What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompeo know most of you know me as pomp you're listening to the podcast. Simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off Mitch Garber is an investor an entrepreneur from Canada. He was previously the CEO of Caesars interactive entertainment and has served on the board of directors of Cirque du Soleil Caesars Entertainment Rackspace Shutterfly and many others. I really enjoyed this conversation with Mitch in it. We discussed Mitch has numerous business success.
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Is there free crypto exchange completely free? No catch. No hidden fees. No trading fees snow spreads completely free go use level L VL D Co / pump. All right. Let's get this episode Mitch. I hope you guys enjoyed this one. Anthony promptly on O is a partner at Morgan Creek digital all opinions expressed by pomp or his guests on this podcast for solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of more Creek digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any
opinion expressed by pomp
as a specific inducement.
Make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion this podcast is for informational purposes only. All right guys bang a bang. I've got Mitch here with me. Thank you so much for doing this sir.
Thanks. Thanks a lot
form for sure. Let's just jump right into your background. You've had this great business and investing career, but a lot of people probably aren't familiar with how you got started. Where did you grow up? And how did you get into business?
Yeah. Thanks a lot. Well, I mean we'll go backwards. I'm 56 years old today, so
I grew up in Montreal in Canada. I live there now because there's been a lot of stops in between but I went to college in Montreal to McGill University. I went to law school at the University of Ottawa and I practiced law for for nine years and I sort of got very lucky. I was I was a lawyer the early 90s. So 96-97 the internet starts and I read an article by Roxy Roxborough talking about a European sports book on the internet that I thought was really interesting. I ripped out the
Was that an actual real physical world article and international gaming and wagering business magazine and I found the owner of that company in Austria. I called them and I said I want to figure out some way we can do business together because I see that you know, you're trying to do business over the internet and gaming I was a gaming lawyer representing IGT Caesars at the time, even though I later on hooked up with Caesars it was unrelated. So I was gaming we're doing gaming related.
Law gaming was exploding in the 90s every state and every Province was getting casinos, but I saw the internet I read this article by Roxy and when I finally spoke to the owner of this of this sports book what he really needed was payment processing and so I called a friend of mine in Montreal who was a really well-known business well business couple two guys, and they owned an internet service provider and they told listening to find a way to process payments for this sports book in Austria at the same.
I offered him my services to help them get licensed in Antigua, which I did and so these two guys started a little payment processing business in the back of their service provider and few years later. I left my law practice enjoying them. The company got bought by Del Canada. We got tons of stock in this e-commerce subsidiary of bell. We did very well. We spied out the payments business. We created our own public company. We grew it. We sold it to a NASDAQ company it grew again.
I later left it to run party gaming but this Payment Processing Company today is called pay safe. And it's got an 11 billion dollar market cap. So the guys who started it myself and these two other guys. It's been through a couple of different I guess, you know versions of itself, but that business that started by processing the sports book payments in and payments out of an Austrian sports book in 1997 is today the 11 million dollar pay sake that just went public in a dispatch.
By Bill solely the owners of Las Vegas nights. So I got my start as a lawyer gaming lawyer got into Payment Processing stuff got into the internet quite early was offered the job as the CEO of partypoker party gaming at the time. It was a ten billion dollar company. I moved to Gibraltar with my family. I ran that business for two years during those two years the unlawful internet gaming app packed into that passed in 2006 and America, I turned off the u.s. Part of our business which took the business from a 10 billion dollar market cap to it.
A two billion dollar market cap I learned a lot we recovered very well the stock did well and shareholders did well, I was standing having to turn off a substantial amount of the business and I met Mark Rowan one of the founders of Apollo and he and David bonderman who co-owned in their firms tpg and Apollo, they co-owned Caesars, which was 50 Casino properties around the United States and elsewhere and they asked me if I was interested in starting a digital subsidiary of Caesars and holding the World Series of Poker.
So I'll stop now but that's sort of the the start of my career as a lawyer and then payment processing and gaming was in my life until party gaming when I left party gaming and I did I did start this subsidiary of Caesars and I guess the rest will talk about.
Yeah, so when you go to start that subsidiary what's so fascinating to me is you essentially go from practicing law around gaming to running a company and probably dealing with one of the most catastrophic things that could happen in terms of having shut off the US business.
And then really kind of jumping full in to a US based business right and kind of saying the we're gonna go do digital gaming. What was so exciting about kind of coming to the u.s. To do this was it, you know bonderman and Apollo and kind of the players was it the opportunity was it just you were going to get the opportunity to kind of build a skill set and experience what really drove you to say? Yes to it.
You know, I think number one. I felt that I had made the money that was going to make me happy and comfortable.
The rest of my life and so I wasn't going to be driven driven by money. I love the idea of working with bonderman and Rowan and Apollo and tpg and the Caesars brand always resonated with me because I was someone who knew a lot about gaming and knew a lot about gaming law and so to be able to be sort of wrapped in the Caesars Palace brand and the Planet Hollywood brand and the World Series of Poker Grand. I thought that was a great opportunity for me. We thought that poker would become legal in the United States. We don't know World Series of Poker and we would make a lot of money for our Cheryl for our stakeholders and our shareholders.
That turned out to not be the case, but I think your first intuition is right that I saw this opportunity to be with around bonderman in Rouen and this group Gary loveman. Who was the CEO at the time and I remember that when I started working there I went to to bond Roman and Roman both separately and I told them what I really want. Is that if I'm successful here, so 2008 if I'm successful here. I'd like to be in your ecosystem afterwards. I'd like to be able to invest with you. I'd like to sit.
Boards and they both said that sounds like a good idea. I don't know what the time if they were, you know, thinking that this was serious or not. But as it turns out it's 12 years later and that's what I do. So I saw the opportunity to be around people that I thought could really help me in my life. If I and I could help them as well. But to be around them it was being around winners. Actually, you know, it's kind of like if I could, you know play for the Golden State Warriors 2 years ago, that would be that would be awesome. So I felt like you know, I was maybe the last man on the bench, but I was playing on a great team and I was happy to be
be there.
Yeah, and in terms of as you get that business started kind of tells the story of starting it all the way to so when you decide to leave
yeah, what happened was they go from from 2009 to 2010. We were very hopeful that we would get legalized online poker. We ran into Sheldon Adelson who didn't want internet poker and he had a lot of you know, the way that us political system works. I think you know it very well but these super Pacs are pretty powerful and you know, I believe that Sheldon made sure that internet poker didn't become
Legal because he wasn't ready for didn't understand it and didn't want it. And so once we realize that we realize is I hate to use the word pivot but we knew we had the pivots because I had a meeting in December 2010 with my management team. I said guys listen, I don't think that you are going to become wealthy running the World Series of Poker and if we don't find something else you're all going to look for something else because look it's the wild west world is Young. You guys are young guys? And so we started looking around and we saw zanga poker.
