#522: Will Clemente on Bitcoin Analytics

Will Clemente is a Finance Major at East Carolina University. He has quickly become one of my favorite writers on all things bitcoin, including deep dives on various onchain analytics. In this conversation, we discuss macroeconomics, quantitative easing, interest rates, universal basic income, bitcoin analytics, miner accumulation, and why sound money is inevitable. ======================= Remote makes it easy for companies of all sizes to employ global full-time employees and contractors. We take care of international payroll, benefits, taxes and local compliance, so you can focus on growing your business. Learn more about Remote and their new Remote for Startups program at http://www.remote.com. ======================= Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp =======================

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 the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Will Clemente is a finance major at East Carolina University. He has quickly become one of my favorite writers on all things Bitcoin, including deep dives on various on-chain analytics. In this conversation, we discuss macroeconomics, quantitative easing, interest rates, universal basic income, Bitcoin analytics, minor accumulation, and why sound money is inevitable. I really enjoyed this conversation with Will, and I hope you do as well. Before I get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our

• 0:41Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:23Anthony Pompliano?

  and so should you. Remote is funded by Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and a host of other top-tier investors. Learn more about Remote and their Remote for Startups program at remote.com. Again, remote.com. If you have a remote team, you have to be using remote.com. Next up is BlockFi. BlockFi provides financial products for crypto investors. Those products include high-yield interest accounts, US dollar loans against your crypto collateral, and a no-fee cryptocurrency exchange. To start earning today, you can visit blockfi.com/pomp. Again, blockfi.com/pomp. I'm an investor, I sit on the board, and I'm a really, really

• 2:07Anthony Pompliano?

  happy user. I think you will be too. BlockFi is also coming out with a new credit card where it pays you Bitcoin rewards back rather than cash back or airline miles. So if you want the Bitcoin rewards credit card, go sign up today on the waitlist at blockfi.com/pomp. Again, blockfi.com/pomp. Go sign up today for their financial products for crypto investors. Lastly is Choice. Choice is rebuilding the way you approach retirement, which starts with making it simple to include Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in your savings. More than 20,000 Bitcoiners, myself included, have already signed up to start investing. Whether we are talking about crypto or songs, Choice lets you trade real Bitcoin and Tesla

• 2:50Anthony Pompliano?

  in the same place, all without paying a dime in capital gains taxes. And if you want to hold your own keys all the way to the moon, you can do that, too. Either way, Choice is on a mission to give you full control of your retirement savings. So head on over to retirewithchoice.com/pomp. Again, that's retirewithchoice.com/pomp and sign up for an account today. And one more thing, you know how I feel about this, but if you have a pro that manages your money, don't take any BS. Choice has tools for them, too. Take back control today and visit retirewithchoice.com/pomp. All right, let's get into this episode with Will. I hope you enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital.

• 3:35Anthony Pompliano?

  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. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Will here with me. Thank you so much for doing this, man.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for having me on. Super excited.

• 4:04Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. So you are unlike most of my guests in that you are 18 years old. I think you are a finance major at the East Carolina University. But talk us through kind of your background. Where'd you grow up? How did you get into finance Bitcoin?

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. So I grew up in the Raleigh, North Carolina area. I really had no interest in finance until right around March of this year, when the markets tanked. I was like, oh, maybe I can make some some easy money here because everything was cheap. I started listening to a couple of different podcasts. I got into kind of the discount cash flow based investing. And what I realized was that when you're when you're doing those kind of free cash flow based analysis on a company, you're making this assumption that there's sound money. And that's a premise that not a lot of value investors really talk about, I think. But when I realized that, it kind of clicked to me why growth and momentum investing strategies have outperformed value over the last couple of years.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  And, you know, you can't fight the Fed. And when they're printing this much money, what you need to be doing is buying some kind of scarce asset. And that really led me to Bitcoin and the fact that Bitcoin is the scariest asset that's on the market right now.

