Jeremy Boynton, Founder of Laureate Wealth Management: How Rich People Invest Their Money

Jeremy Boynton is the Founder of Laureate Wealth Management, a comprehensive wealth management firm for affluent investors generally ranging from $5 million to $25 million in total net worth. In this conversation, Jeremy and Anthony discuss how rich people and rich rich people invest their money, what types of alternative investments he is currently excited about, why he’s been drawn to Bitcoin and crypto, what his clients are currently saying about the industry, and what Jeremy believes is necessary for every wealthy person in the world to own Bitcoin. ATOMS SHOES-----Shoes that are designed for the way you live your life. Visit atoms.com and get your pair today! DELPHI DIGITAL-----An independent research boutique providing institutional-grade analysis on the digital asset market. Learn more at delphidigital.io ETORO-----This episode of Off the Chain is sponsored by eToro, the smartest crypto trading platform, and one of the largest in the world. Join 11 million other traders and create an account at etoro.com/pomp and build your crypto portfolio the smart way. -----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. Jeremy Boynton is the founder of Laureate Wealth Management, a comprehensive wealth management for affluent investors generally ranging from $5 million to $25 million in total net worth. We discussed a lot in this episode, including the difference between how rich people and rich, rich people invest their money, what types of alternative investments Jeremy is currently excited about, why he has been drawn to Bitcoin and crypto, what his clients are currently saying about the industry, and what Jeremy believes is necessary for every wealthy person in the world to own Bitcoin. This episode was a lot of fun to record and I hope you enjoy it. Before we jump in though, I want to talk about our

• 0:44Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:27Anthony Pompliano?

  this stuff, but these guys blow me away every time I talk to them. I like what they're doing so much that I actually joined the board of directors just so I could help them out. So go over and check out Delphi Digital. Again, that's Delphi Digital.io and you can check out their independent research and see what they think is coming up, what's going down, and what's to watch in the markets. Delphi Digital.io. And of course, eToro. eToro's been killing it. They started out offering stocks, commodities, traditional currencies, and cryptocurrencies to users around the world outside the US. Last year, they realized, we gotta come to the US. We gotta go play with the big boys in America. So they came to the US and they started off by offering cryptocurrency trading. But it's not just any crypto exchange.

• 2:12Anthony Pompliano?

  They've got two features, social trading and copy trading, which they're pioneering and showing everyone else how much different trading environments can be. Social trading is basically a social network overlaid on top of the trading experience. You can navigate to an assets page. You can check out what people are saying, read the information, the charts, the graphs, et cetera, and then trade right from the same page. So social trading is pretty cool. But let's say that while you're on that page, you see somebody that you really like, somebody that you think's smart, a good investor, et cetera. Now you can actually click a button that says, "Copy Trader." When you copy that trader, what you're doing is essentially telling eToro, whenever that person trades, I want you to mirror my trades to them. I want my portfolio to look like theirs. They buy 5% of their portfolio with a certain asset.

• 2:57Anthony Pompliano?

  You buy 5%. They sell the asset, you sell it. And so it's a way for eToro to automate the copying of two portfolios. So it's pretty cool to see a crypto exchange having this much innovation around social trading and copy trading. Head on over to etoro.com, sign up for an account. Let me know what you think. I liked it so much that we invested. When you hit etoro.com, let them know that Pomp sent you. etoro.com. So go check out atoms.com, delphidigital.io, and etoro.com. Go thank them for making this episode possible. Now let's jump into this episode with Jeremy and let's learn what the rich, rich people are really doing.

• 3:34Speaker 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.

• 4:00Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. Jeremy's here. Super excited about this. Thank you so much for coming. We've got a lot to talk about today because you come from the non-crypto world into the crypto world. Let's start with the background first. You started out doing everyone's favorite activity.

• 4:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Tell us what we got started.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  All right. Well, first, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here. Background wise, I started as an auditor after getting a degree in accounting and discovered in about six months that I hated it. But.

• 4:38Anthony Pompliano?

  It took you till after the degree to figure out you hated it?

• 4:40Speaker 02

  As, as, yeah, as bad as that sounds, I guess I was naive. I was, I was pretty good at it in school and

• 4:50Speaker 02

  didn't really dawn on me that I wouldn't enjoy it after I got out of school because the school life and the, the actual career life are pretty different.

• 4:58Anthony Pompliano?

  When you talk being an auditor, are you like flying to the location, you're locked in the room that they've turned the AC up really high to get you out of there quickly?

• 5:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, more or less. I mean, it was all in the Dallas Fort Worth metroplex area. So not really on the, in airports for that, but it was

• 5:15Speaker 02

  insurance companies and very much in the darkest corner of wherever they could put you. Very much stereotypical.

• 5:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Hope that your calculator ran out of batteries or something, right?

• 5:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:28Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So you, you did that and then figured out maybe you wanted to do something else. What did you do next?

• 5:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, I wanted to get on the right side of the income statement. I was keenly aware that no matter what I would do with my career, I was always going to be an expense. And, and I wanted to get on the revenue producing side. I, I actually took a position to open an office in Austin for a small third party administrator, which runs corporate health plans. So larger companies would partially self fund and kind of create their own health insurance products. It was a really interesting B to B application to the insurance world and launch an office for them in Austin and had a lot of fun doing it and, and did well.

• 6:07Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. And so how do you go from doing that to managing the wealth of what I think we've already dubbed as a poor, rich people?

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Before we started recording.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, hopefully, hopefully my clients aren't listening to this and won't hear me. Lovingly referred to them as poor rich people, but you know, I kind of reached a point in my insurance world where I had saturated the market. We had really conquered it and there wasn't much for me to do. And that's a really bad place for me. I can't be bored. And so I just started looking around and thought, well, you know, I'll laterally transition out of the insurance world into the money game. And I, I started as a rookie broker, second career wise, and at AG Edwards in Austin in the year 2000, just in time for the dot com.

• 6:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Man, you ran right into the teeth.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  I'm perfect timing.

• 6:57Anthony Pompliano?

  What, what was it like? So dot com crash happens. It seems like the, you know, the world's on fire. What's going on inside the company?

• 7:06Speaker 02

  You're second guessing yourself, number one, from walking away from really good money to start over. But you know, from a money perspective, it actually wasn't that bad because it's, it's hard enough to convince somebody to let you manage your money when the world is good. You'd think it would be harder when times are bad, but not so much. People get insecure about what they're doing and they're actually more willing to listen. So ironically, even though it sounds like that would be a, a hard time, it was perhaps maybe an easier time.

• 7:34Anthony Pompliano?

  It's interesting. It's like the human psychology of what do I need you for? You know, the market just went up 30%. You know, you're going to beat that versus the market just went down 30%.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  Now I'm listening. Now I'm listening. Yeah.

• 7:46Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And so after, after you go through the, the first kind of teeth of a bear market, you ended up actually going through a second one.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, you know, halfway in the middle there, we left the firm and started our own. I had a partner and, and so we, you know, we were kind of entrepreneurial already. Wanted to launch out on our own. And then we went through the great recession and that one hurt more, obviously, because by that time I was, you know, somewhat successful, had clients. You know, I could swing hard in the dot com bubble and nobody, didn't have any money that I was actually responsible for. So I didn't have to apologize, but. So that was harder. And I actually came out of that fairly disillusioned. You know, it was kind of a crossroads where I thought, I'm either going to leave this business or, or find another way to do it.

• 8:33Anthony Pompliano?

  And and why a different way to do it? What was like the the kind of warning signs?

• 8:38Speaker 02

  You know, I had begun to dabble in alternative investments, even the largest brokerage houses on Wall Street have, you know, silos of alternative investments. And it was, for whatever reason, I was just naturally drawn to that. But I knew that it was, you know, dull, boring spoons. It wasn't, you know, you cannot provide big legions of of advisors in the Merrill Lynch's of the world, the UBS's of the world with sharp instruments where they can hurt themselves. In other words, it's about it's about capacity. If you can't take, if you can't ingest $100 million of new capital a month into your strategy, you you can't be on a big platform. So that that kind of takes away the inherent

• 9:21Speaker 02

  positive idiosyncratic risk profiles of what that entire asset class was designed for.

• 9:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And so how do you go from there's a different way to do this that might be interesting to actually know how to do it? Right? It's a pretty big learning curve, it would seem like.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  Huge learning curve. Basically, I I sort of decided that people with real money, $100 million plus money, probably weren't managing money the way that I was. And I didn't know how. I didn't know how to figure that out. But I set about trying to network into the family office world. And you got to understand, the family office world doesn't hire brokers or advisors. They put people on payroll in their office. And so those two worlds are pretty exclusive. They don't usually find a way to connect. And so, but I had a connection. There was a family office in Chicago worth 100 million and another one worth 150. And they were patriarchs of families whose children were now adults and they were seeking to empower the second generation of wealth

• 10:22Speaker 02

  to kind of crystallize a business around taking that quarter billion dollars and inviting other really wealthy families to join them in the classic multifamily office sense of the word. But they'd never done it before. I, on the other hand, had launched my own advisory firm twice and

• 10:39Speaker 02

  Knew how to interface with the regulators. So I kind of talked my way into a job as their chief compliance and chief operating officer in exchange for a seat at their investment table, which, which was a, just a total blast for four years. You know, every time they got on airplane, I went with them and learned all about, you know, hedge fund investing, private equity, direct deals, real estate, direct deals, venture capital. It was, it was, it became the, the education that I needed on which to, to form the, the center of my current practice.

