Bitcoin Is Still The Most Interesting Trade | Eric Peters

Transcript

this episode is brought to you by pariswap the leading aggregator to find best prices across various dexes you'll hear more about them later in the show bitcoin is this wild thing that has never existed and couldn't actually exist until we had the combination of these ideas with the technology with with the cloud with the global internet with all these people that for whatever reason ended up looking at this going this is really exciting and so now you have this network nothing like this has ever existed before so the question is what what's the value of that and i don't know i don't i have a good imagination i don't know what the right value should be placed on the most secure network in the history of humanity and i also know that bitcoin

evolves but slowly all right everyone uh welcome back to another episode of empire i am joined per usual by my co-host santiago and a very special guest today eric peters the founder and cio of one river asset management uh one of the leading institutional investment firms uh at the forefront of digital assets founded in 2013 maybe 2014 eric can correct me if i'm wrong um they uh are very well known for many things uh for leading spit and leading in the space but one of the big things that got one river on a lot of people's radars including my own was their 600 million dollar uh purchase of bitcoin uh back in

what was that november of 2020 i want to say eric right around the election if i remember correctly okay yeah just just after right after the election yeah i think i think that was the biggest bitcoin public bitcoin purchase of all time is that right yeah it was amazing so eric welcome to the show my friend thank you thank you it's great to uh great to be here i appreciate the opportunity it's great to have you so we are going to dive really deep into just your current framework around bitcoin eth all things digital assets how you're seeing things but actually i'd love to start with the macro there's a recent interview that stanley druckenmiller did with one of the collison brothers and he said druckenmiller said that this is one of the hardest periods in time that he's ever gone through as a as a macro

investor i'd love to just get your framework for how you're seeing the macro right now sure and uh yes i look stan he is one of the greats and uh i agree it's a it's a it's a challenging time and i think a statement like that like i i don't know how how stan is is doing in markets or specifically what he's up to at the moment but uh it's hard because it looks so different right now um but that doesn't mean that there are no corollary periods to this so um i've been a student of of a market history throughout my career i started in 89 as a pit trader which is kind of an unlikely start given that my time horizon now is much longer

but uh i would say that throughout the entirety of my career we've been in a in a market and trading an economic and policy and geopolitical paradigm that has largely speaking been really consistent and that that effectively came to an end with the pandemic and it was not so much that the pandemic flipped uh flipped it it's that we were we were kind of we had a a number of very powerful um mega macro trends that were driving us to to kind of a point of in a sense high pressure or congestion and it kind of

it couldn't go any further really and so there was going to be some catalyst that was gonna that was gonna catapult us into a new policy direction and uh it just so happened that the that the pandemic was that catalyst and it's it's just interesting it's kind of almost like the way i think i'm a pretty karmic person it's it's almost the way you know kind of life in the universe lined up to give us such you know after such a long period of time to give us a catalyst that was so powerful to kind of propel us in a new direction and what i mean by that is so and i i'm guessing that stan is kind of um thinking about this as well is that we had we had decades where basically um every time we had decades of

disinflation that were driven by a number of things um not to go too deep into it but you know one of them was just demographic trends globally one of them was globalization so you know as as we opened up the world and we deepened supply chains all over the place it just brought all these low-cost workers into the global workforce and combination of aging in certain societies particularly japan at first but then it it kind of trickled over to europe and then china and u.s is actually in better shape demographically in terms of aging but nevertheless all these things kind of pushed inflation lower or true inflation lower and that allowed the central banks every time there was an economic disruption to

ease aggressively because it didn't really produce significant runaway inflation which had been the experience the 1970s and and so a lot of these trends drove us to a place where when we came to the pandemic interest rates were really low inflation was really low unemployment was really low volatility was really low these new policies like qe acted to suppress volatility to suppress interest rates to do all you know kind of distort markets to squeeze the last bit of stimulus out of that policy framework and it didn't really work anymore so you kind of knew where we knew and i think it was obvious i'm sure stan knew that whenever the next big recession hit there was going

to prob there was going to need to be a big fiscal impulse and that that fiscal impulse um was gonna was gonna come at a time where some of these geopolitics around um around supply chain uh uh deepening globally you know we're already kind of starting to reverse uh and you know tensions between us and china so all these things were going to hit and that would that would propel us into a dynamic where we had very aggressive monetary policy and fiscal policy in a world where globalization had crested already and that was it was almost almost assuredly going to create a new inflationary paradigm and but but then covet hit and that that amplified all these forces it just amplified them so

now we're in this wild new world that just doesn't look like anything that that virtually anyone has traded through you have to be a student of trading in economic history to recall what something like this looks like and even then it doesn't look exactly like the 70s it just kind of rhymes with the 70s so that's um so for anyone who's trading now you're kind of like oh my god this is a really unfamiliar terrain how do i you know how do i navigate and um i think there are some really good ways to navigate by the way and and thankfully we really have for our our investors and clients but it's tricky and it's tricky to do it particularly at scale so really big investors have an even harder time than smaller ones i want to that's that's a good segment my question which is how have you navigated

this environment i think like now people do like a post-mortem and it becomes so it obviously it's hindsight it's 20 20 but i'm curious how how you've been navigating this environment uh how did you manage risks i think it's one of the hardest things to do in crypto yeah so i guess for starters we weren't managing crypto risk before as if i traded personally but we weren't managing it as a firm prior to november 2020 and i'll talk about that but um you know our positioning going into the pandemic was we expected a few things we expected um whenever that economic and market cycle shifted remember pre-pandemic we were in the longest bull market in u.s history and the longest economic expansion in us

history we were we were in kind of rarefied territory or you know we were we were in thin air um and and yet you know when these things happen most people are not positioned that way right because if like if you're in the longest expansion of and the longest bull market in economic history there probably aren't that many people leaning against it because they're probably bankrupt by the time that happens so it's inevitable that you end up with all sorts of things going on in markets and bad behaviors and leveraged carry and ball selling and all these kind of things that people convince themselves will continue for at least the next quarter or something but they'll be smart enough to get out and so we we kind of

our positioning was was pretty different so you know we have we have products and we're positioned to be long volatility we have a um we've got a great alpha fund that's market neutral and truly we we really are market neutral and and also make sure that we kind of own tails so we had competitors who literally lost 100 of their money in their quote-unquote market neutral strategies and we were flat q1 of of 2020 for instance um i was disappointed we didn't make some money but you know is what it is um and and we also have um you know i'm a a big believer that uh in the environment that we have entered that systematic trend following

