How I Invest In Crypto & DeFi

I thought it's such a piece of trash. What a stupid idea, and it did a ton. I'm going to go to every beach on Earth. I just want to go to every beach on Earth, and I did. It took me three years, and at the end of it, I was bored out of my [ __ ] mind. I mean, I just said this sucks.

The industry that mines Bitcoin specifically needs to find a voice to talk about the things they do that actually help build sustainability into energy. I've seen you multiple times riding your bicycle. We've gone to dinner. You've ridden the Mr. Wonderful bike there.

Yeah, did you recover it?

Somebody stole it. So it got stolen in a big, uh, big operation. They stole over 100 bikes that night in Vespas.

Oh, so this was not a targeted crime?

Well, I found out later, um, it, and I offered a $25,000 reward not for the bike. You know, I wanted to catch the guy that did it. So their organized crime organization, and they put in a truck, and they put the truck on a barge in the river, and they took maybe 250 bikes that night off the streets of Miami.

And what do they do with them?

They apparently sell them. They take them offshore, they put it on a ship, and just so my Mr. Wonderful is in some South American country right now. Vivalo, the bike company that made it for me, uh, saw it on social media and said, "Let's do another one, even crazier." So I was there last week designing the craziest Miami bike you've ever seen. It's pink, it's red, it's black. I'll have it though. It's going to—when you see it, I'm going to be Mr. Wonderful a la Miami.

All right, uh, I feel like you've done a great job—Shark Tank, all the social media, uh, CNBC, etc. You've built this massive audience.

Yeah, uh, how do you think about that stuff versus like the investing activity? Do you still spend a lot of time investing, or is it more so now you've got the investments you've got, you've made those investments, and now it's more of the media focus and kind of the content?

I think a new model is emerging, and you're actually part of this new model, and let me explain the way I see it. Over the last 24 months, so let's take a company that is trading—MindMed. When I got approached with that, uh, company here in Miami at the Soho Club, second floor, it was a bunch of crypto guys. Three years ago, one guy there, named J.R. Rand, said, "Look, I'm a Kryptonian; however, I also have a great interest in psychedelics as medicine."

I said, "You're crazy! Those are illegal drugs. LSD is an illegal schedule 1 narcotic, same as cannabis, psilocybin, all of this stuff." He said, "No, no, I'm going to go to the FDA, form a company, and do clinical trials. There's no recreational use of this, and you know I want three million bucks."

And I said, "You know, it's too crazy, but I'm going to—my guy Alex, um, who runs Older Adventures, he's got a team, we'll do due diligence on it. It's intriguing enough." That was three years ago. Alex worked on it for about two months, and he really went to town on it and did a lot of research with his guys.

And the way my deal with Alex works—to give you an idea of how this works—I probably told you, I already know, but go ahead.

Okay, so when we do an investment, you know I'm the bank. I lend him 15 percent, so his—what's her on the line? He borrows the money from me and he invests beside me. He gets his own stock, but he owes me the dough 15, so that I know our interests are aligned. This is the first time in history on MindMed where he came back to me and said, "I'm taking your 15, and I'm tripling it with my own dough."

And I went, "What? Why?" and he laid out his case. We ended up investing. That went from a $20 million valuation that we bought in at to now $1.7 billion, so it's my biggest winner in years.

But those are the kind of investments. And how did that story happen? This is where social media intersected with the story of MindMed. It got into the Rolling Stone, it was in, you know, all the news magazines, it was in the popular press, it was all over social media because I was talking about it along with all the other advocates, and the story built into a giant company that has over 300,000 shareholders.

So, my new model, Pomp, is this: you want me to get involved in your business? All right, I want a proprietary position. I don't care what your last round was at; I want to be a founder. So you're going to give up in stock, but then I'm going to turn on my machine, and if you have a story of merit, I will explain it to other shareholders, and hopefully, we'll build this business together using all the tools the new world has: shows like this, social media, Yahoo Finance, Benzinga, CNBC, CNN, ABC.

That's how companies get to be known, not just for shareholders to tell their product story. Why should you care about microdosing LSD? Because it works, or at least it potentially can, and it's going through clinical trials, and it can solve for, you know, addiction, opioid addiction, anxiety, alcoholism, all these things.

Is there a specific type of company that this works for more so than other types of companies? Like does it have to have some inherent story behind it and some interest? That's really what you're trying to underwrite just as much as the actual investment itself.

It's a great question, but the truth is every company has to be able to tell their story in the best light. I don't care if it's really sophisticated technology. I mean, it's much better when it's consumer good or service, but right now, the reason crypto is of such interest globally is the story was told by guys like you for years, and it slowly emerged as a story of, you know, store of wealth, if you want to call it that, or currency if you want to call it that, whatever it was.

It's the fact that investing has become democratized by the Robin Hoods, by the Reddit crowd, by all the news channels, by the cable channels. Business is part of everyday news every day, and so if you can get a following that is interested in your investment philosophy—I invest sustainably, ethically. That's what I do; that's where I came from. That's all I do. And people that are interested in that follow. They don't have to invest with me; they don't have to, they can bet against me, but at least they hear these companies' stories.

So, my argument is that the value I have to a company now is the ability to take its story and blow it up, and then investors will make their own individual decisions. But that's very hard to get to that place, and it's taken me a long time, as it has taken you, and I want to use that power wisely.

When you think about public markets versus private markets, how much of this is better suited for public markets where there's liquid stock price, there are shareholders, people can make decisions every day—buy, sell, hold, whatever—versus the private market where there's not so much access for some investors, right? There's not that liquid kind of daily stock price, and maybe the impact is more around like helping the business build in terms of getting customers or driving, you know, consumers to check it out or whatever.

Is it either or, or can this work across both public and private markets?

It's both, and the most powerful platform to tie these together is equity, you know, crowdfunding now where you can tell a consumer of a product or service that you can become a shareholder. At the same time, I'm very intrigued by that. I have a relationship with StartEngine, now one of the largest crowdfunding platforms in the world.

So when a company has 100,000 customers that have tried its product, it's still private, we can go to the customers and say, "Look, you love our product, you love our service. Now we're going public; you can buy our shares. You can buy them online; you can put $200 or $2,000 or $20,000 into the company that you've been supporting now for five years."

And that's, this is again another digital, you know, crossroads of equity and funding and debt to the consumer which doesn't have the same issue around timing like a private equity firm does or a venture capital firm where after seven years they turn into a pumpkin, and they want to prep share, and they want this, and they want all these special rights.

I'm not into that anymore. I'd rather do you want to raise $50 million? Let's do it in equity crowdfunding where everybody owns the same share; all the interests are aligned. There's no time bomb. People can buy and sell their stock anytime they want.

