dubbed as a poor rich people before we started recording. Yeah. Hopefully I, hopefully my clients aren't listening to this and won't hear me, uh, lovingly referred to them as poor rich people. But, um, you know, I, I kind of reached, um, a point in my insurance world where I had saturated market. We had really conquered it and there wasn't much for me to do. And that's a really bad place for me. I can't be bored. And so I just started looking around and thought, well, you know, I'll laterally transition out of the insurance world into the money game. And I started as a rookie broker, second career wise, and at A.G. Edwards in Austin in the year 2000, just in time for the dot-com bubble. Man, you ran right into the teeth.
06:55 I'm perfect timing. What was it like? So dot-com crash happens. It seems like the world's on fire. what's going on inside the company? You're second guessing yourself, number one, from walking away from really good money to start over. But from a money perspective, it actually wasn't that bad because it's hard enough to convince somebody to let you manage your money when the world is good. You'd think it would be harder when times are bad, but not so much. People get insecure about what they're doing and they're actually more willing to listen. So ironically, even though it sounds like that would be a hard time, it was perhaps maybe an easier time. Yeah. It's interesting. It's like the human psychology of what do I need you for?
07:38 You know, the market just went up 30%. Right. You know, you're going to beat that versus, Hey, the market just went down 30%. Uh, now I'm listening. Now I'm listening. Yeah, for sure. Um, and so after, uh, after you go through the, uh, the first, um, kind of teeth of a, uh, bear market, you ended up actually going through a second one. Yeah. So, you know, halfway in the middle there, we left the firm and started our own. I had a partner and, and so we, you know, we were kind of entrepreneurial already or wanted to launch out on her own. And then we went through the great recession and that one hurt more obviously. Cause by that time I was, you know, somewhat successful, had clients, um, I, you know, I, I could swing hard in the.com bubble and nobody
08:17 didn't have any money that I was actually responsible for. So I didn't have to apologize, but, uh, so that was harder. Uh, and I actually came out of that fairly disillusioned. Uh, you know, it was kind of a, uh, crossroads where I thought I'm either going to leave this business or, or find another way to do it. And, uh, and why a different way to do it? What was like the, the kind of warning signs? You know, I had begun to dabble in alternative investments, even the largest brokerage houses on wall street have, you know, silos of alternative investments. And it was for whatever reason, I was just naturally drawn to that, but I knew that it was, you know, dull, boring spoons. It wasn't, you know, you, you cannot provide big legions of,
09:01 of advisors in the Merrill Lynch's of the world, the UBS's of the world with, um, sharp instruments where they can hurt themselves. In other words, about, it's about capacity. If you can't take, if you can't ingest a hundred million dollars of new capital a month into your strategy, you can't be on a big platform. So that, that, uh, kind of takes away the inherent, uh, positive idiosyncratic risk profiles of what that entire asset class was designed for. Yeah. And so how do you go from there's a different way to do this that might be interesting to actually know how to do it? Yeah, it's a pretty big learning curve. It would seem like a huge learning curve. Basically, I sort of decided that people with real money, 100 million dollar plus money probably weren't managing money the way that I was.
09:47 And I didn't know how I didn't know how to figure that out. But I set about trying to network into the family office world. And you got to understand the family office world doesn't hire brokers or advisors. They put people on payroll in their office. And so those two worlds are pretty exclusive. They don't usually find a way to connect. And so, but I had a connection. There was a family office in Chicago worth a hundred million and another one worth 150.
10:13 And they were patriarchs of families whose children were now adults and they were seeking to empower the second generation of wealth to kind of crystallize a business around taking that quarter billion dollars and inviting other really wealthy families to join them in the classic multifamily office sense of the word. But they'd never done it before. I, on the other hand, had launched my own advisory firm twice and knew how to interface with the regulators. So I kind of talked my way into a job as their chief compliance and chief operating officer in exchange for a seat at their investment table, which which was a just a total blast for four years. Every time they got on an airplane, I went with them and learned all about hedge fund investing, private equity direct deals, real estate direct deals, venture capital. It became the education that I needed on which to form the center of my current practice. Well, there's two pieces here, right? So the first is that there's a big difference in the mentality and kind of the practice of investing depending on the capital pool. So if you're kind of an everyday American, right, the bottom 50% of Americans don't have any money to invest at all, right? They're living paycheck to paycheck, can't come up with 400, 500 bucks emergency payment. They're obviously in a very different situation than everyone else who the other 50% that have capital to invest. But inside of that, I have capital to invest bucket, you get the people who really probably have enough capital to put in the S&P and kind of more passively invest.
11:45 Yeah. Then you get, you know, what I lovingly described as like the poor rich people, which is, you know, kind of $20 million or less, which sounds like a lot of money to everybody. Right. But when you start to look at how do you invest in all these multiple asset classes? Well, many of these asset classes, you can't actually get exposure to them without putting, you know, one to $5 million. dollars. And so if, you know, you got to put $5 million in real estate, you got to put $5 million in stocks, you got to put $5 million in bonds, you got to put $5 million in fixed income. You got online, you run out of $20 million pretty quickly. And so you actually don't have the capital pool to invest like a big institution would. But I think what you're talking about is these family offices that usually it's some sort of generational wealth, right? That they've created either through a business they own or inheritance or whatever. They can invest like an institution, right? They're essentially a small institution. And so the ability to put
12:35 millions of dollars into each strategy and build kind of a diversified portfolio is available to them. And so it's that mindset shift or change that sounds like you really went to go see like, how do I learn that? Yeah. There's a lot to unpack in what you just said. It's really a passion point for me. The laws that regulate the quote unquote private placement world haven't been changed in decades. I mean, 1940, the Advisors Act was really the last major piece of legislation that governs how to qualify for participating, uh, in, in, um, private placement works, private placement deals. So it's kind of interesting that a hundred million dollar families very often create product, um, that is really just meant for, uh, an
13:25 accredited investor, which you, you and I both know means you got a million dollars basically with a couple other caveats, but they've got $100 million, right? Well, you only get 100 slots in an accredited product. Well, they don't need 100 slots. So ironically, they're creating product with 100 slots for 10 or 15 of their friends, and there's all this room on the backside. So if you figure out how to plug into that deal flow network, and you respect them, and you ask good questions, and you get on airplanes, and you go visit them, and you're interested in their projects, you don't actually always have to put one to five million dollars in these deals. As an advisor, I represent 20-ish families and my capital commitment to that deal
14:10 is meaningful to them, even though at a ticket level, it's very often, you know, $100,000 or $250,000. So it's what I discovered in that regulatory framework that allows me to go port that a hundred million dollar thinking down to this five to $25 million world in a very compelling way that, that, uh, doesn't seem like it should work. Yeah. And I think the other piece of this is the, not only how they think about it, but also you in an effort to go learn did probably the most important thing people can do, which is you went and surrounded yourself with people doing what you wanted to do. Right. And I get young kids who, especially like right out of college, who write to me all the time and say, Hey, I want to do X. What, you know, what's your
14:52 advice. And I always tell them, I say, look, first of all, you shouldn't be asking me for advice because I don't know your situation. Some random guy and you're some random guys. How do I give you advice? I don't really know. But one piece of advice that ends up working regardless of who you are, what you want to go do, et cetera, is just go find people who've already done it. And they'll teach you. I tell my kids and I try to practice this myself. It doesn't help you to be the smartest guy in the room. In fact, rather, you really need to find a way to be the dumbest guy in the smartest room because there's upside there. Uh, no upside to being the smartest guy in the room. For sure. Um, sorry. So you, uh, you go for a four years or so, and you're kind of getting
15:29 this crash course, any like really, really special deals that, uh, that stick out in your mind is like, it was, you know, kind of just a crash course in, um, the type of investing or something that you knew nothing about that you got up to speed really quickly on. Oh, I don't know that could pick one out particularly um we did we did a number of hedge fund deals early um and and maybe i can kind of bifurcate them into two different worlds one of them was coming to grips with 100 million dollar wealth being okay with a five percent return uh in a market neutral strategy that was supposed to get 10 but somehow always got five my clients didn't like that so there there was a big, I had to make a shift to understand $25 million absolutely does not
16:15 think like a hundred million dollars. And specifically around the return profile. Oh, for sure. Yeah. I mean, if you make 5% on a hundred million dollars, life's going to be okay. Yeah. People don't actually, even though it's true in some sense of where people don't actually feel that way with 25 as much, not anywhere near as much, but at a deal level to be more specific to your question. We did put some money in a structured product deal right around the big short deal with the mortgage blow up deal. And that was fun to watch. It was really fun to find a thesis that was contrarian to, you know, very complicated product to get your head wrapped around it, find enough confidence to put an allocation in and then just watch it take off.
