The Pomp Podcast - John McCorvey, CEO of Stonegate Global Financial Group: From Cannabis to Crypto

Episode Date: April 26, 2019

John McCorvey is the CEO of Stonegate Global Financial Group. In this conversation, John and Anthony Pompliano discuss alternative assets, global asset allocation, cannabis and medical marijuana, Bitcoin and crypto, paying NCAA athletes, and what it was like to win a national championship playing for the legendary Bobby Bowden. ----- BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. ----- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

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. John McCorvey is the CEO of StoneGate Global Finance. In this conversation, we discuss alternative assets, global asset allocation, cannabis and medical marijuana, Bitcoin and crypto, paying NCAA athletes, and what it was like to win a national championship playing for the legendary Bobby Bowden at Florida State. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you do as well. As many of you know, crypto investors store their digital assets on exchanges or in cold storage for long-term safekeeping. However, this strategy doesn't help them grow their investment

holdings or build overall wealth. With the new BlockFi interest account, users can now securely store their Bitcoin or Ether at BlockFi and receive 6% annual interest paid monthly in cryptocurrency. 6% is an absurdly high rate. It's the best rate in the industry. I highly suggest you go check out BlockFi.com slash Pomp. Again, that's BlockFi.com slash Pomp to sign up and start earning crypto today. 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. Bang, bang, guys. I am here with John. We got a whole bunch of stuff to talk about. So thank you very much for coming. Hey, thanks for having me. Absolutely. All right. Let's get to your background before we get into all the investing, and smart people stuff. You grew up where? I grew up in the Midwest and down south. My life's mission at that point was to play college football at Florida State. All right. And you ended up at Florida State playing football. Yes. This is what, early 90s? Yeah. Early to mid 90s. Okay. I was there 92 through 96. Okay. So 92 to 96, Bobby Boundit

is uh the coach right uh absolute legend in his own right we'll get to him in a second yep um what is it like playing college football at one of the powerhouses in the mid 90s like it was amazing i mean it's you you can't describe it words really can't describe i mean first of all you're you're playing for you know the legendary coach bobby bowden amazing uh amazing experience Mark Richt was our offensive coordinator. John Eason was our wide receiver coach. I played tailback and wide receiver. A little bit hard to see the playing field behind work done.

One of the most prolific tailbacks to ever play the game. But, you know, we had guys like Charlie Ward and Derek Brooks and Peter Boulware. Just, you know, I think absolutely just killing people out there. And we, you know, I would say probably half of our team went to the NFL and just, just amazing, amazing experience. And, uh, uh, it was, it was a time in history where, um, I believe kind of college football evolved from where it was in sort of the seventies and eighties to more modern football, where you had guys that were just getting bigger, faster, stronger. And I think Florida state was one of the schools where that, you know, just,

we just attracted all of that talent and it was, it was insane. So it was pretty much Florida state and Miami University, those two schools just started doing things differently, was the best way to kind of put it. And what was it like playing for Bowden? He's a legend in terms of wins and losses. I think everyone knows he's a good coach, but from a player's perspective, what was he like? I mean, first of all, just the history and tradition and the legend.

And if you look at the story of the history of Florida State football under Coach Bobby Bowden. There was actually a film produced called The Bowden Dynasty. Definitely go out and pick that up. Download that. That was an amazing, amazing story. And it talks about his life's journey. And, you know, he's a man of faith. He's a Christian, believes in God. And he kind of goes through sort of his life. And I forgot the health condition that he had when he was a little boy. But in the documentary, he walks into his bedroom and he points to his bed and he says, you know, I knelt right there in front of my bed on the floor and I said, God, you know, I would love to serve you. And if you'll allow me to live, then I'd love to serve you through

football. And then it kind of continues on the documentary, continues on his journey. And he takes Florida State, who was an absolute terrible football program in the 70s and just really put the institution on the map and the football program, obviously, you know, sort of the rest is, is, is history as they say. For sure. And was he somebody who would like, if you guys were screwing up, he'd come in and yell and scream, or he was more kind of everyone just feared him and he didn't have to do too much yelling and screaming. Yeah. You're going to push me to do my Bobby Bowden impersonation. I'm going to try to hold off. Uh, and I could tell you story after story. I haven't, I had the, I had the privilege of introducing him to my wife

about two years ago. He was speaking at a charity event at, uh, um, the, uh, college football hall fame in Atlanta. And, um, and so funny story, he says, he turns to me and he looks at, he looks at my wife and he looks at me and he points at her and he says, son, how in the hell did you talk this pretty girl into marrying you? I was like, well, coach, it's because I played football for you. So no, but he was, you know, just absolute, um, uh, you know, it's like your, it's like your grandfather, it's, he's a combination of, you know, God being on the field, your grandfather and you know one of the best coaches ever and from a from a mentorship perspective and you know he always brought the message of faith uh he really believed and uh as a matter of fact

there's a there's a there's a social media group called bobby's boys that we're all members of so we we can all stay connected and it's you know his you know some of his family is connected on there with us and and they just tell story after story about how you know he sacrificed time with with us uh so that he could mentor you you boys and uh and that was his life's passion you know that was uh what he saw as as how he could make a difference and how he could bring you know the message of christ to you know to uh to the world and to us boys and give us guidance so those are the you know things that that you take away from that experience now the on the field stuff the football all of those things amazing incredible experiences and yeah you had you guys won a

national championship so that's that's fun yeah absolutely so it was interesting also just that season uh i forgot how many total teams of our uh during that season that we actually blanked teams so it was like you know 40 to nothing and 50 to nothing and so on and so forth we had an amazing amazing defense and just uh just incredible talent out there um at every position it was it was a an incredible experience to be there it really was yeah i i uh so i played football in college as we're talking about before and um in the video games madden right kind of the 21 rule so for those that don't know when you're playing these video games a lot of uh yeah a lot of people basically say if you get up three touchdowns or 21 nothing uh or you're at any point in the game

up 21 it's over right like we're just gonna stop and let somebody else play and uh i remember being on the sidelines and uh whether we were up 21 or down 21 everyone but hey man can we just stop right we can check out after the third quarter yeah 40 to nothing 50 to nothing is uh is a whole another world yeah um again just an incredible program and and and you know going up 30 40 50 to nothing we we were you know we had second string guys in there and third string guys and so forth so it wasn't like we were leaving our first stringers but there was just such a huge depth of talent yeah um it's amazing great recruiting uh great coaches it was just you You know, and you look at, you know, coaches of the modern era where you have guys like Nick Saban and, you know, Dabo and, you know, those guys are.

Yeah, they're doing a great job of recruiting. They're doing a great job of mentoring guys. And, you know, guys want to be a part of that. Ingredients don't change. No, they don't. All right. And so obviously in the 90s, no one was getting paid legally. I'm sure there was a couple of guys who were getting paid in other ways.