And so for me, um, it again goes to the platform. What I try and do with my companies that are private is get them customer acquisition costs, get theirs down, and I use my platforms to talk about their products and services. I try to get people to try the products, but you know at the end of the day, um, I feel a responsibility.

I don't endorse products I don't use personally. I think that's [ __ ] and I think people can smell [ __ ] a mile away so I never do that. You know I do things that I use, I like, or I invest in, and I tell my story and you can either agree or disagree. It's—but at least I get that mega bull horn to get out there and talk about it.

Yeah, when you think about your career building up the media side, there's a lot of people who listen who they're very interested in this, and more so founders are interested in this as well.

So one of the big secrets in venture capital right now is almost on a daily basis. I have a founder that comes to me and says, "How do I build my Twitter following? How do I build Facebook? How do I build Instagram? You know should I create an email newsletter? Like what should I do so that I have the same power? Maybe it's at a smaller scale but I can talk directly to an audience that's in my vertical or in my industry," and I think that there's a lot of, um, kind of value that can accrue there.

What are the things that you did that you're like these were the big inflection points? Right, obviously Shark Tank probably was a big one, but are there other things that you're like this is how I built this massive platform and kind of made a name for yourself where people were willing to at least listen, hear you out?

What I found worked is these, you know, it's a complex question because I get the same question all the time, how can I get a million followers? Well, it's not that easy. I mean there's people that try and sell you services to do it; there's all kinds of consultants that try and do it for you. They want you to pay them $15 grand a month. All that stuff happens.

But the truth is that social media is the great democratizer of people that are good storytellers because if you have interesting information that may assist somebody or they may find interesting, they will tell another about it. They will send that link to somebody else, and that actually, that organic growth occurred pretty quickly for me. It started, you know, 50 thousand, a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, then a million, and then another million.

It—and I never changed. I mean, I like to have fun on social media. You know, I'll play guitar with my pajamas on Saturday. I'm happy to do that. Um, people play guitar; I like to do that, but you know, just share it.

I talk about stocks; I talk about bonds; I get very, very serious about issues around politics; I just lay it out there, and it's all true, and I don't [ __ ] and I think that's what worked for me. But I'm very happy to be in different verticals. You know I can talk about watches with anybody in the world now; I have a massive watch collection. I used to be a shareholder offender; I can play guitar. I have Chef Wonderful as a multi-million dollar business. Now my wine business is now the largest direct consumer in the country.

Really?

Yeah, yeah. We just did $5.1 million in 20 hours on QVC last week. That's an all-time record.

So these are different verticals that interest me, and there's different constituents that come into your universe around those interests.

I got a huge following of people that like wine.

Tell me more about the wine business; I don't know anything about this.

Yeah, so you know, here's something interesting that I learned. I grew up with a Swiss stepfather who really taught me in my teenage years how to, you know, the difference between Bordeaux and Burgundy and DRC and the Italian wines and all the varietals.

And I became interested and over in Europe, you know, wine is just part of family. It's not about getting drunk over there; they just drink it, you know, maybe one glass or two glasses, not a big deal. So kids drink it watered down, whatever. And so I became pretty proficient at the varietals; I always was interested in why. You know, I'm a collector of wine and an investor. I buy wine futures with a group in Boston; we invest millions of dollars in wine and we try and guess which varietals—like this year's gonna be terrible because it snowed just last week in France. It actually snowed! It's unprecedented.

And the point is when you get knowledgeable about it, you get, it's kind of sucked into that lifestyle. So I started a wine business in California where I blended it, and I sold it, and um, I was losing money like everybody else, like a lot of money. Everybody goes into it romantically, and I'll joke, if you want to be a millionaire, start as a billionaire in the wine business because you lose a ton of money.

And then I met this woman through Shark Tank named Annette Alvarez. She was the wine buyer for Costco. The largest buyer of wine in the world is Costco. People don't understand that—all the global wines, they are the largest seller of wines as well.

I was trying to sell her a Shark Tank deal of single-serve wines. Nobody could ever reach her; she was impossible to get to. And I asked one of the guys in my office to go to the dark web and hack her cell number, which I had in 10 minutes. And I called it, and I left a message, and um, I said listen, I'm the guy on Shark Tank; if you're a Shark Tank fan, I don't know if you saw that deal last night, a single-serve wine deal. Cuban and I went into, and I'd love you to Costco to, uh, this is the, the cupola wine or whatever it was.

It was the, yeah, and there was another one called Zips as well. And so I left the, um, the message, and I thought, well maybe she'll call me back. Ten minutes later, I was up at our lake house, the phone rang and said, "This is Annette Alvarez. I got your message; you were rude to Barbara last night on Shark Day."

I went, "What?"

She said, "No, you're really rude to her."

And I said, "I gotta tell you something, Annette. The only reason Barbara gets the Shark Tank on time is I buy her new broom every year."

And she didn't think that was a funny joke, but we were over two with them.

Yeah, I know, I thought she'd like that, but she didn't, and, and anyways, we got into a conversation. She said, "I'm on my way to Hawaii for our annual holiday with my husband. I'll be at John Wayne airport at one o'clock on Saturday."

It was Thursday night, and, uh, "If you want to fly here to meet me, you can bring your wife because I want to meet your wife too."

I said, "Why?"

She said, "I just do, and I want to see a real person."

And I said, "Linda, we're going to, uh, John Wayne."

And we flew there; I got an hour of her time, and she told me this: she said, "Look, you want to sell wine with me? I'm the largest buyer on Earth. The only reason you get this hour with me is I'm a huge Shark Tank fan. I have some questions about the show I'd like to meet you; it's great, but here's what you need to know about the wine business: 97 percent of wine sold in America is sold for under $14 a bottle. 97 percent! People don't understand that—that's all of the wine pump. That's basically the stuff you buy for $60 bucks; you're in the three percent."

"In order for you to make money, you're going to have to be able to ship me 150,000 cases a day. If I order a cab from you, I need 150,000 cases. That's just my stocking order, the next day I meet another hundred thousand. You can't do that; you don't have the capabilities; you don't have the logistics; you can't even understand how much juice that is if you want to pull that off."

I'm going to give you the name of a guy named Pat Roney. He owns 19 vineyards, and he makes our Kirkland wine; he is our logistics guy. He can ship me 2 million cases; you form a wine company with him; you go 50/50 partnership, then I know you have the logistics skills. Then I'll give you an order, and it'll blow your socks off how much wine we can buy from you.

I go to see Pat, and Pat says, "I know you're coming, and Annette called me. We're interested; let's format a relationship." We fought for six months on the terms of it; it ended up being 50/50.