Her and we saw a farm bill and we said hey, you know, what? Why would sing a poker not want to be, you know involved with the World Series of Poker and add that brand to their to their social game at the time. It was mostly on Facebook. It wasn't a mobile game. And so we went down we finally got a meeting with them. They didn't take that. Seriously. We met with Mark Pincus. He didn't take that. Seriously. He might say differently today, but he takes that seriously and he didn't he didn't really want to do much with us. And so as we left the meeting was xanga in San Francisco. We said, okay now I'm gonna
Ourselves now I had I had a lot of experience in Israel. I speak Hebrew. I lived in Israel. I said listen Israel is a great Hub of game development. Let's try to find something there and lo and behold a friend of mine asked me if I had heard of a certain company, which I had not the company was doing run rate of about 10 million of ebitda with 13 employees in an apartment in Tel Aviv. I flew to Tel Aviv sadly apartment. I met with the guys I fell in love with them and went back to the board at Caesars.
You know an elderly elderly and older board, you know, a board of Bonner means and people of his generation and explain to them. I want to buy this social games company where people are playing games just for fun. No by points just to add, you know to the experience but they don't have any chance to redeem them or win anything and I want to pay a hundred million dollars for this business, which was 10 times even though and actually, you know, I can make the story somewhere exciting but they say go ahead and do it and we went and we bought that company and that company has
It's done spectacularly. Well, four and a half years later. We sold it to a Consortium in China including Jack Ma's family office for 4.4 billion dollars. And now it's four years later. They've they've issued are S1 and they'll be public in two weeks at about an eleven billion dollar market cap. So bought at 400 sold it for 44.4 same management team stayed there. I didn't I stayed at Caesars to finish, you know, a couple of projects I was working on.
And those guys have done incredibly well, and I'm very proud of them. So play Tico will be public in New York in the third week in January probably around 11 12 billion dollar market cap. So I'm really amazing story and the money that Caesars learned from that sale. They used to settle with the creditors of Caesars parent company, which was in restructuring in the time. So it's a really good story for just about everybody the creditors at Caesars the shareholders stakeholders my management team myself, and now once again,
The management team of founders of play
Tikka. Yeah, it's an amazing story. And so obviously you kind of continue to do the work at Caesars eventually you leave and you now do a whole bunch of stuff investing you said on a couple of boards. I've really enjoyed getting to know you. Let's maybe talk a little bit about the board of director positions that you hold two of those are Rackspace and Shutterfly this year or really 2020 has not been the most fun year to be running businesses. That potentially could be
Impacted by a global pandemic government-mandated shutdowns talk us through as a experienced board member who's previously run pretty large companies and had a lot of success. What were those conversations like over the last year with Executives and kind of what are the things that you were thinking about or you were really hoping that exactly for paying attention to it? Some of these larger companies?
Yeah. Well, you know, first of all, there's a great amount of luck here, right? So I'll start with the worst experience. I also helped tpg by Cirque du Soleil and I
As the chairman of surface LA and I had a multi-million dollar Investments or posole and the Cirque is now 300 days into zero Revenue. So from a business of generating close to two billion dollars of Revenue. It's been an 0 for 300 days. It went into restructuring. It's now owned by by its lenders. So those conversations were we're very very difficult because we couldn't figure out a way that you could actually sustain yourself at zero revenue and service the debt.
You always you always will have a contingency plan. What if we lose twenty percent of our
Revenue, but if we lose 30% of our Revenue what if we shut down for a
month or two, it's very difficult to foresee a situation and be prepared for situation where you have 6,000 employees and you're out of business. I think the circle be out of business for a year and a half. So that was a you know, a really unfortunate situation. Of course, you know, I did learn a lot we made some decisions but there were none that we could have made that would have made it into
To a success and that's that's what I'm talking about. When I talk about good luck bad luck, you know if this would have been an internet virus and not a human virus and Google was down for a year and a half and all the internet Cloud companies would after year and a half. Well live entertainment will be thriving and the internet wouldn't be so that was on the negative side and the positive side. Of course, I mean Rackspace a cloud services business, you know couldn't be better had the best year in the history of Rackspace went public again, so we took a private in that
He took it public again about two months ago have a phenomenal CEO and you know the decisions there were if we need to invest in the business to accelerate the growth. Let's do that. Let's not just sit back because the cloud is growing and try to have a highest margins possible with you know, with shortsightedness. Let's have let's have real foresight. Let's make sure that we're here after the pandemic as a high-growth cloud services company and Kevin Jones. Who's the CEO is doing a great job and the case of Shutterfly.
We weren't exactly sure how the you know how we were going to be impacted on the one hand. We have a business where we're the largest procure taker of high school graduation and college graduation in church photos with a company called Lifetouch. So, of course there were hardly any school photos, but at the same time the amounts than the the volume of photo books and other merchandise that we sell through Shutterfly.
Has really been astounding so we've had a great year in Shutterfly. People are stuck at home, you know the average person. I don't know this I'm making the number of but the average person that I know. Okay. So if I asked you to prom how many photos are in your phone right now the numbers probably like 10,000 a lot of people have 20,000 most people have 2000 and they're so organized and so people have had a lot of time and we've seen that because they've taken and use that time to upload photos and create.
Photo albums mugs pillows calendars Christmas cards Etc. So, you know, I think that it's more a matter of luck than decisioning because Shutterfly and Rackspace we didn't have to Pivot at at Cirque du Soleil couldn't pivot and again luck struck us at the Seattle crack anywhere. I'm on the Executive Board of the cracking and in the ownership group with David bonderman and Jerry Bruckheimer and and the Jesse and I guess you could say
Got lucky. We start in October 20 21. And so we haven't had to go through this partial season. No fans. We launched our team name. We launched the team logo. We launched our merchandise very successfully were second and sales only the Tampa Bay Lightning because they won the cup and then we'll have the draft in July and two days later. We'll have the NHL entry draft. So, you know, I think I think you have to have a really strong board in all of these situations and I think you have to play to your strengths and
And you know I said, like I said, I've been in more lucky situations during during the pandemic then not at the same time. You have to have a lot of empathy because the whole world is not in the cloud. The whole world is not jamaat and David Sachs and you on must and calm from the whole world is not in Bitcoin and blockchain, you know, the world is construction workers restaurant owners hotel workers service people stuck at home school teachers. So yeah, I think it's just been a very interesting.
Just in time not only is a board member investor, but just as a you know, as a human being
for sure, we're going to talk about Bitcoin in a second. But before we get to that you've been around the same people for a decade Plus at this point and you've mentioned some of their names now talk a little bit just about how important it was for you and for your career development kind of the success that you've had to not only one surround yourself with people who you admired you found successful or kind of the winners that you described but also to to do it for a long period of time so not just hey, let's work.