Yeah, I cannot admit nor deny. but it's recently become a big issue right so you take like you know zion williamson at duke uh it looks like he's about to get hurt right in kind of the middle of the season guy's obviously ready to go to the nba he's got tens of millions of dollars waiting for him if he gets hurt in college he's not going to be able to go get that money right so there's all kind of every couple of years the conversation comes back up right absolutely in the mid 90s when you were towards the end of your career there was actually a push right that you were part of to start looking at, should these athletes be getting paid? Maybe tell us a little bit about

that. It's just something I'm fascinated with and I kind of just don't understand why they're not getting paid. Yeah. I mean, the good news is, you know, the athletes can get Lloyd's of London policies and so forth. And the schools work out ways to assist with those types of things. So that helps in terms of the risk, you know, but in the area of compensation. So even back, you know, As you mentioned, back when I played, I worked with Walter Byers, who was the founder of the NCAA, to create the NACA, which was the National Association of College Athletes. And it was an initiative that I worked on for about a six-month to a year period of time. And unfortunately, I kind of had to put things down just because of career reasons and things that I was involved with. But Walter Byers signed on as the chairman emeritus of that organization.

And, you know, essentially the theme behind the National Association of College Athletes was that we were, you know, starting the process to to sort of recruit all of the major programs, all of the athletes from across the country to make that push to have athletes, you know, compensated for what they were doing or compensated more. The scholarship, obviously, that athletes are receiving is a form of compensation. Um, and, and that was the theme behind, you know, Walter Byers perspective. And at the time he had just written a book called unsportsmanlike conduct. Um, unfortunately, Mr. Byers passed away, uh, just a couple of years ago. Um, but, um, uh, but back when he and I were working on this initiative, um, you know, he, in this book, he talks about, uh, how, you know, he founded the NCAA and, and, um, and he created these, um, uh, sort of the student athlete term and the, you know, amateurism was sort of the premise behind that. Um, and he fundamentally wholeheartedly

believed in that concept, um, until he got into the mid seventies, I believe when he began to negotiate a sports contract or television contracts. And, um, and at that point in time, he started to step back a little bit and began to say, you know, this has gone from sort of amateurism to a professional sport. And certainly the, you know, college football and college basketball, where you have big funds, big dollars flowing into the schools. And, you know, so over time, these schools are making, you know, $50 million, $100 million plus a year, and it's truly professional sport and um you know so the athletes are are being compensated but they're just being compensated at a at a wage that's essentially below the poverty line um and you look at you

know guys like myself i blew my knee out the summer before my junior season i had you know a number of college scouts looking or pro scouts looking at me even as a sophomore but um you know unfortunately i was injured fortunately for me i was this passionate about investing in finance and economics and my studies as I was football. Um, but a lot of guys don't have that same passion for their, for their education and ultimately end up, you know, doing whatever with their career and, and, um, and, and stumbling throughout life because there's no, uh, there's no sort of safety net. So our theory, uh, with the NACA was essentially that, you know, at that point in time, most of us are, you know, relatively, uh, unsophisticated,

right. Um, uh, and you know, if we were being paid 50 or a hundred or $200,000 a year, we'd probably squander it anyway. So our theory was take a reasonable, uh, compensation package and put that in a, um, you know, essentially a savings account. So you don't even have to, you know sort of invest it yeah um so you take out that risk for the for the player but but that money is sort of stashed away until they get to be 30 or 35 so that they're at least at that point you know hopefully mature enough educated enough to where you know they can manage their own their own capital and so forth so that was our thesis um around the ncaa naca um unfortunately you know we weren't able to uh to really pursue it but uh but it began to gain traction and obviously again this

comes up from time to time so yeah i mean look it's uh i definitely agree with you that look players should be compensated right school's making absolute killing on putting these athletes on the on the court the field wherever then you look at well you can't just hand the kids cash because we do all kinds of crazy stuff with it and it's not so much that they're gonna like go do illegal things with it it's just the odds that they're actually going to have the money by the time they leave are very low right and some of it is you know i've seen people make like the psychological argument like their brain is literally not developed enough to be mature enough to manage the front of the house developed yeah like you had an 18 year old fifty thousand

dollars a year good luck right especially if they're the star athlete at you know florida state yeah yeah and like you said i mean even if even if they don't do anything illegal it's like they are going to do stupid things with that money yeah and it's going to bring embarrassment the organization and just all sorts of crazy things that can happen yeah well imagine now in the world of Instagram and all this stuff, right? All of a sudden, these guys are buying, you know, how did that kid get a Ferrari, right? He really gave $50,000 to get a Ferrari somehow.

So I think that like, you know, there's that element of, hey, how do we protect them but compensate them? And I have seen everything from, you know, more like savings plans to like true retirement plans. So, hey, you're not getting this for, you know, decades, but it's going to be there. To even, you know, one of the things is just health insurance, right? You know, so take for, you know, your situation.

I actually blew up my knee as well. Um, and when you go through that, there's some people who the school will take care of right while they're actually still playing. But if you blow your knee out, you're no longer on the team. Let's say if you were to say, Hey, I'm not going to play anymore. All of a sudden, all that care goes away. Right. So we literally had in college, we had guys who would get hurt. They knew they would never play again, but they stayed on the team so they could get the care of the trainers, et cetera. Right. And so it's just, it's a very, very interesting thing. Right. And obviously the professional leagues have now extended a lot of that health coverage post playing days. Right. And, you know, you've got to think at some point it'll happen in college. I just, there's going to be some kind of catalyst, right. Right. It's going to be some big star player who gets hurt in college,

doesn't end up going pro and, you know, everyone says, okay, enough's enough. But, but it's just interesting that, you know, coming especially in the mid nineties college football at a major university, you know, kind of, you guys are having the same conversations as people are having today. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. All right. So when you leave, you end up going to the Florida pension fund. Is that correct? Correct. Okay. And so tell us about kind of when you joined, what you're doing there and kind of how you started thinking about investing.

Absolutely. So I was there, I forgot the exact year, but mid nineties. And I was an analyst on multiple portfolios. This was, you know, keep in mind, this was during the time that, you know, the internet was just being created. Right. So, uh, thank you, Al Gore. So, um, but, uh, you know, so you, so you have, uh, sort of the, the integration of, um, you know, computer modeling and the ability to, to, you know, pull down data and analyze data with your, with your systems. Um, and so those were some of the projects that I was implementing for the Florida pension system was, uh, leveraging technology, um, to do data analysis, portfolio analysis, portfolios. So great experience. Um, I kind of cut my teeth on asset allocation at the time that I was there,

we managed 65 billion in total assets. There are about 150 billion now. Um, uh, from what I gather, they're one of the better performing, um, uh, pension funds. You know, clearly there are a lot of underfunded pension funds at this, at this stage, which is, you know, which again, I think, you know, um, you know, creates an opportunity for alternative investments. Um, you know, many, you know, foundations and endowments and sort of the smart money in the room, the Harvard foundations, the, you know, Yale, um, uh, uh, numerous institutional investors that have embraced, um, leading areas of alternative investments have performed well. Um, and others have been left behind and ultimately, you know, have found themselves in, in, in some sort of