• 11:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, there's two pieces here, right? So the first is that there's a big difference in the mentality and, and kind of the practice of investing, depending on the, the capital pool. So if you're kind of an everyday American, right? The bottom 50% of Americans don't have any money to invest at all, right? They're living paycheck to paycheck, can't come up with 400, 500 bucks emergency payment. They're obviously in a very different situation than everyone else who, the other 50% that have capital to invest. But inside of that, I have capital to invest bucket. You get the people who really probably have enough capital to put into the S and P and kind of more passively invest.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Then you get, you know, what, what I lovingly described as like the poor, rich people, which is, you know, kind of $20 million or less, which sounds like a lot of money to everybody, right? But when you start to look at, how do you invest in all these multiple asset classes? Well, many of these asset classes, you can't actually get exposure to them without putting, you know, one to $5 million.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:07Anthony Pompliano?

  And so if, you know, you got to put $5 million in real estate, you got to put $5 million in stocks, you got to put $5 million in bonds, you got to put $5 million in fixed, you know, you get online, you run out of $20 million pretty quickly.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And so you actually don't have the capital pool to invest like a big institution would. But I think what you're talking about is these family offices that usually it's some sort of generational wealth, right? That they've created either through a business they own or inheritance or whatever. They can invest like an institution, right? They're essentially a small institution. And so the ability to put millions of dollars into each strategy and build kind of a diversified portfolio is available to them. And so it's that mindset, mindset shift or, or change that sounds like you really went to go see like, how do I learn that?

• 12:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, there's, there's a lot in, to unpacking what you just said. It's really a passion point for me. The, um, the laws that regulate. The quote-unquote private placement world haven't been changed in decades. I mean, nineteen forty, the Advisors Act was really the last major piece of legislation that governs how to qualify for participating in private placement works, private placement deals. So it's kind of interesting that hundred million dollar families very often create product that is really just meant for an accredited investor, which you and I both know means you got a million dollars, basically, with a couple of other caveats. But, but they've got a hundred million dollars, right?

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Well, they only need a hundred, you only get a hundred slots in an accredited product. Well, they don't need a hundred slots. So ironically, they're creating product with a hundred slots for ten or fifteen of their friends, and there's all this room on the backside. So if you figure out how to plug into that deal flow network and you respect them and you ask good questions and you get on airplanes and you go visit them and you're interested in their projects, you don't actually always have to put one to five million dollars in these deals. As an advisor, I represent twenty-ish families and, and my, my capital commitment to that deal is meaningful to them, even though at a ticket level, it's very often, you know, a hundred thousand or two, two fifties.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  So it's what I discovered in that regulatory framework that allows me to go port that hundred million dollar thinking down to this five to twenty-five million dollar world in a very compelling way that, that doesn't seem like it should work.

• 14:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And I think the other piece of this is the, not only how they think about it, but also you, in an effort to go learn, did probably the most important thing people can do, which is you went and surrounded yourself with people doing what you wanted to do.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And I get young kids who, especially like right out of college, who write to me all the time and say, hey, I want to do X, what, you know, what's your advice? And I always tell them, I say, look, first of all, you shouldn't be asking me for advice because I don't know your situation, right? Some, some random guy and you're some random guys. How, how do I give you advice? I don't really know. But one piece of advice that ends up working, regardless of who you are, what you want to go do, etc., is just go find people who've already done it.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And they'll teach you.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  I tell my kids, and I, and I try to practice this myself, you know, it doesn't help you to be the smartest guy in the room. In fact, rather, you really need to find a way to be the dumbest guy in the smartest room. Because there's upside there. No upside to being the smartest guy in the room.

• 15:25Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. So, all right. So you you go for four years or so and you're kind of getting this crash course. Any like really, really special deals that that stick out in your mind as like it was, you know, kind of just a crash course in the type of investing or something that you knew nothing about that you got up to speed really quickly on?

• 15:42Speaker 02

  Oh, I don't know that I could pick one out particularly.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  We did. We did a number of hedge fund deals early and maybe I can kind of bifurcate them into two different worlds. One of them was coming to grips with $100 million wealth being okay with a 5% return in a market neutral strategy that was supposed to get 10, but somehow always got five. My clients didn't like that. So there was a big, I had to make a shift to understand $25 million absolutely does not think like $100 million.

• 16:17Anthony Pompliano?

  But but on a Specifically around the return profile.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  Oh, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you make 5% on $100 million, life's going to be okay. People don't actually, even though it's true in some sense of where people don't actually feel that way with 25 as much, not anywhere near as much. But at a deal level, to be more specific to your your question, we did put some money in a in a structured product deal right around the big short deal with the mortgage blow up deal. And that was fun to watch. It was it was really fun to find a thesis that was contrarian to, you know, very complicated product to get your head wrapped around it, find enough confidence to put an allocation and then just watch it take off.

• 17:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  Those are always fun.

• 17:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And and what you're talking about there about around that return profile, right, is there's a very offensive and defensive mindset difference between 25 million and less and, you know, 100 million and more. And this sounds absolutely insane to anyone who is a normal American, right? The the average American is like, what are you talking about?

• 17:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:26Anthony Pompliano?

  But, you know, and I've gotten this crash course over the last two years or so, going and talking to a lot of these family offices, etc. There's a very big difference. That $25 million family wants to be the $100 million family, right? It's the keeping up with the Joneses in a, you know, on steroids, basically.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:42Anthony Pompliano?

  The $100 million plus family actually understands, I got $100 million, right? Like, I want to keep the wealth I have. And so there's a offensive versus defensive mindset. And you would think that for the everyday American, hey, if I got $25 million, I'm protecting the hell out of that, right? But it's just they slowly go from they have nothing to they have a million bucks to $5 million bucks to 10 to 25. And they still are looking up saying, how do I get to 100? How do I get to, you know, more?

• 18:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I have, I have a theory or two about that. I, you know, you can, you can have a good career and cobble together a million, two million, three million bucks. But if you get multiple tens of millions, you did something special. And normally people that do something special have a really strong type A,

• 18:29Speaker 02

  conquer the world mentality. They're taking entrepreneurial risk. They're doing something risky. And, and it's, it is about the wealth generation. You know, people do end up at 100, but sometimes that guy, he's the guy who went from 2 million to 25 and now he's at 100. But at some point along the way, he retires and, and it actually becomes more about the psychology of generational shifts, where the second generation doesn't have that. They, in fact, they're, they don't, they know they don't have it. And, and so it's more of protect and preserve. So there's a couple of, and there's no, there's no stereotypical thing. Every family is different, but these are generational shifts and sort of wealth accumulation shifts that, that, that kind of happened in, in my experience.

• 19:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. The, uh, one of the most powerful things somebody said to me early in life was they said, a million dollars is a lot of money, right? And I was like, of course, right? I was, you know, 18 year old kid. I was like, Jesus Christ, million dollars. Like, I'd do anything for that, right? And, uh, and they said, um, if you're a teacher in, uh, most places, right? And let's say you're somewhere between $40, $50,000 a year, right? Uh, which is probably an average salary. Um, if you work for 20 years, you made a million dollars. Right now there's taxes, you got expenses or all this kind of stuff, but it is achievable. If there's a long enough timeframe, right? And so what he basically was explaining to me was like, look, a million dollars is a lot of money in short burst, right? If you make a million dollars in a year,

• 19:55Anthony Pompliano?

  if you, if you sell something, make a million dollars, whatever, but over a long enough period of time, even if the salary level is low, you can accumulate top line dollars, but there's taxes. And what's your expense ratio, right? If you make 50,000, but you spend 60, well, you're not going to keep anything, right? But if you make 50 and you spend 10, actually, you know, 20, 25 years later, you have a million dollars.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  I can remember being a sophomore in college thinking, you know, when I'm out of this place in a few years, if I could just make $65,000 a year, life's going to be great.

• 20:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  Life's changed.

• 20:34Anthony Pompliano?

  It's, and it's for multiple reasons, right? There's, there's the inflation, right? So everything around you continues to get more expensive, but also there is this element of, you don't expect the expenses that you have, you know, as you get older, right? You get a family, you get a house, kind of all these things, right? So it's really interesting. All right. So let's talk about kind of after you got that crash course, or you spent four years going and seeing all of these things. What did you change in terms of how you worked with your clients on the wealth management side? So they don't have a hundred million dollars, but they're kind of in that five to 25 million dollar range, et cetera. What was the general, you know, change that you saw or how did you talk to them differently?

• 21:14Speaker 02

  You know, it really was, there are a small, maybe I'd have to think about three, four, five clients that are holdovers that, that, that crossed that bridge. So it was actually more.

• 21:26Anthony Pompliano?

  From 100 to 25?

• 21:28Speaker 02

  Well, no, no, no, that, that I'm saying people that were my clients.

• 21:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, got it.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  In the old world that migrated with me. So it was actually more of a turning over of my business. It was a, it was a shift. It was a shift in, in who.

• 21:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Who you wanted to work with.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  Who I wanted to work with.

• 21:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting. Explain that more.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  Who would work with me?

• 21:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. Explain that more.

• 21:45Speaker 02

  You know, you just start, you know, you just, people tap out, right? I, I, you know, I think the, the bond market today, you know, with a two handle, pretty, pretty. Unattractive place to try to collect a yield. Do I like tax liens where you know, there's a really sharp tax lien strategies you can clip in a really conservative way, six, seven, eight, nine percent a year. Um, with, with a really secure piece of real estate backing you up, right? Why wouldn't I do that? Like you have to take liquidity risk. You don't have, it's obviously not as liquid, but if you're, if you're wealthy enough to have that much capital, you don't need the liquidity. Right? So it's, it's a shift from normal traditional, you know, modern portfolio theory, sixty, forty

• 22:29Speaker 02

  stock bond allocation thinking to no, we're going to think different and we're going to really evaluate risk differently. We're going to stop trying to pay attention to correlation matrices across large timeframes. Uh, and start paying attention to what, what happens to correlation matrices when everything blows up. Cause that's really only time it matters. Nobody cares about correlation when everything's good, just when it goes down.