will be one of the most successful strategies out there and that has been and for you know those who don't know what systematic trend falling is you kind of we all know what price trends are and systematic trend following is just a it's a systematic way to position in the same direction as these medium to longer term trends and then to the extent that you can do it across a wide universe of assets you end up you know creating a quite a robust strategy which can make money in bull markets and bear markets and is not constrained to any particular asset class and so i think that one of the things that was really interesting was that the last decade was the worst decade of trend following from a sharp ratio perspective for the

last say 120 years the second worst decade was the 1960s which is a period that we studied quite a bit because some of the policy i think errors that made in the 60s contributed to the volatility inflation in the 70s and we thought the last decade had rhymed with the 1960s in certain ways and there and and so when that came to an end it was likely we'd have a much more volatile period and disruptive period and trend following can capture that because if you think about what trend is like why does it why does it price move from from point a to point b or say from 1x to 3x or 2x or whatever the number is it's because the future looks very different from today and so

if you have if you have a period ahead where you think that there are going to be a lot of changes in the world that people don't yet really comprehend very well and where guys like stan druckenmiller said this is a really hard time to trade right why is it a hard time to trade in many respects because probably a lot of volatility probably there's a lot of uncertainty about what that future could look like so if you have a systematic way of capturing change that should be a really good strategy so we came we came into the pandemic with that type of positioning and did very well um eric i want to try to tie some of this together and turn it into a question actually just about the future because i know you have a very long-term view on

things basically okay so you're talking about copied right western government governments embarked on this new form of policy uh stimulus right issuing and i think you've talked about this a lot issuing this these unprecedented uh quantities of bonds and then what they would do is they would go buy buy that debt with money that their own central banks created um and it seems like you are uh studied history and your team studies economic history a lot uh and anyone who has studied any sort of economic history knows that this will eventually debase the currency right so it feels like we're going into this big inflationary period but on the other side of that you have these uh deflationary things uh long-term investing is really just an identity identification of these large macro trends and the two biggest trends of the last couple of decades

tech advancements and deepening global trade right two probably very deflationary things so i'm curious just what how you think about uh well you know we're going into this very inflationary period but there are these deflationary um uh factors that are pushing down on that so like what are the major macro trends that you're looking at over the next five 10 15 years yeah um those things are true uh in in the sense that i think broadly speaking deepening technology and expanding uh expanding global trade and deepening global trade tends to be deflationary um it doesn't always have to be so for instance

it it could be let's just to play the thought it's like a simple thought experience just the first thing comes to mind is let's say uber right you could say that there was a period of time where um uber was deflationary because there was a lot of money that flowed into uber they came up with a way to um to basically take technology um package it in in a way that that that grabbed all these idle resources these cars and drivers and gave them away to all of a sudden enter the labor force and kind of drive down the cost of public transport like and by the way i'm not an equity analyst i don't i don't know all the details from but like just use that as a concept right there then

comes i don't know about you but when i take an uber from the airport now i i don't know i i i feel like i'm gonna have to um get student loans for my children to go to college it's it's like so it's a great job yeah yeah it's crazy right right i came back from laguardia uh the other day and it was almost 300 and um but that's the joke right that all that all of these platforms airbnb is much more expensive than hotels now right it's like well it feels like we basically had our lives subsidized for the last decade by vcs and now those subsidies have gone away and that the cost of these platforms that we've basically gotten locked into are actually more expensive than what they were placed right so i use that as just i just use that to illustrate the point that

that some and and this is an important part of investing and i try to do this all the time i try to do it with my kids i try to do with my team it's like what are the things that we believe to be true that might not really be true we should always be questioning that it's about you know i love to follow what's what happens in quantum mechanics and um super excited about the cern um you know particle accelerator coming back on because like these are they're so cool because you're like looking at all these different things around the world and we don't even know how the world really works and operates and exists but if you if you asked a hundred people this technology deflationary they'd be like yeah it's deflation it's like okay i don't know how much of your uber ride

costs are like well that's not really technology it's like but isn't it kind of i mean it's you know so the reason i the reason i say this is i think that um i think that there are in all things in the world and in life and everything that we see around us there are cycles and it could be the weather it could be the seasons it could be technology it could be crypto it could be monetary policy it could be forms of government like at least in my world view all of these things are part of natural systems and natural systems go through cycles so just because technology is is often deflationary doesn't mean that it needs to always be deflationary at a certain part of the cycle so i would i would observe again without being an

equity analyst that we are we appear to be in the part of the technology cycle where there have there have been really interesting uh innovations that have happened with kind of technology and services and things like that and um and they're probably sufficiently mature that the period of being deflationary may actually turn into kind of kind of duopolies or monopolies that that create the less deflation or disinflation and maybe even material inflation and it could even be that some of these technologies were so disruptive in non-economic sense because so much venture capital went in that i don't

again like i haven't studied the the taxi market but could it be that there are a bunch of taxi companies that just said okay we just give up and so now you know now you actually have less traditional supply i don't know that that's true all i know is that it costs a fortune for me to get an uber from you know from laguardia so anyhow big picture i would say that um because you're we're not talking about this specifically like big picture in terms of trends i think that we're in we're in a period where there is a policy choice to create inflation and i think it's that is if there's one thing i i stress that people really really kind of

step back and consider it's that inflation is not an accident it is a policy choice so we got to a point through this multi-decade cycle where not only uh debts and a lot of them have been taken on the government balance sheet but huge debts have been accumulated not just in the us but globally but also entitlements so there is there has been an enormous amount of promises made to the baby boom generation who are the best advocates for themselves in the history of humanity and then they have like they basically they they figured out how to make sure that they were going to have the most wonderful retirement relative to the

amount of work that they put in to creating that that retirement that any generation has ever done and so those like those bills are beginning to come due and so when when governments globally look at their look at their economic model they go okay well this is going to be pretty hard you know we got a lot of people retiring got a lot of people who want health care we got a lot of people that want all these different things and we have relatively speaking fewer people coming up through the workforce um by the way all the old people own all the assets really which it kind of makes sense because they've worked for the longest but they own all the housing and guess what they've put in the you know they've they've put in they've advocated for themselves so it's

hard to build new housing so their houses are way too expensive because it's hard to make supply like all these things happen and now you have all these poor young kids with student debt how are they gonna make enough money to give themselves a good life and also pay for all these old people and it's it by the way i think it's it's a complete and utter injustice generationally and and so the but governments by the way now they sit there and they're like okay well what do we do with that and they're they're not by the way they're not that many things that you could do with that so they can choose to just default on their obligations to all the old people they're not going to do that they could default on their own debt we've seen you know the us government isn't is not

