Why I'm NOT Investing in Bitcoin! | Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary & Anthony Pompliano

You you and I originally clashed, if you want to call it that, around a topic that you're so engrained with. It's part of your brand; it's bitcoin. I'm like everybody else saying, "If it works, I should own some," but frankly all I've seen so far is volatility.

Okay, Pomp, you know you have achieved some formidable success in the YouTube and podcast channels. I want to ask you why you think that happened because there's a million guys and their dogs trying to gather followers and even fewer that can actually monetize it or build a career around it. You seem to be doing exactly that. How did it happen? Just give us, give our viewers a little clue because there's so many of them that want to do what you've done already.

Yeah, I think there's two keys to it. So, one is you got to have substance behind all of the kind of content. And obviously having invested quite a bit of money in early stage startups and having worked at some of the largest technology companies, I think that gives me an advantage over somebody who just kind of rolls out of bed and wants to do this.

Then the second thing is just being overly authentic. Like who you see in the content is exactly who you would meet if you went to dinner with me and a group of my friends. I think that the authenticity plus the substance really kind of stands out from the people who are trying to put on a show or be somebody who they're not on the internet. So basically, that's a nice way of saying people smell [ __ ] a mile away.

If there's one thing that's happened over the last decade in social media, is that [ __ ] is just radioactive. The minute you get caught lying, you're basically disconnected from the whole thing. That's your premise, right?

Yeah, I think one, people have great [ __ ] detectors. But also, two, people gravitate towards those that they trust. And the best way to establish trust is to admit when you're wrong, admit your mistakes, and just own up to the good, the bad, and everything in between. So one key is to not [ __ ] people, but also, two is to really just be honest when it comes to the good and the bad. I think there's a lot of people who maybe don't [ __ ] people but they don't show the bad side. So by doing that, it's another form of [ __ ], it's just not as obvious.

Well, it's interesting. Let me let me pursue that a little bit because I have a lot of investments in a really interesting industry—the wedding industry—which has gone through a lot of trials and tribulations since the pandemic hit. But it's a multi-billion dollar industry. So I've seen it from every single side. It's remarkable that, you know, when I look at investments like Honeyfund, which actually allows for gifting to wedding registrants, I've learned about weddings because I've been in it for so long that basically within seven years, fifty percent of the unions fall apart. Not because of infidelity—because that's kind of the theme of honesty you're talking about—but because of financial stress.

What breaks people up is not screwing around; it's money. What do you think about that? Are you surprised to hear that stat?

Yeah, well, I think just generally there's a lack of financial education throughout North America. And so when you have people who are uneducated about money, it's more likely that they're going to make stupid mistakes with money, which causes more stress. And as we know, that financial stress can lead to everything from divorce to unhappiness, et cetera. And so it shouldn't be surprising since we have such a high degree of people who are uneducated when it comes to personal finance. But I think what hopefully is happening is people are realizing that they need to get educated, but they also need to put together a plan and kind of set expectations, right?

You know, I've got a lot of friends who recently have gotten married and I'm always surprised by how many of them never talked about what their financial goals were or how much money each one of them made and where they wanted to live and what their expenses on a monthly basis would look like.

So it's like anything in life, if you plan well and you stay disciplined, you can have success. If you basically just wing it and you're uneducated, then it shouldn't surprise anyone that you end up in a bad spot, and ultimately it leads to the end of a marriage.

So let's just, on that theme for a second, how would you approach a significant other that's gone off the rails in spending? That's clearly not in track with the, you know—you get married 24 months later, you're stacking up a ton of debt on your credit card and it's all coming from one person, not the other. To me that spells trouble. But how would you change it? What would you do? How much risk would you take with your significant other to say, "Look, you got to stop?"

Yeah, I think the first thing is the most important decision you can make in life is that significant other, right? So kind of choosing well can help you avoid a lot of those problems. Making sure that you're aligned with the other individual, whether it comes to how much money you want to make, how you spend it, debt versus no debt—all of those kind of important components of personal finance.

So Pomp, you're not a romantic; you're telling me you'd rather talk about money. You're on your third date saying, "Look, I really can't consider you for a fourth because I want to talk about cash. I want to talk about how you spend." I mean, is that where you're going to go with it or what are you talking about here?

Maybe not on the third date, but at some point before you get married to somebody for the rest of your life, you probably should have that conversation. And I think ultimately what happens is, again, it's an education thing. So it's very rare that you find somebody who is educated when it comes to finance and kind of money that also happens to be over their head in debt or making really, really bad decisions.

Everyone likes to splurge; everyone likes to buy things that they enjoy. But there's very few people that are educated that do that stuff. And so I think that's kind of the way to solve the problem is to get people educated about how money works and why personal finance is so important.