• 22:53Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So this is important because I don't think a lot of people think about that nuance. Explain in more depth, why that is like, why should people care about the correlation on the downsides or the bad cases and so not so much on the, on the upside?

• 23:08Speaker 02

  Well, um, because everything's, the, the whole point of diversification is to protect your capital in negative events. Right? There is no other reason to, if, if there were never any negative events, you wouldn't need to diversify. You would just be long everything and it would always go up. Um, so the question then becomes, well, if, if I think that, you know, investment A and investment B have a not very strong correlation and I project that across all timeframes, whether the market's going up, whether it's sideways or whether it's going down. I may miss the fact that in fact, it might be positively correlated in a rising market,

• 23:50Speaker 02

  but strongly negatively correlated in a, uh, falling market or vice versa. And invariably what we see is in a capitalist world's system, in a capitalist system that we have, uh, here in this country, um, you have, uh, everything, everything connect, everything connects to everything else. The, the high yield bond market connects to the equity market. The, the, you know, globalization means the international markets connect. To the US markets, the growth and value investors both get their head handed to them when profits go down and people start paying less per profit dollar on the S and P. And, and so that's when it matters. It only matters.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  And the more crazy things we do in monetary policy to try to manipulate that game, the harder things adjust one week no longer can.

• 24:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And, and I mean, it's pretty clear that's what's going on, right? Is every time we start to get towards these negative moments, central banks do two things, right? They cut the interest rates and they start printing money. And it seems like now where we've entered a world where the cutting of interest rates is pretty well understood. There's lots of speculation on what they're going to do, you know, at each decision point. But on the printing of money, it's no longer, are they going to do it?

• 25:03Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:04Anthony Pompliano?

  It's pretty much, look, we're addicted to this and we're going to have to keep some rate of, of inflating the monetary supply in order to, you know, keep kind of this train going because if they stop, it's going to get ugly pretty quickly.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm not, I'm not afraid or averse to taking directional market risk. But what I'm saying is to have safety in your portfolio, there is no real safe assets, in my opinion, in most traditional markets. You, you have to go find, you know, a tax lien investment or a, or a life settlements investment or private debt deals. We, we love what we call the pawn shop business model where you go lend somebody money. I don't care whether you pay me back or not, your collateral is worth, I'll take your collateral and I'll make my money on your collateral or you'll pay me back. And there's all kinds of investment opportunities like that.

• 25:59Speaker 02

  If you do your research, you can, you can clip near double digit yields in a portfolio.

• 26:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain, can you give me like an example of one of those? Cause, cause I think the private credit space is one that we've spent the least amount of time talking about here. But I've got a very good friend who, who runs a shop and that's been one of their main focuses recently is private credit. And I'm personally fascinated by, if you find the right opportunities, it can be quite lucrative.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  Sure. It's, you know, so let's say, um, let's say you've got a.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  I'm just, let me, I'm just trying to think of the deal. Give me a second here.

• 26:36Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm asking him for deals right now. Come on, help me out with the deal flow.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  You know, you got a, you got a multifamily project in a good market, you know, call it, I'm making this up, but it's representative, like in a market like Austin, Austin, Texas. We love, we love Austin. Austin's got really great.

• 26:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Demographics.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's huge. And so you got a deal in Austin. It's, it's poorly managed. It's half full. The, the, the owner of the property has got deferred maintenance. He's been living off of the rents that he should have been pouring back into the property. It's starting to circle the drain. You can tell it's, you know, he's going to have to hand the keys back to the bank. Right? Some other developer comes along and he finds it's a value add play. It's a classic real estate value add play. He buys the dirt really cheap out of foreclosure, bankruptcy foreclosure. And he capitalizes deal properly, you know, fixes the deferred maintenance, gets it pretty again and re-tenants it. Right? And so you go from half full to full. And so there's two ways to win on that.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  There's the entrepreneurial equity side where you're not going to cover off the ball if you actually execute. But you can also win on that deal by being the debt guy. Like I'm going to give you 50 cents in the dollar. I mean, you, you know, if you, if you're, depending on the cap rate you buy it, there's a way to conservatively lend money on that deal. So that if, and as the senior lender, if he screws up, you take the keys. So, so as long as you lend it for a dollar that is at or below fire sale prices. So that you know that in 24 hours, you can get rid of the property and get your money back. That's a really strong, compelling asymmetric risk return profile. I get my capital back in the worst case event.

• 28:19Speaker 02

  I get my capital back plus typically 10, 12% interest if I'm right.

• 28:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. The, the part to me that as I spend more time with folks in the family office world, that I don't think I really understood. In pretty much every game you play in life, right? What you want to do is you want to stack the deck in your favor, right? So what that means is I'm going to try to figure out pieces of information before other people. I'm going to try to find something other people can't find, right? I'm going to have a strategy that no one else understands, all these different things. And that's true in sports. That's true in, you know, board games, whatever.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  That's what family offices, you know, especially the wealthy ones are doing in private investing. Yeah, I'll tell you a deal just because I'm thinking about it as you're saying it, but this is an actual real live deal that I'm doing. In Austin. Can I get in? It's no, please, nobody call on this because it's actually fully capitalized. I don't have, there's no more room, but, but basically. You guys see me using the podcast for deal flow there? No, my real strategy has been revealed. No, it's, it's, it's an RV park. So in Austin, there's such a dearth of, of workforce housing. There's just not enough supply. Cannot keep up with the demand. People are living full time in RV parks.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  I didn't believe it at first, but I, when I heard that, I literally booked a flight, went to Austin and walked the parks to, to, to go figure. And it's unbelievable to me. These are like what? Like tech workers? These are more like blue collar jobs? It's, it's both. It's both because there's also this kind of. Fire. Fire, financially independent, retire early, you know, minimalistic, millennial ethic, you know, the tiny home movement. That's all big in Austin as well. So you, you could have an $80,000 tiny home sitting on a pad next to a $5,000 used, you know, pop up trailer. Yeah.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  And it's really fascinating. Well, the, you know, we basically bought 30 acres of dirt on the edge of Austin and we're developing a new RV park. And it's really hard to get the permitting entitlement done correctly. But basically if you do, you can create, excuse me, a really interesting gated community with curbed streets. And, and, and not a blight on the community and provide on 30 acres, 300 housing units. For this workforce housing and the economics are incredible. It's, it's six to 700 month for the dirt rental per pad.

• 30:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What's crazy about this? So I know somebody who did this with mobile homes. Now they didn't buy the dirt. They bought the actual mobile homes themselves and rented them out. One of the things that I had never thought of until I actually went and saw what they were doing is how much more dense the acreage can be when you're renting it out, right? It's kind of like what the WeWork model was. Now WeWork went in and took a big space and then cut it up, right? And then rented it out in little slices and made a, well, they were supposed to make a some upside or, you know, net something there on, on doing that. Same model here. You go buy 30 acres, right? When you cut that up, if each piece is on a, you know, per dollar basis, higher when you rent it out, cut up, you're going to make money.

• 31:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're going to stabilize this project. You know, we're expecting to break ground late summer, but it's about 69 months in construction time to get it on, to get, to get the infrastructure laid. But we expect to stabilize it at, you know, mid teens cap rate and compress into a sale at eight, which, which, which is a fancy way of saying, we think we can turn $10 million into 20 in a three-year period of time. And the upside is compelling. The downside is pretty minimal. I mean, you know, the dirt is on the edge of Austin. It's on a killer corner in a really busy place. And so if, if I don't get the right to build the park, I could sell the land today for more than I bought it.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  So, so we love those asymmetries.

• 32:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And, and part of this too is you're talking about doubling your money, right? Well, we'll get to crypto in a second, but to most people in crypto, doubling your money doesn't sound that great, right? But you're talking about combining upside with risk profile. And in that risk profile, the part that you also hinted at, that I think a lot of people don't understand is when you have wealth, like many of these families do, time's on their side. So if they buy that piece of property and all of a sudden, you know, markets crash, prices go down, they don't get the approvals to build, et cetera. The worst case scenario is that they left holding it.

• 32:46Speaker 02

  We've become a land bank on a really good piece of dirt and one of the best markets in the country.

• 32:51Anthony Pompliano?

  And five to 10 years from now, it'll be worth two to three X anyways.

• 32:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And so it really comes down to what those liquidity needs are and kind of what the appetite is to the investor. And I think that that's one of the things that the public markets probably don't provide, right? Just given this daily price.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Lots of volatility. They got television shows talking about it, right? They've got newspaper headlines, like, you know, all this stuff's going on and it's very easy for people to get in their own way and make emotional decisions. But in these private markets, it's a little bit harder to do, just given the the nature of the assets.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think real risk management, and this is, this is just me talking, but it really comes down to what's your upside downside? And what's the probability of those outcomes? Right? If I have a upside of 2X and a downside of break even.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  You take that bet all the time, right? If I have an upside of 2X and a downside of lose everything, I better be right more than half the time or I'm not making money. Right? So that's why even something as crazy aggressive as crypto is compelling. Because there's a small right tail risk exposure, two to 5%. It can go to zero. I'm okay with that for the trade of it going 20 to 100X. I mean, I'm making that number up, but it's if you have enough upside and you can throw that bet enough times, you're going to compound capital.

• 34:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, the the numbers over the last five years, and these numbers are a couple of months old. So just generally, this was correct. Over five years, 6040 global portfolio gave you 7.2% annualized return. If you had taken half a percent from stocks, half a percent from bonds, put 1% into Bitcoin, you went from 7.2 to 9.2. So 200 basis point upside. If it had gone to zero, you would have lost 20 basis points, 7.2 to 7. So you have a 10 to one upside to downside, which is what I'm talking about. And by the way, in the worst case scenario where you lose it all, that means you lost 1% of your assets.