• 5:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so you and I don't know each other. We we didn't even know each other existed in the world. The only commonality we have is that we both grew up in the Raleigh area. But I originally came over or came aware of you when I saw one of the pieces that you put out very early on. As you started to write more and more on the internet. And I was just really impressed, I think, with the quality and the intellectual rigor that you put into into the piece. So what I want to do today is I'm going to throw out the titles of a number of the different pieces that you've written over the last few months. And I want you basically just to give us a summary of what is the piece about and kind of what are the takeaways for people who don't have time to go read all of them? And then we'll finish up with with the latest article that you wrote. Does that sound good?

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Awesome.

• 6:04Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, awesome. So let's just start with the first one that I saw, which is why is Bitcoin important? I think there's a lot of people who think it's important, but like, what exactly is your thought process as to why Bitcoin is important?

• 6:17Speaker 01

  Sure. So the the first thing to really note is that the macro backdrop that has kind of taken place over the last you know, and I guess you could say since 2008 with quantitative easing, liquidity being inserted through the fixed income market and interest rates being driven to to pretty much zero. And now we're starting to see a little bit of UBI. This isn't sustainable forever. And in my opinion, Bitcoin kind of is is the solution to that problem.

• 6:47Anthony Pompliano?

  And so when you think through it being a solution, why exactly is it the solution?

• 6:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. So Bitcoin, you know, there's only 21 million that will ever exist every four years that the rate of new flow coming onto the market is cut in half. And so there's nothing really out there that that is like that, you know, when we think about gold, if gold's price goes up, the producers will just step into the market and and start producing more of it. They'll find new ways to extract it, make new technologies, you know, if the monetary incentive through the price going up is there, they'll find new ways to produce more more gold and that will drive the the price of gold back to its mean. And and so for Bitcoin, the idea that there's this fixed supply is really just kind of a revolutionary idea in in financial

• 7:36Speaker 01

  markets that there'll there's finally a constant. In in other disciplines, even like, for example, physics, you have the constant of the speed of light, and we don't have any kind of constant like that in finance, and having some kind of hard supply cap and programmatic monetary policy is something that really brought my attention to Bitcoin.

• 7:58Anthony Pompliano?

  So you also write up, you have written a piece about why this Bitcoin cycle is differently. You compared a lot of what's going on right now to past market cycles, both the bull and bear markets. So explain why you think this cycle specifically is different.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. So when you look at the early days of Bitcoin, it was really kind of driven by cypherpunks and people that were savvy with cryptography. And then in 2013, you had Malkovs and and the aftermath of the compromise of that exchange. And then in 2017, it was really retail driven, and you can kind of see that on chain where coins on exchanges was steadily going up with price throughout that time. And then in this recent cycle, what what really differentiates it for me is the fact that coins are being pulled off exchanges, and you can see that on chain by looking at kind of this dramatic slope downwards. And I think that's driven by a couple of things. The first thing is that people are

• 8:54Speaker 01

  just understanding more of the importance of cold storage and taking custody of your coins, especially institutions that are piling in huge sums of money and they're not going to play around with having this counterparty risk. And the other thing as well is that miners have completely stopped selling and you can see that on-chain as well. They've actually started accumulating. Even Marathon, who I think a lot of people are familiar with, they've come out publicly and said that they've started accumulating. And the third driver, I think, of the coins being pulled off exchanges is this concept that's been made popularized by Preston Pish and Plan B. And that's this whole concept of over-collateralization and

• 9:36Speaker 01

  people taking advantage of arbitrage spreads through the difference between spot price and the futures price that's trading at a premium. So, right now, I don't have it in front of me, but if you look at the futures price, it's trading at a multi-thousand-dollar premium to the current price. And it's interesting because commodities traditionally trade at premiums, but it's because they have storage costs, for example, like with oil. But Bitcoin has no storage cost because it's digital. And so, to kind of just speculate, there's no way to know for sure, but it possibly is because there's regulatory restrictions that are allowing certain, that aren't allowing certain institutions to get exposure to spot

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Bitcoin. And they may be doing that through the futures market. The other thing as well is that it's really easy to get leverage through the futures markets. Those are the two reasons that I think, whether it's one or the other, a combination of the two, that's driving this premium in the futures price. And so, people are looking to capture these arbitrage spreads on an annualized basis. On an annualized basis, they're trading at like 14, 15% right now. And when they go to capture these spreads, they have to lock up these coins because they have to borrow the coins from a lender such as BlockFi. And BlockFi requires...