Okay, let me pivot you in a completely different direction. You and I originally clashed, if you want to call it that, around a topic that you're so engrained with—it's part of your brand; it's bitcoin. And bitcoin has had a resurgence in interest because it's had a resurgence in value. It's a very, very volatile asset class, and it gets a lot of press on its way up, gets a ton of press when it has a precipitous downgrade and goes down, and then nobody hears about it for a while.

Is bitcoin really driven by just emotional enthusiasm of people around the world saying, "Oh, it's on its way up, I'm going to follow it until it blows up and goes down again?" Where do you think it fits in the continuum of holding asset value? Because, you know, I'm going to give you a chance to talk to institutional investors here when you think about it that want to understand, are they missing out on something or is it just another fad?

I know and you know, I'm kind of agnostic to it. I'm like everybody else saying, "If it works, I should own some," but frankly all I've seen so far is volatility.

Yeah, so I think you got to separate price and value, right? The price is just the market that's made by buyers and sellers. When there's more buyers than sellers, the price goes up. When there's more sellers than buyers, the price goes down. And that's true of every asset, including bitcoin. The volatility is driven just because it's such a small market cap, right?

You know, just today it's about a $350-$360 billion market cap. That's much, much smaller than gold, real estate, equities, etc. When it comes to value, though, the underlying fundamentals have only continued to get stronger and stronger over time. This is the number of people using it, the amount of transaction volume on an annual basis, the amount of computing power.

What is really interesting to me about bitcoin is we're basically watching public price discovery in real time. So usually what happens is, let's take a public equity, for example. The public equity was private equity before that, and there was some level of price discovery. And when it comes out, there's a whole bunch of people that get in a room and they agree on, "Here is the price of this asset."

And so you have some artificial pricing, and then it gets released into the market. You see with DoorDash, Airbnb, others; it gets repriced at a new price by those public investors. Well, bitcoin didn't have that kind of couple of people get in a room in private and set a price. Instead, we're watching it happen in real time. And so there's going to be these boom and bust cycles because the other component is the investors have been retail investors.

These are not overly sophisticated professional investors that are managing billions and billions of dollars. So when you have less algorithmic trading, more retail investors in public price discovery, you're going to get lots of volatility that's driven by emotion.

So bad headline comes out, bitcoin sells off. Good headline comes out, bitcoin goes up. I think that that's starting to temper out a little bit, though, just because there are more professional investors like the Stanley Druckenmillers, the Paul Tudor Jones, Guggenheim, Fidelity, etc. coming in. And also you're starting to get some algorithmic trading. And so my guess is that over a long period of time, maybe five to ten years, bitcoin looks very similar to other assets.

The exciting part, though, is if you can participate in the price discovery from where it is today to something that's much more valuable in the future, obviously the people that are early will do well in that price discovery.

Well, there's also another lesson to take from what you just said. Perhaps what's interesting about bitcoin is the fact that it trades 24/7 in perpetuity and that there's very few markets that actually have price discovery going on all around the world every day, regardless of what else is going on.

So maybe what it really speaks to is having other asset classes—like stocks, like bonds—trade in the same manner where there's a market bid 24/7 globally. That's not that hard to do with technology today because we came out of the stock market, you know, a couple hundred years ago with the idea that you opened for business at one time and closed later in the day.

Maybe what bitcoin is telling us is that we should have liquidity perpetually in every asset class and that pure price discovery, because it's always breakfast somewhere in the world, may be the way of the future. And in a way, if that actually happens, Pomp, there'll be less demand for something like a bitcoin. Would you agree with that?

Yeah, so I definitely think that having 24/7/365 markets is important, right? So if you think of the U.S. stock market, for example, the U.S. stock market is closed more hours a week than it is open. There are some advantages to that, but there's a lot of downside to it as well, and it's very kind of Western world view of kind of markets.

And so I think that now that the internet allows for accessibility on a 24/7/365 geographically agnostic basis, it's really important to get to kind of always-on markets. The second piece of this, though, is I also think whether the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ or other types of traditional exchanges move to that 24/7 model or not, it won't matter.

Because what we're starting to see emerge is an entire world or kind of alternative finance world where people are basically taking these stocks off those exchanges, and they're creating tokenized versions of them. So there's an exchange in Singapore right now that essentially allows you to trade Apple stock 24/7/365.

Now, it's not the actual Apple stock that is on the U.S. stock market; it's a tokenized version. And so I think that what people ultimately want in the traditional markets is they want exposure to these assets, and whether they get that through actually owning the shares or they get that through holding what is essentially a price proxy, I think you're seeing the demand there.