17:02 Yeah. Those are always fun. Yeah. And what you're talking about there around that return profile, right, is there's a very offensive and defensive mindset difference between $25 million and less and $100 million and more. And this sounds absolutely insane to anyone who is a normal American, right? The average American is like, what are you talking about? But, you know, and I've gotten this crash course over the last two years or so going and talking to a lot of these family offices, et cetera. There's a very big difference. That $25 million family wants to be the $100 million family, right? It's the keeping up with the Joneses in a, you know, on steroids basically.
17:42 The $100 million plus family actually understands I got $100 million, right? Like I want to keep the wealth I have. And so there's a offensive versus defensive mindset. And you would think that for the everyday American, Hey, if I got $25 million, I'm protecting the hell out of that. Right. But it's just, they slowly go from, they have nothing to, they have a million bucks to 5 million bucks to 10 to 25. And they still are looking up saying, how do I get to a hundred? How do I get to, you know, more? Yeah. So I have I have a theory or two about that. You know, you can you can have a good career and cobble together a million, two million, three million bucks. But if you get multiple tens of millions, you did something special. And normally people that do something special have a really strong type a conquer the world mentality. They're taking entrepreneurial risk. They're doing something risky. and, and it's, it is about the wealth generation. You know, people do end up at a hundred, but sometimes that guy, he's the guy who went from 2 million to 25 and now he's at a hundred, but at some point along the way he retires and, and it actually becomes more about the psychology of generational shifts where the second generation doesn't have that. They, they, in fact, they're,
18:55 they don't, they know they don't have it. And, and so it's more of protect and preserve. So So there's a couple of – and there's no stereotypical thing. Every family is different, but these are generational shifts and sort of wealth accumulation shifts that kind of happen in my experience. Yeah. One of the most powerful things somebody said to me early in life was they said, a million dollars is a lot of money, right? And I was like, of course, right? I was an 18-year-old kid. I was like, Jesus Christ, a million dollars.
19:24 Like, I'd do anything for that, right? and uh and they said um if you're a teacher in uh most places right and let's say you earn somewhere between forty fifty thousand dollars a year right which is probably an average salary um if you work for 20 years you made a million dollars right now there's taxes you got expenses or all this kind of stuff but it is achievable if there's a long enough time frame right and so what he basically was explaining to me was like look a million dollars is a lot of money in short bursts, right? If you make a million dollars in a year, if you sell something, make a million dollars, whatever. But over a long enough period of time, even if the salary level
20:02 is low, you can accumulate top line dollars, but there's taxes. And what's your expense ratio, right? If you make 50,000, but you spend 60, well, you're not going to keep anything, right? But if you make 50 and you spend 10, actually, you know, 20, 25 years later, you have a million dollars. I can remember being a sophomore in college thinking, you know, when I'm out of this place in a few years, if I could just make $65,000 a year, life's going to be great. Yeah. Life's changed. It's, um, and it's for multiple reasons, right? There's, there's the inflation, right? So everything around you continues to get more expensive, but also there is, uh, this element of, you don't expect the expenses that you have, you know, as you get older, right? You
20:47 get a family, you get a house, kind of all these things, right? So it's really interesting. All right. So let's talk about kind of after you got that crash course, or you spent four years going and seeing all these things, what did you change in terms of how you worked with your clients on the wealth management side? So they don't have a hundred million dollars, but they're kind of in that five to $25 million range, et cetera. What was the general change that you saw or how did you talk to them differently? You know, uh, it really was, uh, there are a small hand, maybe I'd have to think about three, four, five clients that are holdovers that, that, that crossed that bridge. So it was actually from a hundred to 25. Well, no, no, no. That, that I'm saying people
21:30 that were my clients in the old world that migrated with me. So it was actually more of a turning over of my business. It was a, it was a shift. It was a shift in, in who you wanted to work with? Who I wanted to work with. Interesting. Explain that more. Or who would work with me? Okay. Explain that more. You know, you just start, you know, you just, people tap out, right? I, you know, I think the bond market today, you know, with a two handle, pretty, pretty unattractive place to try to collect a yield. Do I like tax liens? Where, you know, there's a really sharp tax lien strategies you can clip in a really conservative way,
22:05 six, seven, eight, 9% a year with a really secure piece of real estate backing you up, right? Why wouldn't I do that? Like you have to take liquidity risk. You don't have, it's obviously not as liquid, but if you're wealthy enough to have that much capital, you don't need the liquidity, right? So it's a shift from normal, traditional,
22:25 you know, modern portfolio theory, 60, 40 stock bond allocation thinking to, No, we're going to think different and we're going to really evaluate risk differently. We're going to stop trying to pay attention to correlation matrices across large timeframes and start paying attention to what happens to correlation matrices when everything blows up. Because that's really the only time it matters. Nobody cares about correlation when everything's good, just when it goes down. All right. So this is important because I don't think a lot of people think about that nuance. Explain in more depth why that is. Why should people care about the correlation on the downsides or the bad cases and not so much on the upside? Well, because everything's, the whole point of diversification is to protect your capital in negative events. There is no other reason to, if there were never any negative events, you wouldn't need to diversify. You would just be long everything and it would always go up. Um, so the question then becomes, well, if, if I think that, you know, investment A and investment B have a not very strong correlation, and I project that across all timeframes, whether the market's going up, whether it's sideways or whether it's going down, I may miss the fact that in fact, it might be positively correlated in a rising market, but strongly negatively correlated in a, uh, falling market or vice versa. And invariably, what we see is in a capitalist world system, in a capitalist system that we have here in this country, you have everything, everything connect, everything connects to everything else. the high yield bond market connects to the equity market. The globalization means the
24:14 international markets connect to the U.S. markets. The growth and value investors both get their head handed to them when profits go down and people start paying less per profit dollar on the S&P. And so that's when it matters. It only matters. And the more crazy things we do in monetary policy to try to manipulate that game, the harder things adjust when we no longer can. Yeah. And I mean, it's pretty clear that's what's going on, right? Is every time we start to get towards these negative moments,
24:47 central banks do two things, right? They cut the interest rates and they start printing money. And it seems like now we've entered a world where the cutting of interest rates is pretty well understood. There's lots of speculation on what they're going to do at each decision point. But on the printing of money, it's no longer, are they going to do it? Right. It's pretty much, look, we're addicted to this
25:06 and we're going to have to keep some rate of, um, of inflating the monetary supply in order to, um, you know, keep kind of this train going because if they stop, it's going to get ugly pretty quickly. Yeah. I'm not, I'm not afraid or averse to taking directional market risk. But what I'm saying is to have safety in your portfolio, there is no real safe assets in my opinion, in most traditional markets. You have to go find a tax lien investment or a life settlements investment or private debt deals. We love what we call the pawn shop business model, where you go lend somebody money. I don't care whether you pay me back or not. Your collateral is worth, I'll take your collateral and I'll make my money on your collateral or you'll pay me back.