• 10:58Speaker 01

  Like, the loans are collateralized with the 50% LTV, which means if I'm borrowing fifty dollars worth of Bitcoin, I have to post a hundred dollars of collateral. And then BlockFi takes that hundred dollars and then they transfer it into Bitcoin to kind of eliminate some of the counterparty risk for the person on the other end that's lending their coins out to who's borrowing them. And they turn the collateral into Bitcoin to be held in escrow until the borrower is able to pay off the loan. And so what this is essentially doing is it's locking up more coins out of supply than would have naturally taken place through the natural supply having, if you will.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  And I think those three factors between people just flat out understanding cold storage and having an importance on that, miners stop selling, and then that over-collateralization to capture those arbitrage spreads, I think those three things are really what's driving that, the supply that's being pulled off of exchanges. For sure. And so when you think about Bitcoin, you've talked a lot about this idea of a Bitcoin Renaissance as well, this is a third piece that you wrote. Explain what you mean by that Bitcoin Renaissance. Yeah, sure. So I think sound money is really important. Throughout the last 10 years, we've really started to see a lot of social unrest, especially last year.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  And I think that's kind of indirectly related to the fact that people are getting behind via the inflationary monetary policy that's going on. And they don't understand why, you know, they're fed up with the system, they know something's wrong, but they don't know exactly what it is. A lot of people point fingers at capitalism, but in my opinion, what it really is, is the inflationary monetary policy and the amount of money printing that the Fed's doing, right? If you don't own an asset, then you can't get ahead in the current environment. If you're holding just money in savings over time, you're getting destroyed through the money that the government's just printing, especially throughout the last 12 months when they've printed trillions and trillions of dollars.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  And so I think when you introduce a sound money, particularly one that's deflationary like Bitcoin, you reincentivize saving and you allow people to be able to get ahead again. And so that's what I really meant by saying that Bitcoin would kind of introduce this new renaissance is that in the current, in the current environment, there's a lot of people that are just getting destroyed and they're behind and they're, if you think about it, they're running on this hamster wheel and everything, the world is expanding around them and it's becoming more and more out of reach because everything around them is becoming more expensive. And under a Bitcoin standard, people who own Bitcoin and just hold Bitcoin, it's the complete opposite. Over the past 10 years, everything's become a lot cheaper for people that hold Bitcoin.

• 13:50Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you think through the sound money, it sounds like you and I agree that that sound money is going to be crucial for the future. It is that constant you talked about in financial markets where they haven't been constants in the past. But you've also written about this idea of a Bitcoin black hole effect. And this to me is like one of the most fascinating concepts in the entire market and one that is heavily misunderstood. So talk through what exactly is the black hole effect? And then how does that apply to Bitcoin?

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. So it's a couple of different things that I kind of put together in that piece. The first one was just obviously what we just talked about, the global macro backdrop of money printing and infinite QE and now we're seeing UBI. And the other two things are what we had mentioned about the over collateralization, which is kind of accelerating the rate of coins being pulled off exchanges. And the third thing I touched on in that piece was the speculative attack, which was made popular by Pierre Richard. And that idea is basically that you're leveraging a bad currency against one, against a hard sound currency. And that's something we've seen Michael Saylor with MicroStrategy do,

• 14:58Speaker 01

  where they've issued convertible debt notes, most recently at 0%, which is insane, $900 million, which was all, it should be mentioned that it was oversubscribed to at 0%. And so what Michael Saylor is essentially doing is he's leveraging the failing currency against an emerging hard sound money, which is Bitcoin.

• 15:21Anthony Pompliano?