fiscal trouble? A lot of people actually don't understand how big the difference is. So I was recently looking for another reason, but I was looking at Harvard and Yale's performance. And in 2018, I forget, I want to say that Yale did 10 plus percent. It was like 10, 11 percent. And Harvard did like over 12. So 10 to 12 percent returns in a world where a stock market is just going up into the right. It seems like forever. Uh, does it sound super impressive because we've seen kind of double digit years and just public equities, but how did they get there though? What is the standard deviation of that return? So not only how did they get there, but they're also doing it with $40 billion. That's what people forget. Like, Oh yeah,

you did 10, you know, you did 10% of your personal portfolio and you got a couple hundred thousand dollars. These guys just did it with $40 billion. And so I think it's just the side, like the sheer side of how much capital these people have to invest a lot of times is where do they put it right right and so when you start to look into the public markets uh sure you can go and put stuff there but when you look into the alternative space it's not like hey let me go find a strategy that i can put 10 million dollars to work right i need to find an alternative strategy that's going to drive great returns going to have a kind of risk mitigated approach to it but also that i can put usually hundreds of millions of dollars to work if the strategy you know is

successful. And there's just not that many of them, right? So you got to do a lot of work to find the ones that are going to work. Yeah. And the asset allocation models, you know, cover everything from, you know, equities, fixed income, you know, global equities, derivatives, you know, real estate. The whole thing. Runs the gamut. One of the things that I really liked about the Florida pension system was that they allocated half of their assets was outsourced to outside managers and then the other half was managed internally. Oh, interesting. And I thought that was a good combination because it created a little bit of a cost savings there. I think that was a little bit of an art for the fund. But again,

whether, you know, to your point, whether you outsource all of that capital as a pension system or a foundation or endowment, or whether you manage it all in-house, either way, there's a cost of doing business. And then you have the overall pension liabilities, right, that eats away at principal if the investment fund is not performing well. So let's talk a little bit about and you tell me how much you want to go into a lot of these pensions, the pension problem, right? So kind of this underfunding of pensions. And, you know, I've even met with some pensions recently that have told me we're a mature pension. Right. And I said, well, what's a mature pension? And what they basically mean is their cash flow negative. Right. So for those that don't know,

in the pension world, basically, there's a pot of money. The investment team is directed to grow that pot of money in a risk mitigated way at a certain rate of return. Right. So usually it's kind of six to eight percent kind of is the target. We're going to take our money. We're going to grow it. And the reason why it's six to eight percent is that's how much we need to make in order to pay out every year the liabilities of our pensioners. Right. And so when they said mature, what that meant was they are actually paying out more money than they're bringing in every year. And so there's a net negative on assets every year, which means that at some point you go to zero, right? There's no more assets left. And so the people who are going to be waiting on

that pension aren't going to have anything there. Absolutely. The pyramid scheme ends. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. So let's talk about how you think about alternative assets, right? Because you basically, once you left Florida, you've got a whole bunch of different things in the alternative asset space today. We can get into what those are, but just how you think about the alternative assets versus some of the more traditional ones. Correct. Yeah. So I think on our side, I mean, the way that we look at the world of investments, we primarily invest in alternative investments. So even our exposure into traditional assets such as, you know, equities or fixed income even, we're doing those through various trading strategies.

So, for example, we run a long-short equity fund, but it's primarily options-based called our SOHO fund. And that fund has generated double-digit returns for the past six-year track record, I believe, at this point. We've not marketed that fund to outside investors as of yet, but we're about to start marketing that strategy this year. So but what's interesting is, you know, we look at primarily alternatives as our entire portfolio. So for exposure to things like whether it's equities or options or or fixed income, we wrap those in various trading strategies. And so we're not just taking a portion of our capital, you know, in the old adages, kind of 60, 40. right? Stocks and bond portfolio. But we don't just take capital and allocate it into the equity markets and say, okay, we want to be in the S&P 500 or gain exposure through ETFs or what have you

and place 50% or 60% of our portfolio in a long only time scenario. Whatever portion we're going to allocate to equities, we're doing that through various trading strategies. Whatever amount we're putting, uh, to work in fixed income, um, then we're going to do that through some sort of fixed income arbitrage type strategy. Uh, so for us, uh, really the whole, our entire perspective is alternative investments. Uh, we invest in real estate, we invest in venture capital, private equity, um, obviously blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies, uh, we invest in cannabis. Um, so whole host of, you know, broad range of, of, of investments, uh, film media education, in healthcare. We run a healthcare and medical device venture capital fund. Our business is

really kind of centered around investing in and backing investment teams. And so that's sort of the genesis. And so we look out at the spectrum of here are the different asset classes that we want to participate in. Here are the different sectors that we want to participate in. And then we will partner with a team that manages that particular vertical. Got it. Let's talk about cannabis. Every time I talk about it on here, people go crazy. They love it. It is the, I like to, when I get in Ubers and Lyfts, I'll always ask the Uber and Lyft driver, say, man, if I gave you a thousand dollars, where would you invest it? Just because they just have such a different perspective. Yeah. They just have such a different perspective than, you know, people who work at

investment firms, et cetera. These are, you know, quote unquote, everyday people who don't think about finance all day long. Right. So they just always have really interesting things. Sometimes it's stocks, it's whatever. Number one answer though is, man, the weed companies are going to blow up, right? And it's a thing where I think most people generally feel like, hey, when all this becomes legalized, there's going to be a big boom, right? I think blockchain and crypto has kind of reached that inevitability as well. But what are you guys seeing in the cannabis space in terms of kind of where capital is flowing, where entrepreneurs are really trying to build, and what do you think is interesting there? Yeah, absolutely. So, um, so we are, uh, we've

been investing in the blockchain, uh, blockchain and crypto space, uh, since 2014. Uh, and, uh, and also in the cannabis space since 2014. So, uh, so we've had a number of years to really kind of evaluate and, and sort of, uh, sit on the, sort of the leading edge of these two burgeoning sectors, new asset classes, if you will. And we see tremendous growth on both sides. On the cannabis side, one of the things that we're doing is we're constructing a new fund product that'll be a combination of blockchain, crypto, artificial intelligence, and cannabis. So those three themes are rolled up. Obviously, can't discuss the exact dynamics of all that at this stage but um but those elements together we believe uh create significant alpha in that space

so yeah we believe wholeheartedly when you talk about you know global legalization uh when you talk about um the different areas that uh that you know cannabis and hemp uh can can can affect and impact it's it's it's really quite staggering when you think about and and for me you know i've never been one to, uh, you know, to really like sort of the THC side and the, you know, smoking marijuana and so forth. It's just not my thing, but, uh, to each his own, it's like saying, okay, well, I don't drink beer, uh, but you know, beer should be illegal. Yeah. So I've always been a proponent for, you know, if people, people are going to do these things, it needs to be legalized. Uh, you know, if you drink three beers, you know exactly how you're going to feel. If you,