It has been wildly successful because she was right. The minute we dropped our price point between $11 and $14, we started selling, you know, hundreds of thousands of cases. Last week, I broke a record: never been done before on QVC. We sold $5.125 million worth of wine in 21 hours. That means we have to ship a quarter of a million cases in two days. We can do it, but that's a business that's very profitable now.

In fact, a SPAC took over, um, that company. I'm now a shareholder in Vintage Wine Estates, and it's going to trade on the NASDAQ June 6th.

Wow!

Yeah, and so you also do direct-to-consumer as well or it's just—

Absolutely. Launching a new site; I'll be announced next week, so I'm a little early on it here called Shop Mr. Wonderful, and it's going to have not only all my wines but all my Shark Tank products.

So a massive play direct-to-consumer as a result of the pandemic organized by a great digital team— a lot of work going into this. It's, it's like extending the voice, Pomp, as we talked about at the beginning of the show. You know, what do I do with this voice? These are products I invested in; I use wines; I make my wife blend the whites; I do the reds. This is our family stuff, try it.

It's a very, it's an honest pitch; if you don't like the wines, ship it back. I mean, you know, you can send it back if you want, but when it comes to wine, I've got your back; nobody makes wine like I do.

Yeah, uh, crypto—I think when we first met, uh, three years ago maybe now, yeah, uh, CNBC set—I didn't know very much about you, other than how this guy on Shark Tank.

Yeah.

Uh, I don't think you knew anything about me and I told you that 50 percent of my net worth in Bitcoin, I thought you were [ __ ] crazy!

And, uh, well that's a nice way of putting it because I think on the segment what you said was I forbid you from investing.

I remember we were on the set of Squawk Box, and I thought, who is this idiot? Yes! Why would he put so much into one thing?

And, uh, and you didn't realize that, uh, I think I was playing a game with you, and you were playing a game with me because right before the segment started, uh, they were at commercial and we were all talking or whatever, and uh, I was just kind of jabbing you a little bit, trying to get you to be excited, and then you—you said to me right before, "How much, you know, do you have in this?" I said, "50."

The lights, cameras turn on and that was the first thing you fired across.

Well, I mean, those—that was then, and but in 2017, I had nibbled in—I'd started buying some Bitcoin and some, uh, you know, Ethereum at that time, and a couple of other, I think U.S., I can't remember when I bought my stable coins.

But, you know, what happened to me because I'm in a highly regulated industry with, you know, all my indexing and all these financial services companies that I've invested in, so I'm really regulated by the regulators, and I started talking about crypto and whoa, what a negative response back then. You remember?

It was, it was especially 2018 when it had dropped from $20,000 Bitcoin price to $3,200. So I got my wings clipped pretty, pretty hard by lawyers in Washington saying you got to stop.

I mean, you know, you're a heavily regulated guy and you're out there on TV talking about Bitcoin; forget it.

And you talk about as much as you want or not, but like I think a lot of people think, uh, Elon tweets something or there's somebody who is really bullish who also is a little bit more bearish, and they call the tap on the shoulder, right? The like, "Hey, knock it off" type thing.

Yeah, is that like a, you know, goes through the backdoor conversations someone just says, "Hey, you know, you should chill with that," or is that like something that is, uh, kind of more, uh, stated, right, in terms of the way it works?

Is that I—I have to be compliant as per the compliance officers that work in these companies. Every single word I say, including this podcast, is going to be reviewed by compliance, and these are organizations I have to be compliant with because they have to be, they're telling the regulators that we are compliant and they have to make sure—that's their job.

And so I started getting calls from lots of them in different companies saying, "You're way offside, and you've got to stop," and I did.

And I, you know, um, what happened though, if only it was only eight months ago when the Swiss regulator, the French regulator, the German, uh, New Zealand, uh, Britain, Switzerland and Canada, they started putting ETFs out. The regulators had gone, 360 or 180, whatever you call it, right?

And I said, "Well wait a second, I'm an investor in those jurisdictions. I have investments in all those jurisdictions. I'm a global investor; I have them investments in all those currencies; I am going to buy some, um, Bitcoin, as I can in those jurisdictions."

We don't have it here yet the same way, but it's coming, I would assume, and obviously the regulators have lifted their, their curtain or made it easier to do that.

And so I started, um, growing my position to three percent; I'm a five in the operating company so we have five percent in gold, for example. I said, "Let's go crypto" to three and we started buying coins and we started buying ether and we started, you know, investing in a few other things.

And then I started getting calls, and I think I've talked to you about this. I service, uh, institutional clients and sovereign funds and they, they saw me on CNBC talking about my three percent weighting, and the phone lit up. It went nuts.

And what was it about? It was about ESG; it was about this issue around sustainability and saying, "Where'd your coin come from?"

But they were mined in China. I said, "Well, who cares? It's all fungible coin; it's Bitcoin. It's a Bitcoin; it's awarded; it's a coin.”

They said, "Well, you're supporting coal-burning miners." You know, this issue I predicted would explode, and I think I've been right on that thing, but it hasn't changed my interest in, uh, you know, going long Bitcoin for a bunch of reasons because I've gotten a lot more sophisticated now.

What interests me the most right now is DeFi; I think it's where the puck is going, and I'll tell you why. So now I've got a large amount of capital tied up—three percent weighting in the operating companies, a lot of capital—and it's not yielding anything, right?

So why don't—so I said to my guys, "Let's get into some DeFi and take a portion of the assets and wrap it into the Ethereum chain and let's start making some interest. Let's start looking at different ways that we can loan our, our assets out and start making four, five, six, seven, eight."

You know, I've talked about this. I have gotten way down that rabbit hole, and I'm way deep into that now.

Let's stop for a second, just so people understand where we are. So you got three percent of operating company assets, right, in crypto; you've got five percent in gold.

First question is why still five percent gold, three percent crypto?

I think a lot of people who've kind of gone down the rabbit hole of crypto either invert that, right? So it's five percent crypto, three percent gold, or like literally have gotten rid of the gold.

So why still have more gold than crypto right now?

You know that, it's a great question, and we've had that discussion internally. Every—we do our meetings, uh, every Monday at 10 o'clock, we review the portfolio changes, et cetera.

I know there's going to be a change there soon because it comes up every Monday now, okay? Because we can't make any interest off gold, and we now are starting to get yield and starting to make money.

And the weird thing, as you well know, we've had tremendous volatility in Bitcoin this last 10 days. That actually enhances DeFi; it makes it better. I'm making way more on my contracts now.

And so, you know, I said to the guys, "Look, um, and this is, you know, Brad, this is—I haven't even told anybody this story, it's just unique, it's on your podcast because it's so new."

You only bring me the good story!