And so what we have now is we've got kind of a face-off: Is this new alternative financial system going to be kind of rising in popularity and capture the mental energy and financial means of all of these other people? Or will the U.S.-based exchanges kind of open up their model and go to a 24/7/365 model?

At the end of the day, I think that the people who want that are going to get serviced. It's just a matter of is it going to be the incumbents or is it going to be challengers. And I think that's where the market gets made and where a lot of opportunity lies.

The problem with an idea like that, though, is it's a derivative from the actual asset. So you talk about a Singapore exchange having a call or put on Apple. That works until there's massive volatility in the market, and all of a sudden you get huge spreads between what those things trade at and what the actual Apple stock is doing.

And I think if you're an institutional investor, the value of having 24/7/365 liquidity is nowhere near as valuable as actually having price discovery on the real asset when there's tremendous volatility in the market.

Now that's getting a little technical, but my issue around these special asset classes—let's drift back to bitcoin because it is the granddaddy of all of the debates going on here. There would be tremendous value in a currency, a digital currency. And every time I talk about this, it's the same topic. I look at the asset value of bitcoin versus the asset value of all things traded, and bitcoin is still a nothing burger—a giant nothing burger.

And the reason I would argue that that's the case is you don't have every institution willing to play ball with it. But if there was an attempt to either take bitcoin itself or some other currency—because I think bitcoin's proven the first mile; there's no question about it—there's global interest in digital currency. But a digital currency that could be traded everywhere with the regulator agreeing to it, and would be agnostic—In other words, you could trade it to buy assets in Switzerland, trade it to buy assets in France or in England or in the United States, and everybody would take that digital currency—then you would have something, Pomp.

Then you would have something of tremendous value because that way I could keep half my net worth in the digital currency and just flow and trade and go in and out of things. I could buy groceries; I could buy a house with it. It wouldn't—I’d be agnostic to it.

That is a vision that's really attractive versus this tiny little thing that for some people is an outlier that in many ways is not liquid or not easily liquid. Like, if I want to buy a million dollars worth of bitcoin right now, I got to do a fair amount of work to pull that off. It's not instantaneous. It's getting better, I agree, but it's not something that every regulator in every market—if I just pick big markets like England, like euro, like Switzerland, like the U.S., like China, like Asia—I can't get consistency with any single regulator on endorsing bitcoin for me to actually do a significant transaction.

How are we going to fix that? You're a bitcoin guy. I'm giving you a big opportunity to explain how we get to the next level.

So one of the key things to understand is that bitcoin's market cap has increased by about $80 million a day since its inception, which is really, really fast aggressive growth for any asset. But there's been a lot of price volatility in between there.

And so up until maybe 2019, 2020, most of the interest was from individuals, right? Or very small organizations. It wasn't the large asset managers. But I think that the macro environment and the changes that have occurred, especially the quantitative easing and the interest rate manipulation in 2020, has driven global macro investors to say, "Where should I put my capital?"

And what we're seeing are massive inflows into bitcoin, and it's coming from some very unique people. So again, I mentioned Paul Tudor Jones, Stanley Druckenmiller—those types of people I think are at the forefront or the tip of the spear when it comes to innovation and investing.

But we're also seeing very conservative organizations, like there are multiple public pensions in the United States that have invested in this. There's MassMutual, which is a very conservative insurance company, that are starting to allocate its small dollars to start—usually kind of up to one percent of their assets.

But I think that that will continue to increase over time because ultimately what bitcoin's hope is, right? What the promise of bitcoin is, is that it will serve as that single global currency, right? It can ascend to global reserve status and it can be used by anyone regardless of their nationality, their language, or their location as that single currency.

Now whether that happens or not is up for debate. There are people speculating billions and billions of dollars on the possibility of that occurring. But I agree with you that the opportunity is there. And I think that if an asset can rise to that point, it will be incredibly valuable.

Those that understand bitcoin believe in bitcoin and hold bitcoin, I think believe bitcoin will do that. But there are plenty of other people who think it'll be something else. And so we'll see what happens, but I think you've nailed kind of the opportunity. Now the question is just who actually captures that, and I think bitcoiners believe it'll be bitcoin.

All right, so help listeners diversify the risk. If you just get intrigued with the idea of owning digital currency for the creation of wealth over time, why just bitcoin? What other ones? How? You know I love diversification; that's my whole investment theme. I want diversity; I want to mitigate risk.

Now if I decide, "Yes, digital currency, I think I should have a two percent weighting in my portfolio of digital currencies," you've been watching this space forever. Which ones? Why just bitcoin? What else? What about Ethereum? What about all the rest of that stuff that's in any wallet you look at?