if you have a glass of bourbon, you know what that's going to do to you, how it's going to affect you. Legalizing cannabis, I think, is certainly something that's needed for that element alone on the recreational side. On the medical side, that to me is an area that's, you know, there are tremendous, tremendous areas where I think there's staggering upside in the medicinal side, cannabis-based medicines, essentially. And this really hits close to for me interestingly enough about five months ago our two and a half year old son started having seizures um and that was something that's it was a complete shock to the system completely healthy kid um no genetic markers in our in either of our families myself or my wife uh that would have led

to this um so just one of those things random happens random happenstance and uh and uh and and it's actually gotten, it's gotten pretty bad over the last number of months. Um, uh, he's been hospitalized. We stayed in the hospital for 10 days at one point, um, racked up a whole lot of, uh, medical bills in the process. And, uh, but, uh, but it's one of those things where, um, you know, you begin to see, um, uh, what something like this, uh, could yield right in terms of its benefits and its impact. So there's all sorts of stories about, uh, you know, how But CBD helps Parkinson's patients and epileptic patients and other conditions as well. And so we're right on the cusp now.

We've kind of gone through a lot of traditional medications. We had to wean him off of one or two meds to get to the point now where we can begin to implement CBD for him. So we're excited about that and looking forward to what those results are. I think a lot of people hear about – so this is like a very specific use case that a lot of people talk about because it's probably the most obvious one, right, where it's a young kid, a bunch of other medicines, don't work. It's usually some kind of epileptic or seizure-based side effects to whatever is going on in their body. And I don't think people actually understand when they say, oh, medicinal marijuana can solve the problem, right? It's not like the two-and-a-half-year-old smoking a blunt. right let's all you know let's make sure we're all on the same page here right so just for the

record we do not have bongs in our exactly right so like maybe walk through you know as much as you can in terms of like is this more like the kids are eating a piece of food that has the cbd in it is it something that they're like like i know there's like a wax or something that they're like putting like inside of their mouth or just like how are they actually consuming especially for a young kid absolutely you know two two and a half year old yeah almost three year old so uh so what we, uh, he'll tell you that he's three, right? He'd be like, I'm three and two months. I'm three and a half. So yeah, we have teenage daughters dues and they're, and they're always on the next stage. Right. Yep. Um, but, uh, but you know, in, in, uh, in his case, uh, uh, what

we're, uh, what we're using is the teacher form, uh, sort of the droplets. And what we do is we mix that with, uh, you know, uh, whether it's jello or pudding or ice cream or whatever. So he doesn't even really realize that uh yeah you know that he's that he's taking this oil essentially it's just an oil droplet yeah and so that's what that's what we're starting to use now but we literally just began this uh so we don't have you know enough results at this point yeah but it is it is looking promising so and it's just interesting because again i think that there's the negative kind of you know the drug on or the war on drugs right and like you know you see all over television etc it's everything from the heroin the cocaine the marijuana etc um and i

think that there's a lot of negative connotation because of right you know that whole um thing and then also uh the after effects right so people can literally walk down the street and they see a guy smoking a blunt they see somebody shooting up you know they're doing all stuff all of a sudden you're talking about no no we're talking about oil and i have a dropper and i'm putting it in my kids ice cream right right and it actually can improve their life exactly i think a lot of people, the negative connotations very quickly, like, oh, wait a minute, this is very different than what I thought it was. Absolutely. Completely, completely different. And there are two different dynamics. I mean, there are a lot of different aspects of the cannabis space that

have different nuances. There are things called sativa. There are things, you know, there's THC versus CBD. So probably the simplest way to describe the world of cannabis is you have THC and you have CBD. And technically their chemical composition is almost identical. There's one atom that's a different marker that's sort of in a different location, if you will. And it creates a completely different effect so the thc is sort of the psychedelic side that's the that's the component of cannabis that makes people high the cbd has sort of the healing effects and you have markers in your brain where these things bind to different uh areas of your brain okay um and so for the cbd it has the um a lot of the medicinal effects got it um and this is why people are

putting it in like cream to like rub on your knees. Right. I have some in my bag. Did I mention, did I mention I blew my knee out? So, uh, so yeah. Uh, so that's helpful. It's, you know, it has an anti-inflammatory effect, so it definitely helps. Uh, but, uh, but you know, what's really fascinating is when you research the history of cannabis is you really begin to realize that, um, way back when, right. In the, uh, whether it was 1800s, early 1900s, um, these products were actually utilized for things like seizures back before you had modern medicine and as things roll forward there was a bit of a conflict on whether it was considered a gateway drug there's a theory that because of hemp

could be used for industrial fabrics and things of that nature it was having a negative impact on different manufacturing companies and they they lobbied to essentially have the government classify it as a drug. So you have, on the one side, poppy plants where different medications are derived from those types of plants. These medications are derived from the other plant, if you will. what's interesting is the plant and the medicines that have been supported by the fda and so forth they all have tremendous side effects and so that's why for us we're working as quickly as we

can to wean our son off of some of these medications because they could have long-term side effects and um you know whereas uh there at this stage there are no known side effects from uh, cannabis. As a matter of fact, um, you know, there, I watched one piece a while back that talked about, um, uh, that talked about, um, um, uh, uh, cannabis being used as a way to, uh, sort of wean drug users off of hard drugs. So, you know, most folks look at those drugs as sort of a gateway into bad drugs. And I've said that for years as well. So I'm not pointing the finger at the rest of society. But, um, and, and it could in certain circumstances, you have a kid that starts smoking weed in high school and of course, um, um, affects the development of his

frontal lobe, makes bad judgment, um, uh, judgment calls and then gets into harder drugs and it kind of goes from there. But when you also have, uh, people who are addicted to harder drugs, it seems like, um, CBD can be a gateway out of those drugs. Um, so there are, yeah. So there are really a lot of fascinating studies going on. And what's amazing about this space is that you now have numerous universities and research centers, Cal Berkeley, UCLA, as a matter of fact, Jeff Chen, Dr. Jeff Chen is on the board of one of our companies. And he's one of the directors of research at UCLA. So, you know, again, there are a lot of things that we have in the works there, we're beginning to invest heavily in the cannabis space, in private equity and

other areas. And like I said, just kind of leveraging the best and brightest of sort of blockchain, blockchain, crypto, AI, and leveraging those things to make good decisions in the cannabis space. But I do think that there are just tremendous benefits. Um, uh, but I, I, you know, like I said, the, one of the most interesting things that I found in, in our research over the last couple of years is how much, um, of a focal point this particular medication was way back when, and then it was just shut down and taken away

from society. And then, you know, you also have conspiracy theorists about, you know, well, this was a, uh, this was used as a, as a drug and as a way to, uh, sort of, um, um, you know, um, uh, leverage this as a way to put people in prison, whether they were white or black or whatever race, but this was an easy way for essentially for, uh, for the police to sort of, um, you know, put people in jail for whatever reason. Absolutely. And, uh, and now, you know, what happens there, right? So now, uh, you know, you go through the pardon process and get a lot of people out of jail who probably shouldn't have been there in the first place.