  And so when you do that, I think that the most fascinating part to me is basically people are giving you free money and you're taking it and you're converting it. Right, like, like when you're talking about leveraging it, you're literally taking a bad currency that is being devalued. And you're buying a hard currency which is purchasing power is continuing to increase.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I was talking to Preston the other day and he was telling me, you know, I, I think Michael Saylor could have actually issued it at a negative yield. Because, you know, at the rate that, that the Fed is driving down interest rates and in Europe, you're seeing negative interest rates. And here we're seeing negative interest rates in real terms. And essentially what, what people do are doing that are buying into these convertible debt notes is. A, A, they might not be able to get exposure to Bitcoin through other ways. Through buying market price or buying different shares like a grayscale Bitcoin trust or something like that. So they're trying to look for an alternative way to get exposure to it.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  But in addition, with the interest rates going down by buying these, these notes at zero percent. They essentially will benefit if, if rates go negative. And that's kind of what you're seeing in Europe. Is that people are buying negative yielding bonds because they're betting that the, that the yields are going to go further, further negative. And so that can become really dangerous once that kind of unwinds. And so I think, in my opinion, that's why the Fed is going to have to continue to buy in through the fixed income market and keep driving these yields down. Because the second that they start to reverse, everything is going to unravel.

• 16:52Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you think about the black hole effect itself, right? Explain that.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  Yes. So it's just the idea that Bitcoin kind of sucks everything in. And, you know, every four years, the supply cuts in half. And when you have these cycles, we have these kind of blow off tops. And then through the bottom, every single bottom that we've seen is further, is higher than the, the previous one. And so what you're seeing is this growing network effect similar to anything, you know, Facebook or anything like that. But we've never seen that with a monetary number attached to it. So I think that's why people are really taken back by, by Bitcoin's price movement. But these four year halving cycles will continue and they'll persist until the year 2140. And so essentially, if you can think of it like a battering ram and it's, it's continuing to bang against the legacy financial system.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Until at some point, it's going to break through and. So there's that aspect of it. And then in addition, right now, like I had mentioned, the futures are trading to a premium to the current spot price. And so if the market starts to identify the yields that you can get essentially risk-free through that process of arbitraging those spreads, and if the market starts to recognize those yields as the real risk-free yield, you're going to see a complete repricing of assets. Particularly stocks, they're all priced based off of risk-free yields. When you do a discount cash flow model, you use treasury yields as your discount rate. And right now, that discount rate for

• 18:22Speaker 01

  the 10 years, I think it's right around hovering around like 1.5%. And if that thing, if the market starts to identify these Bitcoin yields which are blowing out to 10, 15% plus potentially, then you're going to see a stock market, for example, just as a round number, if they blow out to 20%, you're going to need to see P/E ratios go well under 5. And right now, the average P/E ratio of the S&P is over 34. So you're looking at a 75% to 80% correction in the stock market if that were to hold true. And not only that, but a P/E ratio of 5 would just match this risk-free rate, right? I'm not going to invest in something

• 19:03Speaker 01

  that is risk-on, that's offering the same yield as something that has no risk. It would have to be substantially lower than that. And the yield that it's offering would have to be substantially higher than that risk-free yield. So you may actually see P/E ratios go even lower than 5 to maybe 2, 3 if we start to see these yields blow out to 20-plus percent.

• 19:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. And one of the things that's really fascinating to me is this last article that you wrote, "Contango and Overcollateralization," right? We're talking a lot about risk here, we're talking a lot about the financial performance of other assets, but there's things specifically within the Bitcoin market that are unique and worth paying attention to. So explain contango and explain the overcollateralization.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. So as we kind of touched on earlier, the futures price is trading at a premium to spot. And so for people looking to capture those spreads, they have to borrow coins from an exchange such as BlockFi and they have to over collateralize on that. So if they're looking to borrow $50 worth of Bitcoin, they have to put up $100 as collateral. That $100 is taken by BlockFi and turned into Bitcoin to be held in escrow. And so what happens is, as the volatility of Bitcoin increases and the price goes up more, the spreads get even fatter and it becomes even more desirable for different

