Michael Venuto, Co-Founder of Toroso Investments: Inside the World of ETFs

Michael Venuto is an ETF industry veteran with over a decade of experience in design and implementation of ETF-based investment strategies. In this conversation, Michael and Anthony discuss how ETFs are built, why they’re important, the benefits of access, and what he thinks is going to happen with the Bitcoin ETF in the future. FIGURE-----Figure provides consumer financial solutions powered by blockchain to improve financial transactions (behind the scenes) and make them more efficient, secure, and less costly. With Figure, you can save time and money! -----If you enjoyed this episode and want to stay updated on everything Bitcoin, blockchain, and crypto. Check out Off the Chain newsletter by visiting offthechain.substack.com and join 35,000+ other investors currently subscribed to my daily investor letter.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  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.

• 0:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Michael Venuto is an ETF industry veteran with over a decade of experience in the design and implementation of ETF-based investment strategies. He's the co-founder and Chief Investment Officer of Teruso Investments LLC. Michael is the lead portfolio for the first actively managed ETF focused on blockchain, BLK, companies filed in the US. He is also behind the launch of the Teruso ETF Industry Index, which measures and monitors the performance of publicly traded companies that derive revenue from the exchange-traded funds ecosystem. In this conversation, Michael and I learned all about ETFs, how they're built, why they're important, the benefits of access, and what he thinks is going to happen with a Bitcoin ETF

• 0:55Anthony Pompliano?

  in the future. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I think you will as well. But before we get into the episode, I want to talk about our sponsors as well. They make this all possible. The first, Figure. That's right, Figure Technologies. We invested a large amount of money because we think that the future of finance is automated. Figure is helping people to take out home equity lines of credit, HELOCs, to do mortgage refinancings, or student loan refinancings. You could simply go to figure.com and you can apply. They'll tell you within five minutes whether you're going to get the loan or not, and they'll fund it within five days. Head on over to figure.com and check out their HELOCs, their student loan refis,

• 1:39Anthony Pompliano?

  and their mortgage refi products. And lastly, don't forget that Off the Chain's not just a podcast. You can also subscribe on a daily basis to receive the email I write every morning analyzing blockchain crypto and Bitcoin news. You can go to offthechain.substack.com, or head on over to offthechainmerchandise.com to grab a sweatshirt, a t-shirt, or a hoodie. So, offthechain.substack.com and offthechainmerchandise.com. Alright, let's get into this episode with Michael and learn about ETFs.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:39Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Michael here. We've been hanging out for a little bit, so we figured we probably should turn the microphones on and start, uh, start actually recording. Thank you for so much for coming to do this. We got tons to talk about and frankly, I want to learn about ETFs.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  I'm super excited to be here. I mean, the last 45 minutes, we've covered so much, so, uh, I can't wait to get into the real meat of it all, so.

• 3:03Anthony Pompliano?

  We pretty much already recorded the podcast, so you guys missed out, but, uh, all right, let's start with your background and kind of how you got to ETFs and then we can get into exactly what's going on there.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  Okay, so, um, I guess at this point, I'm kind of known as the ETF nerd. I gave some little trinkets out earlier, but how did we get there? My background, I actually grew up in North Carolina.

• 3:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, so did I. Where in North Carolina?

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Charlotte. I did spend some time in Chapel Hill. I know you guys have that presence there. I went to NC State, actually.

• 3:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Very cool. I was a Duke fan.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, that triangle, something's happening there.

• 3:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Every friend I had was a Carolina fan or a state fan and they all thought I was weird for being a Duke fan.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  I, uh, when I was a kid, I was pretty good at chess and debate and that paid for me to go to school and I, uh, studied philosophy and religion. Certainly didn't ever think I would be in this industry.

• 4:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Really? Wait, how do you get to school on chess and debate?

• 4:04Speaker 02

  They give scholarships.

• 4:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Really? For chess or debate or both?

• 4:07Speaker 02

  I got the primary money for debate. Yeah. But they still wanted me playing on the chess team. However, there was this thing called girls and.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  And the chest didn't work as well, but it's nice because you know, chess translates into a lot of other things.

• 4:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, hold on, I want to talk about debate for a second because to me, it was always like they were trying to teach people how to argue. And it seemed like the people who were just good at arguing to begin with, like had this natural inclination. But the, the, the education of how to argue or debate didn't really seep in in like high school, etc. Did you have a different experience actually going through it?

• 4:46Speaker 02

  No, you're 100% right. It was, it was really process.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  My, we said we'd go some rabbit holes here, so here's one. My proudest moment in debate was I was at Berkeley for a tournament and I got the first ever tie.

• 5:04Anthony Pompliano?

  What is that?

• 5:05Speaker 02

  So nobody ever thought there could be a tie.

• 5:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  Right? And I was losing bad and the argument they were making against me was a critique of my language that the way I was going about trying to win this debate was oppressing them. Right? And I was like, well, then there can't be a winner and I won a tie.

• 5:22Anthony Pompliano?

  So how do they determine who the winner is?

• 5:24Speaker 02

  There's a judge.

• 5:25Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a single judge.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  Well, in the final rounds, there's usually three judges.

• 5:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  But in the, you know, usually you do like six rounds and then you're in the finals. But that's my crowning achievement, the first ever tie.

• 5:37Anthony Pompliano?

  That's pretty good.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, maybe it'd be better to win, but a tie.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  I was definitely losing, so I'll go for the tie.

• 5:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. All right. So you go to school, chess, debate, etc. What do you do after school?

• 5:48Speaker 02

  So my grandmother passes away and my grandfather's left up here alone. And I think before I figure out what I'm going to do with my life, let me go to New York and take care of my grandfather for a summer. And I had this friend from my childhood who was there and he was driving a Lexus. And you know, the, the Joey Tribbiani kind of stereotype, that was this guy. And I'm like, what do you do? He goes, I work on the stock exchange. I go, what do you do there? He goes, I don't know.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  That's, I wish I was kidding. I'm not gonna say his name because he's a good human, but uh...

• 6:22Anthony Pompliano?

  And he was just like a classic, uh, New Yorker, slicked back hair, gold chain, the, everything I'm envisioning right now.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  Everything.

• 6:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Whipping the Lexus, working on the stock exchange floor, probably slamming donuts in the morning, the whole nine yards.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  Right at, right at 1999-ish.

• 6:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  1999, 2000.

• 6:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Money falling from the sky, bonuses are inflated, yup.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  I, I mean, Eddie didn't know what he did. Um, I know what he did.

• 6:48Anthony Pompliano?

  What did he actually do?

• 6:49Speaker 02

  He was a clerk for Susquehanna or Bear Hunter. I don't think it exists anymore, but it became Goldman or something.

• 6:55Anthony Pompliano?

  And so what do the clerks do?

• 6:56Speaker 02

  Nothing anymore. They barely exist. I mean, that, that's all been digitized. But when I saw that, I said, I'm gonna write a book about how horrible Wall Street is and all these terrible things. I'm like, philosophy, religion, this is, this is my chance to tell the world how terrible this is.

• 7:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Fuck capitalism.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Fuck them all, right? But here's where the story turns, right? Uh, so then I make two or three phone calls. I get an internship. My grandmother buys me the worst sport coat I could ever imagine. The other grandmother, not the one that passed away.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  And I, my grandfather gives me a pair of like alligator shoes. They were the most uncomfortable freaking things I've ever seen.

• 7:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Did you look good though?

• 7:35Speaker 02

  No, I, I looked, I looked like a 22-year-old lost kid who did not belong there.

• 7:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Who was a, a philosophy and religion major who's about to fuck up Wall Street.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  Yes. Yes. Who's gonna write this amazing critique? I knew nothing.

• 7:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  So I get there and immediately actually fall in love with it. It was like a meritocracy, right? It really wasn't all these high-powered brains just trying to scam the system. It was a lot of like, blue collar workers down there on the, on the floor, making what is now being done by computers, right? Like, um, but I fell in love with it. Three months into it, uh, First Union offers me a job as a broker. Spent a year and a half learning what not to do. And then I landed at a, a hedge fund, mutual fund shop called Horizon Kinetics.

• 8:21Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Before we get to Horizon, uh, what did you learn not to do?

• 8:26Speaker 02

  Oh, so when, most of the broker trading programs, like if you've seen the movie Boiler Room or Wolf of Wall Street, all those... I hate to say it, they, everybody thinks it's an exaggeration. It's actually much worse. I mean,

• 8:41Anthony Pompliano?

  It was worse than that.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:42Anthony Pompliano?

  In what way?

• 8:43Speaker 02

  The, the part of Wall Street where they're doing the selling is a horrible part of Wall Street.