I've talked a bunch on here about decriminalization of marijuana specifically, but drugs in a more broader sense, the impact it would have on prison population, right? And we've actually seen now, I looked up the numbers recently, I think it's 22 states, I think it's states, have decriminalized possession of marijuana. So if you're a drug dealer, right, you're actually going to distribute it with intent to sell um still crime right but if they do it based on based on total volume or total yes i forget all the criteria but basically if you're walking down the street and you you know you've got enough weed that you're going to smoke yourself right but you're not going to kind of

bother anybody um they'll give you a hall pass well the police can still arrest you right because it is technically still illegal but when they bring you and the district attorney is supposed to enforce or actually charge you the district attorneys are now saying we're not going to do that right and so what it does is it disincentivizes the police from ever making the arrest because they know that there's going to be no charges brought right so it's kind of a waste of their time and resources to do that um and i think again it's just this inevitability at some point we will get full federal um kind of legalization uh this probably starts with some kind of medicinal you know cbd or marijuana or whatever it is first and then you get into the recreational side

um but but it's the thing that just shocks me it's like alcohol is a drug right right and again And I'm with you in that, like, I'm not a proponent of this stuff because I want to go smoke a bunch of weed, right? Like, they actually don't care. But the idea that I can literally walk across the street and drink until I kill myself, right? And no one's going to say anything. And that happens all the time. Yeah, and no one's going to say anything to me. But you can't smoke a plant that grows in the ground.

Right. Craziness, right? And so let's switch gears here and go to crypto. Tell me about the first time that you ever saw Bitcoin, crypto, et cetera. what was your reaction? It was interesting. So it was back in 2012, 2013 timeline. We were running a couple of option strategies at the time. And one of our traders mentioned Bitcoin to me. And I'd heard it, you know, just tangentially, you know, in passing. But, you know, that was the first time it was sort of presented to me. And, you know, he kind of talked to me about, you know,

I've got these servers in my basement and then, you know, it's, it's always, it's always a story like you have, wait, what? The money just gets printed. Okay. Who's printing it? How does this work? So, uh, so, you know, it was a, it was an interesting educational, um, experience. Um, but it just, the whole thing was, you know, it was just a mind bender. Right. Uh, and you know, what can this be used for? And, and, and what are, you know, what are the applications? What, you know and what are the risks what you know what are the what are the outliers and you know to me I kind of ultimately kind of concluded that you know this was something that could be used for drug smuggling or yep or you know terrorism money laundering and all of those things and

and then also just the the server in the basement thing really kind of killed it and what was what was also interesting was you know it came back about three months later and unfortunately our option strategy was doing well. But about three months later, we talked about the Bitcoin topic again. And he shared with me that his basement flooded and he lost his server. So he kind of had to start over. So I was like, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, a little different then. Right. Absolutely. Thank God for institutional custodians now. Absolutely. How do you see crypto, as you're talking to investors in this global asset

allocation, right? So they're, you know, obviously the Harvards of the world who have $40 billion are in a very different position than kind of the individual. But at the same time, many of them are saying, I have some pool of capital that I need to invest. I'm trying to hit some rate of return. Crypto looks very different. It seems to be non-correlated by a lot of different metrics. It's got kind of an asymmetric return. How do you think about it in portfolio and you know really when people go to get exposure from the liquid market to maybe venture capital and the different investment opportunities within crypto yeah i mean you know needless to say look at the equity markets they've been on a tear it's the longest bull run in

history i believe if not close to it um uh fascinating you know looking at what's transpired in those markets um you know but you know conventional wisdom tells you that you could be seeing a top or a double top here um you know you look at the uh the oil markets they they plummeted in back in october i believe uh gold markets uh january uh so you know when you're when you're working on again kind of that your your asset allocation model and thinking about where should i have some capital deployed and where should i have the majority of my capital deployed and so forth i don't i don't know that you can make a broad statement about asset allocation because I agree with you. I think it definitely differs for each person, each

institution in different circumstances, what type of liabilities, what is their lifestyle, what are their retirement goals, how old they are and so forth. So obviously we don't give investment advice. But what I can say is the way that when you look at the world of assets, you look at the stock market, I don't know how much longer the stock market is going to continue to run up the way that, that it's, it's been on a tear. Um, so I think at some point that definitely flattens a little bit. Um, and, uh, and, and if you're limited in terms of, um, you know, things like real estate, there's, uh, you know, uh, there's discussions about where the real estate, uh, market set business cycle is at this, at this stage, um, you know, is real

estate at a top, uh, you have, you know, pretty insane valuations, uh, venture capital. Uh, you look at the Vision Fund, $100 billion Vision Fund. Andreessen Horowitz recently announced the change of their business model, moving a little bit away from venture because of that reason. That asset class is so crowded and valuations are spiraling, kind of out of control. So in a world of inflated valuations across the board, when you look at areas such as blockchain in crypto and especially crypto right now where it went to a quote-unquote bubble scenario which um which you know i personally believe in the long-term uh you know thesis of of of uh of crypto and we i'm happy to share more about kind of our our general idea of the market as a whole

but but in terms of asset classes i definitely believe that you know um a i believe that the crypto markets are consolidating and beginning to change and go in the right direction currently I definitely believe it's an asset class that individuals as well as institutional investors need to have exposure to. It is very real. I mean, think about it. You've got JP Morgan having now entered into the space in a major way. I think one of our analysts said that something to the effect of they have more blockchain employees or something than any other organization out there at this stage. They're announcing their stable coin to be deployed.

that's going to have a major impact on clearing and settlement. It's one of the huge bottlenecks in institutional investing. You have Cambridge Associates that's announcing to their institutional clients they manage like $300 billion in assets. They're steering their clients towards at least considering cryptocurrency. You have the ICE exchange and the New York Stock Exchange obviously rolling out the backed exchange now for crypto. But what's, you know, the backed exchange is going to have a phenomenal impact on the crypto space because you're talking about physically delivered Bitcoin futures contracts.

That is a massive shift and backed by one of the largest exchanges in the world. It was a big shift from five years ago and you couldn't even really buy Bitcoin, right? Like many people would have struggled to do that. Absolutely. On the exchanges that exist. Absolutely. So, you know, so this the world of technology is growing exponentially. And so and when you have these market participants, these large institutions that are that are beginning to get involved in the space in such a major way, it's it's it's staggering where this can go.

I really believe that we're in the second inning in this industry. You know, so so think about this as a concept. You know, the ICE and the NICE are obviously involved in the space now. impact launches here sometime in 2019. So now you have physically delivered Bitcoin futures contracts. That in and of itself creates an enormous demand on those underlying products. And of course, they'll go from Bitcoin futures to Ethereum futures to whatever else. But over and above that, what about the digitalization of traditional assets? So now you have the ICE and the NYSE, they're, you know, seeing the power of digitalization of instruments and assets.