Well, you know, we talk about a lot of stuff. So I said to the guys on my crypto team, "Look, um, this DeFi stuff is really complicated. It is not easy. You know, we've got a MetaMask format, we've got all of these other platforms, all the stuff we have to do, these contracts. This is crazy complicated, but there must be millions of people that have a little bit of coin that want to make some four, five, six percent on it.

Why don't you go find me a company, a team that I can invest in that will do a commercialization of DeFi? And I mean not corporate so that somebody that has a wallet that's got maybe, you know, 20 grand or 10 or 5 thousand dollars in it could easily do what I'm doing. That takes a staff of four people.

You're basically talking about more user-friendly, better user experience, an easy way—hey, I elect, I want to do this—and rather than me actually have to go in and do it myself, I can use this service to accomplish this.

Yeah, and so they came up with this team again; it's in a different jurisdiction because it's Canada, which is very open these days—a Vancouver team that one of my crypto guys, uh, introduced me to. Ben is the, uh, you know, and he's got a great almost twenty people there doing this that they're all ex-bankers; they understand the whole format. They're, they're deep, deep, deep into the algorithms and all the code they're writing and they said, "Look, we're looking to raise some money here.

Um, uh, do you want to be an investor?" I said, "Yeah, I'll take this on. I'll, I'll—but I want to buy a third of the company; I want to be a significant shareholder."

And we negotiated for a while because you're going to be—you're going to do two things for me: I'm going to help your company but I'm going to give you a ton of capital and you're going to manage it according to the way I want to manage it and you're going to produce things that I want because I know if I want them, others are going to want them, like tax returns.

I want to press a button to get a tax return; I don't—I want to be compliant! Right? Nobody does that yet. I don't want to have to sit there with an account and figure out all my trades; I want to automatically produce—he's working on that; his team is working on that.

So we put, um, we put a significant round together for them, a $20 million round. I'm the lead on that thing, and I, uh, I think it's going to be a great company. We haven't even announced it yet; it's called DeFi Ventures.

Um, I'm going to rename it to WonderFi because it's, it's going to be my, my vehicle, and, um, I think it's just the beginning; you know, some great things to come, and, uh, so when you go into DeFi, what exactly are you guys doing?

You're taking Bitcoin that you own and Ether, and are there many other investors, like me? I've made my decision to three to five percent allocation probably as you, as you snuck out of me, I'm going to be moving it up because you're right; gold's not doing anything for me.

Well, three plus five is eight, not five. So you could get rid of all that gold, could get to ten.

Okay, all right, but you know, we're bound by certain covenants just for how we manage the operating company. Ten, I feel like is on the upper bound of most conservative investors, right? So it still fits within the kind of bands, if you will, if you're a conservative investor. Most of your focus is outside of crypto; yeah, one to ten percent is kind of the band is up there.

Bob, it's five percent institutional investor—ten is up there of course. Right now that number for the big guys is three percent; they're happy, and they, they want Bitcoin; they haven't gotten past that yet. Bitcoin is the property, the digital asset they want, um, and they want to store value. Store value.

And you've been right on that; can't deny that.

Okay, it's a, it's a volleyball; we might have to roll the tape back and they have to erase that, but my whole point is the—the—it has inherent volatility, but imagine, so here's my thoughts about DeFi, okay?

I've got the vol, I know I'm going to be up up and down 38 a year—right, that's what it's been historically, right? So we're seeing that; we've had a crazy vol right here. We're literally recording this on a day that, uh, it's been down 40 in a month, okay?

So let's say in my case, my DeFi company of which I'm a large shareholder now, I say to the guys, "Look, let's put a bunch of crypto on our balance sheet, all right? I'm going to own a third of that balance sheet or whatever I own of the balance sheet; I want you to loan that out and get me between a four and a half and an eight percent yield."

Now of course I have to mark to market the change in value because it's going up and down, but I'm kind of agnostic because I'm owning it as property; I don't really care because it's an allocation. Let's say it's five percent; it's going to stay at five; I'll change it every quarter adding and taking away from it, but I want you to loan it out there.

So the whole operation, the DeFi operation is to start doing these contracts for me on an AI basis so it can go look to the market, see what the spreads are on all these different opportunities. I don't want to get too complicated with it; it's basically yield farming. What you're just going to do is yield it, and then others that are interested, like I am, taking their asset and imagine if I could have—over these years—had a five percent yield on my Gold.

That would have been incredible!

Well, I can on my crypto, so that's really what I'm doing in DeFi, and I think I've got the best team in North America; everybody says that, but I'm backing this team because I've done a lot of due diligence on them, and, um, I think, you know, in the next few months that will become part of our portfolio with a yield metric to it.

So because what you're basically saying is, uh, you're going to keep the assets denominated in the asset, right? So, uh, let's say just freezing things, you have a hundred ETH; you put that in; you want eight percent.

So now you're gonna end the year with a hundred and eight, staying in regardless of did the price go up or down?

I might go back to fiat to just pay some expenses, but I'm going to stay in Ether on that balance sheet, and you as a shareholder go with me in the share price as my assets grow.

Do you think that this is a really important piece that I think the traditional world hasn't woken up to yet? Sounds like you're now getting there.

Is, um, once you leave fiat into crypto—yeah, you don't go back.

I don't want to go back!

Okay, why would I?

Well, I don't know; you tell me. How do you think about it? Right, so you've got a hundred of your assets; you said I'm gonna take three, I'm going to put it into crypto.

Yeah, uh, maybe that goes up, maybe it doesn't, whatever, but let's just say it's three to five percent, whatever the allocation is. Once you put that into crypto, why are you not going back?

Well, the reason I would come back out—let's say our covenant is a max on ten, which at that most institution that is max, arena—okay. All right, so ten is the max allocation because, because if you're going, you know, you basically if you have LPs or you have other shareholders or you have other constituents, you've told them you have a covenant of diversification, and it might be ten, whatever it is.

But it's not much higher than that, so when you get to twelve at the end of a quarter in your crypto, you're going to trim back to fiat; you're going to go back to ten percent or maybe, you know, um, and then you just sit in the weeds waiting for a correction, and you buy back up to ten percent.

I, you know, I've been buying like—I mean you bought the dip.

Well, it's not really a dip; it's maintaining the three percent weighting, right?

Yeah, no, I'm saying the dip in the price!

I know, I know, but it—but to me it's okay, we're 2.4 and we said we're a three; buy up to three because we've had a correction. You can't call that—that's a correction!

Well, I mean, look, in 2017, there was what, six over thirty percent, I think?

Right! There was two forty percent drawdown, so, uh, it doesn't feel good, right? Draws down, but it's not, uh, atypical for the kind of historical bull runs, right?