going to do that we saw what happened with lehman like no one has at the policy and political level no one has tolerance for defaults so the only thing that you can do is maybe on the margin you can try to renegotiate some of your long-term entitlements and then you can debase the debts that you currently have and hopefully some part of those future obligations by just creating greater nominal growth which is an illusion but then it's not by the way it's not an awesome solution it's just the best of a number of difficult and poor choices and it would be by the way i would suggest that as principled as probably both you guys are and as i am if we were actually in the seats of power and we're like

okay well here are our choices you probably go let's create a little inflation now could get out of control and it's not what anyone wants but you probably like given those choices they're tough choices and so that that's that is what's happening so when you think about over the you know five ten fifteen year period i think that we're going to see periods like we're in now where the fed goes there's too much inflation and the present united states who who just wanted inflation now he goes there's too much inflation and everyone in a sense pretends like they want to bring it back down and by the way because there are cycles they're going to be some fast inflation cycles that goes up a long way then it comes down a long way and then it goes back up a lot these things will happen and it's all a

little bit of a charade because the policy choice is clear which is that um is that we are going to debase the currency not in a while we're not trying to create the weimar republic and society breaks down but we need we need to rebalance the system and this is a way to do it and it has been done through history and what you pray if you're the government is that while you're doing this that the younger people like you guys i'm less young but hopefully people like me and certainly all the young people that are working their their you know butts off at our firm are going to do things that are truly innovative that create greater productive productivity in society and and and so while governments are doing

governments are not innovators and productivity enhancers but while they're debasing these few these existing debts and future obligations the younger people are creating greater productivity and by the way that's an optimistic path i think that that will happen but i think it's going to be bumpy but but that's what i see like looking 5 10 15 20 years that's kind of what i see i want to go back to november of 2020 and just understand what was going through your through your head when you made the decision to make that purchase uh i think it was 600 million of mostly btc some eth but largely btc well yeah sure so this is uh i would add in the public record it's just as a

general matter we don't talk about what what we do with clients but all this is is in the public domain at this stage um so we have a um we work very closely with our clients we've we always have as a firm um i mentioned to you you know how we positioned coming into the pandemic and we had expected you know some form of um of debasement whenever that this next cycle had and then and then what we observed is like wow this is way bigger than we would have ever imagined in the sense that this policy response is we're gonna run a fifth at the time like we're gonna run a 15 budget deficit in the largest economy in the world fully funded more or less by

the federal reserve so you know effectively creating new money in a computer and then using it to buy debt and then and then being spent throughout the economy that's unbelievably powerful that is the basement and so the question is well what other opportunities are there and so um one you know one of our our largest clients shares the general world view that that we have their phenomenal firm their british firm they're led by a cio who's one of the the fellow by the name of henry max he's one of the greatest investment thinkers that i've ever met and i've met you know all the greats or most of the greats um and so that was something that we did together um and uh

and the thought was that these assets are they're really poorly understood at this stage so you have this brand new concept of digital scarcity which sounds like an oxymoron really you know and in many respects it is an oxymoron but for the fact that that the the network effects around you know a particular protocol or such and a particular asset is such that you actually can create scarcity of you know of bitcoin even though you can create millions of different versions of bitcoin you know you can create this concept of digital scarcity there was also a recognition that a lot of things that

that made these assets seem difficult for institutions to touch were things that had to do with security had to do with things like money laundering all but if when you looked at those a little bit more you didn't have to look very closely but if you if you dug into each one of those what you discovered was it's a relatively new asset class and just even in the the last few years leading up to that you you'd solved a lot of these problems like you you'd solved the you'd solve the the institutional custody issue so like coinbase custody is just you know was very safe um and all the money laundering concerns had just been it's not that there were none it's just that there were all sorts

of things being developed that that meant that that was a much much much smaller issue um and so when you looked at it you're like well what's going to happen here and what our strong view and our client strong view is what's going to happen here is that institutions are going to look around the world now that they've had to begin to adjust their mindset to the posit to this new market environment they're going to go well what do we do here because typically what it what investors had done and have done for the last 30 years is they've bought a 60 40 portfolio between 60 equity 40 fixed income or some leveraged version of that and they dressed it up with private equity which is just an even more leveraged version of that or private credit which is just you know

all these things are really dressing up this very simple portfolio construct and adding layers and layers and layers of leverage to it and in the new environment that we foresaw unfolding or was at the time actually unfolding bonds would not do a good job of of protecting that portfolio against market volatility and so all of a sudden we thought there is a just there is a serious shortage of very effective portfolio diversifiers in the marketplace and invest institutional investors once they discover what those things are they're going to clamor for them some of those things incidentally are long volatility strategies which we

happen to run um trend following strategies which as i described are good for that market environment but then digital assets were like this really unique expression of that gold could be something that would do well in that environment as well by the way and commodities and so these were all things that look like really interesting the incredible thing about digital assets by the way was that not only should they theoretically do well in that environment but they also have this unique optionality as this new technology platform that people don't really most people don't really understand that well truth be told i didn't understand it nearly as well then as i do now this is going to change the world i know that

now and we're taking part in that now but at the time it was kind of like and you get that for free and so we made that investment and by the way like we crystallized over a bill kind of a billion and a quarter of gains we actually got out of all those trades and returned all of that capital um over the next nine months um because it just went so far so fast um but that was our that was our big kind of initial entry yeah that's what i was going to go to next i mean i think like obviously you timed it particularly well where you bought pretty much at like 13 or you know when bitcoin was i believe at the time like 13 000 15 000 what your entry point was but as you said you know went to 60 000 and

you know that's one of the things that i've struggled with in this space which is coming from a venture mindset you know you're sort of expecting this to be a 5 10 20 year trajectory to truly kind of change a lot of things that are wrong systemically with with the world but the problem is crypto markets uh what you think can happen in 10 years happens in like three months or like six months and managing risk is super difficult especially when you're managing other people's money and so i'm curious again what was the decision to crystallize that trade um because it sounds like you have a really long-term view on the space and i guess perhaps a more precise question would be at what point do you get back into the trade because it sounds like you believe in this your clients believe in this you sort of

exited because you know you saw go up to sixty thousand say okay perhaps it's prudent to take some risk off here at what point do you get back in so um yeah so what i would say is what i've learned in markets is um and uh and certainly uh certainly you know that the our clients are extremely talented uh investors and and have good market sense as well what you insert what you observe in markets over um over time is that there's a certain cadence to them so it's not so much about levels of actual price because