And so, you know, it shouldn't be a long period of time before you see, you know, the digitalization of stocks and options and other instruments and creating true digital instruments across different asset classes. I know you're starting to see, you know, STOs and so forth of, you know, real estate projects and so forth. And that's, you know, that's another fascinating aspect of the, of the, of the space as a whole. And to me has always been one of our underlying themes in the space is, is just the, you know, the, the impact that this technology has on capital markets as a whole, right? So, you know, we run a healthcare medical device venture capital fund. We closed the fund a few years ago and, you know, we think, you know, a couple of the companies

will probably get bought out by big med tech companies and so forth. But we invested in those businesses, I guess, probably four or five years ago. I can't recall the exact year that we deployed that fund. But that's how venture capitalists used to invest. But now, if you invest in an illiquid instrument and you have some type of a digital instrument that can be publicly traded, that venture capitalist can now take risk off the table at some point in time. So whether that's six months or 12 months, you know, and needless to say, you may not necessarily want to take all

of your capital back, right? You made this investment for a long-term because you have a long-term perspective about this company. But at the end of the day, if the valuation ticks up in this business, in that traded instrument, and you can claw back if you make, you know, make a million dollar investment and perhaps the valuation goes up by 30% or 50% or whatever the number is you take a little bit of profit off the table and call back some risk and that's helpful to your shareholder so so that change in capital markets I think is very real I think that's one of the one of the biggest that's one of the biggest themes I think that's out there in the

background that a lot of people aren't looking at yeah it's the change in capital markets and also it's like the automation of finance right it's like these two trends that are colliding right at crypto blockchain Wall Street et cetera. And what you're talking about really is, uh, over time, every asset for the most part, right. Over generalization, but for the most part has become more liquid, right? So there's, you know, real estate used to be really, really illiquid. And then we've created all these products to add liquidity to that asset, right? Same thing with stocks, right? And I think those are functions of, you know, um, you know, population growth that's function of, of, uh,

of more, a larger investor community, larger institutional investor community, creates more opportunities for liquidity in those things. New geographies wanna come online, right? Frankly, you get more banks that are all sitting around or kind of financial institutions that are all sitting around saying, hey, how can we create instruments

that do certain things, hedging also. And I think that all you're just seeing with blockchain and crypto is, it's about access, it's about liquidity, et cetera. But ultimately it does come back to, just because you have an asset and you now quote unquote tokenize it, doesn't mean that necessarily there's going to be liquidity.

Absolutely. Right? Yeah. The asset sales is going to be good. 100%. You still have to have a real investment opportunity. Yeah. You can't put a gun to investors' heads and say, you have to buy this.

Right? Absolutely. Like, because you can doesn't mean that they will. Right? You can't force them to come to the market. And I think that there's a lot of people in kind of the security token, tokenization, whatever you want to call it, space that are kind of learning that. And for us, at least, we've seen the biggest opportunities more in the automation.

Right? So how do you take a lot of the existing investment opportunities and where are the areas or opportunities for automation within it where there's a digitally native asset, right? Or there's digitally native accounting out with a blockchain, right? Like that type of stuff is, it's probably less sexy. It's a little bit less revolutionary. Are you talking about areas like DeFi and where you have? Yeah, I think all that's pieces of it, right? Like basically where like software is replacing products or services that previously were human led, right?

And so, you know, I use automation as kind of a broad term there. could be, you know, things like maker CDPs, right? Super interesting. Is it going to work? No clue, right? And there's some days where it looks, oh, this is really attractive. And there's some days where, you know,

I've checked and I'm like, oh, that looks like people are about to get smoked, right? And so I think that, again, it's the market is maturing. It's going to take a lot of time for this stuff to happen. Absolutely. But you do see early data points, right? And as that kind of matures, it goes from a couple of, you know,

few and far between data points to, okay, there's many and often, right? So eventually it's just, it's here. Right. Right. And I think that transition is going to happen. Absolutely. And I think that's why the community effect is so important. I mean, anything that helps to promulgate the community of, of blockchain technology, the community of cryptocurrency. I mean, think about the, you know, just in order of magnitude, what, you know, decentralized currency, how that impacts the world as a whole, right.

Digital stores of value. Those are staggering. I mean, you know, think about days gone by when you couldn't walk through an airport with more than $10,000 in cash in your pocket. Right. Um, but now you have your code in your head and, and, uh, or on your phone or, or your computer or wherever under your couch or wherever you keep it. But, um, and, um, you know, and, and you can, you can transfer value and so forth instantaneously and take it with you essentially wherever you go. So I think, um, you know, I think it's definitely the dawn of a new day. I think the community aspect of the involvement of the retail investor, I think, is critical. And obviously, a lot of retail investors got hammered in 2018. It's a brutal

bear market, obviously, in the crypto space. But I think a lot of those people will come back. And I think it's a necessity. But I think the way that they come back is through the institutional participation. When you have the backed exchange bringing more institutional participants by virtue of the futures contracts. The CME futures contract seems to have, you know, much more volume now. Not quite sure why the SIBO kind of stepped out, seemed to be bad timing there. But, you know, now you have the backwardation on the futures curve that really is a huge, huge bullish signal as well. But I think you have, you know, so many different elements going on in the institutional community that ultimately brings the retail investor back.

We've got the VanEck Solid X ETF that, you know, in my opinion, you know, I read some of the, you know, some of the reports that absolutely should get approved, in my opinion. Yep. Well, both of them, right? So, Bitwise and also the VanEck one. I mean, look, they're both chipping away, right? Absolutely. And I'm very interested to see, will they approve both of them at the same time or will they approve one and not the other? Right.

In fairness, seemingly, they should do it at the same time. But I think the important thing there, the important catalyst there is, again, building the community that allows the retail investor to park, you know, Bitcoin in there, essentially in their IRA, right? You know, they can, you know, use their Schwab account, their Fidelity account and buy the instrument as opposed to having wallets and storage and exchange accounts and all the stuff that, you know, that you deal with in the trading arena for those assets currently. And you think, you know, look at, you know, you're talking about just ICOs and, you know, digital security offerings and so forth. You know, a lot of those technologies that were developed, I mean, now you have almost 3,000, you know, blockchain projects, right? Yeah. And those will continue to proliferate. But at the end of the day, one of the things that you have to have around every one of those concepts, even if it's a brilliant concept, you have to have community, right?

and so you know especially when you're talking about you know the elements of a utility token right so uh you know those you know things like you know we disclaimer we put a little bit of money to work in telegram for example but think about the logic you think about you know xyz uh ico project that that launches and even when they launch their main net and they might have a hundred thousand users it's just not enough of a community even with brilliant technology Well, it's network effects, right? Basically, we now know and have seen enough technology companies that have been built on the backs of these network effects that if you can drive a significant amount of people in a highly engaged way to be tied in to this community or to this network, there's incredible opportunity for value creation, right? Right. And everyone does it in a different way. I think whether it's Telegram or Facebook, many of these folks were focused on other business models. And then when they saw this, it's like, oh, wait a minute. This may be a better business model.