Right, which again, if you tell in the traditional world, uh, hey, there's gonna be two forty percent drawdowns but you're gonna go up 20x in a year, they're like, "I'm out!"

Well, yeah, like I'm out of this! But, but in this case, um, you end up with more coin after that correction, and then you're out loaning it out, and you're getting your, and with that volatility, you just got 200 basis points more yield.

People don't understand vol is good for yield; it's not good for your stomach, but it actually helps you mine yield from your crypto.

And so when you understand those smart contracts and how it's being loaned out, um, and I'm getting way more sophisticated, so I look at it now with my team saying, "Okay, you know, you could even put leverage on this if you want, which we don't, but I think that's a crazy chicken move, but you could really Gucci!"

Why are you only targeting four and a half to eight percent? Some of these can pay twenty percent! What's your duration?

What duration?

Well, that's why I'm asking you, right? Is it just you're saying, "Hey, I want to be able to earn the four and a half to eight percent forever," and the twenty to thirty is only there for a couple of weeks or a couple of months? Like how do you think about yield versus duration?

So what we don't have is a long history of what that curve on duration looks like; you just don't have it.

We're all pioneers in this, and because I'm a bond guy, I've been a bond guy for decades, and so what I look at is duration and quality—you can't work with that yet. We don't know.

So I said, "Look, let's keep our contract short; let's understand the change in the deltas; let's understand, you know, how inefficient the market is when there's a lot of volatility; let's just gather our own data, keep our powder dry; let's only loan out 50 percent of our positions until we understand it works."

And I should also disclose, I'm working with some of the larger corporate DeFi guys. I've opened accounts to manage some of my company's balance sheets; I'm putting up to five percent of our fiat currency into a strategy like this on our balance sheets.

I don't talk about that too much, but I'm letting you know. I'm saying, "Guys, we're in, you know, let's have an operating company; it's sitting with, you know, $30 million in cash. Let's put a million and a half into this strategy; we'll open an account; you'll understand it works. You're the treasury; let me show you how it works, how I'm doing it."

Let's disclose to, uh, if they're private, we just have to disclose to our LPs what we're doing. I haven't anybody said to me no, "I don't want that." Everybody wants to learn.

So instead of making nothing on our cash—which we're basically under inflation, we're losing money on our cash—you know, we're picking up; we're doing better than four and a half; that was a few weeks ago when coin was very stable.

Now, like today, you can get seven, eight, nine, as you know!

Mm-hmm!

So it's not impossible, and so I think why I only put five percent of the company's assets—why not do more if it's just yield? You're not taking the price risk necessarily in terms of that's the goal because the compliance, um, departments are all in that; let's tiptoe in.

You know, the concern, it's—it really is a three percent number right now. There are some at five, but here's the thing that everybody should understand that I, because I live in this world, the potential is huge. You've got less than one percent of global corporations even thinking about crypto right now.

So as time passes and they see examples of what I'm doing and others are doing, and they start to tiptoe in, you're talking about billions of dollars that are sitting on balance sheets making nothing.

And so it's going to become—that's good and bad news because the more money goes into that, the less yield you're going to be making; there's going to be a lot of competition.

And so, but right now I'm tiptoeing through the tulips, you know, almost double-digit yields. I think it comes down commensurate with the volatility.

So here's the thing to understand: I don't want to get too complicated, but let's say when you put a lot of Bitcoin on your balance sheet, you're gonna have vol; you're gonna have volatility.

The criticism of Tesla, we've been watching—they showed on CNBC today all the balance sheets that have, you know, crypto on it; they're all down because people are like, "Oh, whoa was me, they've got crypto, it's going to affect their balance sheet."

It does! But at the same time, they're loaning it out if they're smart, and they're bringing in yield that they never used to make on their cash.

So over time when people understand this, it'll offset it. I think people when they hear this are going to be very surprised to hear that you're buying the dip. You're getting into DeFi; you're earning yield, right?

Those are, uh, various, um, fairly sophisticated strategies compared to just buy Bitcoin, right? Or, uh, hey, I want to buy a mining stock for example, because you're getting more and more in the weeds, right?

Over the last, like, two years maybe went from, uh, "Hey, I probably shouldn't talk that much about this," okay, maybe there's something interesting to three percent, now like hey, let's start going further and further into the weeds.

Where does this go like ten years from now? Like if you just fast forward and you say, okay, hold on a second, like there's a bunch of stuff that has to get built and get there eventually.

It's just 100 percent of corporate balance sheets or, you know, in digital assets and so there's digital dollars, but also Bitcoin, Ether, whatever; there's yield; there's like all, like a true decentralized financial system that gets built here kind of right out underneath of Wall Street, or is there coexistence?

Or like just like where are we going?

I guess what's happening is the money is looking for the most frictionless way to actually be productive.

And so the reason, um, DeFi is so interesting instead of paying those crazy 200 basis to 2 percent fees that these wallets are charging, I don't need those guys for anything.

Maybe I need a ramp to put my fiat into Ether or whatever, but after that, I don't need them, and I can go and do this for a fraction of those costs on a decentralized basis.

What got me into this was we're always trying to find a place for our cash like when we haven't found an investment, we want some kind of yield on our cash.

And right now we have a lot of cash because we sold a lot of commercial real estate during just before the pandemic and during it because I'm worried about what happens to all that office tower space.

I'm not sure everybody's coming back the way they think. So one of the guys that works with Alex that runs all their adventures was one of our interns, heavy crypto—Eric's name; I'm not going to tell you a second name so nobody bugs him—but he came to me and said, "Listen, you got a ton of cash here; why don't we start a fund, a structured product that does exactly what we've been talking about?"

And I said, "Why is it going to be structured product?" He said, "Because in the jurisdiction we're going to put the fund where you're going to invest the cash, they allow this; they don't allow it here in the U.S. yet, but there's other jurisdictions like Switzerland and everywhere else."

And you just report your gains to the IRS as you said any other asset. And he worked on it; he went way down the rabbit hole on it and he's still working on it. It may still come to pass, but in the meantime, I said to him, "Eric, why don't you and Alice go find me a company that's doing this already?

I don't need to have a fund. I got the cash; let's just buy the company and put our cash on the balance sheet."

If we're a large enough shareholder, we won't care, and, uh, is—which is what we did. And so he found the company; he introduced me to these guys in Vancouver, you know, DeFi Ventures, and I met the CEO and the whole team, and I went, "Wow!"

And I showed other investors the team and said, "Hey guys, do you want to come in with me? Put this deal together."

And that's, that's actually how it happened.

And along the way, uh, you know, I ran into guys, you know, Josh Richards, his partner, Animal Ventures—all those guys, we all looked at it together and said, "This is cool."