Work on one thing but to continuously work with the same people over and over and over again over a decade. Like why do you feel like that's been so important to your success,
you know, first of all, I'm watching you and I see a lot of myself in you or you and me we haven't known each other for long, but I see that you do a couple of things number one you value the networking without seeking to benefit necessarily from the network, even though you know, you will
You meet Jim
Cramer Jim Cramer and Elon Musk at some point that will probably get probably will be good for you. But you don't have this, you know, preconceived notion of how am I going to leverage my relationship with Elon Musk or or tomorrow for whomever. I think that's important and the second thing I find that you do that I think is important is that you think in a couple of areas of business and you know them as well or better than anybody else. So if you value relationships and you don't seek to benefit from them necessarily and so there are
Antic, I think my relationship with vitamins authentic with then Gilbert's authentic with Mark Rowan. It's authentic. They happen to be the Billionaire's I have lots of relationships with people who you know are in the fourth level of management in companies and they've been with me since 1999 or 2003 and I value their friendships and their relationships and their loyalty and we figured out a way most of the time to actually make money and have success together and we figure out a way to deal with failures disappointments and and the like and I feel like, you know, I've tried to know
As much as I can about the things that I'm involved with today, it's a bit more difficult because I don't know more about digital photography uploading than the people who work at Shutterfly and I certainly don't know more about you know, service cloud services business as the people at Rackspace, but I think it's important when I was a CEO of companies, you know that I had that I had the knowledge and the trust of the people who work for me that I was working at least as hard as they were and so I feel that the bottom is in Ruins and Gilbertson.
And love wounds and the like they recognized my work ethic and hopefully if they find me authentic and we found interesting fun ways to work together. You know, I once said to bonderman I said and Jim Holt is another one who I just adore and dimensional con at iconic manage a large amount of Our Family Assets today. I said the bottom and when they said, you know David there were four or five billion dollars. Why are you and I am making Investments where you know reach investing a million dollars or even half a million dollars.
Is actually was the most beautiful answer everyone's I just want to be an interesting deals with people. I want to be in deals with and so that told me everything, you know, he doesn't have to write a 20 million dollar check to make it exciting. Just want to be in an exciting business with people that he likes if it's a half a million or more 25 million or a hundred fifty million. He just wants to be there and that's how I feel. So if my check is fifty thousand five hundred thousand a million 5 million. I want to be there with the people that are in it and and we share
Kind of that same those same values.
Yeah, that's a great way to look at it. Before we talk about Bitcoin you mentioned is Iconic in a number of the Investments. You've made talk through a little bit. Just how you think philosophically about managing your wealth and investing in general you obviously trust the folks that iconic and then you do some of the direct investing like what is there a certain philosophy or approach or framework that you use when you think about how do I actually invest the money that I have?
Well, first of all, I feel like I'm surrounded by
People who know much more than I do about many of the Investments that I have and so I'm better off to rely on ikonics due diligence in getting into Snowflake and then participating in the co-invest of snowflake. So I'm not smart in having a big, you know investment in Snowflake. I'm lucky to have a big investment in Snowflake. I'm smart to trust iconic unlucky to be in the
oh system of iconic eye contacts a big shared family office and they manage a lot of Mark Zuckerberg Sheryl Sandberg Dorsey bonderman Mattel. So, you know, I always say like, I'm the little guy in that office and I'm super happy to be it's fine. And then I invest in then I have a second basket of Investments where the people I trust are making Investments and they feel and I feel that I could add value to the management team. So I'll make a you know, a multi-million dollar investment Rackspace Shutterfly.
At a number of businesses whether it's Circus Olay or long van Wolford and I'll sit on the board and I'll help management usually their businesses that I'm interested in. So I'm happy to make the investment. I want to sit on the board. I want to help management. I want to get deeply involved in their success and if there are failures along the way then, you know all help them through those if I help cause them and I'll help them find ways to get out of them. But so generally speaking and now I'm making a number of smaller investments in things that just interest me that I
Don't know how they're going to turn out. You know, I'm invested in a company that's seeking to prolong the life of dogs. And I think that's really cool. And I think that the woman who runs it is is really really great. And so I made a small investment that I'll make investments in things that I don't know much about but I find interesting either socially interesting, you know, I'm no longer going to invest in oil and I had lots of big investments in oil. So I wanted this and oil I won't invest in gun manufacturers. I want invest obviously in full. I don't know that many.
People that I know are best eaten cold today, but try to be a bit socially conscious and try to find things that interest me, you know my investment in love and Wilfred are because I love fashion, but I do think that will get a good return on the investment and I brought Paris Hilton and Steve Aoki along with me and they love Fashions. Do you know hopefully we'll make something out of it. So good people around me that you know, I really trust then there are the good people that I'm associated with like Apollo tpg info son, whatever they're doing great due diligence for the
Most part and you know they have so many Investments that there are some that are appealing to me and where I can add value and sit on the board and that's really exciting for me. And so those are the kinds of things that I learned. I obviously the hockey team I mean bonderman asking me if I want to be part of the ownership group. Yes, and that's Canadian kids dream,
right? I love that part. Let's talk about Bitcoins. That's how you and I got connected. We've done a couple of calls and I think I've been really impressed with just your intellectual curiosity your open-mindedness and really the reason why we wanted to record
This was you have a lot of questions that many people that you spend all day with whether their Executives or investors have but also you've got a very unique view in that you've built a lot of great businesses or been an investor in great businesses. And so you have a level of resources that may be the everyday person doesn't have which means that you have certain questions or concerns or a perspective or thought process that again, you know kind of the average person doesn't and so let's just start maybe kind of with like
How you currently see Bitcoin and maybe some of the considerations as you're thinking through it and then we can get into the questions that you have.
Yeah, so let me start with the way we met because it will dovetail into my questions about Bitcoin. I have two sons 25 and 20 x 20 year old son, you know, he sees that I'm involved with the cracking and he sees that I'm involved with longfang and he's been following the influencer trend on Tick-Tock and Instagram and he's been following you and
He felt he didn't tell me this first, but he felt that we needed to meet and then that he felt that he wanted to see whether we could do something with you for long vein or for the Kraken with influencers. And the reason I bring that up is because Bitcoin is a bit like that, right? There's a generational Gap. I'm 56. There's a generation gap between what's going on on tick tock tick tocks really making 17 times more even than Instagram how many people know that there's a generation gap also in
oh, it doesn't mean there's not a lot of older guys in Bitcoin and women there are but there's a bit of a generation gap in blockchain and and Bitcoin and so I find that I've sort of passed through a couple of phases the phase of you know, Bitcoin that's bullshit Bitcoin. It's a bubble Bitcoin. Nobody understands it right and then I passed it to the point where I said, wait a minute.
Really smart people I know are really engaged in Bitcoin. Okay leave aside your posts every day reminding all of us who don't own Bitcoin that is up another thousand every 15 minutes leave that aside for a minute but really smart friends of mine are in Bitcoin because they feel they understand it. All right, and another guys like me who are saying, okay pump I have access to you. Thank you for that access. I want to use it for you to explain Bitcoin to me. I have a bank account.