Yeah, so first of all, definitely bitcoin has the network effect. It has the brand awareness; it has the majority of the capital in the space. It's kind of, like you said, the granddaddy of them all. And so if you kind of think of it as the blue-chip, bitcoin is definitely there.

Now most of the people who only hold bitcoin—the kind of hardcore bitcoiners—and are the people who understand monetary policy, etc., they have a belief that bitcoin is going to become that global reserve currency. So they almost use it as cash, right? It is an electronic currency to them, and they hold it for that purpose just like they would hold cash in their bank account; they hold bitcoin.

Now there are some people who disagree with that belief system. They believe that, kind of in your camp, that there should be diversification. And so what we're seeing there is they're starting to be vehicles in which you can actually go get that diversification.

And so a company that I'm invested in called Bitwise recently launched a fund that is publicly traded on the OTC market, or the OTC exchange. It's just BITW as the ticker, and it gives you exposure to the top ten crypto assets, their market weight averaged, and they're rebalanced on a frequent basis.

And so similar to like an S&P 500 type index that gives you exposure to an industry, this specific fund and others that are following it will do the exact same thing. And so I think people have to ask themselves, you know, do I want to basically put my assets in something that is the most de-risked out of all of the assets or do I just want industry-wide diversified exposure?

I don't think you can go wrong with either one. Frankly, bitcoin in one of those scenarios is a hundred percent of the allocation; in the other, it's like eighty-five percent. So bitcoin is just so dominant compared to everything else. But I think either one of those options gets people in the game; you get kind of off zero percent exposure, right?

I keep saying get off zero. And once you put money into something, you start paying attention, you start learning about it. And I think that's kind of the first step for people who have heard about this, are intrigued by it, and want to start to get exposure to it.

All right, let's take a 180 shift. Let's talk about next year. Now, the first on the agenda has to be the vaccine. In your head, where are you at with the vaccine? You're going to take it the minute you get offered it? What are your plans?

I'm probably not going to take it the minute I get offered it. But, you know, look, I think that the vaccine being created on this really fast timeline tells us a couple of things. One, obviously this was a global priority for a lot of different companies and governments and organizations. Two, this is the beauty of capitalism— we just watched some of our smartest healthcare-focused organizations create a vaccine in record time.

And so I think it's just again a reiteration that capitalism works, and we should continue to support private businesses and small businesses. But I also think that what we're going to see is an explosion of pent-up demand. People want to go travel; they want to go see their friends; they want to go back into restaurants; they want to go do the things that they enjoyed doing beforehand.

Most people have been pretty smart—they haven't done that stuff during this pandemic. They've tried to wear their mask, socially distance, stay at home, all the things that people have asked of them. But I do think that once the vaccine is distributed in a pervasive way, you're going to see people run out to go do all that stuff.

And so, you know, while we've weathered this kind of downturn in terms of commerce and economic growth and things like that, I do think we are going to see this explosion, which is a great opportunity for a lot of businesses.

And so to be fun to watch. So if you had to think about that from an investment thesis— I mean I get the sense you want to see a few hundred thousand people take the vaccine first and see what happens to them. Is that really what you're saying when you wouldn't take it if offered it today?

I mean technically you could be offered this today and you wouldn't take it because you want to see more outcomes or what's the reasoning to that? Because right now there are stats out there that I find very scary. Up to 30 percent of the population doesn't want to take the vaccine—in some constituencies, 50 percent doesn't want to take it.

And the point of a vaccine is to inoculate as many of the herd as you can. We call ourselves the herd for the biological reasons of getting herd immunity. But the idea being that if we could get everybody vaccinated tomorrow morning, this pandemic would be over in a couple of months.

But that's not what's going to happen. We're going to have some large percentages of certain verticals of the population saying, "Nah, I don't want to do it for this reason, for that reason, whatever it is."

And when you do that with a vaccine, you give it a very long tail. So to the extent that people listen to you, Pomp, what advice would you give them about the timing of this vaccine? I'm trying to nail you down on exactly what you think on that.

Yeah, I think as a society, what we're going through an exercise of is priority, right? And so I happen to be very lucky. I'm a 32-year-old young guy who's healthy; I have no pre-existing conditions. I live a relatively kind of insulated life in terms of, you know, I've done everything that I'm supposed to do. I've gotten my COVID test; I'm negative—kind of everything that I'm supposed to do.

And so the vaccines that we do have I think are going to first be given to our healthcare workers, to those that work inside of the nursing homes, things like that. So I actually don't think that most young people are going to be offered the vaccine, you know, for sure in the first couple of weeks if not the first couple of months.