25:55 And there's all kinds of investment opportunities like that. If you do your research, you can clip near double digit yields in a portfolio. Explain, can you give me like an example of one of those? Because I think the private credit space is one that we've spent the least amount of time talking about here. But I've got a very good friend who runs a shop and that's been one of their main focuses recently is private credit. And I'm personally fascinated by if you find the right opportunities, it can be quite lucrative. Sure. It's, you know, so let's say, let's say you've got a, I'm just, let me, I'm just trying to think of the deal. Give me a second here. I'm asking him for deals right now. Come on, help me out with the deal flow. You know, you got a, you got a multifamily project in a good market, you know, call it, I'm making this up, but it's representative, but like in a market like Austin,
26:49 austin texas we love we love austin austin's got really great um demographics yeah it's huge and so you got a deal in austin it's it's poorly managed it's half full the the owner of the property has got deferred maintenance he's been living off of the rents that he should have been pouring back into the property it's starting to circle the train you can tell it's you know he's going to have to hand the keys back to the bank right some other developer uh comes along and he finds it's a value-add play. It's a classic real estate value-add play. He buys the dirt really cheap out of foreclosure, bankruptcy foreclosure. And he capitalizes his deal appropriately, fixes the deferred maintenance, gets it pretty again and re-tenants it. And so
27:34 you go from half full to full. And so there's two ways to win on that. There's the entrepreneurial equity side where you're not going to cover off the ball if you actually execute, but you can also win on that deal by being the debt guy. Like I'm going to give you 50 cents in the dollar. I mean, you, you know, if you, if you're depending on the cap rate, you buy it, there's a way to conservatively lend money on that deal. So that if, and as the senior lender, if he screws up, you take the keys. So, so as long as you lend it for a dollar that is at or below fire sale prices, so that you know that in 24 hours, you can get rid of the property and get your money back. that's a really strong, compelling, asymmetric risk return profile. I get my capital back in
28:18 the worst case event. I get my capital back plus typically 10, 12% interest if I'm right. Yeah. The part to me that as I spend more time with folks in the family office world that I don't think I really understood in pretty much every game you play in life, right? What you want to do is you want to stack the deck in your favor, right? So what that means is I'm going to try to figure out pieces of information before other people. I'm going to try to find something other people can't find, right? I'm going to have a strategy that no one else understands, all these different things. And that's true in sports. That's true in, you know, board games, whatever. That's what family offices, you know, especially the wealthy ones are doing in private
28:56 investing. Yeah. I'll tell you a deal just because I'm thinking about it as you're saying it, but this is an actual real live deal that I'm doing in Austin. Can I get in? No, please. Nobody call on this because it's actually fully capitalized. I don't have, there's no more room, but basically- You guys see me using the podcast for deal flow there? My real strategy has been revealed. No, it's an RV park. So in Austin, there's such a dearth of workforce housing. There's just not enough supply. Cannot keep up with the demand. People are living full-time in RV parks. I didn't believe it at first, but when I heard that, I literally booked a flight, went to Austin and walk to the parks to, to, to go figure. And it's unbelievable to me. These are like what,
29:42 like tech workers. These are more like blue collar jobs. It's, it's, it's both. It's both because there's also this kind of fire, fire, financially independent, retire early, you know, minimalistic millennial ethic, you know, the tiny home movement, that's all big in Austin as well. So you could have an $80,000 tiny home sitting on a pad next to a $5,000 used pop-up trailer. Yeah. Fascinating. It's really fascinating. Well, we basically bought 30 acres of dirt on the edge of Austin and we're developing a new RV park. And it's really hard to get the permitting entitlement done correctly. But basically, if you do, you can create, excuse me, a really interesting gated community with curbed streets and not a blight on the community and provide on 30 acres, 300 housing units for this workforce housing. And the economics are incredible.
30:41 It's six to 700 a month for the dirt rental per pad. Yeah. What's crazy about this? So I know somebody who did this with mobile homes. Now, they didn't buy the dirt. they bought the actual mobile homes themselves and rented them out. One of the things that I had never thought of until I actually went and saw what they were doing is how much more dense the acreage can be when you're renting it out, right? It's kind of like what the WeWork model
31:06 was. Now WeWork went in and took a big space and then cut it up, right? And then rented it out in little slices and made a, well, they were supposed to make some upside or net something there on on doing that same model here you go by 30 acres right when you cut that up if each piece is on a you know per dollar basis higher when you rent it out cut up you're gonna make money yeah we're gonna stabilize this project uh you know we're expecting to break ground late summer but it's about six to nine months in construction time to get it on to get to get the infrastructure laid but we expect to stabilize it at you know mid-teens cap rate and compress into a sale at eight, which, which, which is a fancy way of saying we think we can turn $10 million into 20
31:49 in a three-year period of time. And, uh, the upside is compelling. The downside is pretty minimal. I mean, uh, you know, the dirt is on the edge of Austin. It's on a killer corner in a really busy place. And so, uh, if, if I don't get the right to build the park, uh, I can sell the today from ward and i bought it so so we love those asymmetries yeah and part of this too is you're talking about doubling your money right well we'll get to crypto in a second yeah most people have crypto doubling your money doesn't sound that great right but you're talking about combining upside with risk profile and in that risk profile um the part that you also hinted at that i think a lot of people don't understand is when you have wealth like many of these families
32:34 do times on their side. So if they buy that piece of property and all of a sudden, you know, markets crash, prices go down, they don't get the approvals to build, et cetera. The worst case scenario is they left holding it. We become a land bank on a really good piece of dirt and one of the best markets in the country. And five to 10 years from now, it'll be worth two to three X anyways. Yeah. Right. And so it really comes down to what those liquidity needs are and kind of what the appetite is to the investor. And I think that that's one of the things that the public markets probably don't provide, right? Just given there's daily price, lots of volatility. They got television shows talking about it, right? They've got newspaper headlines, like, you know, all this
33:13 stuff's going on and it's very easy for people to get in their own way and make emotional decisions. But in these private markets, it's a little bit harder to do just given the nature of the assets. I think real risk management, and this is just me talking, but it really comes down to what's your upside downside and what's the probability of those outcomes right if if i have a upside of 2x and a downside of break even um you take that bet all the time right if i have an upside of 2x and a downside of uh lose everything i better be right more than half the time or i'm not making money right so that's why even something as crazy aggressive as crypto is compelling because there's a small right tail risk exposure, two to 5%. It can go to zero.