Rose and I have a brokerage account and in that brokerage account, I own shares in a number of public equities. And in that brokerage account, I have two or three different currencies and I want to put a million or two million dollars of Bitcoin into that account. Well, you can't so I start by asking you the question, you know around if I wanted to buy them and I did ask you this question. I want to buy a million or two million dollars of Bitcoin. How do I get comfortable where I'm sending that money because it's not going to be
As for adults not credits ways. It's not BMO. How do I get comfortable where I'm sending that money? How do we get comfortable that what I'm getting in return is 2 million dollars worth of bitcoin that I can create liquidity with when I need to okay and that I can rely on it being in a safe secure place that I'll always be able to turn to it. Whatever the value is. Maybe maybe the price goes down. Maybe it goes up. So the first question I think it's one of the first questions is how do you get me comfortable?
All around that idea that I can't just buy it like I buy Google
stock. Yeah. So in you know, we're cheating a little bit because this question we've talked at length about but I think the first thing is people get really comfortable when they hear especially when they've got large resources Fidelity's in the game or JP Morgan's in the game. Goldman Sachs is getting in the game, right like okay, those are brands that they're from the Legacy World whether I'm a customer or or not. I know them I have friends that work there. I know people who use them and
Have some level of trust simply because it's a brand that I understand and if they're doing it, there must be some level of Regulatory Compliance security transparency reporting Etc. And I think that just that alone gets people to say, okay, like maybe there is a path. Maybe I'll use Fidelity for example, or maybe I won't but at least I know that there is a path that matches the way that I normally do things but to your point, I can't go do it in my city bank account, you know, or or one of the other accounts you mentioned
The second component of this is there's a lot of crypto native or Bitcoin native solution. So these are usually the exchanges or custody providers. They tend to be names that the average wealthy person or investor has not heard before before they start looking. So this is coinbase Gemini block Phi and a whole bunch of others. But what you do quickly realizes wait a second when base has 35 million registered users, right? They've got 25 plus billion dollar.
Some assets on their platform like these are numbers that show one sustainability. So they've been around for you know, many years to they're backed by kind of tier one venture capitalist many people you've Co invested with or that you know, and then three is just the kind of Lindy effect of like the longer it's around in the more assets. They get put there in the more people who use it the more people just have our have comfort and whether they should or not that's just a natural human psychological kind of component right as you just get comfortable with something that is
Is popular and so I think that once people start to understand. Okay, I have options right? I have Legacy options and I have these kind of new to bitcoin native or crypto native options, then it's really just like what do I want to accomplish? Right and so for somebody like you you'll be the first one to say like you're not a day trader, you're not going to go sit and try to time big coins market and buy and sell multiple times a day. So what you basically want to do is you want to think of it from an asset allocation standpoint. I'm going to put you know, it's called 2 million dollars into Bitcoin and I'm basically gonna park it there and sure I'll watch the price because it's
And
exciting but like I'm not going to make any investment decisions based on it Bitcoins at 32 33 or 34 thousand dollars. I'm pretty much putting an allocation and I'm going to watch what happens and so when that occurs, I think really where people kind of focus is like the on-ramp to bitcoin is somewhat commoditized meaning that you can go and use Legacy options where you can use the Bitcoin native options, but really where the differentiation comes is around custody. So do you want to self custody asset or do you want some?
Else to custody it for you. And I think that's the the part of the conversation where one there's a lack of education but also to there's frankly fear, right? You know, how many times have you read something that like Bitcoin got hacked? Right? Well Bitcoin didn't get hacked an exchange got hacked the custody provider got hacked whatever and so I think that what is probably not as well understood in the Bitcoin Community is for you, right? It sounds crazy but like a two million dollar investment is material, but it's also not Material right in the sense of if you're used to
Doing very large deals with your money or other people's money. It's enough for you to pay attention, but it's also not enough where you say, you know, what I'm going to really trust myself to go self custody this I'm going to put it on some sort of Hardware wallet. I'm going to put it in the safe in my house or something like that. And so your use case is very very different than somebody who's kind of in the hardcore Bitcoin Community. Now people will debate should you suffer custody should you not we'll put that to me decide. It just comes down to where do you have confidence?
Penance because this allocation is important, but it's not the most important thing. It's not the most concentrated part of your portfolio. It's where I think people end up on this is Fidelity coinbase Gemini block Phi JP Morgan Goldman Sachs, like they'll all come up with their thing or did next bucket is they'll start using something like grayscale or bitwise for these kind of ETF like structure so their trust structures, but there's a book ticker and so when you get in that world,
And you say Okay, 12 months from now. If we have this conversation, you're gonna be able to buy it in your city bank account right how it gets there one of the
problems with identity for a minute. So if my mom has a Fidelity account and just a million dollars in can she can she buy $100,000 of good point and I think
yeah, so the folks at Fidelity are going to be all over me because I always get this wrong there. They move so quickly that it's constantly changing my understanding of where they are right now is basically if you're a high net worth individual or an institution
You've got kind of a private client type relationship. They will help you buy Bitcoin. They will help you store Bitcoin and I believe that they've announced publicly. They now will also give loans against your Bitcoin collateral via partnership with block
file. So when you but if you believe that in the next three years, you'll be able to click a button and buy Bitcoin in your Fidelity either next five years. That should be the path to you know, the Gen pop by
Not yes. Okay population
most so in this is what's pretty crazy right is as I've kind of unpacked this more and more. I've been fascinated to understand some of the nuances around what like, you know that general population. So when you really think about the United States, I know the numbers pretty well about 45% of Americans hold no investable assets, right me just let it no stocks no bonds. No, you know anything those people actually are very quickly getting caught.
Caught up into the investing world. You have covid shut down all sports. So now they got day-trading stuff going on. The Robin Hood's the cash app. So the world fractional shares crypto becomes a really big thing. It's fun. It's exciting. It's not the promise of you can become rich like all it pulls people into it. And so I think that that like bottom, you know, 45 percent or so of the population generally is less educated has less resources, but now is starting to show a desire and so some of that will change they'll get more educated and hopefully we'll be able to buy investing kind.
Improve their financial
life didn't there is let's call it kind of another 45 to 50% that's you know, the middle to the upper end of the spectrum. These are folks who are into investing. They're somewhat sophisticated. They've got some you know level of resources and also they've got the persistence to go sign up for coinbase or gemini or block fire whatever. So they're willing to put their information in 4ky caml. They're going to you know, open a second account. They're going to go check it. They're going to make sure it's secure like they
they want the exposure. They understand the value proposition and their desire is large enough that they'll actually go do it. The third group is let's call it the top 125 percent of Americans up until maybe two years ago. Most of those people were sitting this out. It was too small. It didn't make sense. A lot of the things that you said, right? I don't understand it. It's a bubble you all of those things were that was the talking narrative that's all shipped in the last 18 months. And so I think those are the folks that
They're used to one of two things either buying directly in that Fidelity account, right and kind of be able to click a button or two being able to make very large multi-million dollar investments in assets where they're an accredited investor, they signed some documents and basically now they own something and so be the idea of I'm going to go open an account on this thing called coinbase and I'm basically going to wire money into it and then make a purchase but I can't see my stocks next to it and I can't in my stock account see my Bitcoin that's like a foreign concept to them.