• 8:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Right? Those cold calls, those, uh, get the client in, churn them, all that sort of stuff. Doesn't matter how big the bank is, at least 20 years ago, it still existed that way.

• 8:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  I can't say it does today, cause I don't, I don't do it anymore.

• 9:02Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I,

• 9:02Speaker 02

  And I never did it. I, I, I didn't succeed there.

• 9:05Anthony Pompliano?

  I've had people come in and say, basically their job was when they joined one of these brokers, they walked in in the morning, you know, 8, 8:30 right before the market opens and the whole goal of the day was 800 dials.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's go.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so,

• 9:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Smile and dial, smile and dial, and let them keep going. And you just heard, no, no, click, no, click, no answer, no, click, no answer. And then somebody wanted to talk to you and it was just reel them in to get them to buy a stock.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  A hundred percent yes.

• 9:34Anthony Pompliano?

  That's fucking crazy.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  So, so you'll appreciate the North Carolina connection. I'm working at First Union.

• 9:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  In New York. Nobody in New York knows what First Union is. Everybody in the South does. Still had a Southern accent. I know you don't believe it now. Are you hearing me now?

• 9:46Anthony Pompliano?

  You sound like you're, uh, Joey from the Bronx. Yeah, alright.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  I sound like that kid who got me into the exchange. Um, but I was calling North Carolina businesses and they're telling me to sell them global crossing convertible preferreds or Sun Micro System stock or, uh, the AOL Time Warner merger. And I'm like, what the hell? I can't do this. So what I did is I found these, uh, closed end funds that were municipals for New, New, North Carolinians. And I called every North Carolinian and sold them that. And I got my 50 accounts and I did everything I was supposed to do to get through the system. And then my senior broker looks at me and goes, you didn't help me at all. These guys aren't gonna buy another thing from us. You sold them the right thing that they gotta buy and hold. Right? So that's what I mean, but I learned what not to do.

• 10:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It, it's almost like there was a very binary outcome there. Either you did something good for you or you did something, yeah, yeah, yeah. Makes sense.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  That, that's been the biggest problem with finance for a long time. Actually, that's what I do love about ETFs. I know we're gonna get there eventually. But it's that transparency. It's that client alignment. That's why I got there eventually.

• 10:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What, what's the craziest thing you saw? Like the Wolf of Wall Street, the Boiler Room, like all, what's the craziest thing you saw?

• 10:58Speaker 02

  Alright, so there was this one day.

• 10:59Anthony Pompliano?

  No names, no names.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  There was this one day where we were close to the end of some of this, like the markets were crashing. And a couple brokers lost their job and in protest, they ordered 1,000 White Castle burgers. To the floor of the exchange, you didn't see it on TV because they did it in one of the back rooms. There used to be like six rooms, now you only see one, there's really two left, but we all only see one. And they filled that room with that just to piss off Grasso, who was the head of the exchange at that time.

• 11:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 11:32Speaker 02

  Yes, and then they had another trick.

• 11:34Anthony Pompliano?

  That's not that crazy.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  Well, no, here's where it gets crazy. So they brought in the burgers, the other thing is there's no way to get alcohol into the exchange legally. There was a firm down there, not a firm, a restaurant down there that did Red Bulls, this is before we had Red Bull as a energy drink or whatever. A Red Bull back 20 years ago was a tomato soup that was half vodka. So he ordered like two or 300 of those as well and was handing them out. And so it did get crazy, right? There's like a mountain, they're like jumping into this mountain.

• 12:03Anthony Pompliano?

  People are getting, they're fucked up on the stock exchange floor and they had their stomachs full from White Castle.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  Yes, there was, I mean, there was all kinds of crazy things back, there was two clerks that worked down there that sold pornography, like videos back when there wasn't really an internet.

• 12:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 12:17Speaker 02

  There's, I'm sure there's tons of weird stuff.

• 12:20Anthony Pompliano?

  So in 2000 and, ah shit, I think 2010, I actually spent a little bit of time at the New York Stock Exchange doing an internship. And I didn't know this, but next door to the stock exchange, there's like a building attached to the actual stock exchange. It's an office complex, right, like executive center? And one of the buildings, one of the offices up there, I forget, it was like Hustler Magazine or something. And, and that was like the talk of a bunch of the traders, etc., was they were always looking for excuses, how do they go up there because it was all filled with, you know, porn and all this kind of stuff.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  It's, it's amazing what entertained people back then. And back then they had the Super Bowl pool, pool there was 10,000 a box.

• 13:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 13:02Speaker 02

  And one winner, one million dollars. You know, and I was 22 and I'm looking at all this going.

• 13:08Anthony Pompliano?

  These dudes are rich as shit.

• 13:10Speaker 02

  And, and most of them are blue collar and they're, they're actually just working hard to get it. But I also watched them all disappear, right? When I was down there, there was 10,000 of them. And now I think there's like 500?

• 13:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, I would be surprised to see that many, but yeah, yeah, they're still walking around.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  The guy who gave me my first job down there is still down there. He's still of floor like governor or something like that. You see him on TV every day.

• 13:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  You just don't know it.

• 13:37Anthony Pompliano?

  So, so the other thing that a lot of people don't know, and I forget the guy's name and I wish I remembered, but there's one guy who has been the overseer of the Berkshire stock. Uh, and he's been doing it for like 20 years, um, or whatever it's been like basically he's been the one guy. And, uh, in 2010, he was still down there and people would walk over and talk to him and stuff. And he said, look, there's the two share classes and he knew everything, but he was I don't know, mid 70s or maybe even to his 80s then. And I remember asking him, I said, uh, how long are you going to do this? And he goes, why would I stop?

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if the human intervention is still good and it's really the guys that do guys and girls that still work down there, they matter from 9:00 AM to 10:30 and then again from 3:30 to 4:30. In the middle of the day, unless there's a disruption, that's why there's 500 instead of 10,000.

• 14:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So how do you go from, uh, learning everything not to do, uh, to Horizon? What was that like?

• 14:35Speaker 02

  So Horizon was like eye opening. Um, it was such a different mentality, right? It was like they were managing their own money. Plus they had this internet fund. Even though they didn't believe in the internet, but they, they wanted to diversify and it was all about how do we find things that everybody else is ignoring? Actually, that's why they're in crypto now. Like they're one of the few RIAs that actually do it. Um, and, uh, four or five years in, I went from being the fourth employee with a company that had a billion to like the 20th employee with 40 billion. We had 40 billion with 20 employees. It was amazing. In 05, our biggest position was Newmont Mining. And we watched it go straight down, like, like falling off a cliff.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  But gold went straight up. And we realized it was because the access has changed. Right? So GLD, the first ever fund that could give you liquid exposure to gold was launched right at the end of 2004. And so all of our big clients, the Soros's and the Einhorns who wanted gold exposure now weren't getting it through the miners. They were getting it directly through the commodity.

• 15:46Speaker 02

  And we realized, well, Murray and Peter and them realized, I was still pretty young. ETFs are threatening the business of two and 20. ETFs are threatening the business of 125 on a mutual fund. ETFs are threatening pretty much everything normal in the financial industry. ETFs 10, 15 years ago were scaring people more than crypto. So they said, how do we hedge this? And it was a boutique firm. So young guy gets the job of how do we hedge this? And it became, let's get into the index business. Let's become angel investors and some of the startups. We got very involved with Wisdom Tree, very involved with Emerging Global Advisors. We looked at a number of others. And we said, not only we want to invest in some of these, we like incubated them in our offices to learn

• 16:30Speaker 02

  that whole creation, redemption, all that sort of stuff. Fast forward to 2012, I said, it's time to do this on my own. And I started Toroso.

• 16:39Anthony Pompliano?

  What's, what's the biggest thing you took away from learning, uh, to working at Horizon?

• 16:44Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  Stay with what you love. Right? So I loved the research part of Horizon. I loved the trading part. I loved the making the deals.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  By year 12, I had become in charge of 20 or 30 people. And I had a person above me and then a manager company and then 20 below me and then the clients and I became a manager of people, not a investment guy anymore. And six months of that was enough for me to say, guys, thank you so much, but I'm going to go start my own company. It was nice when they said, well, we'd like to invest in it. So you can't leave on better terms than that.

• 17:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, absolutely. Uh, and so what was the general idea? You said, hey, I want to go do this on my own, but was it, I want to go invest in ETFs. I want to create ETFs. Like, what was kind of that original idea that you had that, that, uh, really pushed you over the edge to leave?

• 17:40Speaker 02

  So, uh, for all you entrepreneurs out there, your first idea sucks.