• 34:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 34:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Which. Nobody wants to lose money, but you've contained the risk. And so I think that that's part of this as well is what scares me personally is I see, you know, you know, folks on, on Twitter who are like, look, I'm a hundred percent.

• 35:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Right. And what I always say to somebody when they ask, you know, is that a good allocation? I say, it's impossible to answer that question. Right. Because guess what? For a 16 year old kid who's got a hundred bucks,

• 35:22Anthony Pompliano?

  earning 3% or 2% on bonds is probably not going to get it done. Right. And so it's such a small amount of money compared to the earning power. You know, that's a very different conversation.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  He's not spending it on, on, on stocks and bonds. Anyway, he's spending it on his girlfriend or on video games or.

• 35:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course, right? And so it's, you know, I use that as an egregious example.

• 35:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:42Anthony Pompliano?

  But when you start to look at the 25 year old who's got, you know, a decent job at their first job out of school. They don't have any wealth saved up, but they also don't have a lot of expenses, has a very different risk return profile that they're targeting than, you know, the 50 year old who's got three kids that are in college right now. Right. High expense ratio, et cetera. And so I think that that's the mentality and the education around these investors. To me has been the most shocking thing coming from more of the tech industry into finance. It just blows me away how not even uneducated, just unexposed to what the wealthiest people in the world do.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's fascinating. It's, it's, it's really more about psychology than, than the, than the, than the algebra. And, and understanding that psychology and getting people comfortable with taking the right amount of risk. And then that whole conversation goes away from sides more towards the art, the more wealthy they get. Because at a certain point, they can take more risk because they have enough wealth in it. They can risk more because it doesn't matter to their life or, or not. So it's just a really fascinating nuanced conversation that is part of why I get paid.

• 36:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, I'll, I'll give you, uh, give you one more that, um, I didn't understand this, but, uh, there's a, um, a young kid that I know who, uh, who basically, um, I talked to periodically and he said something to me the effect of, uh, I spend too much money. Okay. And I said, well, you know, if you want to tell me, tell me the numbers. And so you told it to me. And I said, look, you're trying to save $200 extra a month, right? Which to you sounds like it would be that, you know, change your lifestyle essentially. I said, what if I said to you, I make $500 extra a month? So rather than try to cap your spending, is it actually easier just to go make $500 more a month? Right? And, and he basically kind of, you know, faltered and I don't know, you know, how am I going to do that?

• 37:38Anthony Pompliano?

  What? I said, don't look, it's not, it's an equation, right? That there's inputs and outputs out in this equation. And if you spend more money, then you either got to stop doing that or you got to make more money. And the making more money may actually be easier for you. So you don't have to change your lifestyle. And guess what? If you save $200, you make 500 more, you actually end up with more money by making the 500.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 37:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And so it's kind of trying to expand the, uh, the mindset from not always just being a, how do I contract? How do I spend less, spend less and less? And it's, well, sometimes growth can actually get you to where you want to go faster than the, let me stop spending, let me do this.

• 38:14Speaker 02

  For sure. Totally.

• 38:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Which I think a lot of, you know, of investing, that's how these wealthy families think about it, right? How do I grow what I have? And in many cases, if they're good at it, it's better than if they had a job.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  For sure. Yeah, they can make, they, they often do make significantly more in their portfolios than they do, uh, in their wages.

• 38:35Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. Um, how's crypto fit into all this? So you've got these, uh, these wealthy families who, uh, are doing all kinds of alternative investing, et cetera. And then are you going to them saying, check out crypto? Or are they coming to you saying, what the hell is this?

• 38:49Speaker 02

  It's both. Uh, but for crypto, it was actually not a client coming to me. But I, I mean, that's another passion point of mine is I sit down with my clients quarterly and I'm like, here's the numbers, blah, blah, blah. Uh, what are you invested in right now? That isn't in my portfolio that you're super excited about. And every client gets that question every quarter. So there's a lot of inbound deal flow that, that I get to be curious about.

• 39:15Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the weirdest one?

• 39:17Speaker 02

  Peanut shelling, peanut shelling operation in South Carolina.

• 39:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Peanut shelling.

• 39:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:24Anthony Pompliano?

  So like taking the peanuts out of the.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  Like farmers got the peanut crops and he's tired of getting jacked around by the shelling co-op. And he thinks, screw it, I'm going to go start my own shelling deal and, and I'm, you know, I get that. Literally, I got this call from a client who got pitched this deal and I had to start to try to figure out how to get my heart, hand, head wrapped around that.

• 39:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Was it a good deal?

• 39:50Speaker 02

  It was a horrible deal. It was a great, it was a great idea. It was a great idea, but it was a bad structure, which happens all the time. Great ideas get killed by bad structures all the time.

• 40:00Anthony Pompliano?

  When you say bad structure, explain that one more.

• 40:02Speaker 02

  Uh, you know, it's, it's, it's the whole pre-money, post-money valuation, you know, how much the company is being sold? What is it? Is it an equity instrument? Is it debt instrument? You know, what, what's the risk that I'm bearing for the capital that I'm laying out? And, and so parsing through the deal docs and figuring out where you are in the capital stack and how much risk versus how much of the upside, that, that's what I'm talking about. Structures, structures can, you can kill a good idea with a bad structure.

• 40:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, it goes back to, uh, you know, you named the price, I'd name the terms, right? When you're negotiating with somebody, cool, I'll pay a billion dollars for your company. I'll pay a dollar a day, you know, for the rest of your life. Good luck.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  So, but for crypto, it came actually from a friend of mine. We were sitting on his deck.

• 40:47Speaker 02

  Just, you know, winter's slowly waning away, a warmer early spring day in 2017. He's like, man, you gotta take a look at this and, and I, you know, he's, he's a kind of a trend guy.

• 41:02Speaker 02

  Trades at Chicago Board of Trade, so he thinks about the world as a trader.

• 41:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Ethereum at that time in 2017, if I remember, had gone from like $10 at the start of the year, probably jumped to like 30. So it's like a 3X right around March timeframe.

• 41:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. He's like, I don't know. I just put money in and it keeps going up. I'm done. And I'm like, well, what is it? He goes, I don't know. And I, I can't, I just, that just doesn't hit my, I gotta go figure out what it is. So I, I thought, well, I'll figure that out. I'll spend an hour tonight. It took me forever just to figure out. I mean, there was not really any content online that was readily available to even understand and explain it.

• 41:36Anthony Pompliano?

  So this is an important point, right? Which is, uh, To somebody who knew nothing about crypto, you don't know where to look.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 41:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Right. You don't know about the Reddit subreddits. You don't know who to follow on Twitter yet. Right. There's no idea that CoinDesk or CoinTelegraph, right? These kind of more niche sites exist. What you do is you Google, right?

• 41:56Speaker 02

  That's exactly what I did.

• 41:57Anthony Pompliano?

  And you find, you know.

• 41:59Speaker 02

  All kinds of stuff.

• 42:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Bloomberg article, right? And I just picked a random one, but talking about something in 2014.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. I got that article. I know the one you're talking about.

• 42:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes. All right. So you go look at it.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  I look at it and the further in I get, I mean, it's a rabbit hole, man. I got, I got in and it was, you know, there's no getting out. It just fascinated me to no end. I mean, the, it is a tech, I remember distinctly, okay, true confessions. College, my senior year, I was in a class, we had a group project.

• 42:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  Will the internet survive and thrive?

• 42:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 42:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so this is 19, 19, this is 1993 or 94.

• 42:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. So just wanted to start to be like, become known, publicize the academic.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  Right. And so, and we did our research and we came back at the end and said, no, there's no way. There's security risk. Yeah, there's security risks. Like who wants to go, who wants to buy shoes online? I gotta go try them on. Like I'm going to the mall. Like, like, you know, obviously stupid hindsight. And after a few years, and I look back on that, I'm like, wow, that was really dumb. Like I missed that one. And I'm like, well, that'll never happen again in my lifetime. And I distinctly remember that moment coming back in my mind when I started to understand what crypto is. Cause it's exactly that moment again.

• 43:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What was the part that pulled you in? Like what was so fascinating about it when you started looking at it?

• 43:26Speaker 02

  Just intermediating third party intermediaries from the financial system globally.

• 43:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Just a small task.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:34Anthony Pompliano?

  We'll be done by lunch.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 43:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so what did you do initially, once you got interested?

• 43:40Speaker 02

  Well, initially I thought, well, this is, this is great. I'm going to go, I'll launch a hedge fund. I'll pick coins. Well, then I started doing a little more work and I realized I don't know how to program open source code. I can barely spell blockchain. Like, I don't know cryptography. I couldn't tell you good cryptography from bad cryptography. I don't, I don't, these are really deep sciences with really smart people that I'm not. So I, you know, I didn't want to be a poser. And actually, there are a fair number of poser hedge funds out there that have none of those credentials that are still somehow smart in the space.

• 44:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, in 2017, if you just picked anything, it would have, it seemed like, at least, right?

• 44:20Speaker 02

  So the next best thing to me was to resurrect the dying animal of fund of funds. And outside crypto, fund of funds is a dying animal. There's no need for it. It served its purpose for a time, but not anymore.

• 44:33Anthony Pompliano?

  You want to talk about why they're dying?

• 44:34Speaker 02

  Well, sure. Fees, access, you know, there's a, there's a natural penetration of, of capital in the arbitrage space that diffuses returns. I mean, the competition, it's a more crowded fishbowl. There's a number of reasons.

• 44:49Anthony Pompliano?

  So I asked Mark Yusko, one of our partners, they used to have a big fund of funds business.

• 44:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:55Anthony Pompliano?