So we're partners on it. I think it's great. I mean and he, you know, he—Josh is like some phenom, you know, Gen Z guy that wants to be part of this.

And so I said, "Okay, who's better at picking stocks, you or Josh?"

We did it; we did it with wine the other day and he shouldn't even be drinking; he's only 19.

But I met his parents online. He's a great cool kid, and, and you know, Griff, his partner, and Michael Gruen, and all those guys, we have fun together and, uh, I actually introduced them to the crew at CNBC and I said, "You got to get this guy on as the Gen Z guy; like you're the crypto guy; I'm the institutional guy; he should be the Gen Z guy; he's very smart.

I like him. And I said, "You know, you want to come into a couple of deals with me? Let's work together and find some stuff," and he's been backed by some heavy hitters, you know?

Oh yeah, I know the whole story.

Um, I think part of, uh, what's so fascinating is, uh, you have a lot of different worlds that collide, right?

So you've got wine, you've got watches, you've got Shark Tank, you've got, uh, commercial real estate, you've got your traditional kind of businesses and investing, uh, venture capital, and then you've also got crypto.

Yeah.

And when all that comes together, is it fair just to say like you're just looking for the best opportunities? You would be right!

But you know, I'm like you—I want to enjoy what I'm doing. I want to get up in the day and say everything that Nancy's plotted for this day, including being here with you, I want to do it!

I don't want to do stuff; I don't have to do anything, but I want to do stuff and I love working with entrepreneurs.

I just—I like finding people and saying, "Look, don't do that because I've been there before, it's a mistake; do this or I can help you here; I can help you here and let me come along for the ride and let me bring in shareholders, invest beside me, and let's do stuff together."

I have a community of entrepreneurs that enjoy, like, you know, I work all day and all night, and I love what I do. When I get up and play the guitar in the middle of the night, I was wailing out on the balcony the other day at like two in the morning; I know they're pissed at me on the beach, but it was just fun for a couple of minutes.

You just enjoyed it!

I enjoyed it, and so that, that kind of, you know, it's like, uh, live your life because as if there won't be another tomorrow and try and make some money because it's expensive.

Can I ask you a, uh, somewhat personal question?

Sure!

I've never asked you this before. Do you have like a number in mind that you would eventually say, you know what, I've had my fun but like I am now rich enough where like I want to walk away? Is there a milestone or is it literally you're gonna die working and you'll just never retire, you'll never stop?

I'm not working for money anymore! I don't need any more. I don't want to lose what I've got and there's always another watch to buy.

And so you know, every—the, the reason I do deals is in my world you have to do a deal to buy a watch so you remember what deal that watch was from.

And that's the collection!

So I'm always doing deals to buy watches; that's basically the way I look at it. So I got a, you know, a massive watch collection now and that community is a very interesting global community.

I've met some of the biggest collectors in the world, some of the princes in the Middle East; I'm friends with them now because you know we were on WhatsApp talking about different watches.

It's a great community to be associated with, and when we find a rare piece, you know everybody gets excited about it, and it's just— I don't know, it's just interesting. I enjoy it.

So what is it? Why are you doing it? Is it literally just to get a watch?

Yeah, you know, it's a good question. You enjoy it; I know you well enough at this point now; I know you enjoy this stuff.

I do! Right, but I'll tell you why I do it. I tried the other way. I took on my first big score, the sale of a learning company is a $4.2 billion transaction including the debt; there were ten of us as founders.

We had all started with in middle class or, you know, no money and and we'd worked together for, you know, I don't know, twelve years or something and then that was a massive liquidity and I remember when we closed, we were in Cambridge and we were sitting around a table just like this, ten of us, you know, having lunch.

We ordered in some lunch to talk, and we closed the deal. So now we were funded and, and I said to every, what's everybody going to do? I mean like, you know, we're—they bought our company; they don't need us. What are we going to do?

And, um, how old are you at this point?

I think I was, uh, 30? Maybe early 30s, maybe 29.

Okay, all right, so around 30.

Yeah, around 30. And, um, I said, "You know, I'm going to take some time off; I'm going to go to every beach on earth. I just want to go to every beach on earth including those ones in Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, you know, these incredible beaches—the northern part of Cyprus, these all these legendary beaches—and I did. It took me three years, and at the end of it, I was bored out of my [ __ ] mind.

I mean, I just said this sucks. It was depressing! This is it—this is all I do is go to beaches and sit there and get drunk; it's just boring.

And I got back in the game. I mean, I just got—I started doing deals like crazy and I put my capital work. I became an investor, not an operator.

I made some great scores; I made some catastrophic failures. I lost millions; I made millions, and I got in the groove, and I figured out what is it I'm good at and you know, um, and then the Shark Tank thing came along, and that became a huge platform.

Then the CNBC thing came along, and it kind of just morphed into this, uh, you know, like, you know, people know exactly I'm pretty transparent; not everybody likes me. They think I tell the truth too much about you know, business. I think it's good, but anyways, it is what it is at this point.

So I'm kind of riding the wave looking for opportunities.

Shark Tank guy renewed?

Yes! Thirteen got announced, thirteen seasons! I mean, you know, uh, nobody can believe what happened there! Like nobody, nobody!

Um, I have another show; I tape to Telemundo here in Miami, which will be announced this week; I'm excited about it, but you know what's going on to keep it a secret until maybe next week.

I don't know when, but Telemundo is a—I'll tell you, I've never been to that studio before; it is the most modern studio in the world; it's completely digital.

The whole thing is wired digitally; even the signs are all digital; they can change anything—temperature in one part of the room. It's, it's—and it's massive!

When J.Lo rehearsed for her Super Bowl act, she did it in a sound stage there the size of a football field!

Wow!

And I was taping right beside that when I—and I went and looked at it like this place has its own weather zone, it's so big! The ceilings were so high!

Yeah, it's just north of the airport. It's a massive facility.

Yeah, Shark Tank, 13th season versus the first time you went on; does it still just as exciting? Is it still just as fun, or is it different now?

Well, a few things have changed.

First of all, venture capitalists have now figured out that they get to 100 million eyeballs for free, so you've got all these VC back deals, like with $50 million valuations, $100 million valuations, and my attitude about that is I don't give a [ __ ] what your valuation is; if you want me as an investor, I'm carving my own deal, and you don't have to take it, but it's going to—

That makes me get; I get a special position because I add way more value than your VC does. Nobody knows who your venture capitalist is; they don't—they don't know the brand, but who cares? They're all the same, and they all want preference shares and all this stuff, and I'm not saying they're bad people; I love venture capitalists, but I don't need them.

I can raise my own money for my firms in my own way, and I don't like preference shares.

I don't like shares that are sitting above me and have rights I don't have. That just pisses me off, so I don't use that stuff.