• 17:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Your first 10 probably suck.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  So our idea was, nobody has ever looked at ETFs under the hood. They've all said, if it says it's small cap, it must be. And I'm going to buy the cheap small cap one. And we thought, what if we look and make a research firm around what's actually in an ETF? Right? So for example, the Vanguard small cap ETF, ticker VB. If you go look at it, it's actually like 58% mid caps. So we thought telling people that they would give us money to manage. Guess what? They didn't.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  It became a really bad time. The other big ETF firms like F squared and Good Harbor and Windhaven, they were hitting some hard times. So for the first three years, we completely floundered while we built a brand around research and content and technology to look at ETFs. We were impossible for us to get in assets to actually manage of portfolios of ETFs. I think we stayed at 30 million in AUM for the first three years. Miserable.

• 18:48Anthony Pompliano?

  And so as you're doing that, do you think, hey, we made a mistake and this doesn't work? Or do you think that we just got to kind of plug, you know, keep plugging along and then we'll get more assets? Like, what's the thought process that you're going through when it doesn't take off how you originally thought it would?

• 19:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. You have to commit to things, right? You have to give them their real try. But you also can't walk into that definition of insanity for too long because then you end up bankrupt. So I would say, we kept trying for three years, but we had this one little piece that was a different angle. We were doing some consulting work for Global X funds, using the research and technology, and that helped grow some of the assets at Global X. So on that year three, when we said, let's keep the research, let's keep the technology, but instead of monetizing it through trying to get SMA models, let's go out and use this to help other ETF issuers grow.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  And the very next day, we had Direction as a client, and then RoboGlobal as a client, and then EMQQ as a client. Today, we actually represent like 14 or 15 issuers. And it was just an

• 20:02Speaker 02

  Today, we're eight years old.

• 20:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 20:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Today, two years.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  We did a party on the New York Stock Exchange floor on February 5th, eight years ago, to launch the business.

• 20:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Congratulations.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  So.

• 20:16Anthony Pompliano?

  It's like happy birthday, basically.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  It's kind of a happy birthday.

• 20:18Anthony Pompliano?

  I didn't know that.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  I didn't realize it till Facebook told me this morning that this was my memory and it has the picture of the exchange and the date.

• 20:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Damn, I would've got a birthday cake. My ice cream cake is my favorite, though.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  So, first three years, lost?

• 20:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  Reposition, two years of getting to sustainability.

• 20:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  And the last two or three of finding scale.

• 20:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, and so, describe what the business does today, because you guys have kind of multiple components to it.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Sure, so, we oversee about 2 billion in assets. We have a traditional wealth management platform, you know, five or six advisors that use ETFs under our tutelage to help people invest. Then we have a traditional asset management platform where we're the sub-advisor of the Active Blockchain ETF, the Active Battery Metals ETF, the Active Gig Economy ETF, and we still manage some assets there that, you know, that's about 600 million as well. And then the last piece is our title ETF services. That's under our umbrella. Anybody who wants to launch an ETF, they come to us, we help them launch it, we help them grow it.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  We did eight funds last year, including some really innovative things like helping Blue Cross Blue Shields equitize their cash in an ETF, and helping SoFi, the student loan lender, launch four ETFs, including the first free ones, and those eight funds raised 620 million in the first year.

• 21:42Anthony Pompliano?

  That's crazy.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  It was a great year.

• 21:43Anthony Pompliano?

  So, describe what exactly is an ETF? Because I think a lot of people hear ETF, they've seen all the people on Twitter or CNBC, etc., talking about ETFs. Like, what the hell is an ETF?

• 21:53Speaker 02

  Okay, so I'm going to quote one of my friends, Reggie Brown. He's, I'm the ETF nerd, he gets called the ETF Godfather. He's the one who kind of, 26 years ago, helped build all the pipes for the trading of it down on the American Stock Exchange and stuff. And his definition of an ETF is, it's a mutual fund with benefits.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  And he says it very sultry.

• 22:16Anthony Pompliano?

  What does that mean?

• 22:16Speaker 02

  So it really is just that simple. The ETF is created under the same laws and same regulations as a mutual fund. It really is the exact same structure. It is exempt from one rule. And that rule is that it prices once a day. So mutual fund, same thing as an ETF, but only prices once a day. ETF prices every second. Now, once you price every second, you get all these unintentional benefits. Okay. One unintentional benefit is you have to be able to create and redeem intraday, which means there's massive tax benefits. So.

• 22:55Anthony Pompliano?

  What are those benefits?

• 22:56Speaker 02

  So an ETF through the creation and redemption process, as long as there's flows, may never generate a capital gain. Most of them haven't. So if you took the same strategy and had it in a mutual fund wrapper and an ETF wrapper, most likely you're going to get a superior return after taxes out of the ETF version.

• 23:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  Right? It's just a distribution of taxes. So I love ETFs because they go back to the philosophy and religion. They're transparent, they're liquid, they're tax efficient, and they tend to be lower cost because they don't have all those embedded fees to pay the old brokers of First Union that I used to work with.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  So it really is simply an access point. It is a better technology. It really reminds me of the precursors to what blockchain and things like that are doing to finance now. It really decentralized a lot of the original investments.

• 23:56Anthony Pompliano?

  And so give me some examples of the most popular ETFs, right? So they're exchange traded funds. They basically are these baskets, if you will, of underlying, usually public securities or liquid assets. But like, what are some of the popular ones?

• 24:10Speaker 02

  Okay. So this is a great question because I have an awesome resource for everybody and it's free. So we run this thing called the ETF Think Tank. It's literally etfthinktank.com and it has on a daily basis, the answers to all those questions. And there's no, there's no ads. It's not a paid site. We just wanted for the ETF nerds out there at aggregation site, right? And on there, it'll tell you that as of today, there's 4.4 trillion in US dollars in ETFs. 4.4 trillion? 4.4 trillion. Damn. Okay, average expense ratio, 19 basis points. Expenses, okay. Okay, so that's pretty cheap, right? If you think about where it's going. The open to close ratio, this is one that I love.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  In the last 12 months, for every ETF that opened, no, for every 1.456 ETFs that opened, one closed. Got it. So net gain every year? It has been, but it used to be for every three that opened, one closed. It's been consolidating. The industry is waking up and saying, we can't just have six ETFs for every little subcategory. I think of it as a good thing. Another one that's, I love to quote, right now, on average, ETFs own 7.5% of every US stock in terms of their market cap. ETFs own 7.5% of all stocks, based on the market cap? Yep. When we started calculating that eight years ago, it was 2.67.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  Got it. So 3X essentially. Over the last seven years. For 26 years, ETFs assets have grown on average at 19.6%. So this is a private equity-like kind of growth. Yeah, annualized. Annualized. How do I, how do I just invest in that? And that number keeps going up? Man, where were you two, I did launch an ETF once to track that. Okay. And it was, you know, everybody just came out, that's the meta ETF. We had ticker T E T F, right? T E T F, okay. Two years of it out there, nobody bought it. Why? Because when it's all said and done, that 19 bips times 4.4 trillion only equals about 8 billion in revenue.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  So when people think of it, they know the ETF industry's growing, but they don't see an 8 billion dollar industry as, as a...

• 26:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Huge.

• 26:32Speaker 02

  Huge.

• 26:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  I mentioned to you earlier, like, the pet care industry generates 50 billion.

• 26:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So here's one of the questions I've got, right, is it seems to me like structuring the passive ETFs, right? So there's a whole bunch of them. Let's say just SPY is an easy one, right? So the S and P 500, I'm basically going to build that basket and I'm going to allow people access through an ETF structure to put capital in. They don't have to be accredited. So it can be unaccredited, accredited, QP, whatever they want to be. They can put very small amounts of capital in and also they can redeem intraday, etc. So they can buy, sell, liquid market, the whole nine yards. Once I create that, yeah, there's some like blocking and tackling that goes into making sure that it still sticks to the index or the construction stays straight. But for the most part, it's marketing, right?

• 27:21Speaker 02

  True.

• 27:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, once you get it there, is that, would it be fair to say like, that's the difference between ETFs that are successful and unsuccessful is who's good at marketing what they've built? Or are there other things that go into the success and failure of an ETF?

• 27:34Speaker 02

  So there's one step before.

• 27:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  And then everything else you said is 100% accurate.

• 27:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 27:40Speaker 02

  You gotta get the product right. Like, I can't tell you how many people come to us and go, I've got this idea. It's very similar to something else that's out there, but I've got a better index.

• 27:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  I'm sorry, nobody cares about your index.

• 27:55Anthony Pompliano?