Them and so I think that really what you're seeing is almost the reverse the very low retail kind of 45% bottom of the socio-economic ladder. They came in then you got the next 45. And then finally, it's you're seeing the 125 percent. These are the Paul Tudor Jones has the Stanley druckenmiller, 's like they're coming when they show up. They're not showing up trying to buy, you know, $500 worth of bitcoin try to buy 500 million dollars exactly what I think that's where you're seeing the price kind of
explode. So I agree and I think I think I won't call the barrier to entry.
The barrier to the inter and once the barriers to and there are going to become more simple more simplified. I think that you know, that's when this thing really really take off. So let's talk about the supply for a minute. Okay all buy a stock tomorrow in a company and they made the next day issue 10 billion dollars of stock to buy another company, right? So I bought them they had 50 million shares outstanding next thing another 100 million shares outstanding that might be fun, right we may not agree with the
If I don't have enough stock to vote, so it doesn't really matter. So people are caught up in this whole supply and supply and demand from of Bitcoin. But yet we all own US Dollars where the supply is infinite and definitely not damaged. We all stopped in public companies where the supply can go down by buying back stock were up by usually new stock. So let's talk about why people like me need to understand better this Supply.
And piece of Bitcoin where there's some fixed supply of Bitcoins.
Yeah. So on the supply side just structurally. It's a deflationary asset meaning that there's 21 million over time. Once we hit that 21 million cap. No more Bitcoin will be created right that is determined by computer code that computer code can only be changed if more than 51% of people agree and obviously as more and more people adopt this that went from you know at one point is a couple hundred people had it.
Agree to now it's literally tens of millions of one day will be hundreds of millions or billions of people that need to agree. And so it's just generally accepted and I personally believe that will never happens too much kind of large-scale global coordination needed to change that 21 million cap.
So when you under the Bodhi take place, so in companies that I own shares in they said proxies around and we still in these sort of antiquated way put x's and box is exactly back. So how does it work in Bitcoin?
Yeah. So without getting really deep in the technical
Needs are that's not how it happens. It is a fairly technical process. And so just if you hold Bitcoin doesn't mean you get a vote, right? So there's a whole mining process and proposals and and kind of a non chain much more technology enabled voting mechanism compared to hey, I mailed you. I need to know where you live. Right and I'm out of paper you check off something email it back. And so the other key piece to the structure is that 21 million cap, but also the incoming daily Supply.
Why and what I mean by incoming daily Supply is as you described with the shares in a company. It's set for a period of time until there's a decision made to increase or to buy back shares, right? And those are fairly infrequent decisions and they create inflection points in price based on whether people agree or disagree becomes more attractive or less attractive. Well with Bitcoin everything is programmatic and that's simply just means that they literally wrote in code at the creation of Bitcoin. We're gonna have 21 million.
Coin and then we are going to take those 21 million Bitcoins and we are going to put them into circulation on a predetermined schedule and so it started out at we're going to put 50 Bitcoin into circulation every 10 minutes and we're going to do that for four years after that four year period we will cut that 50 in half called the Bitcoin having will go down to 25 do that for four years, then we'll go down to 12 and a half and then we'll do that for four years and it will go down to where we are today where it's 6.25 Bitcoin every 10 minutes. So the key to this
Kind of incoming daily Supply is over the last four years up until May 20 20. There was 1800 Bitcoin a day coming into this circulating Supply. Well in May 20-22 got cut down to 900 Bitcoin per day. And so just like there's a supply shock in a company when there is either by backs or there is a large issuance Bitcoin has this kind of pre-programmed Supply shock. Now the last thing I'll say about kind of the structural supply side is when you are trying to determine market.
Isis you usually have two inputs, right? You've got the supply and you've got demand and those two things change and you essentially are guessing or estimating in an educated way what's going to happen to the supply and what's going to happen to demand if Supply stays constant and demand goes up then we think price will go up or vice versa and we kind of figure it out with Bitcoin Bitcoin is unique in that because it is a programmatic set Supply schedule. We have 100 percent certainty what is going to happen as long as the code is
not changed and we can verify so I can literally show you on the blockchain everyday 900 Bitcoin were created here's where they went. And so that kind of certainty and predictability of a programmatic monetary policy is really unique because it then says if we want to determine future price movements, we simply have to model demand rather than models supply and demand and so I think that's one thing that Bitcoin has an advantage over other assets is the supply side is held kind of program.
Actually and predictably and therefore the focus then shifts just the demand side not the supply and demand side like in traditional
assets. Okay, great. So I want to just jump back to a preconceived notion that I had which I no longer think is relevant, but it drove my decision to not learn more about big one for a while. And that was the notion people hate to sound like Tom everyone saying people were saying that people wanted Bitcoin as a means to pay for things.
Things anonymously and I was thinking you know what that doesn't seem like enough of a market people aren't that uncomfortable pay with PayPal thing with their credit card or pay establish that the world needs an anonymous currency and that's what's going to drive the value that turns out that that's not really the narrative anymore that people need an anonymous currency and that the future of paying for things as Bitcoin. It might be but that's no longer than a narrative. So what is the narrative in terms of you know if I buy?
Lock in Google. I think their earnings will increase quarter-over-quarter to the next several years if I buy gold is because in and I don't understand all that well, but there is a supply of gold that's more physically verifiable to most people not to you. But to most people that don't have the code for Bitcoin they can see the gold Supply and understand the supply the price of gold. So what is it that's going to drive especially since we now know that it's going to become easier and easier to buy Bitcoin. So what's better
Drive the value of Bitcoin. Once we get to the point where everyone can buy a Bitcoin the way they can buy a share of Google.
Yeah. So the beauty of narratives is there's always multiple narratives of any asset and some of them are true. Some of them are not and you as an investor base camp to figure out which ones are which right? And so Google is a great example, you may buy it because you think earnings are going to go up somebody else made by it because they think even with earnings flat it's undervalued today and somebody else made by because they think that Google is the most Innovative company that
They don't care about the finances and they just want to own the tech or back the founder or whatever. Right? And so with Bitcoin, I agree that early on there was this very big focus on what people called Anonymous but essentially is sued Anonymous payments, right it so you can use this anywhere obviously that's super attractive to criminals drug dealers money launderers, you know that whole crowd
and so Kayla
all of them and so one of the things that's really interesting is in the
inning people hadn't had a lot of time to study Bitcoin to study technology adoption to study the way that currencies get kind of, you know permeate throughout a society. Now after 10 years, there's a lot of really really smart people paying attention to this writing about it and kind of analyzing it and so given the information we have today. There's a couple of key data points won almost every great Technologies first stop adopted by the fringes of society. So beeper cell phones internet, right? It's disgusting cat and mouse game between law enforcement and Bad actors.