i don't know um we did we were buying ether around 400-ish and bitcoin at 15 000 or something like that and so you know if you make double your money in in a very short period of time it seems like an awful lot of money but if and it is but if um you know if if the market cadence is doesn't seem like it's like it's done its thing you know you're not seeing signs of just crazy euphoria then it it could go you know much further i think what what seemed to be happening at the highs is that there was you know there were signs of the the types of signs of activities like people borrowing money

you know very visibly to then go and buy it and you know buy in very visible ways to almost try to push prices higher in a way those are just like if you've been doing this for decades it's rare that those that those types of behaviors end up being profitable maybe they can over 10 years or but you know rarely over shorter time horizon so you know when you see really really aggressive activities um that are you know super public and making headlines that tends to be a time that you want to reduce positions and then you know we're in we're in a period now where i don't think we're done with this

correction like i'm not talking about bitcoin prices i think i'm just talking about like cadence of correction we're in a period where stuff's breaking i mean it's really breaking right you know you had luna you know luna was a disaster really and now you know you have these various lenders um and uh you know there's a lot of pain to come in in the sense i i think i think the vast majority of the price declines have already happened but now we have the slog of it's like okay how many like how many people out there misrepresented what they were doing in a space of you guys tell me are there 20 000 assets

out there um you know some of them are some of them are really high quality and will be worth a lot more money someday and most of them will be worth zero and of the ones that will be worth zero how many you know how many people haven't really disclosed things the right way how many how many lenders you know not even because not out of malice or even it's just it could be just out of naivete they just couldn't have envisioned a world where they couldn't honor their obligations it does matter what people's intent is but for but when a market crashes and the market has crashed that what is going to happen is the regulators who who have

been skeptical of a lot of these things now have to do the hard work of kind of grinding through this and seeing um you know who are the bad actors and what were those actions that they took and then how do we kind of cleanse that from ever happening again and that's just a process that's not uh that's not a you know a trade that's a that's just a almost a process of of mourning and cleansing that will that will happen and i think that will set all of that will set up this this whole space for the next cycle so i think this this cycle's over like this the cycle that we just lived through is over what comes next will look very different not entirely different but it like for instance if if you were an

entrepreneur in this space in my opinion you should not be thinking about making a little tweak on something that made a lot of money in the last cycle make well we're gonna make this teeny little improvement on it and now it's gonna be great i think you're just you're looking in the wrong place it's it's gonna be a whole new suite of things that we're gonna look that will be great coming out of the cycle but that that's kind of how it works so these are the times where you need to be um you know looking for things to buy at cheap levels and um and you know hanging back and then and accumulating and really if you're an entrepreneur these are the times that you're you should be building and just but build something

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curious if if that ratio would change or would you you know look at perhaps other things beyond bitcoin and eth um what we have done is uh and we're still we do have investments in this space by the way and our clients have investments in space a lot smaller than than you know than it was i mean having returned that kind of capital um but we we have investments in this space um we've we've developed an index an institutional index so we thought that that was lacking so what you find in traditional markets is indices uh well-constructed institutional indices are great for a couple reasons number one for client for clients or

investors who want you know kind of dispassionate exposure to the beta of an asset class an index is a is a great option so that's why something like the s p 500 for people who don't want to sit around picking equities or don't trust that other people are really good at that they just invest in that and so we wanted to create something like that for uh for digital assets and so you know that that has 13 assets in it right now um it it is just it's dominated by bitcoin and heath um although we have a size till index which i think is the most interesting which essentially kind of

takes some of the market cap out of bitcoin the sizing and the market cap out of bitcoin and ethan kind of pushes it to the you know the other um 11 assets in ways that i think um will will outperform just a market cap weighted uh index and that index is dynamic so it's not fixed so you know based on the criteria that we've set um it will it'll change over time and and maybe someday it will have it probably won't ever have 500 you know assets but it will have more than 13 and some of the things that are in it right now won't be in it and uh some things that probably have yet to even be developed or even thought about will be in it in the future and so that's a great way to get exposure to space it's

a smart way of doing it i obviously have exposure that because our one of our products um but but yeah i think that bitcoin and eth if if you were just um if you wanted to take make a really kind of simple bet on this space i think that there will be assets that will outperform both of those we but picking those is a very very difficult thing and avoiding you know mishaps is is also a hard thing i'd you know i'd say that our institutional index avoided luna um and you know that's a good thing um we've avoided any of the kind of real defy types of problems as a firm we have we have thought

um and i have thought that defy in its existing form is not really going to exist in in the major regulated jurisdictions meaning kind of you know d5 protocols where there's no real aml kyc are i don't think are long for the world in in all the major markets that matter like the us and europe and you name any of the developed markets with sophisticated regulatory regimes i think that those are not gonna exist and um and but i think we can talk later i think there are some amazing things that will come out of that and i think that i i have great admiration for the d5

founders and what they've developed i think that version two i shouldn't i know i know in in crypto people don't like talk about virtue i think that you know the second act will be more way way bigger and way more exciting than the first act let me put that but i i i love disrupters i love creative thinkers and entrepreneurs and i you know a lot of these guys are amazing from my perspective i just think that they they were right for per certain part of the cycle and now we're in a new part of the cycle and um you know something something better will work it definitely feels like regulation is is still necessary and and i think it's a it's actually a positive catalyst because i mean how many institutions are

haven't really even touched bitcoin or eth because they perceive you know intolerable uh regulatory risk you know and i think as in so far as we get clarity i think it will you know i think a lot of people done the work over the last 10 years five years and want to add this to their basket as an asset class um and so you know as soon as we get more clarity on the regulatory front um i think it's gonna be super net positive for this space totally agree yeah i'm curious um on the d5 piece just because that's where i spent a lot of my time when i was a perfect just investing in d5 is that something that you would you think is something that you would be investing behind um have you invested in d5 protocols

or just using d5 protocols you know for lending borrowing purposes or swapping purposes like do something a uniswap or is that something that that is part of your strategy or you see it um you know down the road yeah so i spent a lot of time looking at all those um and it just on a personal basis very very small transactions to understand how they work um just personally not as a firm um and i think they're i think that they're all awesome i like really now i think that their use case is super super narrow and i almost think some of

these i mean at una swap but say ave i think some of these almost got created well it's yeah i saw stani speak we were at a conference recently you know like i think that they're trying to solve problems in this this really dynamic world and and it's like what do we do with these assets and they're how can we earn yield on i think they're like i think some of these things just developed um with really creative minds and people who could put that into action in ways that's just phenomenal but the reason that as an institution um we haven't as an institutional asset manager we haven't touched them is