  And explain, but explain exactly what that means.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  They go, all right, there's a, let's say, there's a, there's a widget ETF out there, okay? It makes this widget and it's market cap weighted, right? And they're charging 20 basis points. I'll get people who come to me and say, hey, I want to do an ETF on that widget, but instead of market cap weighting it, I want to weight it by the revenue of this times the X of that.

• 28:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, got it. Like a very nuanced, technical component change.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  And because I've got this better index, I want to charge 40 bips. Failure. There's, there's no marketing that's going to make that work.

• 28:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. All people look at is you're buying the same widget and you're charging me double the fees.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  Exactly. That might work 20 years from now, right? Cause it's how it happened in the mutual fund industry. You had the simple funds and then people came out a little more complicated version and it built on it. Right now, 99% of ETF investors are looking at the exposure. They're not looking under the hood. I thought eight years ago, I could start getting them to look under the hood. I'm eight years in and maybe it's gone from a hundred percent won't to now maybe 99 won't. So, uh, it takes a long time to get people to look past the name, the ticker, the expense ratio. You got the name, the ticker, the expense ratio, right? Then it's a hundred percent marketing.

• 29:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so what are the areas that you've seen that are not the large ones, but they're new? That have come out onto the market that you're like, bam, they nailed it. Like, are there certain sectors that you've seen that, that are really get you excited?

• 29:23Speaker 02

  So I, last year defiance came out with a 5G fund. That was brilliant.

• 29:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. 5G and how did they construct it? Like what's in the underlying assets?

• 29:33Speaker 02

  It's, it's all the companies that are in, I mean, they're going to be in some of the other indexes as well, obviously. But it's the qualcoms and all that that are involved.

• 29:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Verizon, ATT.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  Rolling it out, but they packaged it all in one nice, clean sector. They worked with a, a good indexer. Not, not like, um, some of these specialty thematic things, you don't really want to go to the old school indexers. Right? Cause they're going to market cap, you want somebody who's going to think and research. So he used a company called Blue Star indexes, Steven Schoenfeld. The guy was one of the original portfolio managers at, at BlackRock 25 years ago. So he's been doing this forever. And they built an interesting index, but nobody cares until they actually buy it. And then the guy in charge of the firm just poured all the money into marketing it. You, anybody who goes and Googles 5G tomorrow, you're going to be chased by this ETF everywhere else you go.

• 30:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 30:26Speaker 02

  Right?

• 30:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that, is paid marketing and digital marketing a big part of the ETF world now?

• 30:30Speaker 02

  A hundred percent. Yes.

• 30:33Anthony Pompliano?

  I would have thought that it was much more what I would call, not dumb as in like it's stupid, but like dumb as in not intelligent data-driven marketing. So like, how do I get on television? How do I write a blog? Like that type of stuff? Not so much like, I know that I spend $3 and I get a customer and that customer's worth, you know, $27 and it's more like data-driven acquisition.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  So when I was at Global X, we started right away into this space because actually my partner, Guillermo Trias, had invested in some of these digital marketing firms. Most asset managers won't even touch digital marketing. In the ETF space, it's different, right? Because it is decentralized. There isn't an intermediary that we have to go through, right? Like, if the end client wants to buy it, they log into their account and buy it. Whereas with hedge funds, mutual funds, SMAs, they gotta talk to some old boring person to help them get to the end investment. So at Global X, we did things like ticker targeting, right? So if we had a competitive fund to somebody else and they looked up on Yahoo Finance,

• 31:36Speaker 02

  that competitive fund, guess what? Our ad showed up, right? Nobody had thought to do that in the finance world. When we started talking to the regulators about it and our compliance, we're like, you know, I mean, you know how it is, most hedge funds, they don't want to talk to the press. You know, with ETFs, you want the masses to know because you're 100% transparent.

• 31:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, you're basically marketing to the masses and therefore any way you can get to them, whether it's through kind of the broad base, let me go on television, let me write a blog, let me tweet, whatever, all the way down to how do I actually run a Facebook ad campaign to get you to convert?

• 32:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it better be educational. Like, if you just try and say, "Buy my thing", it doesn't work, right? Show me a growth story. Show me how you're capturing it. Show me, you know, that I want this. Like, when we did the, originally launched the blockchain ETF, we were watching the Google AdWords for blockchain and knowing that there's this demand. People want to figure out how to get this, right? So, you know, it was so much of a demand that the SEC was scared enough to not let us call it blockchain.

• 32:46Anthony Pompliano?

  So tell me the story. Tell me the story of kind of what you guys, the thought process and how you guys created that original blockchain ETF.

• 32:53Speaker 02

  Okay, so, uh...

• 32:56Speaker 02

  This is another one of those, uh, my partner is faster than I am at this stuff. So, uh, I had for our SMA accounts been buying some blockchain stocks, uh, Grow, Hive. I had bought some GBTC, sold it every time it went up because I was scared to death of the, uh, premium. And he kept saying, why don't we do an ETF of this? Why don't we do an ETF of this? And I kept saying, there's not enough companies. I can't make an index. And, uh, all of a sudden there was this epiphany. A friend of ours called us and said, I've, I've built an index, but it's not really investable. And he said, but I'm working with this other firm. They want to do it, but they need somebody to make it investable. And all of a sudden, we said, all right, the three of us are going to do it together.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  And we're going to do it active. And that was the epiphany was, you know, three years ago, when we first started this, you couldn't really do a passive version of this and get anything that's a real blockchain company. It was the fastest we've ever moved in our lives. We went from agreeing to do it to filing in 11 days.

• 33:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow.

• 34:00Speaker 02

  That's especially with three partners, we, that doesn't happen fast.

• 34:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Hmm.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  Um, but we all saw it and we all trusted each other and it's been great.

• 34:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And so it's important to call out here, the difference between these passive and active, uh, ETFs. What, what is that?

• 34:14Speaker 02

  Okay. So I talked about mutual funds with benefits earlier. So the first benefit has always been the low cost that people point to. And over the last three or four years, people realized, A, it doesn't have to be passive to be low cost. And it doesn't have to be passive to be an ETF. And I, I will say the pioneer here is Catherine Wood in Arc. What she did to bring active management into the world of ETFs is brilliant. Because not only did she make it viable by being good at what she does, she did something even more important. It goes back to your marketing points. With a mutual fund, you only know what you own like 35 or 45 days later. So you're not allowed to talk about what you own.

• 34:56Speaker 02

  With an ETF, you tell what you own every 15 seconds. So rather than find that as a challenge, Catherine embraced it and said, since everybody knows what I own every 15 seconds, I'm going to talk about it. Right? So she took what most active managers would see as a negative, embraced it and ran with it. So today, we have plenty of active ETFs. In fact, active ETFs represent about 3% of the assets in ETFs today, but represent 6% of the revenue.

• 35:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 35:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. So you can see why people might be attracted.

• 35:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, absolutely. And Kathy has been on the podcast before. And I think part of what has made her so successful is not only one, her investments and kind of the conviction she has, but in the marketing. But also on top of that, she really embraces the idea that anyone can, quote unquote, participate by kind of open sourcing and open allowing participation in her research meetings, et cetera. And it's just a very different way to think about asset management than kind of traditionally it's been done.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  100% like, I've never understood these people who say, I need to have a lack of transparency in order to have alpha. Well, then you don't really have alpha. Yeah. So I love that she's saying, I'm going to bet on innovation and my team. And I'm going to tell everybody what I'm doing because I got no secrets. She, she has embodied the values of the ETF structure.

• 36:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  It's amazing. It wasn't easy, you know, but I'm, I'm very happy for her.

• 36:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, absolutely. And so as you look at the passive versus active, you guys decided to go with the active model for the blockchain ETF. What was going into that actual ETF? Like when people think of blockchain companies, most of them are private, not public.

• 36:46Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And that, that was really hard in the beginning. It's why, you know, my partner Guillermo kept saying, build it, build it. And I kept saying, it's not ready, not ready. And then the epiphany of going active was, oh, if I'm active, I can buy IPOs 30 days later. If I'm active, I can buy a hundred million dollar market caps. So for example, last year, there was three or four IPOs that I would call very close to pure plays in the blockchain space.

• 37:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Which were?

• 37:13Speaker 02

  My absolute favorite right now is Silvergate. Um, probably half the people listening to you have banked with them because.

• 37:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Alan Lane's been on you.

• 37:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, like they, they are the bank, right? They went public in December, right? It trades at a discount to what normal banks do. Um, I'm at some point when the big banks want to really get in, they're either gonna have to build it or they just buy Silvergate. Like, that's a great one. Uh, Canon, you know, ASIC's chip maker, like pure play miner and chip maker.