34:03 I'm okay with that for the trade of it going 20 to 100X. I mean, I'm making that number up, if you have enough upside and you can throw that bet enough times, you're going to compound capital. Yeah. The numbers over the last five years, and these numbers are a couple of months old. So just generally this was correct. Over five years, 60-40 global portfolio gave you 7.2% annualized return. If you had taken half a percent from stocks, half a percent from bonds, put 1% into Bitcoin, you went from 7.2 to 9.2. So 200 basis point upside. If it had gone to zero, you would have lost 20 basis points, 7.2 to 7. So you have a 10 to 1 upside to downside, which is what you're talking about. And by the way, in the worst case scenario where you lose
34:49 it all, that means you lost 1% of your assets, which nobody wants to lose money, but you've contained the risk. And so I think that that's part of this as well is, uh, what scares me personally is I see, you know, you know, folks on, uh, on Twitter who are like, look, I'm a hundred percent. Right. Right. And what I always say to somebody when they ask, you know, is that a good allocation? I say, it's impossible to answer that question. Right. Because guess what? For a 16 year old kid, who's got a hundred bucks earning 3% or 2% on bonds is probably not going to get it done. right and so it's such a small amount of money compared to the earning power you know that's a very different conversation he's not spending it on on on stocks and bonds anyway he's spending it
35:34 on his girlfriend or on video games or of course right and so it's you know i use that as an egregious example but when you start to look at the 25 year old who's got you know a decent job but their first job out of school they don't have any wealth saved up but they also don't have a lot of expenses has a very different risk return profile that they're targeting than you know the 50-year-old who's got three kids that are in college right now, right? High expense ratio, et cetera. And so I think that that's the mentality and the education around these investors to me has been the most shocking thing coming from more of the tech industry into finance. It just blows me away how not even uneducated, just unexposed to what the wealthiest people
36:19 in the world do. Yeah. It's fascinating. It's really more about psychology than the algebra and understanding that psychology and getting people comfortable with taking the right amount of risk. And then that whole conversation goes away from science more towards the art, the more wealthy they get, because at a certain point they can take more risk because they have enough wealth and they can risk more because it doesn't matter to their life or not. So it's just a really fascinating, nuanced conversation that is part of why I get paid. Yeah. Well, I'll give you, uh, give you one more that, um, I didn't understand this, but, uh, there's a, um, a young kid that I know who, uh, who basically, um, I talked to periodically and he said something to
37:05 me, the effect of, uh, I spend too much money. Okay. And, and I said, well, you know, if you want to tell me, tell me the numbers. And so he told it to me and, um, I said, look, you're trying to save $200 extra a month. Right. Which to you sounds like it would be that, you know, change your lifestyle. Essentially. I said, what if I said to you, you gotta make $500 extra a month. So rather than try to cap your spending, is it actually easier just to go make $500 more a month? Right. And, and he basically kind of, you know, faltered and I don't know, you know, how am I going to do that? I said, don't look, it's not, it's an equation, right? That there's inputs and outputs out in this equation. And if you spend more money, then you either got to stop
37:47 doing that or you got to make more money. And the making more money may actually be easier for you. So you don't have to change your lifestyle. And guess what? If you save $200, you make 500 more, you actually end up with more money by making the 500. Right. Right. And so it's kind of trying to expand the, um, the mindset from not always just being a, how do I contract? How do I spend less, spend less, spend less. And it's, well, sometimes growth can actually get you to where you want to go faster than the, let me stop spending. Let me do this. For sure. Totally. Which I think a lot of, you know, of investing, that's how these wealthy families think about it, right? How do I grow what I have? And in many cases, if they're good at it, it's better than if they had a job.
38:26 For sure. Yeah. They can make, they, they often do make significantly more in their portfolios than they do in their wages. For sure. How's crypto fit into all this? So you've got these, wealthy families who are doing all kinds of alternative investing, et cetera. And then are you going to them saying, check out crypto or are they coming to you saying, what the hell is this? It's both. For crypto, it was actually not a client coming to me, but I mean, that's another passion point of mine is I sit down with my clients quarterly and I'm like, here's the numbers, blah, blah, blah. What are you invested in right now that isn't in my portfolio that you're super excited about and every client gets that question every quarter so there's a lot of inbound deal
39:13 flow that that i get to be curious about what's the weirdest one peanut shelling for a peanut shelling operation uh in south carolina like peanut shelling yeah so like taking the peanuts out of the like farmers got the peanut crops and he's tired of getting jacked around by the shelling co-op and he thinks, screw it. I'm going to go start my own shelling deal. And I'm, you know, I get that literally, I got this call from a client who got pitched this deal and I had to start to try to figure out how to get my head wrapped around that. Was it a good deal? It was a horrible deal. It was a great idea. It was a great idea, but it was a bad structure, which happens all the time. Great ideas get killed by bad structures all the time. When you say bad
40:00 structure explain that a little more uh you know it's it's it's the whole pre-money post-money valuation you know how much the company is being sold what is it a is it an equity instrument is a debt instrument you know what what's the risk that i'm bearing for the capital that i'm laying out and and so parsing through the deal docs and figuring out where you are in the capital stack and how much risk versus how much of the upside that that's what i'm talking about structures structures can you can kill a good idea with a bad structure yeah well it goes back to uh you know you name the price i'd name the terms right when you're negotiating with somebody cool i'll pay a billion dollars for your company i'll pay a dollar a day you know for the rest of your life good luck
40:40 so but for crypto it came actually from a friend of mine we were sitting on his deck um just you know winter's slowly waning away a warmer early spring day in 2017 he's like man you got to take a look at this and and i you know he's he's a kind of a trend guy uh uh trades the chicago board of trade so he thinks about the world as a trader uh and i am at that time in 2017 if i remember had gone from like 10 at the start of the year probably jumped like 30 so it's like a 30x right around march time frame yeah he's like i don't know i just put money in and it keeps going up i'm done and i'm like well what is it he goes i don't know. And I can't, I just, that just doesn't hit my, I got to go figure out what it is. So I
41:25 thought, well, I'll figure that out. I'll spend an hour tonight. It took me forever just to figure out. I mean, there was not really any content online that was readily available to even understand and explain it. So this is an important point, right? Which is to somebody who knew nothing about crypto, you don't know where to look. Right. Right. You don't know about the Reddit subreddits. You don't know who to follow on Twitter yet. Right. There's no idea that Coindesk or Cointelegraph, right? These kind of more niche sites exist. What you do is you Google, right? That's exactly what I did. And you find, you know, all kinds of stuff. The Bloomberg article, right? And I just picked a random one, but talking about something in 2014.
42:06 Yes, exactly. I got that article. I know the one you're talking about. Yes. All right. So you go look at it. I look at it and the further in I get, I mean, it's a rabbit hole, man. I got in and it was, you know there's no getting out it just fascinated me to no end i mean the it is a tech i remember distinctly okay true confessions college my senior year i was in a class we had a group project okay will the internet uh survive and thrive and really yeah and so this is 19 19 this is 1993 or 94 Okay. So just when it started to become known publicly in the academic world. Right. And we did our research and we came back at the end and said, no, there's no way. There's
42:53 security risk. Yeah. There's security risks. Who wants to go, who wants to buy shoes online? I got to go try them on. I'm going to the mall. Obviously stupid hindsight. And after a few years and I look back on that and I'm like, wow, that was really dumb. I missed that one. And I'm like, well, that'll never happen again in my lifetime. And I distinctly remember that moment coming back in my mind when I started to understand what crypto is, because it's exactly that moment again. Yeah. What was the part that pulled you in? What was so fascinating about it when you started looking at it? Just intermediating third-party intermediaries from the financial system globally. Yeah. Just a small task. We'll be done by lunch.
43:35 Yeah. Got it. And so what did you do initially once you got interested? Well, initially I thought, well, this is great. I'm going to go, I'll launch a hedge fund. I'll pick coins. Well, then I started doing a little more work and I realized I don't know how to program open source code. I can barely spell blockchain. I don't know cryptography. I couldn't tell you good cryptography from bad cryptography. These are really deep sciences with really smart people that I'm not. I didn't want to be a poser. Actually, there are a fair number of poser hedge funds out there that have none of those credentials that are still somehow smart in the space. Well, in 2017, if you just picked anything, it seemed like at least, right? So the next best thing to me was to resurrect the dying animal of fund of funds. Outside crypto, fund of funds is a dying animal. There's no need for it. It served its purpose for a time, but not anymore. You want to talk about why they're dying?