And they're constantly looking for new technology to skirt law enforcement. So it's actually a positive sign. If you look at it from a technology adoption standpoint that those are the people who first adopted Bitcoin right? Because it's kind of the natural progression. Does it feel great from a society standpoint when that's the narrative on day one, but it's actually a natural thing to happen. The second thing is that people say, oh it is electronic cash, right? It is a P2P electronic cash right written in the white paper. Well, that is true, but one of the key pieces to
Understand about a currency right? If you go back and you look at let's say gold is you first have to have a store of value properties before you can have medium of exchange properties. So real quick example of gold is gold served as this great store of value for 5000 years, but it's hard to use it's hard to carry around. It's heavy. It's hard to break into, you know divisible pieces. It's hard to kind of measure, you know, one ounce Force another without a scale all those issues can't send it right across borders, you know in the mail very easily all that comes up well in order to
That problem we basically took gold and said rather than carry around the gold. Why don't we put the gold in a safe and will create paper claims on the gold so literally the US dollar backed by gold and we'll just ride around this paper claims much easier to use much easier to divide much easier to kind of count and really Drive kind of velocity of money or Commerce will eventually we said great those dollars are awesome. Why don't we then create electronic versions of them? So now we can just trade ones and zeros on computers rather than have to carry on the physical cash and then we created credit and kind of all these other layers on top of it and then in
1871 we decide to unpack the dollar from gold, right? So that's kind of the the story of gold but really dollars were just a second or third layer to Gold to make it much easier to use gold. Well, that's what's happening with Bitcoin Bitcoin chose to optimize for one thing out of the gate and that was the security to provide store of value. How does it store the value that you put into it? And so today you can think of Bitcoin as a suit or a scientifically engineered say
In
technology and what I mean by that is by Between the monetary policy of that Cap supply and the disinflationary monetary Supply schedule combined with the fact that Bitcoin is the strongest Computing Network in the world. Meaning. Nobody can hack it that provides the trust or the validation for people to Simply act exchange their fiat currency for Bitcoin. So they take dollars they buy Bitcoin. They take your rose. They buy Bitcoin they take the RMB they buy Bitcoin and then they just hold it and the reason why they're holding.
Adding it is because they believe that the store of value it will protect or preserve that purchasing power. And so compare that to the dollar right? The dollar basically is falling off a cliff in terms of purchasing power year-over-year 15, 20 % kind of degradation of that purchasing power comparing that to bitcoin Bitcoin is basically going up fifty to a hundred percent a year in terms of purchasing power. And so now you're starting to get people waking up saying wait a second if we know that currencies get adopted by first being store of value than being medium of Exchange.
And Bitcoin is first optimizing for security and store a value and then as now starting to add layers 2 and 3 and you know into the future and it's going to become easier to transact. It's going to become cheaper to transact actually again, we're just kind of on the natural progression of adoption for a currency. So you overlay natural progression of adoption for a technology with natural progression of adoption for our currency and you start to realize this Bitcoin thing is actually really really interesting and it's interesting.
Because it is so different than all of the other currencies in the world and I do you know as an investor you'll this will kind of hit home for you right is when everyone's doing the same thing whether you know, whatever the industry is in a new player comes along and says I'm going to do something different if that person's right, they end up using being incredibly disruptive to the incumbents. And so if you look around the world, I currencies every fiat currency is exactly the same. They're all inflationary currencies. They're all governed by humans usually with a central
It's got a small number of people who are making decisions and they're manipulating interest rates or quantitative easing. That's every currency. They compete on details, right? Well who's got what interest rate who's devaluing faster or slower? But they're all structurally the same Bitcoin comes along and says, we have no centralization. We're completely decentralized. We're going to be programmatic. We're going to be transparent. And by the way, we're gonna have a cap Supply. Therefore we're going to serve as a hundred eighty degree different Choice than your Fiat currencies and so 12 years six hundred billion dollars in value and
I think we're on the way to something much much higher into the trillions of dollars, right if not tens of trillions of dollars and it's simply because this new Challenger is a hundred eighty degree structural difference and people are starting to understand the narrative around if I can find something that is more accessible digital. I don't have to have a bank account. I can simply have an internet connection and it is able to preserve my purchasing power in the US and Canada. That's interesting right like yeah the dollar works for me but like if I could
Reserve purchasing power that's cool in Venezuela Iran, India Pakistan African countries, that's life or death. That's literally the difference between having money for food or not. And so I think that we forget, you know, the u.s. Is 330 million people we matter but we don't really matter that much when you look at the 7 plus billion people in the world that are beginning to look at this and understand it and see where the adoptions coming from. You're likely to see it with people who understand hyperinflation who understand the erosion of
Hissing power and so that's what to me makes it. So interesting is as a global phenomenon well,
but you let the Americans do lead. I think one of the things do things that throw people like me off is there hasn't really been any new currencies in a long time. Right? So all the countries have their currency than a bunch of countries got together gray the Euro. So if anything there's a shrinking number of currencies instead of an expanding number versus so Bitcoin comes along and you and I have been talking now for the 52 minutes and we only mentioned Bitcoin which for me is five.
Because I'm right now so super like narrowly focused on understanding Bitcoins. If you throw a theory mm into it and then a number of others. Do you think that the existence of multiple currencies in crypto is confusing to most people do you think it's good for the crypto economy or is there really only room for one reliable leading currency and at these are questions? I have no idea what
The
answer is yeah. So the framework I used to kind of think through this and this is you know, just constantly iterating on it talking to people from public pensions endowments Hospital Systems, folks like yourself all the way down to the average Joe literally on the street of New York is I personally believe that every stock Bond currency and commodity will be digitized in the future. Right? What does that mean? It sounds cool. But what does that mean? If you go back kind of let's say pre 60 70s and into the 80s. Everything was analog.
There's a physical stock certificate of physical mortgage, you know a physical deed to a home whatever and those were all transacted in the analog world. Literally, I would either hand you or mail to you a physical stock certificate and that showed that you own the shares in that company. Well the people who quickly realized when the internet came out that I could use a computer to now purchase those same shares and I could own electronic you sit versus owning the physical paper. They had a significant Advantage they were early adopters, right and now all of a sudden I could buy and sell
so with information asymmetry with trade execution advantages, whatever well every asset now is that electronic uses its kind of the electronic age of these Securities. So literally you can own a mortgage as an electronic you step you can own a stock a currency all that kind of stuff. Like when you say you have multiple currencies in your portfolio. You don't literally have the physical currency sitting in you know, a safe somewhere you own them through these electronic you sense. Now, what's happening is we're moving from that electronic version to the digital version, right and so in that world you're going to have
Stocks digital bonds digital currencies digital Commodities in the world of crypto. There are a very very small number of assets that are trying to be digital currencies. Right Bitcoin is one of them. There's these things called stable coins, which are basically backed 1212 Fiat currencies central banks are talking about creating Central Bank digital currencies, but a currency very specifically as a store of value medium of exchange has kind of a definition to it and there's very few in there Bitcoin by far being the leader. There is a whole host of
of other things trying to be digital stocks bonds and commodities. So something like ether which is part of the etherium system right is not so much trying to be a currency right people aren't trying to use it simply as a currency. It's more something akin to a digital commodity right? It's used to power the system is used to gain access to things and so there are some applications that are that want to use ether as money. I've got my personal opinion as to why I don't think that's going to happen but
If you talk to the folks in the etherium community, they say look this is something different Bitcoin and etherium don't compete with each other. They're complimentary, right? They Empower different things their purposes are different. And so that Nuance just understanding Bitcoin in ether or built for two different things. Once you understand it, you're like, oh, okay that makes sense to me. The problem is that majority of people outside of crypto have no clue that that's true, right? They just think of oh, they're all digital assets and like they're all competing for each other and why is number one number one?