It really just comes down to prioritization, right? There's people, frankly, who need it way worse than I do, and I'm fortunate for that. But also I think that it's important that we kind of prioritize certain types of people.

The second thing then comes down to, you know, there's a lot of unknowns here, right? And I think that's where you're getting at. You know, when they ask people, "Will you take the vaccine, will you not?" I think people are just scared, frankly; they don't have enough information.

And so, you know, if I was in charge of the vaccine campaign, if you will, I think the number one thing that you can do is not, you know, "Hey, I'm gonna take the vaccine publicly," right? which we've seen some elected leaders say that they're going to do. Instead, it's educate people. Explain, "Hey, here's how the virus works. Here's why the vaccine works. Here's what's going to happen. Here's what the side effects are."

And then give people choice, right? I definitely don't think we want to be in a world where the government is mandating or making it illegal not to force you to put something in your body. But at the same time, I generally think that most people are rational actors. And if you explain to them what the problem is and what the potential solution and the risk associated with that solution is, they usually end up taking the rational choice.

And in this case, I think getting a vaccinated society can be a very beneficial thing. And so it's just don't mandate it, don't force it on people. But if you educate people, I think that that number 30 or 50 percent will come way down. And so that's the body of work ahead for governments and these organizations.

Here's what I see happening, though. As we roll out this vaccine with the passport system, I mean, you're going to go into your provider or a pharmacy, take the vaccine. You're going to book your appointment through an app—whether it be CVS, Walgreens, or anybody else—and then when you get your second dose, 20-plus days later, you're going to be issued a digital and a physical passport.

Now, let's say I'm a private sector operator. I have a restaurant, I'm running an airline, I have a sports arena, I have a bowling alley. I want people with passports. I don't want to be liable for passing the vaccine from one to another. I don't want people getting sick in my facility. For my grid of reasons, I want all my employees to have a passport, and if you come to the door and ask to get on my airline or come into my restaurant or my bowling alley or my sports arena, I'm going to say, "Sorry, no passport, no tiki."

I think that's a way that the private sector is going to react to this ever-growing inoculation because it mitigates risk. And in all things, risk mitigation is the path of least resistance. Now that's not mandated by the government, the scenario I just described to you, but it's a highly likely outcome because why in the world would I want people on an airline if I ran an airline to have one super spreader at the front getting everybody sick, regardless of what people say about how the air is transferred around the aircraft or the airport or the restaurant or whatever it is?

Do you think that's going to cause any problems in a sort of have and have not scenario in America over the next two years?

Yeah, I mean, you can very quickly see why this gets politicized, right? It's basically you get into the ideological kind of camps of private businesses are private, and they're allowed to do whatever they want. And then other people who believe that humans have certain rights and they should be allowed to kind of prevail over small business.

I think what you're going to see is exactly what you described. There will definitely be businesses. I think even like a Ticketmaster and maybe a couple of others have already said that their intention is that you will have to be vaccinated or have a negative test. So it might not just be the vaccine, but they'll have some kind of requirement for you to participate or attend any of their venues.

And so I think you'll definitely see more and more businesses doing that. And where I think the government's going to be in a very weird situation is, one, do they encourage this or do they deter it, right? And ultimately, there will be cases where people sue whether it's a business, a government, or whatever on constitutional bases, and the courts will decide.

I don't think I'm going to have the answer; I don't think you're going to have the answer, but a court will decide kind of what's legal and what's not legal. But I do think that we need to be very, very careful here because this is a slippery slope when it comes to— It's one thing to mitigate risk for your business; it's another when we start labeling people based on medical history, right?

And so there are all kinds of suggestions I've seen, literally like you should label something on your clothing or on a mask, or you should have a digital passport on your phone. That sounds a little scary to me because you start to get into a world where, like we've seen, populations separate—haves and have-nots—with labels in the past, and that usually hasn't turned out so well.

And so I think that we've got to be smart. We don't want to put people at a higher risk, but at the same time, we also have to understand that we can't violate individuals' personal liberty and individual freedoms as we pursue—

Here's a problem with what you just said, and I'd like to address it. When you give someone an individual right not to disclose whether they've been vaccinated or not, or given the right not to vaccinate at all, which is definitely going to happen in America—it may not happen in other countries—but you also give them the right to get other people sick.

And that is a big, big issue for a vaccine that doesn't understand race or color or economic status—it simply moves from one person to another. And the outcome for some percentage of them is a horrible death in a plastic tent alone.

And I would think at some point people are going to say—and this probably happens sometime next fall—we have to finish off this inoculation, and I don't care if it treads on your rights; I don't want to die. And that is where we're going to test a whole new theory about public health—there's no question about it. And I don't know the outcome of it; you may be right. But I know with certainty, having waited this long, sequestering myself—sounds like you're doing the same thing—changing my lifestyle in ways I would have never anticipated, and I'm really getting sick of it.