44:34 Well, sure. Fees, access. There's a natural penetration of capital in the arbitrage space that diffuses returns. I mean, the competition, it's a more crowded fishbowl. There's a number of reasons. So I asked Mark Yusko, one of my partners, they used to have a big funder funds business. And he basically says the same thing as that, it's a dying business. And I said, why? And he responded, he goes, the internet. What do you mean the internet? And he goes, well, it used to be that people would come to a fund of funds and they would say, hey, I have some money. I'd like to get into, you know, good hedge funds, for example. And that fund of funds had relationships, access, right? Do the returns and could pick, et cetera. He goes, now it's, I Google top performing hedge funds. I see that, you know, Tiger Global is really high performer. I go to their website. I click the contact us page and I get a phone number and I call up and say, hey, I have money. Would you take it? Right? Yes. And sometimes they say yes, sometimes they say no. Right. That's true. But but in from a mechanism standpoint, I now know who to give it to. And now I just got to make sure that they're willing to take it. Yeah. But but with crypto, there is relationship equity. There is access. There is a repeat of what happened in the other world. It will run its course and be useless and obsolete sometime in the future as well. But I felt like that's the only way that makes sense for me to do my part in that space because I'm a capital aggregator. I have clients that have money. People come to me to hear about things like this. So we launched a fund of funds.
46:08 Got it. And on the fund of funds side, what are the types of funds that you found most interesting? Is it people who are picking individual liquid tokens? Is it some other strategies? Yeah. So a couple of really big passion points for me on this, and I hope I remember them all. But number one, we are structured mostly as a liquid product. My redemption terms kind of forced me to mostly stay away from VC kinds of deals. Now, that said, even our liquid guys can't help themselves when they come across really enticing VC deals. And we've got side pockets for all of those. So I would even say maybe I'd have to look again, 20 to 30% of the fund ends up going through a VC side pocket kind of a deal. For those that don't know, what he's talking about in terms of redemptions, if you're an investor in the fund and you say, hey, I want my money back, there's usually pre-agreed to terms. So it may be you can redeem every 30 days, but you've got to leave your capital locked up for a year to start or something. And the problem is if you go and take all of the capital in the fund and you invest it in illiquid deals that are going to take three, four, five years to materialize, if everyone comes and says, hey, give me back my money, but the capital is in illiquid investments, you can't actually give them back the money. So there's a mismatch between the liquidity profiles, but by having a liquid portfolio or exposure to liquid assets, it's much easier to get liquidity, which means that then you can serve back those redemptions when necessary. Right. So we purposefully went liquid partly because we feel like the gap between VC and liquidity and crypto is a really compressed timeframe compared to traditional VC to begin with.
47:48 So the alpha that you earn from traditional VC lockups isn't really there in crypto. We think that liquidity comes early enough that you still capture the majority of the beta trade in the liquid markets to begin with. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. So that's our bet is to be liquid. Number two, we want to be with the smartest herd in the room. And we were talking about this a little bit before. crypto, in a sense, I feel like has a bit of an insecurity complex and wants to grow itself up
48:25 and wants to be considered institutional. And so there's a lot of work done to pigeonhole market neutral guys versus, you know, coin pickers versus absolute return. There's just that we're trying to do what happens in normal hedge fund investing in crypto to make it appear like it's becoming more grown up. And I think that's a mistake. I think this is venture capital meets liquidity. It's capture the beta. It's stay with the smartest guys in the room. And you better let those smart guys adjust as the market shifts. I don't want the exposure in 17 to look like the exposure in 18 or 19 from that guy if he's seeing things differently. So I don't want to pigeonhole people. I just want wide mandates with the smartest guys in the room. And I want a very
49:17 small concentrated number, most traditional fund of funds, 20, 25 funds, you know, we're, we're in five currently anywhere from three to seven, but beyond that utilitarian value of that extra manager, uh, from a statistical analysis standpoint, it's useless. Yeah. Well, and also in crypto, um, there's not that many funds in terms of like the denominator. And so therefore, Or if you just say, hey, some are really good, some are okay, and some are bad, the number in the really good category is just going to be a much smaller number as well. Very small. We think there's maybe eight or nine world-class funds in the game, and we're in half of them, and the other half we've chosen not to be because they're redundant. Can I get you to name one?
50:06 They're on my website, so you can have all of them. So it's Metastable, Multicoin, Hazur, Digital Global, and BlockTower. All horrible people. Yeah. I know all of them and they're just the worst. I know some of you are listening. Just you guys are so bad that I want to be your friend. No, they're all great.
50:28 And I think if you look at all of them, they all have nuances to the strategy, but they all have a general thread between what they're looking to invest in, the structure, the stage, et cetera. Um, so it makes a lot of sense. Yeah. How do you talk to your clients about it? Very big picture, long-term. I mean, literally every time it's like, look, this is the riskiest thing in your portfolio. Right. I mean, first of all, we launched the fund January 18th, so it's down right there. They've lost money. So we, we slowly add more capital, but basically we're like, look, this is, this is high risk. It can go to zero. Um, but this is, you know, world changing technology that if, if we're even half right, um, you'll be glad you own
51:15 this in 10 years. What's the general sentiment when they're sitting there, they're about two years into the trade, right. Depending on when they came in, uh, they're down, but there's not the like mass hysteria probably of like late 2018, you know, December when it was down around $3,000 Bitcoin price, et cetera. What's the general sentiment when you talk to the clients you have today? Yeah. It's interesting because I think that question is never really asked. It's never really confronted with my clients because my clients in an hour and a half dinner meeting will spend five minutes on crypto, five minutes on the RV park, which is going really well, five minutes on the biotech strategy, which we're not going to
52:00 cover off the ball. As long as I've got a narrative of reasonable, reasonably differentiated ideas, some of which are working, some of which are not, but all sort of heading in the direction that I promised them we'd try to go. I really have, I have zero. And that's because of the sizing in the portfolio. Totally. Yeah. We're not. If it was 50% of their portfolio, there'd be a lot of questions, right? If it's 1%, then obviously it's a whole different conversation. Yeah. And let's take on a spectrum of your clients, right? So the most sophisticated when it comes to crypto and the least sophisticated, what are the main differences there? Is it just time spent educating it? Is there a demographic difference? So younger clients are more inclined to be interested and older clients aren't. What do you see between the big differences between those sophistication levels? No, that's interesting. I, it's, it's really just, um, it's really, I don't think it's an age thing. Most of my clients probably do tend to be older just because most to get money, it takes time to get money. Right. So, uh, I can't, I can't say that's a lesson for all the 20 year olds out there. Right. Who, who are all like, I want a hundred million dollars. It's like, look, very, very few 20 year olds in the world ever had a hundred million dollars, let alone are going to have it in the future. I don't think there's a correlation on the age issue, or at least in my limited data set, I don't think there is.
53:21 But I think it's a personality issue. It's really a, you know, some people just don't care. And for whatever reason, they got money and they need somebody to manage it. And they just don't care. They don't care to care. Other people get fascinated by technology. There's an element of curiosity that they don't need. They're not challenging me to know.
53:43 they just, they like to, they'd like to learn new things and neither one of those is right or wrong. Yeah. Do you see any of the clients who didn't have financial exposure, they get financial exposure, whether they do it or with you guys, and then you see them lean into, um, kind of paying attention more and learning. Cause one of my theories here is like this whole get off zero idea, right? It's like, look, I don't care if you've got a penny or you got, you know, a lot of money in uh exposed to any asset right it had to be crypto just anything you start paying attention a little bit more than for sure right and and i think that most of the wealth managers that i've talked to such that they're like look it's probably been the best thing we can do to
54:23 get these people to pay attention is half a percent i totally agree i completely agree it just and that's not just a crypto idea that's every every major we are for full risk on like embracing risk capital, we are bullish for 10 years on three things, biotech, crypto, and workforce housing. If we can go around the country building more RV parks, if we can press into crypto and biotech, we think those are... And so just getting a little piece of capital in the portfolio, start small, put it in the portfolio. It's a talking point when we get together every quarter. That's... I 100% agree with your thesis. Why biotech? Oh man, this is my latest super exciting idea that I just can hardly contain myself about.