• 37:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  One Connect Financial, these are some that, you know, came out last year, but we've also got things like Hut Eight and Hive, uh, Galaxy Digital, Nova Graz's company. I mean, it's a merchant banking company. You know, they're stakes in Ethos and stakes in Hut Eight, stakes in all of it. GMO Internet, I mean, they're, they're just cranking away. A lot of what we own at the top are these large Japanese firms like GMO and Z Holdings and, um, and, uh, digital, digital garage. That primarily are doing stable coins and getting into the, uh, decentralized finance or they're building exchanges. So I think the original negatives that everybody talked about, these are just chips companies

• 38:26Speaker 02

  or these are just, uh, uh, big FAANG names, not so much anymore, right? There's, if I look through my top 10, you know, there's maybe two names that the average investor would recognize.

• 38:39Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. What, what is, um, as you look out at the space, what are the things that are coming down the pipe that are in the private markets that you're saying, hey, when this gets into public market investors' hands or they can get exposure through ETFs or otherwise, uh, you're like, that's gonna be a really big moment?

• 38:59Speaker 02

  So in terms of the, the, the public companies, I think it's gonna be the spinoffs.

• 39:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, explain.

• 39:06Speaker 02

  So right now you have awesome things that are 10, 20, 30% of big companies revenue and standalone, they're a pure play blockchain company, right? So I think we're gonna see spinoffs of JP Morgan, that's their blockchain business, or IBM, that's their blockchain business. Or backed being spun out of ICE, right? Like, I think that's the play, play because a lot of the private stuff is partially owned by SBI Holdings, or SoftBank, or Digital Garage, or, you know, Accenture has an arm here, Citigroup's invested here, JP Morgan, they all have taken these little stakes, you know, Mastercard's gone all in. I think that for the public markets,

• 39:48Speaker 02

  that's, that's the net. Now, the other end of it, you know, whenever we talk ETFs, everybody wants to know about the Bitcoin ETF, right? I think that's what everybody's waiting for. Ironically, we don't see that as a threat to what we built. The blockchain ETF, Block is a hedge against crypto as a loan.

• 40:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, explain this. First, as why do you feel like Block is not threatened by a Bitcoin ETF?

• 40:14Speaker 02

  Because Block is the technology. It's the companies making money off of it. If there is a Bitcoin or cryptocurrency ETF someday, Block will become like GDX. So GDX is the gold miner ETF. And GLD is the gold ETF. So people who want to own the protocol will buy the Bitcoin ETF. And people who want to use, buy the picks, axes, and utilization of the protocol, will buy the blockchain ETF.

• 40:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And as you think about the Bitcoin ETF, like, what's your analysis of kind of where we are today? I know we're investors in Bitwise, obviously, they've got one of the applications in, and a mutual friend of mine, yours, is Hunter.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 40:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Kind of what is the, the thought process there as to how that plays out?

• 41:02Speaker 02

  So I've been a little controversial on this. If there was a crypto ETF, I would buy it. I would buy it for my clients. I think it would be

• 41:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Why is that controversial?

• 41:14Speaker 02

  Well, here's where it gets controversial. The part is, I don't think it's good for crypto.

• 41:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, explain that.

• 41:21Speaker 02

  So crypto's part of the original mission is to get rid of the trusted third party. Right? Like, that is, that is part of why we want a decentralized network. That said, we have this whole group of investors that are waiting to get in until the trusted third party of an ETF in the SEC says it's okay. Right?

• 41:45Speaker 02

  The reality is, it's a contradiction, right? The SEC is saying, when these markets are clean and we can follow them and all that sort of stuff, then we'll let you put it in an ETF, okay?

• 41:55Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, so let me, let me give you a scenario. There's a couple of people who have said this to me. I'm not saying that you're wrong, but let's take cash, for example, US dollars. I can own that in a decentralized, self-sovereign way. I can have physical cash, right? I've got money right here in my pocket. Or I can take these same dollars and I can put them into an electronic version in a bank via a centralized third party. Right?

• 42:23Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 42:23Anthony Pompliano?

  And I can get exposure through multiple ways to the same asset. But it's my choice, right? I could take all, every dollar that I own and I could put it all into physical cash and hide it underneath my bed, or I can go use centralized third parties. If I could only have it in one format, either or, right? It would drastically limit the access.

• 42:44Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 42:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Bitcoin, in my opinion, is similar in that I can own Bitcoin directly, right? And I can self-custody it and kind of do all the things that is kind of that Bitcoin ethos that you're talking about, which without a doubt is super important and should be encouraged. But there is some percentage of the population, I don't care how much education you use, they'll never do it, right? And so when you add in a Bitcoin ETF, all of a sudden, you're just giving another way to access. So it's not so much that I disagree with you. It's, I don't know if it's going to be as big of a moment as people want it to be, right? Because there's still, the people who own Bitcoin today aren't then going to just go buy Bitcoin ETF.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  No, why am I going to go pay for it when I've already got it?

• 43:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, when I already have it, exactly. So that's one. And then two is, you're actually just going to bring in the people who probably weren't going to go buy it directly. Like, I keep going back to, anyone who knows about Bitcoin and has made the decision to invest, went and bought it, right?

• 43:36Speaker 02

  I agree.

• 43:37Anthony Pompliano?

  They're not waiting around for the ETF, in my opinion, right? Maybe there's some people who are like, eh, we haven't made the decision yet, but if an ETF got approved, then we would do it. But if people have decided to invest, yeah, it's difficult to go to Coinbase or to go to Gemini or go to, you know, BlockFi or whoever, but it's not that difficult.

• 43:55Speaker 02

  No, it's not. The reality is, the reason most people want it is so that advisors can charge fees on it.

• 44:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:02Anthony Pompliano?

  It helps the advisors.

• 44:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's to me, it's like it's like they're signing their own death warrant. Right? So I get the question, and this is kind of connected. What is the biggest threat to ETFs? It's this, the blockchain, right? Like, once every security is tokenized, why would you need an ETF? Why would you need half the 500 people left on the stock exchange, right? And that's why people like NYSE are investing in backed and things like that. So it's the same contradiction. But it's it's important to talk about it because if the average person is going to buy the Bitcoin ETF or the crypto ETF as a speculation,

• 44:43Speaker 02

  they need to know that the reason it has value is because it's going to replace that whole system. Right? Like, it is going to replace the ETF if it works. And that's when it's going to be worth an insane amount of money.

• 44:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What do you feel like right now is the general sentiment of folks that are buying ETFs? Are they saying, I can't wait for the Bitcoin ETF? Or is that something that's more like the crypto community is waiting for? And they think it's a big deal, but people outside of crypto could care less?

• 45:17Speaker 02

  It will it will likely cause the price to go up because there will be a massive demand.

• 45:21Anthony Pompliano?

  You do. So you do think that there's an impact on price?

• 45:23Speaker 02

  I think it's a billion dollar fund within three months. I think there is a lot of demand, right? Because they look.

• 45:32Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think the fee looks like on that?

• 45:34Speaker 02

  A reasonable one or what is likely to come? I think somebody could probably charge close to 1% because there's going to be storage costs.

• 45:41Anthony Pompliano?

  You think that 1% is 100 basis points, whereas the traditional fee structure right now is on average around 19 or 20 basis points.

• 45:49Speaker 02

  But that's asset weighted, right? So if I if I look at like the robotics ETF that's done extremely well, that's at 95 bips.

• 45:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so there are ones that have high, high in air quotes because.

• 46:00Speaker 02

  But when you have, you know, SPY at 200 or 300 billion at 7 bips or no, 9.45 bips. I love how now now they're rounding the half bips so that it, you know. It's almost 10, but it really gets quoted as nine. It's very smart what they do nowadays. But when you have a quarter trillion dollars at nine bips, that takes the whole average down. But there are plenty like Arc, I think is at 70 bips. Nobody has any problem with that. Or maybe 75. Our blockchain ETF is at 70 bips. Nobody's complaining there. We're doing a lot of active research. We gotta sit down with Novogratz and Overstock and and the Japanese companies, Digital Garage, meet all the IRs, figure out if Riot's a real company or not.

• 46:44Speaker 02

  Like, we're being paid for doing the research.

• 46:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. And so when you look at that ETF, Bitcoin ETF gets approved, billion dollar fund in a couple of months. You're driving a billion dollars. That's probably a $10 million revenue business, give or take for somebody.

• 47:04Speaker 02

  What? Yeah, but if it keeps going up.

• 47:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so that's my thing is like, what does it grow into though, right? You're talking about $250 billion in the ETF world today.

• 47:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, how big could something like that get?

• 47:20Speaker 02

  A Bitcoin ETF? So the problem is there's, there's two variables here, right? So there's the variable of probably raises a billion dollars in three, four months. And then you get the price run up, right? That's part of why the SEC is being so careful.