• 20:26Speaker 01

  fixed income investors that are currently dealing with near negative yielding instruments right now. And so as these yields continue to grow, you'll see more people stepping in to capture those spreads and more coins being over collateralized. And so it's just accelerating this rate of coins being pulled off of supply. And so that's the idea of Contango, that it's kind of this self-enforcing positive feedback loop, if you will, that the more coins pulled off exchanges drives the price higher and volatility higher, which makes the spreads fatter, which makes them more attractive, more people step in, and then more people are over collateralizing and it's just this feedback loop

• 21:07Speaker 01

  of coins that just continue to be pulled off of exchanges at this crazy rate.

• 21:14Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So here's the big question then, is as that happens, where do we go in this cycle? Is this a super cycle that everyone keeps talking about and we're seeing, you know, $500,000, $1 million in US dollar kind of exchange value? Is it, no, it's like more like a 150, 200? I don't care about the price prediction necessarily, as much as just like, hope people understand as that supply, and really it's the addressable supply, right? The kind of the available supply continues to trend down, what happens to the price?

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, man, that's a good question. I would hate not to own Bitcoin right now, right?

• 21:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really interesting to see, you know, as we had mentioned on kind of at the beginning of the conversation, that we have never seen this dramatic of a slope downward in coins being held on exchanges. And that the supply suffocation going on, that that's just persisting every day. I mean, every day I'm checking this this chart. And it's just continually going down. More coins are being pulled off exchanges. And it's kind of, it's kind of hard to tell exactly what's driving that. But, man, I would be terrified not to own some Bitcoin right now.

• 22:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and well, and I think part of what what people are waking up to the fact is, and I jokingly talk about it. As Bitcoiners are selling their Bitcoin and institutions want it, so the price has to go up to accommodate everyone. But if you actually break down what, you know, the joke, and you kind of melt that away and you say like, what is the truth in that joke? It basically is the fact that 60% of coins have not moved in the last, you know, call it year plus. And so those are Bitcoiners who have strong hands, right? There's been hundreds of percent of appreciation. There's been a 50% drop in a single day, multiple 20, 30% corrections along the way. And Bitcoiners just aren't selling, literally middle fingers to Wall Street, to the institutions, to everybody. I'm not selling my Bitcoin.

• 23:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Then you go and you look, okay, but there's all these big institutions that are showing up, right? New York Life, Mass Mutual, every Wall Street firm, especially, and they're showing up and they've got billions of dollars. And they're saying, we want Bitcoin. And so really what you're talking about is 40% of that 18.6 million Bitcoin that are in circulation are kind of available for purchase. But even those are quickly being eaten into. People are taking those offline as well, right? So you're basically talking about this like 40% addressable supply that is decreasing. And yet, at the same time that the available supply is decreasing, the demand is increasing. And so naturally, what you get is you get this like squeeze, right?

• 23:48Anthony Pompliano?

  It's literally a price squeeze. And when that squeeze happens, you know, again, it's scary as hell not to own any Bitcoin.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, to just basically go off what you were just saying. I mean, you're seeing, like we, like we said, you know, supply is going down at never seen before rates and we're starting to see demand come in that we've never, at rates we've never seen before and money being thrown at this thing that we've never, you know, sizes of money that we've never seen before. When you're up, you know, several hundred percent, Bitcoin has 200% risk-adjusted returns annually, you, you don't care about it going down 20%. You know, when, when you can see this on chain as well, if you look at coins that are held in holders from the last six months, last, last year, they kind of sold into this recent dip, they might've got freaked out and sold it. But

• 24:40Speaker 01

  when you look at coins that have, addresses that have been holding coins since, you know, 2015 and, and further back, they're continuing to accumulate. They haven't sold anything. And it's this, you know, when you're up thousands and thousands of percent, you could care less about this little dip. And you understand every time that there's a dip, historically throughout Bitcoin, it's always gone back up. It's always recovered. Every single all-time high that you've ever bought, Bitcoin has always come and, and gone past that.