I don't care how nice it is wherever I am; I like to go out. I haven't been to a restaurant since March 7th or flown on a commercial aircraft since then, and I want to. And I guess the reason I can't and won't be able to is somebody—maybe you, Pomp—won't get vaccinated, and that really pisses me off.

And I think to myself, "Wait a second; where are my rights in that scenario?"

Yeah, and look, this has been kind of the entire, you know, the entire situation around the vaccine and the pandemic. I think has really brought this exact debate to the forefront, and there's a lot of conversation. I think that's always like black and white. Everyone wants to go to the extremes: It's open the economy and the hospitals get overrun, or vice versa, close the economy and everyone will be okay.

And you and I know that, you know, in business or in life, most things aren't black and white. And so what I think that we're starting to see now is a conversation around nuance and how do we find these nuanced kind of solutions.

And so one thing for sure is there is a public health crisis, right? There are a lot of people getting sick with something. It abnormally affects a certain population rather than others. And so there's people now that are starting to say things like, "Well, wait a second, if you are old, if you are sick, or you are scared," right?

Just because a lot of people forget, like, the psychological fear of this takes a toll on people. You don't actually have to be old or have to be sick already or have preexisting conditions to just fear it. And so if you are in those buckets, we should protect those people aggressively.

And whether that is keeping them inside, providing them with government stimulus, there's all kinds of things we can do to protect that population. But I also think at the same time as we're protecting that population, we have to be weary that we're not also violating the rights of an entire other part of the population, right?

And I've got a unique view on this because I've spent so much time internationally. I served in the United States Army overseas, did all these different things where I saw kind of the end of where this goes. If all of a sudden you start telling people that they have to do things, right? And that's why I go back to—it’s not that I don't think people should get the vaccine. It's not that I don't think people should take the public health crisis seriously; I actually think that's exactly what they should do, right?

But I do think that we've got to be careful about how we do it. And I don't think government mandates the right way to go. And it sounds like actually we agree on this, which is there are kind of softer ways of doing it, right? So for example, if private businesses all start to say, "Hey, you can't come in my private business unless you've got the vaccine," well, they have the same right that the individual does.

The individual has the right not to take the vaccine, but the private business has the right to refuse you service. And what you do is you build social pressure, right? If you want to go out to restaurants, if you want to go do things, then you got to have the vaccine.

And so I think that kind of the free market or natural market will really push people, and my guess is a majority of people will take the vaccine, I don't know, 12, 18 months from now—so however long it takes to get the distribution and kind of get it in people's hands and have access to it. I do think a majority of people will take it.

But I think that it's just the way that we go about it is important. And you know, look, at the end of the day, there's a lot of people who've gotten sick; there's a lot of people who have died, and that's not okay.

And I agree with you that we've got to be careful about allowing, frankly, stupidity or the uneducated to just go around and spread a virus. But I think that there's kind of this in-between that doesn't exist on the extremes.

I want to talk about some other sectors: music and the arts. I'm an investor in that space in different places, different things in hip-hop. Well, I'm going to ask you about that. Think about what's happened to a new artist emerging during this last year. When you're breaking a new act, the best thing you can do is go to a city like Miami or Chicago or L.A. or New York and hit the streets in terms of getting into small clubs, getting a buzz going, getting people to see you live.

It's different than a digital splurge; you know, it's just a different feeling. You look at acts for years and years and decades and decades—it started in clubs and hit the road and met with their fans. That's a different trajectory. You can't do that anymore. And you probably won't be able to do it for maybe another year, maybe longer, depending on what happens to what we just discussed about passports and stuff.

How do you think a young artist today that is smoking hot should address getting out there and making a living when the only option they have is yet another attempt on YouTube or on Instagram to get someone to watch them?

Yeah, what we got to remember is all of these creators, whether they're a musician, a content creator, or whatever, they're just entrepreneurs, right? They're trying to build a business, and that business is to go get customers to give them money—whether it's through streaming platforms, in-person at concerts, buying merchandise, buying their music—whatever it is.

And I think what we've seen specifically around musicians is there's been a number of musicians who have figured out through these digital platforms how to kind of attach their music to viral moments. So there's this story of Lil Nas X, which is a guy in kind of the hip-hop space, and what he did was he would basically look for memes or GIFs and kind of short videos that were going viral on platforms. He would download them, he would put his music over top of them, and then he would basically re-upload them.