So we get a lot of those companies now, Pomp; we got all these companies that SAFE that only we could get on Shark Tank, right?

So we get—they have to weed a lot of those out because they're just gold diggers. Then we get some really interesting stuff on direct to consumer, like there's a trend emerging in America.

Let's just take the food group, for example, low sodium, low sugar, low cal, totally healthy, like really eclectic verticals where people, you know, that really care about health will make a different kind of coffee or a different kind of peanut butter.

And what I find—what I see happen on those deals is when they hit the airwaves, you sell $5 million worth of it in one hour.

Yeah! A lot of people are into that health thing, so that's a big change that because in the old days we just have pizza sauce and, you know, just hot sauce and sauce, and you know now it's sauce with no sodium, totally fresh, no preservatives—all that kind of stuff.

And things like that, and really they come in knowing what Shark they want; they've known us so well now.

I want to deal with, you know, Damon and clothing or, you know, I want to do a financial thing with Kevin or whatever it is in anything in the wedding industry—that's me. I love!

I want to leave with the best story from Shark Tank that you've ever told me, which is your best investment, which is the potatoes.

Yes, tell us the story and what happened since you did this deal.

Yeah, so it's called Potato Parcel, and it's a company I'm imagining Damon being here right now and just laughing his head on; he and he did.

He—this guy comes on and he says, "I take a potato, a real potato, and you send me your image digitally, and I imprint your face on the potato, and then I ship it to somebody for you in the U.S. mail, and then they put the potato with little toothpicks in a little thing of water, and the potato grows right through your face, and it takes months to do it. Crazy stuff happens, right?"

I thought, "That's really, really stupid!" I mean, that is incredibly stupid!

And what a stupid business this is! And he said, "Well, what is it you care about in business? Sales, right?"

And I said, "Of course, but nobody would buy that crap!"

And they said, "Oh yeah, look at this." He had like 30% growth a month, and he was really good at SEO; he was really good on digital, really good on social; he was telling the story, and I was sitting there thinking I'm never going to invest in this thing!

So stupid!

And I said to him, "Well how about I get a chunk of equity, but I want a royalty?"

I want to— but hold on, you'd already seen one example of something stupid make money. Right? That's an important part of this!

Well, it's true! I saw I want to draw a cat for you, yes, which was the stupidest most stupid thing I've ever seen!

Which one's dumber, potato head or I want to draw drug half using? Incredibly stupid!

You pay a guy to draw a cat, and then he mails it to you, like—and Cuban invest in that made a fortune!

I thought that was the stupidest stupid because he had the song right; he like had something to do with danced like a cat and it was like so.

I thought it was such a piece of trash! What a stupid idea! And it did a ton, and, and really, really high margins because this guy would just sit down and draw a cat, and he had other cat drawers; so dumb!

So when I saw the potato parcel, I said, "There's room in my portfolio for a potato parcel company."

Now remember on Shark Tank, you calculate you're putting out capital, so you really want the internal rate of return on that capital in, in really NAS adventure investing, it's return of capital not return on capital; you care about that thing aired, and I got my money back in like 45 minutes.

And so it has the highest return ever for me and a shark, everything, because I had a dollar royalty on every potato and I own—I can't remember what percentage, I forget what I own to the company, but that thing has just spun cash.

And I got calls from CEOs of major corporations saying, "Listen, I want to buy 1500 potatoes for my sales force globally and ship them, and I want a discount."

I said, "No way! There's no discount! I'm the only kid in town!" [Laughter].

Monopoly on Facebook; nobody else puts a face on a potato the way we can, plus our new gift box, Pomp—we get a premium gift box with a beautiful little label on it and a gift package with your face in the potato, and it comes to your door, and you're just thrilled to death!

We are pumping those out by the hundreds of thousands, and there's no discount.

I mean, this is the el supremo potato, so there it just shows you with the right social media platform what you can do, and, and, and these are real entrepreneurs; it's a real business, it's not a [ __ ] business!

So it's made money; it's a watch!

I'll tell you that. I'm proud of you because three years ago when I went on the CNBC set and you hit me with, you were forbidden, you're not at fifty yet!

Yeah, but uh, you're at three, maybe five, maybe, you know, you're headed in the right direction!

Yeah, we are! And I think we could eventually get—we may, we may abandon our gold position which is significant.

We pay— the way we own gold is we own the GLD for rebalancing. Even though it's more expensive, it's very liquid.

But we also store gold and pay for the storage, so it costs us money to hold an asset that has no yield, and that's the argument that the committee makes about the gold position we’ve got, saying, "Think about this! It's reversed interest. If gold stays flat, it costs us to own it."

Why don't we just allocate 200 basis points of the gold portfolio, just sell down our GLDs, go to fiat and then just buy in, you know, Bitcoin?

Yeah, or, you know, whatever! You can—you don't have to just buy Bitcoin! But buy a portfolio of different crypto assets and then do the contracts, and I'm opening up to it.

Um, because proof is in the pudding, and so it's just—and you—and the weird thing is that, and you said it earlier, you don't want to go back to fiat, and so you're saying to yourself, "I'm going to live with more and more of all because you are."

As you build up that asset, but you feel a lot better about getting yield off it, all of a sudden, it's working for you while you're sleeping, as opposed to most people think they just own Bitcoin in their wallet, pay their ridiculous fees to their wallet, which they don't have to.

I mean, people are going to figure this stuff out; they're going to start to see DeFi can be a lot cheaper, less, less friction; you can still be compliant.

I don't want to break any laws; I want to be compliant because I got a lot of other assets, and that's why I want this version of what we're doing in Vancouver with the, you know, the DeFi ventures guys.

I want that to be compliant to the point where I just press a button to get my tax return; you know, that's how it works!

Yeah, I mean, it can.

So I'm very excited. I mean, obviously, you've been riding the wave a lot longer than I have, but I'm caught up pretty damn fast!

You're coming along; we just got to get you to stop.

The other thing you said one time was a crypto garbage—not garbage, garbage—which is a little bit above garbage!

No, but I liked it, and it's now legendary out there, and everybody nails me to the wall on that thing.

They say, they say, "You're the guy that called it garbage."

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Hey, Kevin, so you recently said on CoinDesk TV that institutions' ESG committees are in fact taking a harder look at crypto assets specifically and demanding better compliance.

And of course, that conversation has only heated up since then—especially around Bitcoin. So we’d love to know what's your take on the current view on ESG in terms of the sector?

You know, it's a—this is all a good thing, and I'll tell you why: it shows you that the institutional allocation committees and sovereign funds and pension plans and large institutions who really have been ignoring crypto for quite a long time.

I know we're all very excited about it, but the truth is that less than one percent of institutions globally actually carried it as an asset class at all.