because i think that that i and our investors always want to know who's on not who specifically is on the other side of the trade but that the the the person or the institution on the other side of the trade is not an illicit actor in any way and you kind of can't really know that with those protocols um and so that's that my view has been i mean like we we don't we don't engage in any of these activities where you're kind of going at some offshore unregulated exchange and you're you know you're i don't know um we don't do anything in defect for those reasons and they're and

they're the same reasons incidentally that i that i think that now that this cycle has ended the regulator's just not going to let those those types of protocols um operate and and it's you know in some cases like they can't shut them down i'm not saying it won't operate in different jurisdictions in the world and i'm not saying that there will be no americans who do it but they'll probably find that they're on the wrong side of regulation potentially the wrong side of the law and our clients would not you know we we were very careful to make sure that we didn't do that for those reasons and and we protected our clients in the future because some of the things i

think one of the things that is going to happen is that there have been a lot of people that have done engaged in a lot of activities over the last few years and regulators they are you know they are not they're not ahead of the market but they they continue to move there's slow moving river and there are a lot of people that engage in things that they they probably in the future will wish they hadn't engaged in and we were very cognizant of what some of those things could be and so that's why we didn't operate also they're just there there were security risks and you know you you didn't you could lose sure you could get really high rewards but by the way like you never get high rewards if you don't take any risk most people

didn't really understand what all those risks are now increasingly you're starting to understand what some of those risks are people at celsius are right for instance um but with different hacks it's just not clear that the the protocol risk was consistent with our risk tolerance or our clients tolerance so that's why we stayed away eric it sounds like you really you're quite long on d5 just from a personal belief that finance will get digitized but maybe short on the current iterations of what defy looks like so maybe i'd just ask you to extend that out and say like so what does d5 look like if it's not the current iterations of ave compound uniswap maker and you don't believe that maybe the current iterations of the jpmorgans and the bad banking experiment experiences

with the bank of america and the wells fargo's like where it sounds like it's somewhere in the middle like what does the future of maybe maybe the questions just like finance look like to you so i think that i think you know predicting the future's usually pretty hard i think in this case it's actually not that hard um i think that what what we have discovered from the time that the bitcoin appeared is that that tokenized assets and you know right now they're predominantly just native digital assets but tokenized assets can be traded very quickly very securely um with

finality of settlement that's virtually instantaneous and you know it obviously it depends and i and i and i know we're still in the early stages of some of this you can argue about like how how fast is it really and how you know how much does it cost and what what's the gas and what's this and what's that but like basically i think we we now all know and i say we meaning you guys know i know but it's not just us the regulators know the people who run these banks know that we now have a new let's call it technology platform that allows for virtually instantaneous or instantaneous settlement

that's final and that is and in as you imagine what the future could look like extremely cheap with the ability to do phenomenal reporting and track transactions in ways that that from an aml kyc from a anti-money laundering and know your client and get bad actors out of the system standpoint all these things come together and as a regulator you look at that and you go okay so like let's for a moment strip out the fact that almost everyone over the age of 50 right now spent most of their life hating bitcoin and thinking that they

were all you know drug dealers and things like that who who are involved like take take bitcoin out of the equation or take any of the unsaved reactors that you know may have been spokespeople for anything like take that out just go okay if i told you that we could have incre instantaneous final settlement with the ability to understand transactions you know all the way back in time and we could have incredibly good reporting and in a financial crisis the regulators and counterparties could know who has what immediately would we or could we have a more robust financial system with less

risk what's the answer and the answer is just unambiguously yes we can okay now if we had a system like that that was interoperable across assets meaning the settlement system for real estate assets and leveraged loans and equities and commodities and currencies and derivatives imagine that all of that could operate on the same ultimate platform and system would the efficiencies glean throughout the financial system be be you know allow the financial system to operate not only faster but at a much lower cost than it does today is the

answer that yes or no the answer is unambiguously yes so now all of a sudden if you if you just just like think of it through that lens you now have the regulators who go um and then suddenly we're really close to them jake the former sec chair leads our advisory council so everything i'm talking about is you know not is is not kind of our hypothetical in the bubble what does this look like it's you know these are well-informed statements that i'm making right now that are my own personal statements but they're well informed like if you look at that you go okay well if the regulators were to look at this technology suite and go this helps us do our job better it creates greater financial stability which is a huge issue because the the

marketplace broke down in march of 2020 the marketplace broke down in 2008. and if we're going to have the deepest most efficient most important financial markets in the world here in the us things can't break and so we now have so if the regulators go that's going to help us understand where things are it's going to prevent things from breaking in the future and more efficient and then and then all the settlement across this you know multiple asset classes in an interoperable way is is possible then you go to all the banking chiefs and you go this is going to slash the cost of your operating business you now you basically have and and let me just add the consumer

looks at this and the consumer isn't going to care that his equity is a token or not a token or anything he's all he's going to understand is that his ability to get well-crafted financial products at a cheaper level probably in a more customized way because these efficiencies allow for all sorts of things to be combined in ways that are just impractical now so the consumer has greater financial inclusion you look at around like everyone around the table wins so that's why i say that is what the future will look like it's not it's that's not hard to predict the only thing that's hard to predict is how soon will that happen we happen to be taking a very active role in making that happen as soon as possible so i

don't think it's gonna we're not talking about 20 years by the way so it's it's going to start happening relatively soon and that's super exciting so that's i think that's what things look like yeah yeah it's i mean i think that's a really good framework to look at it uh through and it seems like you think that maybe there's gonna be a regulatory unlock for d5 um but it feels like that usually isn't actually how it works like when i think back to bitcoin everyone's like okay the regulation needs to come around it there needs to be an etf but really what it was uh was paul tudor jones i feel like in july of 2020 or june of 2020 you remember he goes on cnbc or he come fat bitcoin is the fastest horse in the race and what that did is it basically took

away the career risk meaning any portfolio manager in the world at any hedge fund in the world can now say ptj's doing it i'm doing it too what is the what does that moment look like for defy i don't think it'll be the same in d5 um i i think your your point is a very good point and i agree you know paul is a personal hero to me and in a lot of ways certainly is a as a traitor and and i've always looked up to him and so whenever he speaks he's you know he's got great insights and great instincts and and i think you're exactly right i think what that did by the way is it took out career risk for traders at hedge funds it did not remove the career risk