One versus number eight thousand number eight thousand. There's just a miscommunication. So what I think the world we're moving to and the part that becomes really interesting is your portfolio. Eventually, you're going to hold not just your stocks next to other stocks. You're going to hold every stock Bond currency and commodity in one single digital wallet and the switching cost between those assets is going to go way down. So today if you want to go from owning a stock tune then owning. Let's say you want to pick a really
Gear fiat currency, you probably have to sell your stock into either Canadian and US Dollars, then you got to go do the currency exchange. Right and it's a pain in the ass frankly even more so is if you want to take the currency that you got paid at, you know salary for a job and then go buy a stock. You got to get paid into your bank account. You can get a wired into your brokerage. Can I get to go buy the stock all that kind of stuff? Well, when everything just sits in the same place and has some level of kind of compatibility on a technology layer your ability to go from getting paid.
Din, US Dollars into the RMB then into Bitcoin then into a stock then into a bond that friction goes down. We enter this really interesting world where people start to say wait a second. Why do I hold so much cash or why do I hold so many equities write the friction that the switching cost goes down. And so what I ultimately believe is going to happen is Bitcoin will continue to rise it will continue to be this great store of value on a global basis. It'll serve as not only a global Reserve currency, but it will serve as a personal or corporate Reserve.
See what I mean by that is the government in the u.s. May never accept Bitcoin for taxes. Let's say they may just say we only accept US Dollars great you're gonna get paid in u.s. Dollars with a click of a button you'll be able to either automatically or manually switch that dollar into Bitcoin. You'll sit there and hold it. It will preserve your purchasing power until you're ready to spend it. And then when you want to spend it, you'll click back into the u.s. Dollar and you go pay your taxes or buy something at the store or whatever that will persist for some period of time but eventually of Bitcoin just become stable because so many people have it.
There's so much liquidity all of a sudden you start to say wait a second. Why can't I just use this asset? Right? And I think that's the world that Bitcoin Darcy, you know, I don't know if it's 15 years out or a hundred years out, but that's the world that I think a lot of bitcoiners are saying wait a second. This is how this currency is going to evolve over time. Yeah. I
think the volatility actually hurts its ability to be a transaction with currency because if it's going to be going up tripled in the last eight weeks very few parents. He's doing some currencies followed by another percentage.
If you grow by but so my last question is is I told you a story earlier where regulatory events led me to a decision to turn off any road eight billion dollars in market cap value of a very widely held ftse100 stock on the London Stock Exchange. So there is talk about regulatory risk in crypto. How do you dress sort of, you know, people say well it's going to be regulated. Wow, the government will control at the central bank to control it, but people like new Beanie and
Warren Buffett people we trust their like or respect whose books we read our I don't know if they're naysayers. Some of them are naysayers some warmer cynics. So maybe it's a two-part question one is credible sentence and the other is regulatory rules.
Yeah. So I think that one having the regulatory conversations important right people who just completely ignored or deflected aren't being realistic like there is regulation in the world. Right? And the beauty of regulation for The Regulators is that they have armed men that
I can put you in jail. If you don't listen, right so like that is a very real kind of conversation to have now. The first part is like, where are we with regulation? So the in the United States specifically the SEC and cftc have both come out and they've said look Bitcoin is not a security, right? So this is a property or currency. It's something else other than kind of a regulated security like you would see on a stock exchange that's important because it allows for more people to hold it and do other things with it that you can't do with a stock the second thing. Is that every company that
Transacts with or is related or interacts with Bitcoin has to be a regulated entity based on existing rules. So they haven't created new rules in most cases. There might be a state here there that's create new rules, but for the most part if you want to transmit money right be a money transmitter, you have to get a money transmission license in the state's you want to interact with so you're kind of held to a regulated by the same exact rules. You would be whether it was US dollars or it is Bitcoin now that could change that's one of the
Concerns is all of a sudden. There's more regulation on bitcoin or crypto companies will see if that happens or not. There's a lot of people working on the nonprofit and lobbying side to kind of prevent that from happening a lot of Education with elected leaders, but that's one part of the conversation the second part and I think the thing that scares people more is not so much. Hey are these companies going to be regulated or is there going to be kyc am L? Right? It's basically going to be like feature parity to my legacy institution. Its is the government going to step in and ban ownership. Right? Are they going to try to do something that would
be catastrophic from an ownership perspective. Am I as a holder of Bitcoin going to be at risk in some way and the key part about Bitcoin that I think is so interesting is just like The Regulators pulled, you know, Jack Dorsey Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, whoever into these regulatory hearings and they said you're the CEO you're going to be in trouble. If you don't do X or Y or Z or we're going to shut down your servers or we're going to come, you know, and come to your office has none of that exists with Bitcoin. There's no CEO to call in front of regulators. There's
Headquarters to go to there's no one to put jail or fined or go shut down. And so that decentralisation actually becomes an incredibly advantageous position to be in given what Bitcoin is becoming but what the us could do is say we are going to ban ownership of anyone in the United States with gold They confiscated gold. They made it illegal to own back in the 30s. And so they could attempt to do that. The difference though is I think that we would see an absolute Global like scavenger hunt.
And of all of these government's saying the United States is going to not adopt this. Let's get off the US dollar system. Let's all go and adopt it. Right if we Russia China, you know, whatever their major superpower. We want to get off the US dollar system. We think that it is expensive. We think that it is risky because they can sanction us and tariffs and all this kind of stuff. Let's get off. And so I think that there's enough people in the government who are saying an outright ban is probably an overreach that's probably not good for the sustainability in the position of power and influence the United States.
Have but we should add more regulation. We should have kyc a Mel. We should have companies that have to you know, become a broker dealers or Bank license or whatever it is. I think
that's not any different by the way. It's good for the currency because that means my mom can buy Bitcoin more easily. You know, it's true. You know, my mom was buying Cisco which is how I knew that in 2000 the bubble was there who say no, it's issue Baptist well-made oil cooking oil and I thought I was Crystal but and it's true story, but three
Reality is that you want that if it's a MLK YC and your broker or your online broker is able to transact in you think it's actually it's actually a good thing. So I asked you about cynical cynical critics.