So we're just at the nascent beginning of this interest, and as you know, and it's been discussed quite a bit in the last few weeks, most of these institutions have both ethics and sustainability committees that filter offerings before they're allocated on the investment committee, and they're doing the same thing with every asset.

They're not just singling out crypto or Bitcoin or Ether; it doesn't matter—they're doing it with every asset.

And so the fact that they're going through this process I consider a very positive sign.

Now we have to find a voice—the industry that mines Bitcoin specifically needs to find a voice to talk about the things they do that actually help build sustainability into energy.

I mean, they—obviously when you're mining coin, you want the lowest cost of energy you can get, and that makes you invest capital in finding it and finding sustainable ways to have it, so that you can mine in the most profitable you can.

The profit motivation of mining Bitcoin is actually helping sustainability, but that voice is lost in the criticism right now, particularly after New York threatens to put that three-year moratorium on Bitcoin mining.

And then you heard from Elon, and then all the institutions chimed in; we have no voice. Miners have no voice; that's the problem currently.

So, Kevin, so a voice is part of this, but presumably, there's some very specific things that whether it's miners or developers of digital assets in particular can do to try to ensure that they do meet these demands of ESG investment committees.

What kind of things should they be focused on?

Well, if you're in Kazakhstan burning coal to make Bitcoin—not so good! That's obvious.

Obviously, every sustainable committee is going to say no, we don't want that; we've got to find a different way to do it.

And I think a lot of the energy now—and there's more and more of this conversation dialogue occurring—is to go to the institution itself and say, "I'm a Bitcoin miner; I have a sustainability mandate; I am in sync with you; I am going to mine my coin sustainably. Here's my energy source; here's how I do it; here's where I mine it, and you can buy my shares if I'm public or in private; you can invest in me, and I will hold that coin on my balance sheet for you.

You will know its providence; you will know it was mined ethically. You will know it was mined sustainably, and we together can build this business together."

That's after you, as an institution, decided to put three or five or six percent into Bitcoin in the first place.

And there's a lot of excitement about Bitcoin; there's no question. It's the one that most institutions are talking about even though as a community, the crypto community has lots of other opportunities right now.

The institutions are interested in being exposed to the volatility of Bitcoin, but they've got to resolve this problem, and I think there's some very interesting research going on now and indeed investments, and I'm part of it to try and find a way to tag a Bitcoin—a coin itself, to prove that it has a wrapper around it that it came from a sustainable miner.

And this sounds out there, but it's being worked on right now because that's what institutions want.

And when that dam gets released, the amount of capital that will come into Bitcoin, it'll be the reason it goes to $100,000, $200,000 and all the dreaming that's been going on around price appreciation; that's not going to happen until institutions start to buy it.

So everybody's got to wake up and realize there's demand, but it's got to be done around ESG concerns.

So to your point, there definitely are some really exciting projects and data and high-quality research on these topics, but the reality is at least right now, the debate around Bitcoin's carbon footprint is really—it's happening in these overly simplistic talking points on both sides.

And so some of us really believe there's a critical need for more nuanced, sophisticated dialogue on what's possible and what's not possible.

What do you think can be done to help shift the narrative?

Well, the narrative is going to be shifted by the market itself.

I mean, obviously there's a lot of miscommunication and a lot of mistruths about it. The fact that there are miners in China and other places in the world—Iran, Iraq, you know, Kazakhstan, etc.—that are not really concerned about ESG issues because they've never had to deal with it, but they're still profitable miners—

New mining operations, new investments in mining are very, very let's call it hip to the issue; they get it.

And particularly if they're going after institutional capital, there's many deals on the market right now that are trying to raise $100, $200, $300 million dollars to build out facilities in a sustainable fashion.

So, you know, obviously this is a very new issue; it's probably only four months old, but it's becoming a big cry from those institutional investors and the community itself.

There's many different views; there's no question about it, but this issue is not going away, that's for sure.

And if you want to unlock, as I said earlier, the power of the institutional dollar—the billions and billions of dollars that would be coming into Bitcoin alone if it was in a way that would be part of the mandate for sustainability and ethics, that's what really unlocks the power.

So everybody that owns Bitcoin today regardless of how it was mined is incentivized to solve this problem for one reason alone: price appreciation.

This is not brain surgery; everybody can figure this out—price and demand.

And to ignore it and to say, "Oh, it doesn't matter," is a huge mistake.

And I think over time, particularly over the next 24 months, as the new deals—every deal I look at now to invest in a miner—let's stay in the mining sector for it for a moment—it's the number one question I have: how are you dealing with the ESG issue?

What is your plan to show institutions that may want to own your stock down the road just to have exposure to your coin? What are you doing about it?

Are you taking off flared gas, or are you in a hydro facility for hydroelectric?

Are you going to new geographies where there's very, very sustainable low-cost power? What's the plan?

And I'm glad we're having the conversation; I'm glad you're focusing on it because it is a very big deal.

So it sounds like you think it's very demand-side driven. Do you think that there's alignment in these investors? Do you think that they agree on what it is they want to see?

Well, you know, it goes from a baseline of don't burn coal. Don't do harm to let's find the most profitable miner that has found a way to get the lowest cost energy contract.

I mean, there's a lot of differences between all of these different offerings, but this issue we weren't even talking about as a, you know, crypto community just 11 months ago; it wasn't on anybody's radar screen.

And then all of a sudden you started to hear it no matter what direction it came from; there's all kinds of people talking about it.

But, but I think it's not a bad thing at all!

The challenge with a decentralized asset like Bitcoin is there's no central voice. There are thousands of participants, but there's no committee; there's no—for lack of a better word—lobby group that says no, these are the actual stats; this is the real information!

There's lots of different tangents, but it's an industry that's so nascent, so new that it hasn't found a way to say, wait a second; we're being accused of all these incorrect facts; we're going to fix this; we're going to put out real information.

In the end, the truth is what matters, particularly if you're an institutional investor and you want to know the facts.

But I can guarantee you at the institutional level right now, whether it's sovereign or domestic pension or anybody else around the world, they are listening to what governments saying.

You know, Norway just pulled its tax credits because they've got a lot of concern at the, at the popular level; the population, the people that live there are worried about it.

You've heard the same concerns out of other geographies have said, "Why are we burning all this power to make, uh, you know, a currency?"

And there—and there's no voice; there's nobody pushing back.

And I think this is going to change over time—either the CEOs of the large mining operations will come together and say here are the facts about what we do or the crypto community will somehow take from a decentralized view to a central one to address government's concerns at the state level, at the federal level and at the international level as well.

Bitcoin as an asset is here to stay, and now it's got to get in sync with what institutions want before they buy it.

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