• 47:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep. You're saying a billion dollars of capital inflow into the ETF. They then obviously have to go buy Bitcoin.

• 47:42Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 47:42Anthony Pompliano?

  All of a sudden, you get a billion dollars flowing into the asset. It's only 160, 170 billion dollar asset today. There's price movement. Now you see the price moving, then people start chasing, right? You can see very quickly how here we go into this parabolic run. But at the same time, the SEC wants to protect people from getting caught up in that mania.

• 47:58Speaker 02

  100%, yes. They saw the, the Long Island blockchain or Long Island ET, what T was it?

• 48:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Long Island Iced Tea.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  Long Island Iced Tea blockchain thing. So like.

• 48:10Anthony Pompliano?

  They changed their name to blockchain like overnight and then literally the stock just exploded.

• 48:14Speaker 02

  Exploded. And that was like two weeks before we launched our blockchain ETF, right? And two days before we launched, they called us and said, you can't use the word blockchain in the name.

• 48:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 48:25Speaker 02

  Yes. Cause they saw the, the mania that was happening.

• 48:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  Now for us. Honestly, it was one of the best things that could happen. Um, there's an irony here because we had a great ticker, BLOK. Everybody knew what it was.

• 48:38Anthony Pompliano?

  What is it actually called?

• 48:40Speaker 02

  The Amplify Transformational Data Sharing ETF.

• 48:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Jesus Christ, the amplified data sharing.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  Amplify Transformational Data Sharing ETF. I don't think I've said that in two and a half years.

• 48:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, AKA blockchain.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  I mean, but I understand that the regulators are there to protect the public, right? And they did.

• 49:03Speaker 02

  You know, but anybody who went and looked at what we owned, they knew what they we owned. We showed our holdings. So, but at that time they were protecting. So when they look at this stuff, they're always looking to protect because there's no upside in it for them, right? What is the upside for them to bring in this new technology? Right? It's they've got enough to regulate. So it has to actually prove itself out. And here's the irony back to the the statement earlier. I think once it proves itself out, I don't think people will need the ETF anymore.

• 49:34Anthony Pompliano?

  I agree.

• 49:35Speaker 02

  You know?

• 49:36Anthony Pompliano?

  I agree. We'll see.

• 49:37Speaker 02

  We'll see.

• 49:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, when do you think it gets approved? Does the ETF get approved while Jay Clayton's in office?

• 49:44Speaker 02

  I don't know. Um.

• 49:46Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a cop out answer.

• 49:47Speaker 02

  No, no, but I'm gonna give I'm gonna give a little more. I would have bet this year, uh, because.

• 49:53Anthony Pompliano?

  This year, meaning 2019 or 2020?

• 49:54Speaker 02

  2020.

• 49:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, 2020. We're recording this, uh, February 2020.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  Yep. So I would have bet February 2020 because we've seen the interval funds get approved and and I see trading in markets starting to understand it. But then, as I talked to a lot of the, uh, regulators directly on other things, they don't seem to see a reason to get here. I always thought that the first product was going to be futures based. And then you had, you know, CBOE futures kind of fail. So like, I don't, you know, they wouldn't do the VIX products until the futures were trading well. They're not going to do this is so all the things that I thought were going to get it there aren't. Uh, here's the wild card. We got our halving coming. We don't know what's going to happen. I, I love your warnings on Twitter all the time.

• 50:40Speaker 02

  You know, gotta be careful and you gotta do your own research. I agree with it, but.

• 50:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Listen, cause here's why. You ready? Because I, people accuse me all the time.

• 50:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Of never saying negative things or never saying the warnings. And so I say, you know what? Fine. Everyone, that's your biggest knock against me. I'm going to periodically tweet. You know what? I'm going to tweet it out while we're, while we're on record right now is that I'm going to periodically tweet out saying, don't invest all your money, do your own research, all the things that people want to be, that people don't want to hear, but need to be told.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I mean, it's, you have to know what you're on. Like that's, that's what I love about this whole ETF thing. It shows you what you own. There's no secrets and you know, I don't want to be the, the bull here and say, oh, the crypto winter is coming to an end. And the halving is coming, but that's the wild card.

• 51:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you not, you don't think it's over?

• 51:36Speaker 02

  I, I am, well, I'm so on the record here that I'm afraid to say how bullish I am.

• 51:46Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Well, tell us some of why you're bullish.

• 51:48Speaker 02

  I just, I see the actual companies involved actually using the technology, not for bullshit anymore. Right? So when I, when I first started doing the actual company, uh, research, I'd go there. I talked to the IR department. And blockchain was like ESG to them.

• 52:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. They have to talk about it. We need our blockchain strategy so that we can get some headlines and everyone pays attention.

• 52:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so I was like, ah, you know, how do I buy this? This little bit here? I gotta see it. And now, when I talked, the second time I go and back to talk to them, it was, we've got a utility token. The utility token era drove me insane. And that was basically when everything was crashing, right? Utility token this, utility token that. And then, in the last, call it 18 months, I've watched so much happen with security token and actual finance things and, and actual transactions happening. And, I mean, even overstocked, despite all the headaches that come with that, what they did with the token dividend forced certain parts of the financial system who've never thought about this to think about it.

• 52:56Speaker 02

  It, uh, and we traded through it. Like, it was not easy. So, I am bullish because although I don't see the full killer app yet, other than the cross-border, I see it coming because there are actual real projects now. It's not, it's not just, hey, we said it at our IR meeting so that we got some SEO and SEM on it, and you know?

• 53:19Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. What, um, what's the worst part of the ETF industry? There's a lot of good things. There's a lot of things that, uh, obviously are great for investors. They're great for the asset managers. Uh, what do you think is like the dark side of the ETF industry?

• 53:33Speaker 02

  Oh, man, I'm gonna piss people off if I go here.

• 53:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that's fine. I piss people off every day. I'll take the blame. This is, I'm just channeling what I'm thinking to him, so he's only gonna repeat what I say.

• 53:44Speaker 02

  No, no, I'll just tell the truth because I, philosophy, religion, transparency, we're all there. Um, it's gatekeepers, man. It's, when this started, the ETFs could be bought anywhere. It was decentralized. It was just like a stock. Over the years, the bigger firms, and it's every one of them have figured out how to put up gates to prevent investors that are acting or using them as an intermediary from accessing new innovative ideas. And then they're asking the older firms that they already have relationships with to clone those ideas.

• 54:19Anthony Pompliano?

  So give me an example of what like a gate would look like?

• 54:23Speaker 02

  A gate would look like, um, bank XYZ.

• 54:28Speaker 02

  Says you can't buy this ETF because it's from a new issuer who we haven't approved.

• 54:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, got it.

• 54:34Speaker 02

  But if you really want it, we'll call this issuer that we already have business with and ask them to create a clone of it.

• 54:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it.

• 54:41Speaker 02

  Right?

• 54:41Anthony Pompliano?

  That's basically.

• 54:42Speaker 02

  Stifles innovation.

• 54:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Basically, they take the idea, they hand it to the big asset manager, the big asset managers, the you're not going to get fired with going with IBM type model.

• 54:49Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 54:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Cover my ass. You as the investor, you're going to get the same exposure. The big asset manager loves us because we're bringing them capital. We cover our ass. You're not going to fire us. But the person who gets screwed is that person with the innovative idea who's creating the the small ETF.

• 55:04Speaker 02

  A hundred percent.

• 55:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 55:05Speaker 02

  And you got to understand ETFs are taking a massive business model away from these big banks. Right? They make a ton of money on these mutual funds and they're that fee's not booked banked into ETF. So they deserve the right to figure out a due diligence, figure out this or that. But I don't like that it comes at the cost of innovation. Right? Like to me, that I always say there's two things pushing the growth of ETFs. We talked a lot about client alignment factors. I said tax efficiency, transparency, liquidity, low cost, all that. The other one is innovation growth factors. Okay. ETFs made gold accessible. ETFs made leverage accessible. ETFs have made buy rights accessible.

• 55:49Speaker 02

  ETFs have made robotics and blockchain accessible. ETFs will probably eventually make crypto accessible. You start stifling that innovation and then we're just back to to the making 800 dials a day.

• 56:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 56:03Speaker 02

  Up on.

• 56:05Anthony Pompliano?

  It's pretty crazy.

• 56:07Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 56:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? What um, what else do you think about the blockchain crypto space? What are you excited about outside of ETFs?