And he was trying to basically attach his music to these viral moments. And what ended up happening is one of them worked, took off, and now he's one of the biggest stars in the world. And so I think that whether it's kind of the memes on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, or it's simply trying to get your song to be the background music of the next TikTok dance that kind of sweeps the world, you know, over then, I think that's a way to get your work in front of eyeballs.

That's very different than going from club to club in New York City trying to build buzz, but there's advantages to it as well. So you don't—maybe you don't get the human connection that you would playing in front of 100 people and kind of them getting to see the live energy, but it's a way to get in front of way more people much more efficiently, cheaper, and faster.

And so I don't think that there's a single answer here. I think that there's going to be tons of musicians, once we can get out of this pandemic, that will go back into clubs and arenas and venues, and they're going to do great, kind of employing that old playbook—that playbook that's worked for decades and decades and decades.

But there is this new class of creators and musicians and entertainers that have figured out these digital platforms. And you see these success stories, and you start to wonder maybe actually the solution moving forward isn't either/or; instead, it's both. And I think that's what we're going to see kind of into 2021 and beyond, is people understanding I still need the human connection by playing in front of people and them seeing kind of the live energy; but I also need to be very savvy when it comes to the digital platforms.

And whoever can kind of crack both of those at the same time is likely to be the next mega star.

Well, I wonder if that isn't exactly the same for business—any business. Because the genie's out of the bottle on digital. I used to say to kids going into college and racking up college debt—$60,000, $80,000 bucks—"If you want a short guaranteed job, engineering's number one, engineering's number two, and engineering's number three." I don't feel that way anymore after this last year because so much of what I spend on now supporting all my businesses is support of their digital strategy.

Which means copywriters, editors, videographers, graphic artists—all kinds of technology around editing and adding to presentation skills is where I spend a ton of money that I didn't spend only two years ago. And so I'm thinking now there's a resurgence in kind of a very unusual way to go back.

There's no starving artists—if you're good at any of those skills, you ain't starving anymore because the demand for your skills, corporately, and for individuals and for artists and for businesses and for restaurants—for any sector you're talking about—is to be able to tell a story in 19 seconds, 29 seconds, 59 seconds.

And that I don't think is ever going to change. And so we've accelerated digitization. You're part of that; you're part of that whole story. The fact that you've garnered an audience that listens to you on this stuff is because of that exact trend. I don't think it's going to change. I don't think your strategy is going to change. You're not going to be playing any New York clubs; you don't have to. You can reach out to people around the world every day if you wish.

So why isn't it really something now that is probably going to change the way we think about marketing forever and the way we spend our dollars?

Yeah, so it's definitely changed, right? And I think that digital is the default now, but just like the businesses that had kind of analog stores or went into these venues, and analog was the default, and they were good at digital, they thrived in kind of the old world. I think people who are default digital but figure out how to mix in the analog in thoughtful ways will thrive as well.

And so a great example is if you're really, really good at the digital platforms as the musician and then maybe you go do meet and greets with fans at a certain city, or if you are an entrepreneur and you're really good at digital, but basically you go and you do a pop-up in your local shopping center or at a farmer's market or something like that.

And then even if you look at people who kind of do content creation, right? So if I was to go to a city, let's say that I went to St. Louis, Missouri, and I tweeted out and I said, "Hey, I'm going to do a live podcast. If you'd like to come and listen to me do a podcast, you can buy a ticket to it."

There's a lot of people who probably would buy a ticket and come and watch. Now I'm not going to go do that every single day. And so I think it's more digital as default and the analog stuff ends up being really thoughtful special experiences and allows you to connect with your audience, your customer base in a new, unique way.

But really what's new again is old again, and it's just a repeat of what we already had.

It's just that digital is the majority of the time and the energy and the money spent rather than analog. It gives me an idea, Pomp: I should have done this in an amphitheater and sold tickets. Big screen of you, big screen of me—I mean how did I leave—I would— You and I could sell out Madison Square Garden if we did enough promotion. How did we leave that on the table?

All right, I want to end with how I always end. I want to give you a chance to just describe three stocks that you would buy at the beginning of the year and hold for 12 months for next year. Any investments; they can be—they don't have to be stocks; it could be anything you want. Three things that you would put your money into for the next 12 months.

Yeah, that's a great question. I would say that one, for sure, is I think that we're going to see a lot of fintech kind of continue the trend that it has and explode in that area. You've probably got Square as the leader, I think, in terms of just a highly innovative company that really understands technology and finance, is pulling off global expansion, and it's also operating in the legacy world of kind of more traditional finance and this new world of bitcoin and crypto.

So I think Square is kind of a leader—that's pick number one.

Square, luckily I own that already. What's next?