• 25:11Anthony Pompliano?

  To me, it just feels like people who don't pay attention every day to the level of detail and nuance that you and I do, it's very easy to say, hey, this thing's wild. It's volatile. It goes up, it goes down. I don't know what's going on. It's a scam. It's a Ponzi scheme. It's, you know, worthless. It's, name your, you know, kind of FUD of choice. And it ultimately just goes back to education, right? Is, they're just not educated on the topic to the level of information that you and I are. So I guess my big question is just like, where do you get your information? How do you stay educated? And then what is your process for taking those inputs and kind of the consumption that you have, and then turning it out into these fantastic articles?

• 25:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. So thanks a lot, first of all, but I get a lot of my information just from different podcasts in the space. Preston's podcast is excellent. Stefan Rivera, Peter McCormick, yours as well. And there's several books as well that you can read. I think the Bitcoin Standard is the most well-known. And then just in general, you know, just being on Twitter, asking questions. Twitter is such a cool space. You can get in contact with all these people you never would have gotten the chance to be able to reach out to. Just, you know, slide in people's DMs and you'd be surprised how many people are willing to respond and willing to help you out and answer questions. So I think, you know, when you're really obsessed with something, learning really doesn't feel like learning. It just kind of feels like

• 26:36Speaker 01

  fun to you. And the further you start to go into this thing, Bitcoiners kind of call it the rabbit hole. But the further you go, the faster you begin to kind of be interested in it. And it kind of compounds on itself, the rate at which you you want to learn. I mean, if you look at Michael Saylor, he said he didn't take a single look at Bitcoin until right after March, after the liquidity crisis. And then he knows more than almost anybody in the space now. And he's only been in it for for months. So

• 27:03Anthony Pompliano?

  It's pretty, it's pretty wild. What is kind of the impetus for why you enjoy writing? Is it a way to learn? Is it just something you've always done? Talk to us a little bit about the writing itself.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. So there's a lot of really brilliant writers in this space. I think the one that everybody's familiar with is Robert Bredehoff. He's brilliant. But, you know, some of Robert's articles are 20, 30 minute long reads. And for people that are coming into the space, and these kind of philosophical comparisons that Robert's making Bitcoin to comparing Bitcoin to, it's just, they're not good for for entry level Bitcoiners that are coming in, or Lynn Alden, who just put out two brilliant articles yesterday. These are all kind of higher level articles and reads for people that are kind of financially savvy, or have some surface level understanding of Bitcoin. So for me, especially, being younger

• 27:56Speaker 01

  and having people constantly asking me questions, but don't understand anything about finance. I kind of took it upon myself to kind of dumb everything down into really layman's terms and and and explain things kind of at the surface level where somebody who doesn't have any financial understanding can can

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Can kind of make sense of all this stuff. The other thing as well is that when I write, it really helps me formulate my own thoughts. I would consider myself more of a slow thinker. I can kind of sit down and really soak everything in and then, you know, I'll sit down for like an hour and then things will come to me over time rather than just thinking of things on the fly. So that as well, I think I'm much better at articulating things when I'm writing and taking time to kind of think my thought process out. So it's beneficial for me in that aspect as well.

• 28:46Anthony Pompliano?

  You're doing a fantastic job. Before we get into the rapid fire questions, where can people find you on Twitter or find your writing?

• 28:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. So I'm on Twitter at W Clemente III, I'm the third. And then as well, I'm writing for Bitcoin Magazine, who just brought me on as an intern this summer. So I'm super excited to be there. I'll be at the Bitcoin Conference in June. I don't know if you're coming, but I hope I'll see you there.

• 29:11Anthony Pompliano?

  I'll be there.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  I'll be there. Awesome. And then as well, I'm writing periodically for bitrawr.com. B I T R A R A W R. They were kind of the ones that originally brought me in and kind of recognized me. And so I owe a great deal of recognition to them for kind of giving me an opportunity to begin writing. And then that kind of led the way for Bitcoin Magazine to bring me on their team as well.