• 56:14Speaker 02

  Okay, so my favorite thing about blockchain is it takes the the values that I've talked about in ETFs to the next level. And I love. How the next generation is going to embrace this. So I have three children. They're now eight, 10 and 12 and each one of them got a Bitcoin two or three years ago at like 850 bucks. So that means every day they look at it. They know the price, right? And to me, that tells me this is really going to work because they're watching all the YouTube videos. They're understanding it. My, my eight-year-old, he was seven at the time, so but he has a raspberry pie. He went and built a Bitcoin miner after watching a YouTube video.

• 56:59Speaker 02

  It didn't work. He really didn't know what he was doing, but he plugged a bunch of wires together and and put it there and I was so proud of him. I know.

• 57:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Show it to him.

• 57:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, the listeners can't see it, but for the Youtubes, I bought this for seven bucks online.

• 57:17Anthony Pompliano?

  It's a gold coin that has the Bitcoin B on it.

• 57:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's basically a piece of metal. It's worth $7 and but I stuck it on his raspberry pie. And when he came home from school, he's like, oh, my God, it worked. But because of that, I think I'm going to buy him a coin mine for his birthday.

• 57:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, let's go. So, so what's interesting, though, is the kids, they, they don't question whether this is a thing.

• 57:45Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 57:45Anthony Pompliano?

  They're like, of course, it's a thing.

• 57:46Speaker 02

  Of course, like they don't watch TV.

• 57:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 57:50Speaker 02

  Right? They, they watch their, their screens and, and they don't.

• 57:55Speaker 02

  They, they don't have the same misconceptions that we have. They're not walking in with this idea that the government has to tell me it's worth something.

• 58:05Anthony Pompliano?

  So every time I talk to one friend, he has two kids, they're around 10, 11, and then probably 13, 14. So kind of between the ages of 10 and 15. I wish I could say who it is, but, but a good friend of mine. And he says that his kids are the ones who convince him to buy more Bitcoin. They don't actually say like, hey, Dad, go buy more Bitcoin, but the way that they talk about it, he's like, this is absolute like, I'm so fucking bullish because like my kids don't question it. Right? And it's interesting to see, you know, kids, when they see technology.

• 58:46Anthony Pompliano?

  One, they're better at using it. Like, you ever seen like a six-year-old using a iPhone? They know everything.

• 58:51Speaker 02

  My, my son sets up like iPhone stores in the basement of all our old broken ones. And he knows, like, he'll, he'll list out, "The iPhone 11 does this and that, the, the, the, I have no idea what you're talking about," but...

• 59:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Crazy. But, but they just, they understand what's gonna work and what's not, right? Which is, which is pretty cool.

• 59:07Speaker 02

  And they don't care about, you know, who is Satoshi Nakamoto, or all the, all the BS we deal with, with trying to explain to somebody who's, you know, 80 years old.

• 59:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Do they buy things in video games?

• 59:22Speaker 02

  Um, yeah. So Fortnite bucks, uh, the V bucks. Oh my God, I hate V bucks, but like, because it's like he gets a Christmas present and all he wants to do is buy V bucks. But I get it, that he's acclimated now. Um, I know, like, my friends over at Galaxy Digital, they keep telling me, "Look at the cryptos that are working in gaming."

• 59:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 59:40Speaker 02

  Because those are gonna be very powerful.

• 59:41Anthony Pompliano?

  I know, I know Mike is real bullish on, uh, I think, I think...

• 59:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, Yoshi keeps talking about it, too.

• 59:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Yoshi, man. Shout out to Yoshi.

• 59:49Speaker 02

  He's been very helpful with us with Block. I appreciate it. You know, the, the kids get it, though, and they, they don't, they don't slow down, and that tells me it's gonna get there. Actually, we did have a story to talk about that I promised I'd tell you today.

• 1:00:03Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, let's hear it.

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

  And it kind of links in here, so I mentioned the kids don't care who created it.

• 1:00:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  And I, I love, and I always explain that the fact that we don't really know who created it is awesome. But this is one of those scenarios that people don't, a lot of history buffs might know, but this is, uh, his, history not repeating but rhyming. There's this story of Nicholas Borbaki.

• 1:00:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:00:27Speaker 02

  Nicholas Borbaki was a Napoleonic general who lost, like, multiple wars, or multiple battles, I guess, so he didn't lose the full war. He got exiled to some island, tried to kill himself, failed at that. Like, he was like the, known as the failure, right? That was, you know, a couple hundred years ago in, in France, that was the name. The elements of algebra, all the volumes that create the original text for how algebra works, written in France, are all authored by Nicholas Bourbaki.

• 1:00:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 1:01:00Speaker 02

  No. It's the same as Satoshi. It's a group of people who didn't want to have credit for it.

• 1:01:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:01:08Anthony Pompliano?

  I did not know that.

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, modern algebra is written by a group of mathematicians in France, and they claim the author is Nicholas Bourbaki all the way through.

• 1:01:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Because they didn't want to be identified?

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  Because they wanted people to adopt it and not question the authors. Not be like, "Oh, this guy has this opinion because he's trying to sell that paper," or this or that.

• 1:01:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:30Speaker 02

  "That was a poor French accent." "He the payman." "I just got back from France." They're a little bit rude. I must say that the stereotype is true.

• 1:01:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it depends where you go.

• 1:01:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, Paris.

• 1:01:41Anthony Pompliano?

  No, but that idea is really interesting, because when you look at the removal of the creator, it does drastically increase the likelihood that people will adopt something.

• 1:01:53Speaker 02

  I love it. It's a give the ego away.

• 1:01:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, Marty Bent calls it the immaculate conception.

• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  Beautiful.

• 1:01:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Which is, you know, little theod is religion, and so is any money.

• 1:02:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:05Anthony Pompliano?

  And so...

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  You have to have a belief system somewhere. I mean...

• 1:02:09Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. Where can people find you on the internet?

• 1:02:11Speaker 02

  So, there is @michael_venuto on Twitter. I'm pretty active there. etfthinktank.com is probably the best place to get our unbiased content, right? And then we have plenty of other websites where we're doing and selling stuff, but I'd rather you find me where we're educating, right? Where we're acting as a Bourbaki or a Nakamoto.

• 1:02:34Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. I love it. Before I finish up, rapid fire, what's the most important company in crypto?

• 1:02:39Speaker 02

  Hmm, most important company in crypto?

• 1:02:44Speaker 02

  In terms of public, like what we're dealing with?

• 1:02:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Whatever, public, private?

• 1:02:49Speaker 02

  I mean, I guess from an adoption standpoint right now, even though it's not the core, I, I think it's fidelity or, or backed like from, from getting to people understanding this and actually using it in the finance world.

• 1:03:03Anthony Pompliano?

  You think they're huge.

• 1:03:04Speaker 02

  Custody.

• 1:03:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:05Speaker 02

  That's, that's the big thing.

• 1:03:08Anthony Pompliano?

  What's your most controversial thought in crypto?

• 1:03:11Speaker 02

  That, that a Bitcoin ETF is a contradiction to the overall concept.

• 1:03:16Anthony Pompliano?

  So that's controversial for everyone except for the hardcore Bitcoiners.

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:03:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Right?

• 1:03:21Speaker 02

  I guess, I guess, I guess my price targets, oh, maybe outside of the crypto world, whenever people say, well, why do you have Bitcoin? I go, one, I believe in it. Two, it's bug out money, right? I, I, I.

• 1:03:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, chaos.

• 1:03:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I do believe if I've got to go to Europe, if I got to go to Latin America, I want to know I got a hundred grand. That's probably going to be worth way more than that in that scenario.

• 1:03:44Anthony Pompliano?

  What, um, what's the one law or regulation that you would change or improve in finance?

• 1:03:49Speaker 02

  Oh, um.

• 1:03:53Speaker 02

  So there's a lot of ridiculous ones out there. I think probably the biggest ones have to do with, with taxes, right? I, I think that the tax code as it applies to investment should be changed to promote good investor behavior. People who trade in and out should be punished, right? From the tax code and people who buy and hold and do it as an investment should be rewarded. The ETF does some of that, but there's plenty of other parts of finance that are left out.

• 1:04:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's, it's kind of like on a 10,000 foot view, they've done it correctly. But when you get into the details, that's where it gets.

• 1:04:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, it gets messy quick.

• 1:04:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:04:34Speaker 02

  I could list a hundred other little ones, but they don't matter to the average investor. Taxes eat away. Taxes are fees.

• 1:04:40Anthony Pompliano?

  What, uh, what's the most important book you've ever read?

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  So, uh, I, I always like to give two here because I have my fiction one and my investment one. Fiction, City of Glass. So we mentioned North Carolina earlier. City of Glass helped bring me back to New York. It's Paul Oster's book. It's part of the New York trilogy. If you haven't read it, it's it's worth reading, especially if you love how New York City works. But it also handles language and.