Yeah, look, I think that those folks are either one uneducated or two. They're actually very educated and they're playing the role of entertainer. Right? And there's a whole Spectrum spectrum of them. I tend to say to myself. That's how a market is made like you need the people who don't believe because that's where the market is and frankly when you talk to most people or almost everybody. I don't think I've met a single person who did the work to
Educate themselves and be able to talk intelligently about Bitcoin who didn't say yeah, there's a good chance this works. Right? Maybe they're not a full-on Bitcoin or maybe they've got some concerns or questions, but nobody walks away and says this is really stupid. I can't believe anyone believes in it and it's going to 0 right and so I think education and time spent really important kind of the investment you make to get to that place. The second thing is I don't know a Bitcoin ER who isn't paying the price goes down. This is really interesting every stock pert, you know, kind of investor.
They want the price to go up bitcoiners have this deep-seated long-term belief that the u.s. Dollar value is going to continue to rise. They actually want the price to go down in the short term though, so they can get more of it. They always kind of feel like I don't want enough. I don't own enough. And so that is a really interesting psychological element because I maybe it happened to send some stocks, you know, like a Tesla or something like that, but that doesn't really happen to the degree you see in Bitcoin and so it's almost the exact opposite level of fervor than
The cynics right? Like the critics of Bitcoin are super passionate. They go on television to make a bunch of noise and they kind of, you know, get a bunch of clicks and attention for it. Well, the bitcoiners are almost exactly, you know the opposite but just as passionate take go on television. It's a bunch of crazy stuff people pay attention, whatever and so you get this really interesting asset where you've got two sides that dump their heels in and the markets going to be the referee the markets going to determine who's right who's wrong and you know, I'm
biased so much I mentioned your mom.
Couple of times because you know, he's a clear ball super smart, by the way, I know and respect a lot a lot of the poker Community very very smart very well educated on when it does take those techniques are advice just want to mention one more thing, which is that if you're not my financial advisor becoming a friend and they will respect you a lot you your comment to me privately was Mitch Mitch by 2% of your networking deployment and that makes perfect sense, right? That means that 90%
Scent of your assets an audiobook and I think it was you or somebody who tweeted that you know, the the most difficult Bitcoins advise your first and once you own it, you do not have it better than both of you Tweeting to each other. But so I still don't know my first but it sounds like it makes sense like once you own it one or more of it and they're the most difficult barrier to jump over is the is the initial ones to get the first big one.
So I'll leave you with this you'll appreciate it and then we'll go into some rapid fire questions and up, but I used to
People by one person and somebody who I won't name who's pretty well-known in the finance World said, that's not fun because if it goes down 50% I only lost 50 basis points. So then I started to say 2% because if it goes down 50% then you've at least lost a whole one percent of your of your portfolio and then you can really feel like there was some pain there, but the I think that's the right way to think about it, right? It's like just once you kind of breach the the wall a little bit you say. All right. I'm going to buy one or I'm going to buy, you know with half percent one percent very quickly people.
Get up to speed so all right before I let you go. I've got three questions. Okay that I ask everyone first one is what's the most important book that you've ever read?
What's important book that I've read is startup Nation? I'm half Israeli speaking of where I live in Israel. I bought and sold Israeli companies and it's actually not that the book taught me a lot. It's that the book is a great source of Pride that the rest of the world gets two reels and see what Israel is all about, especially since there are many misperceptions. It's not a perfect frenzy, but it's a great country and it's I think you know the second greatest entrepreneurial country in the world. I think America is the greatest ones brilliant.
Nothing in the world. So that's really the most important book that that I read for that reason.
Yeah, that's a fantastic answer. No one's ever said that one before the second question is a question that is sponsored by eight sleep. So Mateo, who's the CEO there has absolutely berated me into becoming a better sleeper. I sleep on this mattress that they have that cools it off and I told him I would now ask everybody. What is the Sleep routine like do you get four hours of sleep eight hours of sleep how important is it and do actually
Hassan sleep, or is it something that just kind of you do with the bare necessity?
So it's a super it's like a bit of a personal question for me because I almost a very transparent and every time I do a lot of interviews and I say ask me any question on into it. So I sleep extremely poorly. I wake up a couple times in the night. We're asleep five hours more than five animals. I take sleeping pills, two three four times a week just to take an edge off their vocally fall asleep.
I could use help. I never saw help like some type of Sleep Therapy somehow so your grandma I'll speak to anyone because I'm a horrible sleeper. I've been functional. I have a lot of energy will hasn't hurt me. I hope it hasn't taken any years off my life, but I'm not a good school work.
I will introduce you to Mateo. He will your like his his perfect person. He
literally for sleep sleep
research last year. I took a hundred twenty flights and not only do I not sleep.
It very well because of that but I was always sleeping in like on a plane or you know on a red eye or whatever and when I met him and he started getting any up the the curve I've got to say it was like the most impactful thing and you forget like what a good night's sleep is so it's just interesting to hear from people last question and then we will cut it is aliens. Are you a Believer or a
non-believer? Non-believer not how why? Yeah. Listen, could there be life out there?
It could be can I explain you know other than through Big Bang Theory's in Darwinism our existence? No, I'm not that smart, but and I don't need to I don't need to have real hard evidence of something to believe in it. But you know, I it's never occurred to me that there are aliens, you know, whether some other life form, but the galaxies are so huge that the possibility that there is other life forms in some galaxies are probably very high. I don't know if that's what's called aliens.
When you get into aliens that have maybe visited her then I don't believe it all UFOs. Don't believe it all. You know, maybe I'm maybe I'm too much of a Cartesian Cartesian think
far for Galaxies is one
thing I agree with what Star Trek or Star Trek style and then um, yeah in our galaxy I need to thank my son Ryan for introducing us because this this generational that would never happen in the old days, you know, I could never have to meet my father, you know when I was
22 someone in business that he needed to know the internet and Twitter and Tick-Tock and Instagram it's amazing and it's what brought us together and they all look great debt of gratitude.
Yeah, he won is super smart, obviously and the thing I think that I'm most impressed by and I hope I'm not revealing too much here is when we've talked you've had them on the call and they're not only intelligent. They're intellectually curious like you are and it's very
Very fascinating to me to see kind of you bring certain skills and experience and interest they bring different ones in some cases and you guys are able to kind of meld those together. And so, you know Kudos wanted to you to kind of having them involved but also to to for them to be interested enough to pay attention as
well and also thanks for showing that interest and giving them the time I appreciate it. Of
course, how can people find you on the internet? Where should we send them?
Yeah, Mitch Garber on Twitter. It's need a lot in French, but that's okay. It didn't turn you off.
Yeah, I miss Barbara on Twitter. I Miss Carver on Instagram Mitch and Mitch Barber. Investments.com can find me. Am I late time ever on
LinkedIn following every time I see you tweeting about Bitcoin. It's usually you're tweeting at me telling me. Hey, man, stop stop rubbing it in that it's going down and then when
I sleep but I won't so
okay what I see you tweeting in French. I'm like, oh, he's definitely talking bad about
us, but I know I love you guys. Thank you.
You
absolutely thanks so much for doing this image.
Okay bomb.