for portfolio managers and cios at large pension plans right and things like that but it was an important step because the first the this is a unique asset that started with retail and then it went to hedge funds and then it eventually get to the end asset owners and it usually doesn't go it kind of usually goes in a different order there um but i think that the moment i think that we won't have a similar kind of moment in d5 that just breaks some crazy log jam i think that it's gonna happen and the bet that we're making is going to happen working in conjunction with with regulators because really what you're talking about with d5 is you're talking about bringing

buyers and sellers lenders and borrowers together in an efficient way and i think that the the early protocols brought them together in a completely anonymous way and that it just at its core that's not going to work it can't be um it can't be anonymous it can be it can be private um and it will need to be private because we can't have a world where if blackrock's doing something jpmorgan understands exactly what it is and they're start front running like it can't it won't be that but it'll be i think that it will be by bringing the regulators on board and saying this is a more efficient way of doing it and we're gonna and this is our approach we're gonna

we're gonna show you how and why this works in this particular market get you comfortable there working only with institutions and then once once they are comfortable and they see that you know you you have more efficient transactions you have instantaneous and final settlement it all the aml kyc works there are a broad range of of different partners that that agree that this is in a sense a good meeting place and that they see that it works for this asset and like okay well that that works and then it'll expand out to another asset and then um or another market and then what you'll eventually see is

once once you get a little momentum behind that it creates a forcing function which is that it forces all the participants to make sure that they have the ability to settle these things to custody these things to risk manage these you know these tokenized assets whatever they may be um to report them to deal with the tax issues to deal with 24 uh 7 365 trading like but once you once a bank builds that out think about think about how the way banks work you got and this is not to this is not to knock anyone who works in kind of traditional operations group but let's say you spent your career building out a traditional operations for one of

the the big banks and you have god knows how many people working for you and you built all these systems it's like been your life's work in many respects and then these other guys come along and say most of the people and most of the stuff that you have is just is unnecessary um and you know you're gonna look for the eight different reasons why this new technology may have weaknesses and may not be the right thing and ultim but ultimately once you have a guy who's running that at a bank and has had to do it because you have some you have these d5 protocol that that you know that are this different you know this newer version in this new stage of the cycle then you actually have an advocate for both and then the ceo gets to litigate you know who has

the stronger voice and if this guy has the better technology and the cheaper cost it's going to change quickly and so that i think the aha moment will be when you get a few of those things happening and you get the first technology rails built out because once that happens then it's that's like that's your peter thiel zero to one yep uh step right once you get once you get to one it's gonna go fast yeah i wanna actually go back to bitcoin um which i think a lot of folks who have spent a lot of time in crypto uh maybe have moved away from bitcoin they move on to eth from eat they push into d5 but i'm reading between the lines and i still feel like you think that bitcoin is one of the most actually i remember you said this i think it was to ted

saudis and maybe 2020 bitcoin is the most interesting trade that you have seen in 30 years so i think maybe a two-part question hey i'm curious if if you still feel like bitcoin is that that quote-unquote most interesting trade that you've seen in your career and then b i'm curious about just your framework for how you're seeing bitcoin right i think the narrative around bitcoin almost changes every couple of years it started as like money uh so i'm curious if you see it as like an inflation hedge a digital gold internet native money non-censurable money uh i just would love to hear your framework around bitcoin yeah it's uh it uh it was and remains the most interesting trade of my career um we obviously have been in and you know in

and out of it in size um i i so i'd say that i think that the right way of looking at bitcoin um in the most conservative way is it is a store of value um obviously it's a volatile one because it's it's still in its early stages um and so in its most conservative sense i think that's what it is well that is what it is it's a store of value and and i think that the whole world will become digitized so i i don't think let's put it this way i don't have a thousand year time rise but i was gonna say like in a thousand years people are not gonna be lugging gold

around you know around around the world or around the universe or whatever is if we're still around that that's not happening there will be digital stores of value um if in fact we even have a societal structure and system where people even even need to store value and we don't we just don't it's just too far out to know but at some point along that path i think that you know people of of your generation and and like your kids someday the notion that they're going to be digging up gold and it just to store value when they are when they've grown up in a in a true

digital world and there uh there is a network effect around a pro a protocol or multiple protocols that that represent sufficient scarcity that they can have confidence that if they you know if they put their value i'm gonna save money if they put their if they exchange their work for or they exchange other ownership of something for this particular thing it should hold value i think that that's what i think bitcoin has has really won that and uh and so i so in that sense it's the most conservative way of looking at it is the store of value and i think it will be worth a lot more money over time because what everything i just described

about how i think assets get tokenized and finance moves to this tokenized world if you think about what that future looks like it it will mean that every financial institution will have built digital custody digital trading rails digital systems across the board for all for tokenized real estate tokenized currencies tokenized equities tokenized everything right and what they then all of their customers will have will have uh digital wallets right and so right now not that many people really have digital wallets not that many people even know uh how to exchange

fiat for a tokenized asset or anything it we're probably not more than 10 years away from virtually every person in the world having the infrastructure that allows them to buy bitcoin or eth or anything else and so the what's exciting to me about the value of these assets is in that world do you really think bitcoins will be worth less than it is today like we've just had a historic leveraged wipeout i don't think so i mean i think the probability of that is close to close to zero that it's gonna be worth less than it is now i think it'll be worth way more so that's a trade right i'd say that that's a that's a longer-term trade and that's and and so that that's how i see

it now what i would also suggest and and this is kind of the this is why i think no one should ever really be short this asset is i think that bitcoin is already the most secure network in the history of humanity and some people might scoff at that because they go well the u.s dollar is because the u.s dollar for instance you know is backed by the one of the greatest nuclear arsenals in this naval fleet and rule of law and economy and i i agree that the dollar is a great asset but it's still controlled by the us government and i am not anti-government in any way but my

point is that it actually is controlled by by a group or a system or an entity that could choose to devalue it in some way bitcoin is this wild thing that has never existed and couldn't actually exist until we had the combination of these ideas with the technology with with the cloud with the global internet with all these people that for whatever reason ended up looking at this going this is really exciting and so now you have this network nothing like this has ever existed before so the question is what what's the value of that and i don't know i don't i i have a good imagination i don't know what the right value should be placed on the most

secure network in in the history of humanity and i also know that bitcoin evolves but slowly and so if you take a long view on it could it be that over the next 20 30 50 years i don't know bitcoin maybe less time bitcoin bitcoin becomes this this not only a store of value but a network that is used in all sorts of ways that we can't even yet imagine as this security as this highly secure network that other things plug into kind of like people look at ethereum right now like could it be that bitcoin ends up actually being the ultimate winner there