  And he basically said the same thing, because that's a dying business. And I said, you know, why? And he responded, he goes, the internet. What do you mean, the internet? And he goes, well, it used to be that people would come to a fund of funds and they would say, hey, I have some money. I'd like to get into, you know, good hedge funds, for example. And that fund of funds had relationships, access, right? Knew the returns and could pick, etc. He goes, now, it's, I Google top performing hedge funds. I see that, you know, Tiger Global is really high performer. I go to their website. I click the contact us page and I get a phone number and I call up and say, hey, I have money. Would you take it? Right?

• 45:31Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 45:31Anthony Pompliano?

  And they, sometimes they say yes, sometimes they say no, right?

• 45:34Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 45:34Anthony Pompliano?

  But, but in, from a mechanism standpoint, I now know who to give it to. And now I just got to make sure that they're willing to take it.

• 45:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. But, but with crypto, there is relationship equity. There is access. There is.

• 45:46Anthony Pompliano?

  It's a repeat of what happened in the other world.

• 45:49Speaker 02

  It will run its course and be useless and obsolete sometime in the future as well. But I felt like that's, that's the only way that makes sense for me to, to do my part in that space. Because I, I'm, I'm a capital aggregator. I have clients that have money. People come to me to hear about things like this. So we launched a fund of funds.

• 46:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And on the fund of funds side, what are the types of funds that you found most interesting? Is it people who are picking individual liquid tokens? Is it some other strategies?

• 46:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. So a couple of really passion point, big passion points for me on this, and I hope I remember them all. But like number one, we are structured mostly as a liquid product. My redemption terms kind of forced me to mostly stay away from VC kinds of of deals. Now, that said, even our, even our liquid guys can't help themselves when they come across really enticing VC deals. And we've got side pockets for all of those. So I would even say maybe I'd have to look again. 20 to 30% of the fund ends up going through a VC law, you know, side pocket kind of a deal.

• 46:54Anthony Pompliano?

  For those that don't know, we're talking about in terms of redemptions. If you're an investor in the fund and you say, hey, want my money back? There's usually pre-agreed to terms. So it may be you can redeem every 30 days, but you've got to leave your capital locked up for a year to start or something.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 47:08Anthony Pompliano?

  And the problem is if you go and take all of the capital in the fund and you invested in illiquid deals that are going to take three, four, or five years to materialize. If everyone comes and says, hey, give me back my money, but you, the capital's in illiquid investments, you can't actually give them back the money. So there's a mismatch between the liquidity profiles. But by having a liquid portfolio or exposure to liquid assets, it's much easier to get liquidity, which means that then you can serve back those redemptions when necessary.

• 47:33Speaker 02

  Right. So we purposefully went liquid partly because we feel like the, um, the gap between VC and liquidity in crypto is a really compressed timeframe compared to traditional VC to begin with. So the alpha that you earn from traditional VC lockups isn't really there in crypto. We think that liquidity comes early enough that you still capture the majority of the beta trade in the liquid markets to begin with. Does that, did I say that right? Does that make sense?

• 48:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 48:06Speaker 02

  So, so that, you know, that's our bent is to be liquid. Number two, uh, we, we are, uh, we want to be. With the smartest herd in the room. So I, I, and you know, we were talking about this a little bit before. Crypto, in a sense, I feel like has a bit of an insecurity complex and wants to grow itself up and, and wants to be considered institutional. And so there's a lot of work done to pigeonhole market neutral guys versus, you know, coin pickers versus absolute return. There's just that we're trying to do what happens in normal hedge fund investing in crypto to make it appear like it's becoming more grown up.

• 48:46Speaker 02

  And I think that's a mistake. I, I don't, you know, I think this is a, you know, this is venture capital meets liquidity. It's, uh, it's capture the beta. It's stay with the smartest guys in the room and you better let those smart guys adjust as the market shifts. I don't want, I don't want the exposure in 17 to look like the exposure in 18 or 19 from that guy. If he's seeing things differently. So I don't want to pigeonhole people. I just want wide mandates with the smartest guys in the room. And I want a very small concentrated number. Most traditional fund of funds, 20, 25 funds. You know, we're, we're in five currently, anywhere from three to seven.

• 49:27Speaker 02

  But beyond that utilitarian value of that extra manager, uh, from a statistical analysis standpoint, it's useless.

• 49:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, and also in crypto, um, there's not that many funds in terms of like the denominator. And so therefore if you just say, hey, some are really good, some are okay and some are bad. Right. The number of in the really good category is just going to be a much smaller number as well.

• 49:48Speaker 02

  Very small. We, we think there's maybe eight or nine, like world-class funds in the game, uh, and we're in half of them. And the other half we've chosen not to be because they're redundant.

• 50:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Can I get you to name one?

• 50:06Speaker 02

  They're on my website. So you can, you can have all of them. So it's, it's a meta-stable, multi-coin, uh, HAZUR.

• 50:14Speaker 02

  Digital Global and Block Tower.

• 50:18Anthony Pompliano?

  All horrible people.

• 50:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:20Anthony Pompliano?

  I know all of them and they're just the worst. I know some of you are listening, just you guys are so bad that I want to be your friend. No, they're all great. And I think if you look at all of them, they all have nuances to the strategy, but they all have a general thread between what they're looking to invest in, the structure, the stage, etc. So it makes a lot of sense.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:41Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you talk to your clients about it?

• 50:44Speaker 02

  Very big picture, long term. I mean, literally every time it's like, look, this is the riskiest thing in your portfolio. Right? I mean, first of all, we launched the fund January 18th. So it's down, right? They've lost money. So we slowly add more capital, but basically we're like, look, this is, this is high risk. It can go to zero. But this is, you know, world changing technology that if we're even half right, you'll be glad you own this in 10 years.

• 51:16Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the general sentiment when they're sitting there, they're about two years into the trade, right? Depending on when they came in, they're down, but there's not the like mass hysteria, probably of like late 2018, you know, December, when it was down around $3,000 Bitcoin price, etc. Like, what's the general sentiment when you talk to the clients you have today?

• 51:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's interesting, because I think that question is, it's never really asked, it's never really confronted with my clients, because my clients, in an hour and a half dinner meeting, will spend five minutes on crypto, five minutes on the RV park, which is going really well, five minutes on the biotech strategy, which we're not going to cover off the ball. As long as I've got a narrative of reasonable, reasonably differentiated ideas, some of which are working, some of which are not, but all sort of heading in the direction that I promised them we'd try to go. I really have, I have zero.

• 52:19Anthony Pompliano?

  And that's because of the sizing in the portfolio?

• 52:22Speaker 02

  Totally. Yeah, we're not.

• 52:24Anthony Pompliano?

  If it was 50% of their portfolio, there'd be a lot of questions, right? If it's 1%, then obviously it's a whole different conversation.

• 52:29Speaker 02

  Completely.

• 52:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And let's take on a spectrum of your clients, right? So the most sophisticated when it comes to crypto and the least sophisticated, what are the main differences there? Is it just time spent educating it? Is there demographic difference? So younger clients are more inclined to be interested and older clients aren't? Like, what do you see between the big differences between those sophistication levels?

• 52:51Speaker 02

  Oh, that's interesting. It's really just, it's really, I don't think it's an age thing. Most of my clients probably do tend to be older just because most to get money. It takes time to get money, right? So I can't, I can't say.

• 53:07Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a lesson for all the 20-year-olds out there, right? Who are all like, I want $100 million. It's like, look, very, very few 20-year-olds in the world ever had $100 million, let alone are going to have it in the future.

• 53:16Speaker 02

  So I don't think there's a correlation on the age issue, or at least in my limited data set, I don't think there is. But I think it's a personality issue. It's really a, you know, some people just don't care. And for whatever reason, they got money and they need somebody to manage it. And they just, they just don't care. They don't care to care. Other people get fascinated by technology. They get, there's an element of curiosity that they, they don't need, they're not challenging me to know. They just, they like to, they like to learn new things. And neither one of those is right or wrong.

• 53:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Do you see any of the clients who didn't have financial exposure? They get financial exposure, whether they do it or with you guys. And then you see them lean into kind of paying attention more and learning? Because one of my theories here is like this whole get off zero idea, right? It's like, look, I don't care if you got a penny or you got, you know, a lot of money in, exposed to any asset, right? It had to be crypto, just anything. You start paying attention a little bit more than you were, right? And I think that most of the wealth managers that I've talked to such that they're like, look, it's probably been the best thing we can do to get these people to pay attention is half a percent.

• 54:26Speaker 02

  I totally agree. I completely agree. It just, and that's not just a crypto idea. That's every, every major, we are for full risk on like embracing risk capital. We are bullish for 10 years on three things, biotech, crypto, and workforce housing. If, if we can go around the country building more RV parks, if we can press into crypto and biotech, we think those are, and, and so just getting a little piece of capital in the portfolio, start small, put it in the portfolio. It's a talking point when we get together every quarter. That's, I a hundred percent agree with your thesis.

• 55:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Why, um, why biotech?

• 55:05Speaker 02

  Man, this is my latest super exciting idea that I just can hardly contain myself about. It's very much in some ways like crypto.

• 55:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 55:15Speaker 02

  Um, the old school, hang with me as I explain this. The old school biotech IPO was an exit. Right? You got, you got a, you got an idea, you got an idea in a university. They do a lab rat model. It goes well. They raise a seed round, you know, they, they, they get to phase one, the safety trials, they go well. Phase two, you go through this process, you're phase three, the data's not in yet, but it looks promising. And you're at the end of the deal and it's in the privates, it's in the venture capital world and they go IPO and it's a binary outcome. It's either the phase three works, the FDA says yes, you turn the revenue stream on and you make a ton of money. Or something happens, it doesn't work and it goes to zero and you wasted all that private money.

• 56:01Speaker 02

  That's the old school biotech IPO. Not today.

• 56:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. What's the difference?

• 56:06Speaker 02

  Today, biotech's going public pre-clinical trials.

• 56:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 56:11Speaker 02

  Because they can.