• 29:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. I asked the same three questions to everyone before you could ask me one to finish up. The first is, what is the most important book you've ever read?

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Jeez. Um, I would, I would say financially, The Big Debt Crisis: How to Navigate the Big Debt Crisis by Ray Dalio. That book really breaks down the, you know, the long and short term debt cycles, inflationary and deflationary crisis, the main things that drive those. And then just for general life, I would say another Ray Dalio book, Principles by Ray Dalio. That book is really life changing, at least to me, and I recommend it to anybody.

• 30:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Those are two, uh, two great, uh, suggestions. Now we just gotta get Ray to, uh, buy some Bitcoin. But, uh, I think.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  He might be, man. He's been awfully quiet about it. So I don't know.

• 30:28Anthony Pompliano?

  He's getting closer. He's getting closer for sure.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  Uh, it's amazing. When you read his book, you know, he highlights, he highlights everything extremely well. You know, Ray, Ray understands these things better than anybody, but he thinks that the one will be the new reserve currency. So I think he's got everything down pat, except for that. And he'll come around. He'll come around soon.

• 30:49Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I tend to think so as well. Uh, next question comes from our friends over at Eight Sleep. Uh, I used to sleep like five or six hours when I was in college, like you tried to party my face off and basically, uh, destroy my body on a, uh, on a weekly basis. Uh, but now I sleep on the Eight Sleep Thermoregulated Bed. It's freezing cold. I sleep like eight or nine hours and it literally changed my life. Uh, what's your sleep schedule and how has that changed?

• 31:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. So, um, when I was at school last year, I really wasn't sleeping much, you know? It's getting maybe four or five hours a night, but now that I'm home due to COVID and, uh, because I can't really do anything here and there's not much going on. I've been, I've been getting my hours and I've been getting seven, eight hours a day. So, but I have been feeling a lot better, getting more sleep. So it's definitely been something that I'm gonna keep in my, uh, habits moving forward.

• 31:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it, it's crazy to me how, uh, you can go from basically school and then you go back home, right? And every college kid in America pretty much is, uh, sitting at home and just itching to get back. You gotta get, uh, get back and get the college experience for sure.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, man. I'm ready to go back in August.

• 31:57Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. Uh, last question is aliens. Are you a believer or a non-believer?

• 32:04Speaker 01

  No doubt. I mean, when you just think about the, the probabilities, it just really doesn't make sense that there wouldn't be any kind of other life form, all the different combinations of elements and, and different things in, in the universe and all these different kinds of planets. I mean, there's no way that there hasn't, that hasn't, the combinations haven't come together to make another life form somewhere else in the giant universe that we have.

• 32:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. I, I completely agree. All right. You could ask me one question to, uh, to wrap this up. What you got for me?

• 32:33Speaker 01

  What would you ask your 18 or I'm sorry, what would you say to your 18 year old self?

• 32:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Go bigger. Just that's it. Just go bigger. No fucking fear. And I think that at 18, you're always kind of trying to figure out, how do I, how do I make a thousand dollars, right? How do I kind of get the next step in the milestones? How do I get my foot in the door, something like that? But I think that what you start to realize is it's all hard, right? Whether it's you're trying to make a thousand dollars or a million dollars. If you're trying to, you know, buy 10 Bitcoin or 100 Bitcoin or, you know, point one of a Bitcoin. If you're trying to get a internship or get a full-time job, like it's just all hard. And so just set your sights much, much higher and and

• 33:20Anthony Pompliano?

  kind of dream bigger. And I think that when you do that, you're going to put the same effort into it. And you just get a bigger reward if you're successful.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Keep that in mind moving forward, man. Thanks.

• 33:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. All right. Well, listen, you're doing a fantastic job. Keep it up. I really want to make sure that people kind of understood your viewpoint and highly suggest everyone to to go read every time you put something out. It's always enjoyable to read. So keep up the great work and we'll do this again in the future.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  Thanks a lot, Pomp. It was super fun.