Right. And look, the company that we've got a relationship to, but I'm just blown away by how forward thinking they are, is Kikken with their Kin token. Very similar to what Telegram is doing. It sounds like what Facebook is going to try to do something similarly where you've got a bunch of users. You create a token that is going to be used as a currency within your ecosystem. And each one of them has a little bit different kind of variations of some, you know, Facebook's rumored to do this with backed by a conglomerate of foreign currencies. I don't think Telegram's claim that they're going to back it by anything. And so it's just, look, the experimentation is important. We should be encouraging everyone to try. Absolutely.

Right. And by the way, let's say 90 percent of you fail. Well, we need to figure out what the right one is, right? I was like, what is the model moving forward? And I don't think that we yet have that outside of Bitcoin, right? And then, you know, I'm kind of in the camp of if Bitcoin is successful, sound money on a global basis, do people want other forms of currency that aren't just sound money, right? What I mean by that is, you know, I always talk about Starbucks points in their mobile app, right? Amazon AWS credits, gift cards. all these things that we that we use every day nobody runs around and says like oh like that's

a shit coin right like like the starbucks points actually like the you know a bunch of people are using it right now agreed that it's not the soundest form of money right and all this stuff and so it's more of like it's worth a cup of coffee every now and then right yeah and they use it for gamification and incentivization right and so like it's understanding that a currency can fit different, you know, ways that you use it. I think we're going to see the same thing with digital securities, right. Kind of all that online. Um, but again, sound money is the most important thing because that's kind of the foundation of which everything is built. And then these companies are going to figure out kind of variations of it that fit their specific needs,

you know, from there. Right. And I think that we should be encouraging it all. Yeah, absolutely. You have to encourage innovation. I think, you know, um, anything that can be done with, you know, think about you've got guys like Mike Novogratz, you have, you know, Tim Draper, a lot of sort of industry champions that have really began to get involved in the space. And those types of incredible influencers have a, you know, there's a ripple effect that occurs there, right? So it doesn't just impact their involvement and their constituents and their investors, it affects the rest of the market, the rest of the globe, really, for market participants.

So all of those things are great steps in the right direction. Absolutely. I completely agree. Before we wrap up, I always ask a rapid-fire set of questions. What is your most controversial thought in crypto? What's the one thing you believe that you think the most amount of other people would disagree with you on? That's a tough question, controversial thought. I think you stumped me.

Let me think. Yeah, I got to tap out on that one, man. You got me. All right. That's fine. You don't have to answer any of them. What do you think the most important company in crypto is? You know, what's interesting in the world of crypto is that, you know, companies are

really sort of, you know, decentralized platforms, if you will. Right. So you don't think of Bitcoin as a company. But I think Bitcoin far and away is definitely the most important. I also think on the tails of that, the institutions that I mentioned, the ICE exchange and ICE and BACT and even J.P. Morgan turning their perspective from fraud to one of the most largest blockchain proponents in the space. Um, those things are, are impactful, right? You know, we talked about the ETFs a moment ago, having those types of institutional products with institutional custody behind it with, you know, uh, insurance policies and so forth, uh, sort of the institutionalization. And I saw

this in the, in the hedge fund space, you know, in the, in the, uh, you know, as I kind of, you know, began my career, uh, in the early to mid nineties. And, um, you know, you, you had sort of this, what was considered at that time, a cottage industry was a hedge fund space. And, And it became more institutionalized over time. And I think that's what we're seeing. But what's fascinating about the blockchain and crypto space is all of those things are happening at an incredibly rapid pace. Oh, for sure.

What one regulation would you change or improve if you could? Definitely the U.S. tax code. Okay, why? I just think that in the modern world, a flat tax across the board just simply makes sense. You know, if you make X dollars, you're going to pay Y in taxes. You don't have to deal with this complex tax code, all of the deductions and all of those sorts of things. You know, if you make $25,000 a year, if the tax rate is 10%, you're going to pay $2,500 in taxes, right? So I just think that is an evolutionary process that really we need as a country. And you

you certainly don't want to get into hyperinflation. You have areas like France and Venezuela and, you know, where your tax rate and, you know, the devaluation of currencies and so forth, which again, go back to, you know, the logic for, you know, Bitcoin and blockchain and crypto and so forth, where you have those decentralized stores of value and forms of currency. And I know we're kind of wrapping up, but I was just going to mention that, You know, those are some of the themes that we saw early on, I think, and one of the reasons that we were so successful in this space. We really saw the different, you know, really sort of bifurcation across, you know, what could be considered sort of a store of value, what could be considered a use of currency, if you will. And if you're using something as a currency, it needs to have a stability mechanism.

And so we always saw things like Bitcoin as a store of value. We also saw Ethereum as more of a platform. Now you have other areas or other applications that are potentially better than Ethereum. But Ethereum has such a lead in the space. They have so many developers on the program. It's like 200 plus developers working on the platform. them. So those different themes, I think, are critical as participants begin to explore the space. Make sure that you don't just look at blockchain and crypto as Bitcoin only. Obviously,

merits and tremendous value there. I think 21 million Bitcoins to be mined, I think it's close to 18 million have been mined already. So you're coming up to the tail end on that. uh but um but i think the point is is you really have to analyze the space looking at different uh areas of value propositions yeah it's just like any market right it's not just one size fits all there's very different things in there uh what's the most important book you've ever read um being a christian i'd say uh the bible for sure uh just the global impact that uh the message of christ has had in you know the last 2 000 years is pervasive it's got to be the most read book of all time yeah i mean i don't know what the numbers are but it's got to be probably one of

the most popular in terms of sales in terms of reading it has to be it has to be and and the other thing that you know when you think about uh the collection of all of those writings and the fact that they've been kind of put together and then saved over time and and and in some of the you know some of the different uh scriptures that you read are um you know it's incredible the level of wisdom that those statements have and the impact that they could have on your, your life today. Right. And certain principles that you can live by and just, you know, some of which are kind of common sense. Right. But, um, but I just, it, it, it astounds me that, that that work has been preserved, you know, for so many years. And that again, from there it's, you know,

it's, uh, it's been so widely read and, and, and adopted by, by many people, um, in terms of, you know, business books, um, you know, uh, kind of an old school book, uh, good to great. Oh yeah. Yeah. Uh, I really loved that one. I mean, it just talks about, and I think for, you know, entrepreneurs, it's something that we strive for, right. To kind of continuously build a great company. Um, you know, so, uh, you know, one of the things that I learned through, I mean, you've learned this as well through playing college football, um, you know, just team building. Right. And, uh, and it really kind of cuts to the, cuts to the heart of that, Right. You got to get the right people on the bus. And and, you know, just in your experience.