• 56:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Cause there's the ability in the markets, the access to capital.

• 56:15Speaker 02

  So, so you're getting, uh, tickers trading on Wall Street that are a lab rat model and an idea. They, the FDA has not allowed them to go into clinical trials, even for a safety trial yet. Now you might think, well, that's crazy. That's horrible risky. Actually it's the opposite.

• 56:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 56:34Speaker 02

  Because, um,

• 56:37Speaker 02

  There's a, there's a lot of companies that go from lab rat model to phase one. There's a lot of companies that go from phase one to phase two. There's fewer, but many that go from phase two to phase three. Very few companies commercialize, right? So if you're in a bid ask spread, public market, liquid world, and you come to market and say, guess what? FDA said, yes, we're going into the clinic for phase one. Guess what? We came out of clinic, we didn't kill anybody, hurt anybody. We're going to be allowed to dose this in actual efficacious manner to see if our regimen, our therapeutic regimen works, you know? And there's multiple value creation points along that journey where you can win even if it fails. That were before relegated to a private world.

• 57:21Speaker 02

  They're now being discovered in public markets.

• 57:24Anthony Pompliano?

  And so is the argument that you're now sharing the upside from the private market into the public market so more people can participate?

• 57:31Speaker 02

  It is that, but it's even more about the fact that that's, that's the backdrop in the context of how it's happening. But Wall Street doesn't know how to do, deal with that. Wall Street analysts are not venture capital scientists. And you cannot understand the, the idiosyncrasies of these, of these deals without having venture capital science. So what the aha moment is, and venture capital scientists don't want to be in an analyst desk, making a Wall Street analyst earning, right? They want to be going and creating companies. So there's this natural bifurcation of those two worlds. Well, if you find a bridge, if you find access to solid VC science, who can look at those public tickers and say, yeah, this is massively undervalued.

• 58:16Speaker 02

  I mean, they're, they've been in the clinic now for four months. They're, they're due to report phase one in three months. And if they haven't reported any, they're bound to, they're, they're required to report negative adverse events if they happen. They haven't reported any. The chances that the phase one turns out thumbs up, get better every day. There isn't an adverse, things like that get, get, uh, don't get well understood. And, and so the, the, the bottom line is we just figured this out over the last six, six to eight months. And, and I launched a Liquid biotech strategy tapping into this VC research on October 4th.

• 58:59Speaker 02

  And it's, it's, it's just stupid money. Yeah, it's really good.

• 59:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. The, the part to me that's really interesting is you're seeing it in biotech, like you just described. Crypto allowed better access to, to capital for innovators. And I think that this trend across the board is going to continue as just, there's this pent up demand in, people want access to what used to be private investments that at some point, kind of the dam breaks.

• 59:23Speaker 02

  It's, it's the only place, biotech is the only place where I'm not an alpha hater. I'm, I'm, I'm, I actually think there's a, right now, there's an arbitrage, there's a reproducible model where alpha actually matters. There's a corner of the liquid stock market in biotech, in these really small cap biotechs where it's completely unorganized. The market is every, is anything but efficient and, and real understanding of this venture capital science involved gives you a massive, massive alpha trade.

• 59:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Access to information. Yeah. All right. Before we wrap up, what, uh, what do you think your clients are kind of headed to over the next two years when it comes to crypto? Is it more of the same? Do you think that more of them lean in? Are there things that happen in the crypto industry that you think, um, you know, touch other parts of their portfolio? Like, like, how do you think about, I got a set of clients, here's the profile that they are, there's this thing crypto. Like, how do those two things interact moving forward?

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. So you're, you're asking, uh, like, do I anticipate scaling my allocation higher? Would you say, is that, is that?

• 1:00:31Anthony Pompliano?

  So you could scale it higher, you could scale it lower. There could be the introduction of, uh, hey, we want to start taking parts of their cash position and holding in stable coins. There could be, um, tokenization of, uh, real estate or stocks. I mean, there's a whole bunch of stuff that could happen here. So how do you think about that?

• 1:00:47Speaker 02

  I got you. So in the two-year timeframe, uh, I would say,

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  Probably will stay put. I, you know, I really am pitching this as a 10 year idea. I don't know. I mean, it could be in two, two years from now, it could be that everybody in the world understands that crypto is, is the new thing and it's already 10x. I, I don't, I don't know that I

• 1:01:10Anthony Pompliano?

  We'll see.

• 1:01:10Speaker 02

  I don't, I'm not actually counting on that. I, I think there's going to be an inflection point moment at some point in the next five or 10 years. I just don't know what it is. And I would, I wouldn't want to say that I think it's going to be inside two years. So with that risk reward profile, we, we have the bet where we want it. We, you know, we're two of, we're, as I gain new clients organically, uh, you know, we'll, we'll add capital to the funds through new relationships, but the allocation, you know, two to 5% model is really where it needs to be. Now, if we're lucky and it does go 20x in two years,

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  totally different game. And I, I don't even know what we would do at that point, whether, because, because the trade could get better from there.

• 1:01:52Anthony Pompliano?

  So one of my questions is always, let's say you have 2%, right? All your clients are at 2% and you see a 10x. So now 20% of client assets, do you rebalance or you keep it?

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I'm not sure. I, you know,

• 1:02:05Anthony Pompliano?

  It's probably a good answer, right? Is you need more data to understand where you are in the market, et cetera.

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:02:10Anthony Pompliano?

  But it, it's very interesting because when you have the asymmetric assets, you could go from it was 2%, now it's 10, 20%.

• 1:02:16Speaker 02

  So, yeah, so like number one, I will not, I'm not ever going to be the, the, the, the actual capital manager. It will be through my managers. I don't want to have to make a choice on a coin. I don't have the skills for it. So this is always going to be a manage the smartest manager kind of mentality. But if, if we get, you know, a 10x run up from here and it looks like 17, where there's no killer app, it, it's speculation. I, I hope that we can have the wisdom to think about how to, to, to protect that. If it's the opposite and fidelity and Schwab and all of these gargantuan, monolithic financial beasts that run our world today,

• 1:02:59Speaker 02

  adapt it and adopt it. It literally, there are many killer apps in the industry. It's, it's not a speculative bubble. It's actually an EBITDA measured bubble, if you will.

• 1:03:11Anthony Pompliano?

  I never heard that. I like that. Even the measured bubble. Yeah, but it's a different conversation, right? Totally. Kind of what you do there. Absolutely. Are there any companies in crypto that really stand out? You name some of the funds that you like, but but any companies that you just think done a really good job?

• 1:03:26Speaker 02

  I don't. I probably don't have much on that. I mean, I'll tell you that we have an allocation to Nvidia.

• 1:03:33Anthony Pompliano?

  And that's for the crypto exposure through like the GPUs or just computation in general?

• 1:03:40Speaker 02

  Both. Yeah, we think that. And it's a small allocation, not in the fund, of course, just in the portfolio. We think we think that space has multiple ways to win over the long. Obviously, you're embracing, you know, risk on that trade as well. But beyond that, I'm I am not. I'm generally not a stock picker. I'm not a a technical.

• 1:04:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it was. It's interesting way to think about the crypto industry, right? In the sense of taking a look at, okay, there's public stocks that are available. What are the ones that have exposure? Most of the quote unquote blockchain public stocks actually are, that's not their DNA, right? They kind of backed into it. They changed their name. They did all kinds of crazy stuff. But somebody like an Nvidia that is supplying, you know, the picks and shovels, right?

• 1:04:29Speaker 02

  We think it's. We think it's the classic picks and shovels idea.

• 1:04:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:33Speaker 02

  But I'm not recommending the stock. I haven't even looked. I don't even know where it's trading today.

• 1:04:38Anthony Pompliano?

  What is the best book you've ever read? The most important book?

• 1:04:43Speaker 02

  See, I did my research and I knew you were going to ask. See, I've got these notes like.

• 1:04:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's see your notes. At least you came in here without paper. I'm not going to call the person who walked in here one time with six pages of notes and I made them throw them in the trash and not look at them.

• 1:04:55Speaker 02

  No, you know, I love to read. I didn't used to, but I.

• 1:04:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you read or you listen?

• 1:05:00Speaker 02

  No, I'm an audible audible guy because I can go, you know, and I like to work out. So like it kills two birds with one. So I can go one and a half speed, crunch through a lot of material. And.

• 1:05:10Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you? Can you run and listen to the audio book?

• 1:05:12Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:05:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Can you lift and listen to the audio book? You're like I am. I do the same thing. I don't listen to music anymore at the gym.

• 1:05:18Speaker 02

  I don't either. I used that used to be all, but it really doesn't do me much good. I mean, there anyways.

• 1:05:25Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you do at the gym?

• 1:05:26Speaker 02

  Like in a for workout. Oh yeah, I'm like, I'm a every other day. Chest, back, try by shoulder core. So it's a full body except lower body. And then on the opposite days in the summer, it's a four mile run. In the winter, it's a thirty minute, ten mile bike.

• 1:05:47Anthony Pompliano?

  That's like a real workout.

• 1:05:49Speaker 02

  You know, it gets me sweating.

• 1:05:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, it takes like an hour.

• 1:05:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:54Anthony Pompliano?

  It's a I'm I'm just asking people what they do for workouts because some people come in here and I'm like, person they worked out. I don't think they're working out very much. You actually look like you work out, but I'm gonna start calling bullshit on some people.

• 1:06:06Speaker 02

  It's a sanity check for me. I can't.

• 1:06:08Anthony Pompliano?

  So you go seven days a week or you do six?

• 1:06:10Speaker 02

  No, so I'm getting older. I'm forty eight and and every week and a half I have to take an extra like like extra day off.

• 1:06:19Anthony Pompliano?

  It it's um, do you do anything diet wise?

• 1:06:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm a not. So I like to think about it in terms of just a lifestyle habit.