it's possible and and so if you're if you're kind of short that i think that you're you really are short human creativity imagination you're short all the things that you historically the people who've shorted those are bankrupt and you never hear about them like they don't make the history books um so i i just i think that you that's why you should never be short like maybe if you're short you make some money on a trade but you should never be short that kind of thing with ethereum you know like you might be like ethereum might might be one of the great winners i would bet that it would but it might not be and it's going to be proof of stake and there will only be one real proof of work network i i believe because it's so energy intensive and it'll be bitcoin

and then we just don't know what it'll be worth um so that's how i look at it so the ultimate question look i hate when people ask me for price predictions but going back to a question that i asked earlier is at what point do you jump but but i'm about to because i get to ask the questions while i'm podcasting and so i am curious like at what point do you do you put back uh risk and what do you think what do you need to see uh you know from the fed from macro from just pain in the markets to really jump back in in size and put risk back on because to me everyone that i talk to is everyone's just sort of like look i'm gonna enjoy the summer and not do anything and just observe uh because the there's i don't feel like i'm getting

paid enough to take on risk at this point so i'm curious to get your thoughts yeah um i don't like to make price predictions either i'll so i'll point a few things out and just tell you my framework for thinking about it so i told you earlier that you know when when people are borrowing a lot of money and making a lot of noise about how they're they're buying stuff you should be selling and when stuff is breaking and fed is doing quantitative easing or quantitative tightening and um you know markets are under a lot of stress those are the the area those are the times just cadence-wise to take price out of it like those are if you just if you never even saw price and all you saw all you got to see if you

you know if if you were denied price and all you got to see was cadence in terms of that type of news flow and chatter you're you're in the zone where you should be um you should be accumulating and and the period that i described was one where you should be selling and that will hold in that will hold into as long as there are or that that framework will hold as long as there are markets that human beings uh interact with um so we're in we're in that zone i would say the things that um the things that uh concern me still about the market and i don't know how to await these is that

um i think that there's i think that lower prices could still push some people to have to sell and that's usually markets get to a point where that's not the case and they never get to the point where there literally is not one person left in the world that a lower price wouldn't force to sell but broadly speaking it gets you know markets usually get to that that point so if you look at say what the miners are what the bitcoin miners are doing like these guys have been having a blowout position blow out their bitcoin holdings because they

cannot get funding i mean i i'm exaggerating it it's it's becoming extremely expensive for miners or in some cases impossible to get them to to get the money that they need and so they are having to sell bitcoin so we're still in a dynamic where i think the macro is actually starting to improve for bitcoin but we still have residual uh businesses and traders who got themselves over levered or were too optimistic or have weak business models and they have to sell their collateral and or things need to get liquidated so we're in kind of this i think around this 20 000 level we're in this kind of

balancing area here so i expect there to be chop and volatility i think that i think that it is unlikely that that the fed is going to hike rates return to a normal um normal there's no such thing as normal in finance return to the economic environment that we were in for the last 30 years like that is in my opinion not happening the fed is hiking rates right now they're way behind the curve they i think that the economy will weaken inflation will come off hard everyone's gonna kind of panic again they're gonna they're gonna transition

to a uh an easing cycle or they're gonna stop hiking and i think that bitcoin all else equal will bottom before before that actually happens so if you think about what bitcoin did it anticipated this period of monetary debasement exceedingly well and it got what it got way ahead of itself into the highs and then it rolled over before the fed started quantitative tightening or even tightening or even really talking about tightening and so it will it will start working its way higher um before the fed exits this policy and that process could be happening somewhere now if you look at what the

futures prices are predicting uh you know the market's kind of saying the fed's going to be using some rates next year so um so bitcoin will i think bitcoin will bottom before that but then it but it also then has to exhaust all of all of the the the kind of crappy positions that people still have on because of their business models and things i just described so we're in that process probably probably sloppy but if if as as you're as your investment advisor and i'm not your investment advisor but like if i were advising my own self on how to trade i would say yeah you should have been selling back then and yeah you should be accumulating in here and yeah you should be willing you should you should size it so that

you could take plenty of downside in case like one of these guys needs to get blown out on a day below 7 000 or 10 000 or like anything can happen in markets there is no buyer or lender of last resort in this market i love these markets they're they're fiercely um [Music] real and un you know unregulated i don't mean in the in the bad sense i just mean like these are real free markets this is probably like what trading equities was like in the late 1800s and and it's pretty awesome and it's terrible it's ruthless yeah so you know be prepared for anything by like

you know do would i really care if we had if we had a crazy spike down there and you blew people out to be like oh my god that is an awesome signal because now i actually i'm i'm gonna deploy a lot of capital if i see something like that um but i you know like we've seen stress but we haven't seen that insane stress um we might not by the way you don't always have you don't always have it if i see it i'll be like okay we're clean and we're off to the races again yeah eric i wanna start to wrap it up actually just with a thought experiment for you um yeah i know you think on more of a five to ten year horizon but i wanna maybe take it into like a two year horizon uh thinking about actually the

election so here here's a here's a potential future for you there is uh things look things look pretty crappy right now right we've got like we've got a war in ukraine uh we've got gas prices at five bucks we've got the fed just raised interest rates higher than they have in like 28 years a potential future looks like the fed is basically fighting inflation until november of 2020 uh november of 2022 uh and they are that it's all hands on deck for inflation the dems looks like they might not do too well in the elections which kind of sets up this like lame duck uh two-year stint for biden in which case all hands on deck for the dems to basically fight for the 2024

presidential elections in which case they basically start supporting any policy uh that helps put money back into americans pockets so the easiest thing to do there would be basically turn the money printer back on which would potentially continue inflation and basically that seems like it could wrap out this massive 80-year debt cycle and that that is like the the end period of the last sentence of the book of the 80-year debt cycle agree disagree like that future don't like that future what do you what do you think about that take i uh i think that i think that this period is not going to

be compressed into the next uh couple years i think it's going to be stretched out over the next decade so when you look when you look at these periods and and and i'll say that there's a tendency um and i had the stronger tendency when i was probably your age i don't know exactly how old you are but you're at least a few years old 14 younger than i am 14 so um so i think i know where you're going with this you yeah you don't want to make predictions and try no no no no no no no no no i like to agree now number one it's fun number two it's important when you think about trading investing to to contemplate a