Right. You started out as a safety. And then, you know, before you know it, you're you're spending it. You know, you're you're you're you're playing quarterback. So, you know, but if you're a great athlete, you can get moved around to different positions. And I think, you know, the business world, especially in a in such a rapidly evolving space like blockchain and crypto and cannabis and all the things that we're involved in. um, you have to have, um, you know, the right people on the team. So I, I really love that book. I think, I think, uh, it's a classic for a reason, right? Yeah, no doubt. All right. Uh, before we end, I will let you ask me a question, but first we talk about aliens, um, believer, non-believer real, not real, you know, um, my perspective on that is really all over the place. Okay. And I'll tell you why. First of all, when I was probably 19 years old, me and a couple of buddies, and this is straight out of what was the movie Sandlot. It's like me and a couple of buddies are hanging out at one of my buddy's house down the street. And I swear to God, we saw what looked like, and it could have been a governmental project, right? But what looked like a spaceship, right?

You were the first person to say they saw an alien. Yes. Well, I didn't see the alien, but I saw what looked like a spaceship. A UFO, right? Unidentified flying object. And it was unidentified for us. But, you know, chances are it was probably, you know, some sort of a secret governmental, you know. Of course.

Ship of sorts. You know, which is, you know, you look at where. But still, as a kid, it probably freaked you out a little bit, right? As a kid, we were just, man, we were just blown away. Uh, and then the other thing is just, you know, as you grow up and you research and, and, and learn and so forth, and you have your perspectives that, you know, part of which comes from your religious background and, and your educational background and science. And I think that all of this is, there's kind of a confluence for me. Um, um, but looking at the expanse of the universe,

the expanse of, you know, first of all, you start out with, you know, the solar system, the galaxy right the universe and is there a multiverse right so it just kind of can there's a huge continuum there so you know i don't know what to think i mean yeah but but what it's it's fun to talk about but but what what is interesting is uh you have um titans in the in the world of business who see opportunities for space exploration and uh and you have researchers that are finding planets that could potentially carry life as well so do you ultimately get to a point where um you know we could travel from you know this blue planet to another blue planet so i don't know whether there are aliens out there or not but what i will say is i think that um

interplanetary travel i think is is going to be something that can be helpful for mankind over time yeah it is uh it is wild to think that in less than 20 years or i think spacex was started 2001 uh in less than 20 years we have seen us go from there's basically no damn way in hell we're getting to mars yeah to that's probably gonna happen in my lifetime absolutely yes yeah right it was it was pretty wild uh all right what uh what one question you have for me question for you i would say um if you fast forward um three to five years okay where do you see the world of blockchain digital assets cryptocurrencies etc i think it is more of the same and what i mean by that is you're going to continue to see smart people come into the space you're going to

continue to see really innovative companies being built that are attacking the incumbents I think we can just continue to see like the trend of automated finance happening. I do think that three years maybe is early, but five probably makes sense in terms of like really, really good user experiences. Right. So not just the technology works, but like is usable by a mass consumer, which I think drives, you know, incredible adoption, all this kind of stuff. I think that next three to five years we'll have had another bull market like we saw in 17, probably bigger, which would be pretty crazy. And then I'm paying attention to non-crypto markets, right? Like what happens in traditional assets and with the macro economy. I read something today that I think it was somebody wrote an op-ed in Bloomberg.

Don't quote me on that, but I think that's where it was. um what they said was in the last two recessions uh basically there has been interest rate cuts of over 500 basis points right well the interest rate is that not above 500 basis points right now so unless they're going to go negative interest rates they don't have that tool in their toolbox anymore right and so he was just talking through like actually we may not have all of the things that previously were at uh our disposal to fight you know recessions in the past and so if that happens you know not only one is that true right so there's a debate there but then two is if it is true then what does that mean right does that mean that uh if we get into a recession it's like

a spiral you know death spiral and and we can't get out of it right probably not but uh does that mean that it's just going to be a deeper tougher recession than maybe the last two right that'd be pretty scary um does that mean that people will look to leave kind of traditional assets get more into alternatives or maybe even Bitcoin as like a global reserve currency. All these questions that are there, I don't think anyone actually can say with confidence, hey, I have the answers. But what I do think is that there's likely in the next five years, you know, there's going to be some impact. You'll see those things play themselves out, right? Yeah. It's just like the odds that we'll continue in this massive bull market, right, traditional assets for another five

years. The math tells us that's unlikely, right? Like there's a return back to the average, right and so um yeah and and so uh we'll see i just think all of that's like really really interesting um and so it's you get this like weird trend and um i can't remember uh i'm gonna give credit to travis cling at uh ikigai but i don't know if it was actually him who said this or not but it was basically something to the effect of like if you had to guess right now and you had to write the script for how bitcoin gains global mass adoption on you know on a global scale uh we're watching it play out yeah right like absolutely we're watching the macro market be a little bloated right we're seeing they may not have all the tools to you know to um respond

to some kind of economic crisis uh crypto continues to be built with really smart people solving the problems that are necessary for scalability security etc and then like humans who lead the non-crypto world are just doing dumb shit like they like they continue to commit crimes they continue to you know do things that expose people uh data or money or you know all of this stuff and it's just like i actually think crypto's greatest ally and bitcoin's greatest ally is just time challenging challenging circumstances i think just let it all play out proves the case right so so i think you know it's a long-winded way of just saying like i think we're heading the right direction um but but it's uh it's not just what's going on in the industry it's also

of what's going on in other industries that'll probably force people to take this more seriously. And, you know, I mean, look, we're 2019 right now. If over the next two years, you see public equities fall, you know, double digits, 20 plus percent, let's say, which I think is possible right now. I'm not saying it's gonna happen, but it's possible. And then you got Bitcoin and other cryptos

like double or triple in value, which is again, possible. I'm not saying it's gonna happen, but possible. I think you'd have a lot of public market investors being like, I probably should be looking at this thing, right? It's funny how like capitalistic incentives matter, right? Yeah. I think that the more you have adoption across the institutional landscape that makes the road easier for the retail investor.

I think that's when we begin to get into those things. And hopefully those things play themselves out before we have some sort of major correction, because then those investors don't have a flight to quality, right? But if Bitcoin ultimately is that store of value and some of these other crypto assets and cryptocurrencies are areas where they can generate alpha and returns for their own portfolio and so forth, when other asset classes are failing, you know, hopefully the hopefully the government gets it right and gets those things approved. I can I can only hope. And so can you. Absolutely. All right. Thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it. This is a ton of fun and we'll have to do it again in the future. Awesome. We'll catch up soon. One more word from our sponsor BlockFi. Their new interest account allows you to securely deposit your Bitcoin or Ether at BlockFi and receive 6% annual interest paid monthly in cryptocurrency. This rate actually compounds. So you receive a 6.2% APY, which is very attractive

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