• 1:06:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:06:27Speaker 02

  You know, so it's really not a binge thing. It's a very low carb, low to no carb. One and a half meal a day, like high protein. I had chicken salad before I showed up here.

• 1:06:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:06:37Speaker 02

  That's all I've had to eat, just a little bit of chicken salad today, and I'll have a reasonable dinner, but low to no carb. So high protein, high plant, you know, a simple carb, no breads and sugars, but complex carbs, you know, vegetables, tons of those.

• 1:06:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. So just really staying away from, I'm assuming, sugars and and the breads. And then if you can eat protein stuff.

• 1:06:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:57Anthony Pompliano?

  It's um, it's interesting because I was recently looking at if you take two diets that are on the opposite end of the spectrums, you take the like vegetarian, vegan, you know, whatever variation you want. And then you take like the keto, right? Both of them are optimizing for quote unquote health. But if you actually read into what type of health they're optimizing for, one is optimizing for what I would consider more short to medium term health. And the other, one of the, you know,

• 1:07:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Proposed benefits of the vegetarian diet is longevity.

• 1:07:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And so it really becomes this thing of there's no silver bullet, right?

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:34Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, there's different diets for different people. It also matters what physical exercise you're doing, or you're trying to build mass, lose weight, you know, all these different things.

• 1:07:42Speaker 02

  You just gotta get, you gotta, you gotta start listening to your body. The older I get, the more I listen to my body. I didn't used to, I used to just bludgeon my body with workouts and I can't do that as much anymore. But it's, it's kind of a interesting, fun little hobby to, to tweak it as you get older.

• 1:07:55Anthony Pompliano?

  But yeah.

• 1:07:56Speaker 02

  But on your book deal, I actually have some thought about this because I, I knew that was one of the questions that you like to ask.

• 1:08:04Speaker 02

  You know.

• 1:08:04Anthony Pompliano?

  If you come up with a bad, a bad suggestion, you're gonna get destroyed on Twitter, now that you thought about it.

• 1:08:10Speaker 02

  No, I mean, so, so I read books really for mostly like three different purposes.

• 1:08:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:08:16Speaker 02

  Right? So I don't read to get smarter. I mean, I do other things to get smarter.

• 1:08:20Anthony Pompliano?

  All right.

• 1:08:20Speaker 02

  I don't, I don't really think that.

• 1:08:25Speaker 02

  I'm a skeptic. I'm, I'm very, my, my natural comfort is to be a linear thinker.

• 1:08:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:08:30Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm pretty, I feel like I'm pretty decent at that. What I need to do is I need to be, I need to be challenged at learning how to dream better.

• 1:08:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:08:42Speaker 02

  I need to be able to, you know, I, I need to have an imagination. I did a very poor job of managing money for clients early in my career because I was, I was the world's consummate skeptic. I could pick apart any deal and tell you 100 reasons why it was the worst deal in the world. That doesn't really help people, right? So I had to learn how to get imagination. So I read to be inspired. I read to, you know.

• 1:09:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Some more nonfiction, I'm assuming.

• 1:09:06Speaker 02

  Totally nonfiction, but you know, the truth is stranger than fiction. I love the, the, the biographies that are just crazy stories. And it could, could have to do with anything, but if it's a true story and it's inspiring, I like it, you know?

• 1:09:20Anthony Pompliano?

  What are the best ones?

• 1:09:20Speaker 02

  Oh, there's a ton of them. I, you know.

• 1:09:23Anthony Pompliano?

  You give me one, I'll give you one. Let's see who runs out first.

• 1:09:25Speaker 02

  All right, I'll do you two.

• 1:09:27Speaker 02

  The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks.

• 1:09:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:09:30Speaker 02

  Heard that?

• 1:09:31Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I have not, I haven't read it, but I'll put that on the list.

• 1:09:33Speaker 02

  So the, she is a girl who lived in the thirties or forties. Without giving a punchline, there are more living cells of her body alive today than there were when she was alive. And Helax is the backbone of every scientific experiment that's done.

• 1:09:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting.

• 1:09:54Speaker 02

  And it, it's just, it's a crazy story.

• 1:09:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Henry.

• 1:09:58Speaker 02

  The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks.

• 1:10:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Henrietta, okay. Sam Zell. Am I being too subtle?

• 1:10:06Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:10:07Anthony Pompliano?

  He, uh. Basically, he was all in real estate.

• 1:10:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And one day said, I'm probably over indexed, I should diversify. So I'm gonna take 50% and I'm gonna go put it in, take companies public. And then all of a sudden, he saw a REIT for the first time, he said, wait a minute, I am an expert in real estate. I'm an expert in taking companies public. I should do that. And next thing you know, he built the $40 billion largest REIT in the world and sold it to Blackstone, who? I'm gonna cheat and say two books. Steve Schwarzman just wrote a book and in his book, uh, it's called What It Takes. He describes, uh, when he starts what became Blackstone. They ran an ad in the Wall Street Journal and thought all the people were gonna call, nobody calls. Other than to say, congratulations on your new company. And he's like, why don't you give me some business like, ah, we'll, we'll consider you for, you know, later. Gets a knock at the door and there's a guy with a motorcycle helmet.

• 1:10:56Anthony Pompliano?

  And, uh, he thought he was the food delivery guy. He's like, I know this guy was. And, uh, the guy says, uh, you know, I'm here to talk to Steve Schwarzman. Cause that's me, who are you? He goes, uh, my sister said I should come see you. And, uh, literally had his bike chained up outside, you know, the way the story goes. And, uh, guy in the motorcycle helmet walks in and there's no furniture. So they're supposed to be sitting on the ground and they just talked for a couple of hours. And that's how Steve Schwarzman met Sam Zell.

• 1:11:23Speaker 02

  That is fascinating. What's the name of that book?

• 1:11:25Anthony Pompliano?

  What, What It Takes by Steve Schwarzman.

• 1:11:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I need to read those.

• 1:11:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Thirty years later, uh, Blackstone bought Sam Zell's, uh. REIT. And so it's just, it's interesting how the world turns. All right, what's your next one?

• 1:11:38Speaker 02

  Red Notice, it's a classic.

• 1:11:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Man, I love that one.

• 1:11:41Speaker 02

  Love that book.

• 1:11:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, I, it's probably.

• 1:11:45Anthony Pompliano?

  It's up there. It's my top three most recommended books over the last couple of years to people. Because it is, it's unbelievable.

• 1:11:52Speaker 02

  It's totally unbelievable. Dude, this like you, I have seen Putin on TV mention this guy's name and I'm like, that's, that's nuts.

• 1:12:00Anthony Pompliano?

  So those that don't know, there's a book called Red Notice. It's about a guy, Bill Browder, who is an American investor who went to Russia, did a bunch of investing, things turned sour. And if you've ever heard of the Magnitsky Act here in the US that sanctioned a bunch of Russians. He's basically the reason for it. And so it's such a crazy story that I actually saw on Twitter. This is maybe a couple of months ago, whenever it was, he was in Spain and he got picked up by the Spanish authorities under the red notice, right? So red notice is basically like a FBI's.

• 1:12:35Speaker 02

  I did not know this.

• 1:12:37Anthony Pompliano?

  And he was only for a couple of hours and then he got released, but they were kind of just, you know, making sure whatever. And it was a very stark reminder of like, the book's interesting, right? And the book is educational and it's entertaining and all stuff. It's real life for this guy.

• 1:12:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's crazy. Just finished Tara Westover's book Educated.

• 1:12:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, so okay, you're the second person to mention this. Good?

• 1:13:02Speaker 02

  I actually thought it was really good.

• 1:13:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Really?

• 1:13:05Speaker 02

  Really good.

• 1:13:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:13:06Speaker 02

  Highly unusual.

• 1:13:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Did you read, oh man, I'm going to forget Ashley Vance's book. Is Ashley Vance? Yeah, Ashley Vance, the book about like people in West Virginia? All right. Tell me another one. I'm going to find this book for you before we end up.

• 1:13:20Speaker 02

  Oh, man, you know, so completely different, not, not quite as inspiring, but the closest that I get to trying to read for being smart, I did read House of Morgan. I read, there's a new Churchill biography out. These are both massive 50 hour books. But, but I like, you know, historical, like these are things where you basically deal with the financial system in this country for 150 years. And you see generation after generation of people dealing with stuff that we're probably going to deal with again at some point. And it's just an interesting context. I think it's helpful just to have some background.

• 1:14:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Context?

• 1:14:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:02Anthony Pompliano?

  The book's called Hillbilly.

• 1:14:04Speaker 02

  Oh, I did read that one.

• 1:14:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Really good. All right. So I got one last suggestion. Then we'll talk about aliens.

• 1:14:09Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:14:10Anthony Pompliano?

  We on, uh, so it's not a book. It's documentary. Have you seen, uh, The Men Who Built America?

• 1:14:15Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:14:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, man. If you like the House of Morgan and stuff, you gotta go watch this. So it, uh, it was on television, uh, when it first came out, you can now either buy it, uh, or you can even, there's some like YouTube, you can kind of patch together the different sections. It is an eight part series from the History Channel and it starts with, um, I think the first one it starts with is, uh, Carnegie, then it has Rockefeller, JP Morgan, um, and it's got like two or three others. I forget Edison's in there, uh, Tesla, et cetera. And it basically goes through the story of essentially the Industrial Revolution, uh, and what each one of those players was doing, um, and kind of how America got built.

• 1:14:59Anthony Pompliano?