55:12 It's very much in some ways like crypto. Okay. The old school, hang with me as I explain this, the old school biotech IPO was an exit, right? You got an idea in a university, they do a lab rat model, it goes well, they raise a seed round, they get the phase one, the safety trials. They go well. Phase two, you go through this process. You're phase three. The data is not in yet, but it looks promising. And you're at the end of the deal. And it's in the privates. It's in the venture capital world. And they go IPO. And it's a binary outcome. It's either the phase three works. The FDA says, yes, you turn the revenue stream on and you make a ton of money or something happens. It doesn't work and it goes to zero and you wasted
55:59 uh, all that private money. That's the old school biotech IPO. Not today. Okay. What's the difference? Today, biotechs go in public preclinical trials. Why? Because they can. Because there's the ability in the markets, the access to capital. So, so you're getting, uh, tickers trading on wall street that are a lab rat model and an idea. The FDA has not allowed them to go into clinical trials, even for a safety trial yet.
56:29 Now, you might think, well, that's crazy. That's horrible, risky. Actually, it's the opposite. Why? Because there's a lot of companies that go from lab rat model to phase one. There's a lot of companies that go from phase one to phase two. There's fewer, but many that go from phase two to phase three. Very few companies commercialize, right?
56:51 So if you're in a bid-ask spread, public market, liquid world, and you come to market and say, guess what? FDA said, yes, we're going into the clinic for phase one. Guess what? We came out of the clinic. We didn't kill anybody, hurt anybody. We're going to be allowed to dose this in actual efficacious manner to see if our regimen, our therapeutic regimen works. And there's multiple value creation points along that journey where you can win even if it fails. That were before relegated to a private world, they're now being discovered in public markets. And so is the argument that you're now sharing the upside from the private market into the public market so more people can participate? It is that. But it's even more about the fact that that's the backdrop in the context of how it's happening. But Wall Street doesn't know how to deal with that. Wall Street analysts are not venture capital scientists. And you cannot understand the idiosyncrasies of these deals without having venture capital science. So the aha moment is, and venture capital scientists don't want to be on an analyst desk making a Wall Street analyst earning. They want to be going and creating companies. So there's this natural bifurcation of those two worlds. Well, if you find a bridge, if you find access to solid VC science who can look at those public tickers and say, yeah, this is massively undervalued.
58:16 I mean, they've been in the clinic now for four months. They're due to report phase one in three months. And if they haven't reported any, they're bound to, they're required to report negative adverse events if they happen. They haven't reported any. The chances that the phase one turns out, thumbs up, get better every day, there isn't an adverse. Things like that don't get well understood. And so the bottom line is we just figured this out over the last six to eight months, and I launched a liquid biotech strategy tapping into this VC research on October 4th, and it's just stupid money. Yeah, it's really good. Yeah, the part to me that's really interesting is you're seeing it in biotech like you just described. Crypto allowed better access to capital for innovators. And I think that this trend across the board is going to continue as just there's this pent up demand in people want access to what used to be private investments that at some point kind of the dam breaks. It's the only place, biotech is the only place where I'm not an alpha hater. I actually think there's a, right now there's an arbitrage, there's a reproducible model where alpha actually matters.
59:37 There's a corner of the liquid stock market in biotech, in these really small cap biotechs, where it's completely unorganized. The market is anything but efficient. And real understanding of the venture capital science involved gives you a massive, massive alpha trade. access to information yeah all right um before we wrap up what uh what do you think your clients are um kind of headed to over the next two years when it comes to crypto is it more of the same do you think that more of them lean in are there things that happen in the crypto industry that you think um you know touch other parts of their portfolio like how do you think about i got a set of clients here's the profile that they are there's this thing crypto like how do those two things interact moving forward. Yeah. So you're asking, do I anticipate scaling my allocation higher? Would you say? So you could scale it higher. You could scale it lower. There could
01:00:34 be the introduction of, hey, we want to start taking parts of their cash position and holding in stable coins. There could be tokenization of real estate or stocks. I mean, there's a whole bunch of stuff that could happen here. How do you think about that? I got you. So in the two-year timeframe, I would say probably will stay put. I really am pitching this as a 10-year idea. I don't know. I mean, it could be in two years from now, it could be that everybody in the world understands that crypto is the new thing and it's already 10x. I don't know that I see. I'm not actually counting on that. I think there's going to be an inflection point moment at some point in the next five or 10 years. I just don't know what it is. And I wouldn't want to say that I think
01:01:20 it's going to be inside two years. So with that risk reward profile, we have the bet where we want it. As I gain new clients organically, we'll add capital to the funds through new relationships. But the allocation 2% to 5% model is really where it needs to be. Now, Now, if we're lucky and it does go 20X in two years, totally different game. And I don't even know what we would do at that point, because the trade could get better from there. So one of my questions is always, let's say you have 2%, right? All your clients are at 2% and you see a 10X. So now 20% of client assets, do you rebalance or do you keep it?
01:02:03 Yeah, I'm not sure. It's probably a good answer, right? is you need more data to understand where you are in the market, et cetera. But it's very interesting because when you have the asymmetric assets, you could go from, it was 2%, now it's 10, 20%. So yeah. So like number one, I will not, I'm not ever going to be the actual capital manager. It will be through my managers. I don't want to have to make a choice on a coin. I don't have the skillset. So this is always going to be a manage the smartest manager kind of mentality. But if we get a 10X run up from here and it looks like 17, where there's no killer app. It's speculation.