• 1:05:08Anthony Pompliano?

  City of Glass.

• 1:05:09Speaker 02

  City of Glass by Paul Oster.

• 1:05:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, and then what about the investing book?

• 1:05:12Speaker 02

  I I have to go with a classic because he's been somewhat of a mentor to me is Random Walk Down Wall Street. Bert Malkiel's helped us with our business over the years. And there's two things I love about it. He lays out the math case for buying and holding. And then at the end of the book and in and edition number 10, 11, 12, he starts talking about where there's inefficiencies and how to do it. So he's not an ideologue. I hate people who come out and say, this is the only way to do something.

• 1:05:41Speaker 02

  I love that he's laid out why indexation works and why it's a base. And then he's laid out why active works where there's inefficiencies.

• 1:05:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Makes complete sense. Aliens? Believer?

• 1:05:53Speaker 02

  Probably. I'm a believer that there's extended life.

• 1:05:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 1:05:59Speaker 02

  I just don't see how there isn't. I like it's.

• 1:06:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Just the world's like, like the galaxy is too big?

• 1:06:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I don't want to get too weird, but.

• 1:06:08Anthony Pompliano?

  No, we get super fucking weird.

• 1:06:10Speaker 02

  This can't be the only dimension. There's I've met plenty of people that probably have a zipper on the back of their neck. You know, like.

• 1:06:15Anthony Pompliano?

  You think that it's a simulation?

• 1:06:17Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:06:18Anthony Pompliano?

  No simulation?

• 1:06:19Speaker 02

  I don't feel the simulation. I I've I feel there's multiple parallels. There's multiple. There's too much space for us to be the only consciousness. And I think we have too much hubris to think that out of all the living beings that we could see on this planet, that we're the only ones that are actually woke.

• 1:06:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:40Speaker 02

  I think that's.

• 1:06:41Anthony Pompliano?

  It's crazy when you start thinking about like, we don't need to go off the planet to find.

• 1:06:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:45Anthony Pompliano?

  The the other life.

• 1:06:46Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:06:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I I saw recently another video on Twitter of this fucking thing in the ocean. I don't even know what it was. But I'm telling you, that shit ain't nothing that we learned about in school.

• 1:06:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, cuz it was moving in all weird directions. It was changing colors. It was doing all kinds of crazy stuff.

• 1:07:06Speaker 02

  There's so we've talked about some of my weird stuff with chess and debate and ETFs and crypto and wokeness. The other thing I love to do is fish. I do that with my kids. We're on the sea all the time. I've been 100 miles out to sea overnight for three or four days. You see weird, weird stuff.

• 1:07:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Really? Like, yeah. What's the weirdest thing you see?

• 1:07:26Speaker 02

  I mean, I've seen, I've seen swordfish come up with like a squid chasing them. And it's supposed to be the other way around. And there's lights, like there's no light out there, but you see it coming up from the depths with lights. I saw a

• 1:07:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Where's the light coming from?

• 1:07:39Speaker 02

  The fish. They're bioluminescent. The squids have bioluminescence. And then I saw this one time a lobster pot I pulled up on 80 miles off the coast of New York. And there's a fin on it and I don't, what is this? And I pull up and it's a shark that was like eight feet long that bit the rope and got his teeth stuck in it. And I spent a half hour getting this shark's teeth off the, like you see crazy things.

• 1:08:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's just, it's just nature.

• 1:08:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I could have just kept going.

• 1:08:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:06Speaker 02

  But I wanted to save that shark.

• 1:08:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you, do you have, you have Instagram?

• 1:08:09Speaker 02

  Uh, no, my kids do, and they keep telling me about it.

• 1:08:12Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Don't, don't tell them what I'm about to tell you because you don't want them watching this. But if you just go on, you know, your browser, go to www.instagram.com slash nature is metal, M E T A L. It's just absolute savagery in nature. It's just complete violence of animals eating each other, tracking each other. Just shit that you would look at and be like, it is a daily reminder of how humans are just soft, right? If you think of us as an animal compared to actual the wild, the things that go on in nature, most humans don't want to see.

• 1:08:52Speaker 02

  I hear you. I think my kids have shown me some of those videos. I mean, I was, I was in Florida at the ETF conference at a like 9 a.m. I just get a picture of a giant tuna from my son. He's like, look at the size of this fish. Like they just get excited.

• 1:09:06Anthony Pompliano?

  They just love it. Yeah. That's awesome. What question you got for me to end this thing?

• 1:09:12Speaker 02

  Question for you. Um, you know what? I've heard so many of your pods, so I kind of know the answers to a lot of them.

• 1:09:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Whatever you got.

• 1:09:19Speaker 02

  I got it. I got it. What question have you not been asked that you've always wanted to be?

• 1:09:25Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know. Um.

• 1:09:27Speaker 02

  How's that for a turnaround? There's that debate skill.

• 1:09:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, the, the question that I haven't been asked, I'm more surprised that people don't ask about, uh, my motivations for certain things, or, uh, they don't, uh, everyone wants to ask like the easy, soft questions. No one really asks like super hard questions. The people who have, so like, I'll give a shout out to Matt Odell. Matt Odell came in and he had very specific questions. He was like, you know, why are you doing this? Why are you doing that and stuff? So like, he definitely gets credit there. Um, and then, uh, Meltem, the first time that we did the interview, uh, Meltem DeMorse came in and she pushed back on some stuff, et cetera. And like, what people don't realize is like, I kind of enjoy that more.

• 1:10:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, it's just like people come in and ask like, kind of like softball, kind of like, well, what do you think is going to happen with Bitcoin? Like, okay, everyone's kind of already heard that, right?

• 1:10:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I listened to your AMA on the train ride in today.

• 1:10:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:27Speaker 02

  I know the YouTube. So I was like, I, I can't think of a question, but it's interesting to hear how you just described that.

• 1:10:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:34Speaker 02

  Because I think that's why you've been successful with this is because it's genuine.

• 1:10:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 1:10:40Speaker 02

  Right? Like, people, if people were sitting here going, Pomp is selling something.

• 1:10:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah. So like, here's what I tell, I tell people behind closed doors. I have no problem saying sell out. This is the most selfish thing I do. And everyone thinks about it as, uh, that's so nice. He creates so much content. No, fuck no. I'm learning every single conversation I have and I'm writing every morning. It forces me to put my thoughts. I'm tweeting. I'm seeing the way people interact with it. Like, I'm getting all of these inputs and signals and feedback and critiques. Uh, and it helps me accelerate what I think and kind of have a more thorough, um, thesis. And so like, it's selfish in that standpoint. If I wasn't learning anything in these conversations, I wouldn't have another conversation. Like, I'd just see ya. But the fact that I then record them and I post them and people find value, great.

• 1:11:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Like that, that's a second order of fact, but this is the most selfish thing I do by far.

• 1:11:31Speaker 02

  Okay. So when they want to edit this, you just go back and say, Mike's going to ask the question, why do you do these pods?

• 1:11:39Speaker 02

  No, let's leave it all in.

• 1:11:40Anthony Pompliano?

  No, we don't do any editing.

• 1:11:41Speaker 02

  Cause we got to an awesome answer.

• 1:11:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Joe's in the corner. We might do a behind the scenes video to post on YouTube. Cause Joe's got his little studio set up. We got the Mevo camera. We've got lights.

• 1:11:50Speaker 02

  We got him laughing.

• 1:11:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Think about this. It took 220 something episodes before we got a fucking light in the room. But we got a light in the room now. We are ready to rock and roll.

• 1:12:00Speaker 02

  Next, next time I want makeup.

• 1:12:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, there will never be any makeup. But the next thing I gotta do is we gotta get the, uh, some art for the wall.

• 1:12:07Speaker 02

  Or some of that foam stuff for the echo.

• 1:12:09Anthony Pompliano?

  No, I don't care about the echo. People don't like the noise.

• 1:12:12Speaker 02

  Well, we're up on our ears. I don't think there's much echo, but I think we, we played Jeopardy on that question.

• 1:12:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:17Speaker 02

  You gave the answer, I gave the question afterwards.

• 1:12:19Anthony Pompliano?

  That's fine. All right, man. Listen, I appreciate you coming in and doing this. You guys have done a ton of shit in the ETF world. I appreciate you giving us a rundown there. Uh, people can go check out ETF think tank.com. Uh, check out the block ETF and, uh, what do's again in the future.

• 1:12:33Speaker 02

  This has been a blast.

• 1:12:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely.

• 1:12:35Speaker 02

  We'll reach her out. Oh, there we go. Thank you.

• 1:12:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Hey everyone, Pop here. If you liked this episode of Off the Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the apple, Spotify and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off the Chain.