  And, um, you find fact, like, I'll give you one detail that I didn't know and, um, now having watched it just here to my brain. So John Rockefeller was looking for oil, very quickly realized, rather than me be the guy, you know, the, the idiot poking the ground for the oil, why don't I just become the refiner? Cause then I can make sure I have a more sustainable business. And then he struck a deal. Um, I think it was with, uh, maybe it was Vanderbilt, I think, uh, he struck a deal with, um, and said, Hey, I will give you access to my oil so that you can, uh, put it on your rail cars. And now you have a business, right? Because you're going to have all of my oil. And at some point along the way, um, they basically start to, um, you know,

• 1:15:40Anthony Pompliano?

  twist his arm and say, Hey, well, you need our rails to get your oil anywhere. And so they say, you're going to pay us more. And at some point, there's basically a lockout where they say, you can't use our rails anymore unless you, you know, do what we want you to do. And so he is a very creative and ambitious person says, well, what if I just created pipes? And then he created the oil.

• 1:16:00Speaker 02

  Seriously.

• 1:16:01Anthony Pompliano?

  And so the way that he, and it was out of necessity, right? The innovation came from the necessity of he no longer could put his oil in barrels on rail cars. And so instead what he did was he said, well, I'll just build oil pipes and I will literally pump it, uh, or take it from the refineries, push it through these pipes and I'll get it to where it needs to go. And now you, now basically you lost my business and you can't stop me.

• 1:16:23Speaker 02

  That's really fascinating.

• 1:16:25Anthony Pompliano?

  And so there's example after example, you know, as you start to realize this, there's a reason why, yeah. JP Morgan is a big name, right? Rockefeller is a big name. They did a lot of stuff that was pretty innovative.

• 1:16:36Speaker 02

  That's the, that's the antithesis of that skepticism I was telling you about trying to grow out of.

• 1:16:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:41Speaker 02

  Personally.

• 1:16:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, the, the men who built America are aliens, real or not?

• 1:16:46Speaker 02

  This one is another one that I, I knew you, you might ask. I have kind of a, maybe a backward answer for you.

• 1:16:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:16:54Speaker 02

  Uh, I actually think the entire question is a backdoor question to your, your, your view of the world.

• 1:17:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course. I've said it many times. The reason why I ask the question is it tells you how people think.

• 1:17:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. Meaning, uh, is there intelligent design or not?

• 1:17:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:17:10Speaker 02

  What do you think? It's origins of the universe type of deal. Because if, if you, your answers are going to naturally bifurcate coming down, or you would think your answers would naturally bifurcate coming down that. So I, you know, I'm, I'm in the intelligent design, uh, camp. I'm in the, you know, traditional Judeo-Christian view of the world.

• 1:17:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:17:30Speaker 02

  Um, so that would naturally probably put me in the camp that says, no, they can't exist. But I, I'm actually not there. I would say, um, you know, in the Nash, in the natural Judeo-Christian view of the world, the pinnacle of creation is man, which would mean, uh, that to have other life forms evolve ahead of us, uh, wouldn't, wouldn't really necessarily coexist. Uh, and I would actually subscribe to that. But Amy, this, the world, the, the universe is a big place. So there's no reason why God could not have superintended an evolutionary process to culminate with man and have aliens on five million planets in the universe.

• 1:18:14Anthony Pompliano?

  I got a stat for you for the next time you're at the, uh, the, uh, trivia night at the local bar. How many planets are there out there for every grain of sand on earth?

• 1:18:27Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:18:29Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you, how many planets per grain of sand?

• 1:18:33Speaker 02

  In the universe? Well, clearly it's more than a one to one ratio. I have no idea.

• 1:18:38Anthony Pompliano?

  10,000.

• 1:18:39Speaker 02

  10,000 to one.

• 1:18:40Anthony Pompliano?

  10,000 planets for every grain of sand on earth.

• 1:18:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. That's, see, so.

• 1:18:47Anthony Pompliano?

  That's, that scares the shit out of me.

• 1:18:49Speaker 02

  It is. It's a, it's a fairly myopic view. First of all, it's fairly myopic. It's, it's actually normal for Judeo-Christian worldview people to be myopic in their thinking. But, you know, the facts are, it's fairly myopic to think that, that we're, we're it.

• 1:19:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So that stat comes from, uh, there's a new Netflix explained series on, uh, they don't use the word aliens because I guess that's too taboo. So they use like artificial and, you know, or, or extraterrestrial life or whatever terminology they use, but that, that was in there. And then the other thing is I read, uh, right now there are two galaxies that are colliding.

• 1:19:30Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:19:31Anthony Pompliano?

  And we are going to hit them in like two or four billion years. And I'm out, man. I shut my computer. I gotta go do something else.

• 1:19:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's interesting stuff.

• 1:19:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Cause, uh, I also saw there's, uh, there's meteors, uh, right now coming towards earth. Uh, and this is supposed to be, you know, one of these that like, hey, we should be paying attention to yada, yada, whatever. And, uh, I was like, and I say, look, whether they're right or not, we have no way to check.

• 1:20:01Speaker 02

  We don't, well, see, that's, that's my, you know, either way, if you're, if you're atheist, you're agnostic, you're Christian, you're Hindu, you're Buddhist. It ultimately comes down to not science. This is, nobody's there to observe how this stuff happens. So you, you're a man of faith, whether you're a man of faith, believing in Jesus or in the fact that there is no God. One or the other, either way.

• 1:20:23Anthony Pompliano?

  It's a great way to look at the world. What, uh, what one question you have for me to finish this up?

• 1:20:28Speaker 02

  Uh, what is the most exciting, interesting, non crypto investment that you are stoked about like right now that you cannot?

• 1:20:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, that we've done?

• 1:20:40Speaker 02

  No, that you're into, that you're like, right now, I'm not going to cover off the ball. This is like, this is the coolest thing.

• 1:20:47Anthony Pompliano?

  I.

• 1:20:48Speaker 02

  Maybe there's nothing.

• 1:20:49Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't want, I don't want to say the name of the company because I don't know what they're comfortable with me saying or not, but, um.

• 1:20:56Anthony Pompliano?

  There, well, there's a couple of ways to answer this. So first, somebody said to me, this guy Bruce Fenton, who came, he's an ancient alien researcher. Love you, Bruce, but I'm only 80% of the way there with you. And he said, look, every human has two questions. The first is, are we alone? Right? Meaning, is there extra trust in your life? And two is, what happens when we die? Right? And every human at some point in their life will think of those two things.

• 1:21:22Anthony Pompliano?

  I believe that here on Earth, answering one of those two questions would be one of the greatest, you know, achievements in life. Sure. Right? Now, I don't think that somebody's going to be saying, what happens after we die? Right? It's just, conceptually, would be very difficult to do. Along those lines, though, we invested in a business that scientifically has figured out how to freeze your brain. And what I mean by that is, it essentially, in a very overgeneralized, non-scientific way, delivers cryogenic freezing technology to your brain at the point of death. So as you're dying, puts pushes this in there through this oxygenated process, freezes your brain with 100% structural integrity.

• 1:22:06Anthony Pompliano?

  By doing that, what the belief is, is that they can actually freeze your synapse connections, what exists in those electrical connections, experiences, knowledge, right? Emotions, all this kind of stuff. So if I can basically salvage and preserve emotions, the consciousness, all this kind of stuff, can I then take it and upload it to a computer? And so therefore, imagine if we had Thomas Edison's brain, and we could feed it new problems. Right? So not so much in the, there's some people who say, oh, this technology would be great because when I come back. Right? So there's that, that kind of, you know, more sci-fi stuff. Right. There's some people who just say, hey, look, by being able to do this, we can do research.

• 1:22:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? So there's kind of, you know, directly applicable science. Or this kind of middle ground of, okay, I'm not there yet on like, humans come back. Right? And I'm not there on like, I can cryogenically freeze you and then revive you later. But I do see this world where I could essentially take what's in your head. Put it into a computer and then I can't necessarily evolve it from there, but I can feed new problems to it and use the frameworks, mindset, you know, all this kind of stuff that you have. To me, I don't know if that's the right answer, but this combination of taking human brain and intelligence and combining it with computational power. I think a lot of people are thinking about it. How do I take the computer and put it into the brain?

• 1:23:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And augment it that way?

• 1:23:33Speaker 02

  And you're doing the opposite.

• 1:23:35Anthony Pompliano?

  This company's doing it opposite, but just like either direction, I think is super interesting because you could say, how cool would it be if I don't have, you know, I had to look up hillbilly, it would be the book, right?

• 1:23:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, if I had a chip in my brain, I could just immediately tell you the big inflection point in human history.

• 1:23:50Speaker 02

  Well, that's cool. The common thread is, you know, the Human Genome Project, I think is nearly 20 years old now. And the, the order of magnitude that that mapping has done in clinical trials is, is breathtaking over the last 20 years, but it's an asymptotic curve into the future. The next 20 years are going to be by an order of magnitude larger than the last in terms of the scientific advances that we can do in the human body based on our understanding of the human genome and our ability to construct trials accordingly. It's, it's, it's a, it's one of the reasons, it's one of the reasons why we're massively bullish biotech in general.

• 1:24:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. It's, um, we know more about the surface of Mars, I think, than we know about our own oceans. Right?

• 1:24:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:40Anthony Pompliano?

  There's same thing could be said about the human body. We, we know a lot. We don't know nearly as much as we probably should. So.

• 1:24:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:46Anthony Pompliano?

  A lot of work to cut out. All right. Listen, this is one of the longer ones I've done in a while. So I appreciate it. This is, uh, the longer we go, the weirder it gets. So if you're, if you're still listening, you're, you're a trooper. Um, actually, if you're still listening, the first three people to tweet at me with the words, uh, aliens are at the end of the podcast, I'll send you something special to see who, uh, who made it all the way here. But, uh, thank you so much for, uh, for coming to do this and uh, we're gonna have to do this again. Maybe, maybe I'll come do it in, uh, in, in Chicago.

• 1:25:14Speaker 02

  Oh, it'd be fun. It'd be, it'd be blessed. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun.

• 1:25:18Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. 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.