Two is I think that you're going to see kind of these platform commerce businesses do very well. And so there's a whole bunch of different ways to play them; you could just go with simple Amazon, right, and kind of get part of their commerce business and everything else.

You could go to a Shopify, kind of arm the rebels, and really the anti-Amazon, if you will, of some degree. Or even things like WeCommerce—a buddy of mine, Andrew Wilkinson, recently put into the public markets via—let's talk about ecommerce. He—I did the show with him today, Halftime Report. He came on, talked about his raise, his strategy. He's going to try and be the next generation Berkshire Hathaway—that was his pitch and he's going to identify companies living on an island in Canada somewhere, which I found intriguing.

Which really signals how you can do this digitally from wherever you are. He was very good; he took a real grilling from the crew and he came out on top. I thought, "Good guy." What do you think about his? He's now public; he went public on a Canadian exchange this morning. You think he's a good buy? Is that your pick or would you go Shopify directly or Amazon?

Yeah, so the reason why ecommerce is so interesting is, again, you are investing in the people behind these companies and their capital allocation decisions and their abilities. There's a lot of things that can change, as we saw in 2020, and if you were backing companies that had great operators, they probably did pretty well. If you were backing companies that didn't have such great operators, then they didn't do so well.

And so I always look at, yes, the fundamentals of the business make sense, but I like to look at who the person is at running the company and do I trust them with the task of growing my wealth, growing my capital? And I think Andrew and the entire team there is really world-class—they've proven this over and over and over again.

And so for a kid that basically started a design studio from Canada a number of years ago to today is pretty impressive. So I—so your investment premise on that platform is he helps to find operational winners, and you're investing with their head, not having any headwind; you've got great operators. So you've got the tailwind behind them, and you have a portfolio; you're diversifying your risk. That's the investment thesis, right?

Yeah, it's the same thing like any private equity type firm would do, right? They look for companies that they can buy at good prices. So you're betting that Andrew can find winners; it's the same way you would bet on Ackman to find private companies to take public—same idea, right?

Exactly. Okay, you got one more, and I like your premise because I'm a huge shareholder in Shopify. Why? Because I buy all their licenses for all my companies. I mean, we use that platform almost exclusively outside of Amazon, and I believe that we're going to try and replace as much retail as we can and sell direct and get the full margin.

One more investment idea—one more investment thesis. What do you like?

Yeah, so I love to operate at the fringes of society. I look for the contrarian idea that will become consensus over the next 12 to 24 months. And the two areas that I'm going to kind of lump together as a single idea is psychedelics and bitcoin.

I think that there's a whole bunch of different ways you can play this, but from my perspective, both of those are contrarian ideas, and especially have been for the last two or three years, and they are just now hitting the inflection point where they are about to become consensus ideas.

And so the psychedelic space—individual names, I'm not as familiar with. I know there's Field Trip and a couple of others. I don't know if there's like an index that you could buy there. But when it comes to bitcoin, one of the interesting companies is there's a company, MicroStrategy, that basically, you know, Michael Saylor, the CEO there, has taken 85 plus percent of his balance sheet—he's bought bitcoin.

He's now raised about $600-$650 million dollars in debt to buy more bitcoin, and he's almost backed himself into like a pseudo bitcoin ETF to some degree, right? He's got all this bitcoin exposure. And so the stock has done very well in 2020. I think it'll continue to do well as bitcoin continues to do well.

And so those two areas are really interesting to me, but just along the theme of go to the edges of society, find a contrarian idea that'll become consensus over the next 12 to 24 months, and I think both psychedelics and bitcoin fit that bill.

Well, it's interesting. I mean, I've been talking to you for a bit about bitcoin for over a year, so you're getting me, you know, me sort of tenderized like a piece of veal before it becomes a scallopini on it.

But I think I'm ahead of you on psychedelics. I was a very early investor in MindMed and that's gone from a nascent company to over a billion market cap in a matter of months because you're right—thematically, the whole sector is being re-explored as medicine, not recreational drugs. The idea that you can help people with depression, or opioid addiction, or these massive maladies that afflict whole societies, and solve it with a drug that we've ignored since the '60s (LSD or MDMA or, you know, 18MC—these different molecules).

I'm into that; I've been an investor in that. I'm a huge advocate for the sector, and we don't yet know the outcomes, but it's NASA; we're starting the FDA trial stage, one trade, stage two. But that's interesting that you would have identified that as well.

And no, it isn't indexed yet. You know I am an indexer, and there is no index for psychedelics, it's too early. But there's many companies, and if anybody's going to index it, I'm going to take a shot at it one day, but I've got to get more companies. There's just not enough diversification yet, and that's the key.

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