whole range of of possible futures and and then assign probabilities to them and so that's the smart approach to doing so what i'm saying is is particularly when i was a young or some 55 so when i was younger i tended i i tended to think about things as happening a lot faster than they tend to happen and i think it's just because you care about this so like you care a lot about bitcoin or digital assets and and so you you spend all this mental energy honing in on something and and sometimes you see things you'll see things that seem obvious and so therefore your brain

tends to compress the time that that will happen but the reality is the world is this like big you know they have these big gears that grind over time some change happens really fast like the pandemic and it's incredibly disruptive for for people and people struggle to process rapid change it's throughout like in any in kind of i wrote a piece a few weeks ago just about survival and um there's a great book on survival that uh that i i'd recommend uh it's called deep survival and it just shows like how vulnerable people are to rapid change so you get lost in the woods a lot of

people just die in the first few days because they just can't literally their their brain can't handle the fact that they just um that they got lost and they're just disoriented so there's this you have to be careful about kind of your time horizons when you think about things what if you if you kind of dispassionately step back and say okay i think that a political decision has been made to um debase the currency and it's a pretty it's a pretty good choice relative to the other ones then then it allows you to step back take a deep breath and go okay if that choice has been made have there been other periods in history where choices like that have been made and the answer is yes and and then well how long

they tend to take to play out they can they can take 20 years by the way they don't they don't tend to happen in two years and and so i think what we need to be prepared for is is if you do the work and you kind of put things in politic in proper perspective and you go do i think that this decision has been made because it's the least bad of all the potential decisions if the answer is yes which you know that that is my my strong belief then you go this is going to happen over a long period of time so you know you could be right in terms of with that political dynamic you could be wrong but if you know if you're trying to trade the political cycle that's a pretty tough thing to trade if you get

if you get republicans in then not a whole lot's gonna happen and um you know but if republicans don't win then dems could throw a lot of money like there are a lot of things that could happen here um but i i yeah i would i would caution in thinking it's going to happen really quickly um and the big inflations that have happened historically tend to happen in a short period of time but they also correlate to economic systems that are deeply broken our system right now is stress supply chains are stressed but the economic system has not collapsed so it is it is highly improbable that we have some type of wild short-term inflation but we

could have we could have a period of chronic inflation between say at the lows on a spike down three percent at the highs 12 let's just say and evolve it all over a period of the next decade and when you look back in a decade you go wow my dollar's worth a lot less now than it was than you know it was back then i think it's likely that that's kind of what what this period looks like yeah i think no one knows what it's going to look like but one thing is for certain it feels like we're going through some massive paradigm shifts right now and so eric this is uh this has been a pleasure it's been really helpful i think for me and just uh i think hopefully the listeners and i'm sure santiago as well just hearing your thoughts on everything

that's going on both in the markets today but the bigger five 10 20 year framework so i appreciate you coming on i'm curious if there's anything else you want to share or if not we can wrap it up no that's great i i really appreciate the opportunity and it's great to chat with you guys fun fun discussion and uh let's review yeah let's uh yeah let's let's get back together in 20 years we'll replay this and just see how embarrassing i mean i guess like if you're not embarrassed what you said like 10 15 it's like looking at an old picture of yours and saying my god what was i thinking back then and so that that just shows that you've made progress i think um santiago you don't want to see what i was running i mean you're still you're still wearing crap anyways um eric i guess like a last

question just out of curiosity you have years of experience what would you tell if you were to go back like your young trader self i mean if you were to go back and say gosh i wish i knew that much earlier in my career as an investor what would that be i think you mentioned a bit of that like just like slowing down understanding how the world works but maybe something else that you can offer us so that's a i uh no one's asked that question but i really like that question because it gets to the it gets gets to the heart of of trading and investing i would i would say um because you're asking

me as a 55 year old and i started in 89 so i don't even know how old i was you know i'm right out of college so i would say that um and this is reflected in kind of book recommendations i make for people so when young when young traders come and say so okay so what should i read and they're expecting to read i don't know market wizards or this or that and i i'll give them i'll give them survival books really um i'll give them you know you should you should read about shackleton uh yeah deep survival you should read into the land of white death you should read

moby dick i i tell people and and like and why and it's because what i've seen over the course of my career is that most people really fail in this pursuit and what often happens is people survive for people rather thrive for a period of time and then something changes either in their own psyche or they start managing too much money relative to their ability or the cycle changes or something and then they and then they they don't succeed or they lose a ton of money or they they become so enamored with their own success and a lot of that tends to be cycle driven like they just caught the

right part of a cycle and they and they they did a levered carry type strategy that's a lot of what you just seen in d5 blow up and certainly these these business models i i just look at them at this stage just like i was talking about market cadence and like the people who engage in those activities like they're definitely gonna blow up someday i don't know if it'll be the next month or something but they'll definitely blow up just like the people who are buying in this kind of environment they're gonna be the ones who actually do well if they have the discipline to be selling in another environment and i think that this is it investing and trading is such a painful pursuit and my in my business philosophy and it applies to our business itself i talk to our team about this a lot but also our

investments so just not only our firm but investments is is if you're dead nothing good can happen to you nothing you have to remember that like if you're dead you're dead if you're alive you at least can get lucky even if you're not good you can get lucky but if you are good and you're disciplined and you you manage to survive and protect capital even if you haven't been the best performer if you have that discipline you you will have wonderful opportunities in the future and they just keep coming like people always think oh my god i have to make all my money right now and it's not true it is like i mean look at look at us we never had made a we never invested institutionally in

digital assets and you know we made a billion and a quarter inside of a year on a 600 million dollar trade like there there are new things that come along and opportunities but you have to survive to be able to get there and you have to you know you have to run a tight ship and that's it starts with the internal and so when you read about moby dick and you read about the obsession um that captain ahab you know had it's like you see that you could point you could point out a few captain ahabs and i won't name them in you know in the crypto markets over the last two years and if i name them and you name them they probably have pretty good overlap like they because it's that personality

type and it's that lack of of kind of restraint and discipline and so i think the earlier you can kind of you can kind of read those things and try to internalize them not just as these stories but what they reflect in terms of human nature the better off you'll be and and then you can kind of keep your eyes open and stay humble and you know you'll get there it's just it's it's a long race it's not it's not it's not a spread stay in the game yeah well we'll certainly love to host you and let's all survive and everyone listening just survive and uh we'll have to we'll have to reach in the saxon pod uh you know maybe in a year or you know six nine months but it's been a true pleasure erica i really

appreciate your thoughts and i'm sure the listeners will too thanks for coming on awesome you guys do great work and i i really appreciate being uh invited to join here so thank you thanks eric all right see ya [Music] you