01:02:44 I hope that we can have the wisdom to think about how to protect that. If it's the opposite and Fidelity and Schwab and all of these gargantuan monolithic financial beasts that run our world today, adapt it and adopt it. There are many killer apps in the industry. is it's not a speculative bubble. It's actually an EBITDA measured bubble, if you will. I never heard that. I like that. EBITDA measured bubble. Yeah. But it's a different conversation, right? Totally. Kind of what you do there. Absolutely. Are there any companies in crypto that really stand out? You named some of the funds that you like, but any companies that you just think done a really
01:03:24 good job? I probably don't have much on that. I mean, I'll tell you that we have an allocation to NVIDIA. And that's for the crypto exposure through like the GPUs or just computation in general? Both. It's interesting, both. Yeah, we think that,
01:03:42 and it's a small allocation, not in the fund, of course, just in the portfolio. We think that space has multiple ways to win over long. Obviously, you're embracing, you know, risk on that trade as well. But beyond that, I am not,
01:03:57 I'm generally not a stock picker. I'm not a technical- Yeah. It's an interesting way to think about the crypto industry, right? In the sense of taking a look at, okay, there's public stocks that are available. What are the ones that have exposure? Most of the quote unquote blockchain public stocks actually are, that's not their DNA, right? They kind of backed into it. They changed their name, all kinds of crazy stuff. But somebody like an Nvidia that is supplying the picks and and shovels right we think it's we think it's the classic picks and shovels idea yeah but i'm not recommending the stock i haven't even looked i don't even know where it's trading today so
01:04:36 um what is uh the best book you've ever read the most important book see i did my research and i knew you were gonna ask you i've got these notes like uh all right let's see your notes you at least you came in here without paper i'm not gonna call the person who walked in here one time with six pages of notes and i made them throw them in the trash and not look at them no you know i love to read uh i didn't used to but i i uh do you read or you listen no i'm an audible guy because i can go you know and i like to work out so like it kills two birds with one so i can go one and a half speed crunch through a lot of material and what do you can you run and listen to the audio book oh yeah can you lift and listen to the audio book yeah you're like i i do the same thing i don't
01:05:17 listen to music anymore at the gym i don't either i used that used to be oh but it really doesn't do me much good uh i mean they're anyways uh what do you do at the gym like in a for a workout oh yeah i'm like uh i'm uh every other day um chest back try by shoulder core so it's a full body except lower body and then on the opposite days in the summer it's a four mile run in the winter it's a 30 minute 10 mile bike okay that's like a real workout you know it gets me sweating yeah well it takes like an hour yeah yeah it's uh i'm i'm just asking people what they do for workouts because some people come in here and i'm like yeah person they work that out you actually look like you work out but i'm gonna start calling bullshit it's sanity it's a sanity
01:06:07 check for me i can't so you go seven days a week or you do six no so i'm getting older i'm 48 and and every week and a half i have to take an extra like extra like extra day off yeah it's um do you anything diet wise yeah i'm uh not so i like to think about it in terms of just a lifestyle habit okay you know so it's really not a binge thing it's a very low car low to no carb one and a half meal a day like high protein i had chicken salad before i showed up here okay that's all i've had to eat just a little bit of chicken salad today and i'll have a reasonable dinner but low to no carb so high protein high plant you know a simple carb no breads and sugars but complex carbs you you know vegetables tons of those got it so just really staying away from i'm assuming sugars and
01:06:54 and the breads yeah and then if you can eat protein stuff yeah it's um it's interesting because uh i was recently looking at if you take two diets that are on the opposite end of the spectrum so you take the like vegetarian vegan you know whatever variation you want and then you take like the keto right both of them are optimizing for quote-unquote health but if you actually read into what type of health they're optimizing for one is optimizing for what i would consider more short to medium term health and the other uh one of the you know um proposed benefits of the vegetarian diet is uh longevity yeah right and so it it really becomes this thing of there's no silver bullet right you know there's different diets for different people um it also matters what
01:07:37 physical exercise you're doing or trying to build mass lose weight you know all these different things you just gotta get you gotta you gotta start listening to your body the older i get the more i listen to my body i didn't used to i used to just bludgeon my body with workouts and i can't do that as much anymore but it's it's kind of a interesting fun little hobby to to tweak it as you get older but yeah but on your book deal all right i actually have some thought about this because i i knew that was one of the questions that you like to ask um you know if you come up with a bad uh a bad suggestion you're gonna get actually destroyed on twitter now you thought about it no i mean so so i read books uh really for mostly like three different purposes okay
01:08:15 right so i don't read to get smarter i mean i do other things to get smarter all right i don't i don't really think that um i'm a skeptic i'm i'm very uh my my natural comfort is to be a linear thinker okay i'm pretty i feel like i'm pretty decent at that what i need to do is um i need to be challenged at learning how to dream better. I need to have an imagination. I did a very poor job of managing money for clients early in my career because I was the world's consummate skeptic. I could pick apart any deal and tell you 100 reasons why it was the worst deal in the world. That doesn't really help people. So I had to learn how to get imagination. So I read to be inspired i read to you know more uh non-fiction i'm assuming totally non-fiction but you know
01:09:08 the truth is stranger than fiction i love the the biographies that are just crazy stories uh and it could could have to do with anything but if it's a true story and it's inspiring i like it you know what are the best ones oh there's a ton of them i you know you give me one i'll give you one let's see who runs out all right i'll give you two um uh the immortal life of henrietta lax okay heard that i i have not i haven't read it but i'll put that on the list so the she is a girl who lived in the 30s or 40s uh without giving the punch line there are more living cells of her body alive today than there were when she was alive and helax is the backbone of every scientific experiment that's done interesting and it it's just it's a crazy story
01:09:56 henry the immortal life of henrietta blacks henrietta okay uh sam zell am i being too subtle okay he uh basically he was all in real estate and one day said i'm probably over indexed i should diversify so i'm gonna take 50 i'm gonna go put it in take companies public and then all of a sudden he saw a reet for the first time and said wait a minute i am an expert in real estate i'm an expert in taking companies public i should do that and next thing you know he built the 40 billion dollar largest read in the world and sold it to blackstone who i'm gonna cheat and say two books steve schwartzman just wrote a book and in uh his book uh it's called what it takes he describes uh when he starts what became blackstone uh they ran an ad in the wall street journal and thought
01:10:45 all these people were gonna call nobody calls other than to say congratulations on your new company and he's like why don't you give me some business like ah we'll continue for you know later gets a knock at the door and there's a guy with a motorcycle helmet and uh he thought he was the food delivery guy he's like i know this guy was and uh guy says uh you know i'm here to talk to steve schwartzman because that's me who are you he goes uh my sister said i should come see you and uh literally had his bike chained up outside you know the way the story goes and uh guy in the motorcycle helmet walks in and there's no furniture so they're supposed to be sitting on the ground and they just talk for a couple hours and that's how steve schwartzman met sam zell
01:11:22 that is fascinating what's the name of that book what what it takes by steve schwartzman yeah i need to read those 30 years later uh blackstone bought sam zell's uh wow reet and so it's just it's interesting how the world turns all right what's your next one red notice it's a classic man i love that one love that book uh i it's probably it's up there it's my top three most recommended books over the last couple of years to people uh because it is it's unbelievable it's totally unbelievable dude this like you i have seen putin on tv mention this guy's name and i'm like that's that's not so those that don't know there's a book called red notice uh it's about a guy bill browder who is american investor who went to russia did a bunch of uh investing things
01:12:09 turned sour and uh if you've ever heard of the magnitsky act here in the u.s that sanctioned a bunch of russians uh he's basically the reason for it and so uh it's uh it's such a crazy story that i actually saw on uh twitter um this is maybe a couple months ago whenever it was uh he was in spain and he got picked up by the spanish authorities under the red notice right so red notice is basically like a uh fbi i did not know this whatever and he's only for a couple hours and then he got released but uh they were kind of just you know making sure whatever and and it was a very stark reminder of like the book's interesting, right? And the book is educational and it's, and it's entertaining and all this stuff.
01:12:51 It's real life for this guy. Yeah. Right. That's crazy. Just finished Tara Westover's book educated. Oh, so, okay. You're the second person to mention this. Is it good? I actually thought it was really good. Really good. Okay. Highly unusual. Did you read, um, oh man, I'm going to forget Ashley Vance's book. Is it Ashley Vance? Yeah, Ashley Vance. The book about like people in West Virginia. All right. Tell me another one. I'm going to find this book for you before we end up. Oh, man. You know, so completely different. Not quite as inspiring, but the closest that I get to trying to read for being smart. I did read House of Morgan. I read there's a new Churchill biography. These are both massive 50 hour books. But I like historical. These are things where you basically deal with the financial system in this country for 150 years. And you see generation after generation of people dealing with stuff that we're probably going to deal with again at some point. And it's just an interesting context. I think it's helpful just to have some background.
01:14:01 Context. Yeah. The book's called Hillbilly Elegance. Oh, I did read that one. Yeah, it's really good. um all right so i got one last suggestion then we'll talk about aliens sure we um on uh so it's not a book it's documentary have you seen uh the men who built america no oh man if you like the house of morgan stuff you got to go watch this so it uh it was on television when it first came out
01:14:22 you can now either buy it uh or you can even there's something like youtube you can kind of patch together the different sections um it is an eight part series from the history channel and it starts with um i think the first one starts with is uh carnegie then it has rockefeller jp morgan um and it's got like two or three others i forget edison's in there uh tesla etc and it basically goes through the story of essentially the industrial revolution and what each one of those players was doing and kind of how america got built and um you find in fact, like I'll give you one detail that I didn't know. And, um, now having watched it's just here to my brain. So John Rockefeller was looking for oil very quickly realized rather than
01:15:12 me be the guy, you know, the idiot poking the ground for the oil. Why don't I just become the refiner? Cause then I can make sure I have a more sustainable business. And then he struck a deal. Um, I think it was with, uh, maybe it was Vanderbilt. I think, uh, he struck a deal with, um, and said, Hey, I will give you access to my oil so that you can, uh, put on your rail cars. And now you have a business, right? Because you're going to have all of my oil. And at some point along the way, um, they basically start to, um, you know, twist his arm and say, Hey, well, you need our rails to get your oil anywhere. And so they say, you're going to pay us more. And at some point there's basically a lockout where they say, you can't use our rails anymore unless you, you
01:15:50 know, do what we want you to do. And so he is a very creative and ambitious person says, well, what if i just created pipes and then he created the oil seriously and so the way that it was out of necessity right the innovation came from the necessity of he no longer could put his oil in barrels on rail cars and so instead what he did was he said well i'll just build oil pipes and i will literally pump it uh or take it from the refineries push it through these pipes and i'll get it to where it needs to go and now you now basically you lost my business and you can't stop me that's really fascinating and so there's example after example you know as you start to realize this there's a reason why yeah jp morgan is a big name right rockefeller is a big name they
01:16:33 did a lot of stuff that was that's that's the that's the antithesis of that skepticism i was telling you about trying to grow out of yeah personally so uh the men who built america are aliens real or not this one is another one that i i knew you you might ask i have kind of a maybe a backward answer for you okay uh i actually think the entire question is a backdoor question to your your your view of the world of course i've said it many times the reason why i ask questions it tells you how people think yeah meaning uh is there intelligent design or not okay what do you think origins of the universe type of deal because if if you your answers are going to naturally bifurcate coming down or you would think your answers
01:17:20 naturally barricade coming down that so i you know i'm i'm in the intelligent design uh camp i'm in the you know traditional judeo-christian view of the world yep um so that would naturally probably put me in the camp that says no they can't exist but i i'm actually not there i would say um you know in the national in the natural judeo-christian view of the world the pinnacle of creation is man, which would mean that to have other life forms evolve ahead of us wouldn't really necessarily coexist. And I would actually subscribe to that. But the universe is a big place. So there's no reason why God could not have superintended an evolutionary process to culminate with man and have aliens on 5 million planets in the universe.
01:18:13 I got a stat for you for the next time you're at the trivia night at the local bar. How many planets are there out there for every grain of sand on Earth? Wow. How many planets per grain of sand? In the universe. Well, clearly it's more than a one-to-one ratio. I have no idea. 10,000.
01:18:39 10,000 to one. 10 000 planets for every grain of sand on earth yeah that's see so that's that scares the shit out of it is it's a it's a fairly myopic view first of all it's fairly myopic it's it's actually normal for judeo-christian worldview people to be myopic in their thinking uh but you know the facts are it's fairly myopic to think that that we're we're it yeah so that stat comes from uh there's a new netflix explained series on uh they don't use the word aliens because that's too uh taboo so they use like uh artificial and you know uh or uh extraterrestrial life or whatever terminology they use but that that was in there and the other thing is i read uh right now there
01:19:27 are two galaxies that are colliding and we are going to hit them in like two or four billion years and i'm out man i shut my computer i gotta go do something else yeah it's interesting stuff because uh i also saw there's uh there's meteors uh right now coming towards earth uh and this is supposed to be you know one of these that like hey we should be paying attention to yada yada whatever and uh i was looking i say look whether they're right or not we have no way to check we Either way, if you're atheist, you're agnostic, you're Christian, you're Hindu, you're Buddhist, it ultimately comes down to not science. Nobody's there to observe how this stuff happens. So you're a man of faith, whether you're a man of faith believing in Jesus or in the fact that there is no God.
01:20:21 One or the other. Either way. That's a great way to look at the world. What one question do you have for me to finish this up? What is the most exciting, interesting, non-crypto investment that you are stoked about, like right now, that you cannot? That we've done? No, that you're into, that you're like, right now, I'm not going to cover off the ball. This is like, this is the coolest thing.
01:20:47 I. Maybe there's nothing. I don't want to say the name of the company because I don't know what they're comfortable with me saying or not. but um there well there's a couple of ways to answer so first somebody said to me i was this guy bruce fenton who came he's an ancient alien researcher love you bruce but i'm only 80 of the way there with you um and he said look every human has two questions the first is are we alone right meaning is there extraterrestrial life and two is what happens when we die right every human at some point in life we'll think of those two things uh i believe that here on earth answering one of
01:21:25 those two questions would be one of the greatest you know achievements in life sure right now i don't think that somebody's going to be so what happens after we die right it's just conceptually would be very difficult to do along those lines though um we invested in a business that uh scientifically has figured out how to freeze your brain and what i mean by that is um it essentially uh in a very over generalized non-scientific way delivers cryogenic freezing technology to your brain at the point of death so as you're dying puts pushes this in there through this oxygenated process freezes your brain with 100 structural integrity by doing that what the belief is, is that they can actually freeze your synapse connections, what exists in those
01:22:15 electrical connections, experiences, knowledge, right, emotions, all this kind of stuff. So if I can basically salvage and preserve the motions, the consciousness, all this kind of stuff, can I then take it and upload it to a computer? And so therefore, imagine if we had Thomas Edison's brain and we can feed it new problems right so not so much in the there's some people who say oh this technology would be great because when i come back right so there's that kind of right you know more sci-fi stuff right there's some people who just say hey look by being able to do this we can do research right so there's kind of you know directly applicable science or this kind of middle ground of okay i'm not there yet on like humans come back right and i'm not there
01:22:58 on like i can cryogenically freeze you and then revive you later but i do see this world where I can essentially take what's in your head, put it into a computer, and then I can't necessarily evolve it from there, but I can feed new problems to it and use the frameworks, mindset, you know, all this kind of stuff that you have. To me, I don't know if that's the right answer, but this combination of taking human brain and intelligence and combining it with computational power, I think a lot of people are thinking about it. How do I take the computer and put it into the brain. Yeah. Right. And augment it that way. And you're doing the opposite. This company is doing it opposite, but just like either direction, I think is super interesting
01:23:39 because you could say, how cool would it be if I don't have, you know, I had to look up hillbilly LV, the book, right? Yeah. Well, if I had a chip in my brain, I could just immediately tell you the big inflection point in human history. Well, that's cool. The common thread is, you know, the human genome project, I think is nearly 20 years old now. And the, the order of magnitude that that mapping has done in clinical trials is breathtaking over the last 20 years, but it's an asymptotic curve into the future. The next 20 years are going to be by an order of magnitude larger than the last in terms of the scientific advances that we can do in the human body based on our understanding of the human genome and our ability to construct
01:24:23 uh, trials, uh, accordingly. It's, it's, it's a, it's one of the reasons, it's one of the reasons why we're massively bullish biotech in general. Yeah. It's, um, we know more about the surface of Mars, I think, than we know about our own oceans. Right. There's same thing could be said about the human body. We, we know a lot. We don't know nearly as much as we probably should. So yeah, a lot of work to cut out. All right. Listen, this is one of the longer ones I've done in a while so i appreciate it this is uh the longer we go the weirder it gets so if you're if you're still listening you're you're a trooper um actually if you're still listening the first three people to tweet at me with the words uh aliens are at the end of the podcast i'll send
01:25:06 you something special to see who uh who made it all the way here but uh thank you so much for uh for coming to do this and we're gonna have to do this again maybe i'll come do it in uh in chicago it'd be fun it'd be blessed i appreciate it thanks for having me it's a lot of fun for sure hey everyone pop here if you like this episode of off the chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the apple spotify and other podcast charts please do us a favor and rate review and subscribe to review simply go to the off the chain homepage scroll down until you see the five blank stars taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts i appreciate you listening
01:25:44 and see you next time on off the chain
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